Page 60 of Things We Never Said
I’m feeling quite well this morning. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’m feeling positively chipper. But don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just that after a week of rain, the sun has come out.
I wish this communication was a two-way thing. I wish I could ask you how you’re doing, too. According to my calculations, it must be summer by now. God, I’ll miss not being able to walk along the Cam with you. Well, I would miss it, if I wasn’t dead.
So, April’s first day at school ... I know you’ve had to wait too long for this, but here goes: I was wrong.
I fell apart at the seams that day. And, yes, I was a terrible mother, a wicked mother who completely forgot about her daughter’s needs. And, yes, you were totally right to point that out.
I got lost in myself, that’s the thing.
As a mother, you spend all of your time trying to make everything right for everyone else. But that day, I got lost in me.
Everything welled up: how inferior I felt, to you, to your family, to the people we knew in Cambridge, to the pretty students wafting around in summer dresses showing off their slim, child-free figures and their smooth brown legs. And, yes, inferior to Maggie, too.
Up until that day I at least had April. Until that moment at the school gates, my existence had been justified. I had a baby. She needed me. She needed me twenty-four hours a day. Only suddenly she was off out into the world on her own.
I felt so lost, Sean. Once she started school it seemed like the only thing tethering me to planet Earth had been cut free. I was terrified I’d just float away.
You never knew it, but I used to spend the entire day in bed and then get up in time to meet her from school. You were working pretty late back then, so I usually had time to cook and clean and shop before you got home. I tried to keep everything looking normal.
I suppose, looking back on it all, I was depressed. Then again, perhaps that’s just a label people use too much. Half the time, when people tell me they’re depressed these days, I think,No, you’re not, you’re sad!Or confused. Or lonely. Actually, I think I must have been all of those.
Whatever it was, I wasn’t right in the head, and I’m sure you must have noticed how nutty I went for a while.
It didn’t last too long, thank God, because Maggie found me that job at the RSPCA shop in October. She had been laid off from Nicholson-Wallace (which, I hate to admit, I was glad about. I got to stop worrying about you and Mags on that open-plan carpet). She had split up with Stéphane, too, so I was extra glad you’d no longer be working together. It turned out that Stéphane had a wife hidden away in Paris. How French of him!
Anyway, Maggie suddenly had loads of free time to interfere in everyone else’s lives, and because my own was so empty and perhaps because I wanted to keep an eye on her, I accepted her interference.
At first, I thought this was her way of making up for the fling you two had had and, if I’m honest, I got a certain amount of pleasure from watching her grovel.
I eventually managed a rather special kind of mental gymnastics whereby I managed to forgive you both – superficially, at least – for the simple reason that you’d come back to me. I felt, somehow, that I had won that particular round and that Maggie had lost it. And I even, in my finer moments, managed to feel sorry for her loss.
But I did my best never to leave you two alone together again. Because from that point on, she always seemed a little dangerous to me.
She was so present, though, and so seemingly natural towards me and April, and even towards you, that I think I must have begun to doubt myself. I think I started to wonder, first if it was really Maggie you’d had a fling with, and, later, if you’d actually had a fling at all.
I struggled, the more I thought about it, to imagine her able to be that bare-faced about it all. But who knows? Women can be surprising.
Sean takes the following Friday off work in order to help his daughter move house.
He offers to drive down, but April insists they don’t need an extra car. Ronan, she tells him, has booked a van.
He leaves the house just after seven and, sandwiched between commuters in suits, manages to snooze on the train. He makes it to Hyde Park Gardens before nine and is surprised to find that April’s move is almost completed. As the previous flat had been rented furnished she only has her personal effects to move. With all of her housemates present, they have made light work of the task. Sean finally gets to meet Matt, as well. He almost thanks him for the use of his room, but then wonders if April even told him. Sean can understand April’s attraction to him, though. He seemingly buzzes with energy and looks like a young, prettier version of Pete Doherty.
‘Don’t worry,’ April says, pushing a wisp of hair behind one ear. ‘There’s still Ronan’s place to do, and he’s got loads of stuff and only one friend. So you’re still needed, Dad.’
‘I don’t only have one friend! My friends will all be at work by the time we get there,’ Ronan explains. ‘Otherwise that sounds a bit sad. Jesus! Only one friend, indeed.’
Ronan drives the van to his current place, which turns out to be at the top of Finchley Road. April and Sean follow on in April’s Mini. ‘We can talk, that way,’ she insists.
And talk is exactly what April does. She tells Sean about the goodbye party they had the previous weekend and how drunk everyone got, and how bored she was because she couldn’t drink. She tells Sean, with apparent pride, that Matt seemed a bit tearful as they were loading up the van. ‘But then again, he might just have a cold,’ she admits.
‘You sound quite happy about that,’ Sean teases. ‘You’re not still carrying a torch for him, are you?’
April giggles. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ she says, indicating to overtake a bus. ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole now I know him. And Ronan’s worth three Matts. At least. But, well, it’s nice to imagine that he’s regretting missing his chance, if you know what I mean.’
She tells Sean about her work life and about Ronan’s job as well. She recounts an article she read in theGuardianand going bed-shopping with her friend Lisa and being mistaken for a couple of lesbians and how Lisa’s gone vegan, which has always struck her as a bit of a lesbian thing, so perhaps she’s going to go lesbian as well.
Eventually, Sean interrupts her flow of almost random words to ask, ‘April, honey. Are you feeling OK?’
