Page 99 of Things We Never Said
Even though she never has anything much to say, Sean phones April regularly. ‘What have you been up to?’ he asks, every time.
‘Sitting here feeling huge, mainly,’ she always replies. ‘I’m so over this whole being-pregnant lark.’
The weekend before the move, Sean drives down to Wiltshire to visit his mother.
She’s on a new drug regimen, but though Perry claims she has more good days than before, Sean has seen little proof of it so far.
When he arrives at The Cedars, she’s sitting staring into the middle distance and working her mouth, as usual.
Sean kisses her on the cheek and hugs her frail, rigid body. He asks her if she knows who he is, and she says, shortly, ‘Of course I know who you are,’ but then fails to give any further information that might prove this to be so.
Sean sighs deeply and then moves a chair so that he can sit right beside her. ‘I brought some pictures to show you,’ he says, sliding a manila envelope from his bag. ‘I found them in the loft.’
He starts with photos of his own childhood. Perry and himself in school uniform. A picture of his father fishing, a photo of the house they grew up in ... It’s finally a photo of Cynthia, looking youthful and pretty in an evening gown, that provokes the first reaction. She reaches out tremblingly, as if to caress the fabric. ‘Such a pretty dress,’ she says.
Sean continues to go through the photos but Cynthia only seems interested in the ball gown, at least until he comes to a photo of himself, aged about five on his mother’s knee. ‘He fell in the pond,’ Cynthia says, causing Sean to pause.
He looks up at her and smiles and says, ‘Who did? Who fell in the pond?’
‘Um?’ Cynthia says.
‘Who fell in the pond?’ Sean asks again.
‘Why, Perry did, silly,’ his mother replies.
‘When did Perry fall in a pond, Mum?’
‘The day Edward took that,’ Cynthia says, nodding at the photo. ‘Don’t you remember?’
Sean stares at the photo and struggles to recall the incident. But though he can locate a vague feeling of panic, a sense of urgency that seems to linger in the borders of the image, he’s unable to remember the details. ‘Not really,’ he finally admits.
‘After this one,’ his mother says quietly, tapping her finger on the photo. ‘Your father wanted one with both of you. That’s when we realised he was missing.’
‘Right,’ Sean says, squinting. Perhaps he does remember something. Perhaps he remembers being cast aside urgently; perhaps he remembers watching his mother run away from him through the French windows, heading off to save his brother from the duck pond. Or has he just, this instant, manufactured those images to fit the story? It’s difficult to say. Memory is such a strange thing.
‘So, what about this one?’ he asks, nervously sliding a square black-and-white photo from the pack. ‘Do you remember this one, Mum?’
He holds the photo out and studies his mother’s face and prays for a sign of recognition. ‘The inseparables,’ she says. ‘It’s what the French call lovebirds, you know.Les inséparables.’
Sean wide-eyes his mother. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘You are with it today. And this little girl. Do you remember her name?’ He points at the little girl in the photo, hiding behind her hair. He wills his mother’s lips to move. He wills them to say ‘Catherine’.
Cynthia works her mouth as she thinks about this for a moment. Then a shadow crosses her features and her eyes start to water. ‘No,’ she says, feebly. ‘No, I don’t. It’s all gone again.’
Sean reaches out and rubs her back. ‘That’s OK, Mum. You’re doing really well today. And this was ages ago. Years and years ago.’
‘Was it?’ Cynthia says, sounding confused, sounding frustrated. ‘It’s so misty, that’s all. Everything’s misty and mixed up. It’s all just ... wrong.’
Sean crosses the room and returns with a tissue, which he hands to his mother. ‘That’s normal, Mum,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘ ... so cold,’ Cynthia says as she dabs at her eyes with the tissue.
‘You’re cold?’ Sean asks, glancing over at the radiator, which is on full blast. He can feel the heat from here.
‘No, in Cornwall,’ Cynthia says, irritatedly. ‘It was summer, I think, but it was freezing the whole time.’
‘Gosh, you remember that, do you?’ Sean says. ‘That’s amazing.’
‘Silly little dresses,’ Cynthia says. ‘Silly, summer dresses. She was cold all the time, the poor thing.’
