Page 75 of Things We Never Said
‘Just don’t,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’
Jake put his glass back down. ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ he asked.
‘I can’t do this, that’s all. That was a mistake. And don’t call me darling.’ I was already pulling on my top. ‘I’m sorry, but I need to go, now.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Jake said. He crossed the room and tried to grab my arm, but I pushed him away.
‘I’m married, Jake,’ I said. ‘You’re very lovely and you’re incredibly good-looking. You’re like this perfect photofit fantasy man. You really are. But I can’t do this. I’m sorry.’ And then I grabbed my own jacket and walked out the front door. I was shaking so much I could barely walk.
Jake came running after me eventually. He caught up with me in the street. ‘Catherine!’ he said. ‘For fuck’s sake, at least let me drive you home!’
I just waved over my shoulder and continued to walk and, after a while, I flagged down a taxi.
If I’m being completely honest, I’d have to admit that I continued to fantasise about Jake for a while, but thinking about him always made me feel sick, too. It was a very complicated set of feelings. I sometimes considered getting a taxi over there again. I once looked up his phone number on the computer at work, but I never used it.
When Mum died, the shock killed off, for a while, any remaining desire I had for anyone at all. And it threw you and me back together, too.
But I’m too tired to go into all that today, sweetheart, so that’ll have to wait until next time. I am sorry, though, that I broke my marriage vows. I love you so much. It lasted less than ten minutes out of thirty years of marriage, but I broke them all the same. It was short and stupid, and by the time it was happening I understood that I didn’t want it anymore, but I know that won’t help. But what can I say? Humans are human, desire is desire, and life’s life, isn’t it? And you know what? Now I know that I was right– now that I know that I really was going to die one day, and sooner than I thought, I don’t regret the Jake thing at all. It just feels like something I needed to experience, and I’m glad that I gave myself that leeway. Because, for a while, it was fun. Actually, it was more than fun. It was a passion that came and made me realise that I was alive again, before vanishing, just like that.
I bumped into Jake only once after that. I was in the Grafton Centre, and he asked me to have a coffee with him. I felt I owed him that, at least.
I didn’t feel any danger in doing so because whatever had drawn me to him – the beginnings of love, or just empty lust, perhaps – was gone. I explained, over coffee, that I was sorry but I was married and I loved my husband and I loved my daughter, and that was all there was to it. I said that what had happened had been a terrible, terrible mistake. I told him lots of wonderful things about you for some reason. I think I was brandishing you like a crucifix to keep the vampires away. I told him that some other woman would be very, very lucky to snag him, but that woman wasn’t me. I thought, too late, of Mags. It seemed such a waste that I had used Jake for myself rather than introducing him to Mags.
Poor Jake. He was so sure of his irresistibility that when I told him it was definitively over, it was as if he couldn’t even understand the words I was saying: he made me repeat it three times. And then he straightened his tie, buttoned his jacket, did that Prince Charles thing with his cuffs, pecked me on the cheek and stood and walked away.
Sean is angry. Sean is so angry that he can’t think, he can’t eat and he isn’t sleeping properly, either. His mind obsesses about Catherine, about Jake; it creates visions of their entwined bodies that are so real and so painful he finds himself wincing.
When he opens the laptop of a morning, the previous evening’s Google search is there, full screen, waiting for him.
My dead wife cheated on me: About 3,230,000 results.
He moves the pointer so that it hovers over the little cross that will close that window, but then he clicks on one of the links instead. He finds an entire forum of people who discovered that their partners cheated on them, but the fact that out there, in the myriad randomness of humanity, someone somewhere is feeling the same as he feels doesn’t seem to help. It doesn’t seem to help at all.
He asks himself who he hates the most – smug, suited Jake, who shagged his wife, knowing that she was married, or Catherine herself, for cheating on him, for breaking her marriage vows, or perhaps, above all, for having waited until now to tell him, for waiting until she was no longer present to bear the weight of his anger.
His memory of her is sullied – that’s the thing – and he can’t see how that can ever be undone. He hates her. And the reason he hates her the most is because he had been happy to have spent his life loving her. Even if it was over, at least his life had been built upon that rock of certainty. And now she’s taken even that away from him; she has retrospectively made their years together seem false and stupid and cheap.
His anger comes and goes like ripples of red-hot energy from an unpredictable nuclear reaction, and, because he can’t think what to do with all that heat, he punches a wall and hurts his knuckles; he throws a chair, albeit feebly, across the room. And then finally, on Wednesday evening, after pacing around the now-hated house for an hour, he pulls on shorts and trainers and goes running.
It’s drizzling outside, but he doesn’t care. He imagines the rain sizzling against his angry skin as he runs and runs, driven by the spiritual pain born of this anger, which is too big to even be thought about. Eventually, after almost an hour, he finds that he has been lost to himself for the last mile or so, and when he takes stock of the sensations within his body he finds that the fizzling molten heart of the pain has gone, that the fire has died. He discovers that his anger has been consumed and transformed into a different physical pain, in his legs, in his chest, in his lungs. And where the anger sat, only emptiness remains. He turns and starts to walk homewards.
By the weekend, Sean’s feelings towards the house have morphed so radically that his thoughts from the previous weekend – that the house was a shrine to Catherine, to their daughter, to their life together – seem little more than sour, slightly embarrassing memories. The house, now, feels like salt to a wound, so much so that he can hardly bear to step through the front door of an evening. But autumn is closing in fast, the evenings are cooling, the Cam is punt-less and the drizzle almost constant, so he finds himself forced indoors, angry and resentful as he looks around, scowling, at the many reminders of Catherine’s long shadow.
On Saturday morning, a young, smooth estate agent named Irvine arrives, as requested. He has a Scottish accent and is wearing a tonic-grey suit and a hugely knotted tie. Sean wonders if this is what Jake looked like and has to fight his desire to slam the door in the poor guy’s face.
Irvine wanders around, opening cupboards and taking measurements with his laser device, before sitting at the kitchen table and, after tapping away at his smartphone screen, announcing a price bracket. The house is worth a little more than Sean had thought, but still not enough to buy and renovate the apartment in Cantabrigian Rise.
‘You’re thinking of selling up soon?’ Irvine asks.
Sean sighs. ‘My wife died,’ he says, and he hears that he has said this without sadness, without kindness, and feels suddenly scared of himself, feels unexpectedly frightened by the power of his own anger, ‘and my daughter’s moved out, too. So yes, I’m toying with the idea of a riverfront bachelor pad, actually.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Irvine says unconvincingly. ‘Do you have a property in mind?’
Sean shakes his head. ‘I’m really just at the start of the whole process,’ he says, scratching his ear.
Irvine nods thoughtfully.
‘I looked at a place out at Cantabrigian Rise,’ Sean explains, ‘but it was too expensive and needed too much work, so ...’
