Page 59 of Things We Never Said
‘Ooh,’ Maggie says, looking worried. ‘But, no ... I meant, how long did she believe this? Not until ... not the whole time, surely?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think she believed it for a while. And then when Stéphane came along she started to doubt herself.’
Maggie rubs her brow for a moment, then blows through pursed lips. ‘I’m not sure I know what to do with that information,’ she says.
‘No,’ Sean agrees. ‘Me neither. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘Oh, it’s not that. No, it’s better out in the open. Everything always is, really. And I can see why she could have thought that, I suppose.’
‘You can?’
Maggie shrugs. ‘We were always close. Stéphane was jealous of you, actually. So is Dave, hence the rowing troubles.’ Maggie pulls a face like she has toothache.
‘What?’
‘Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about Stéphane, actually. What an error of judgement that one was.’
Sean smiles at Maggie whimsically. ‘You enjoyed it at the time, as far as I recall. You wouldn’t shut up about him.’
‘Well, yes,’ Maggie says. ‘Yes, I always enjoy it at the time.’
Sean winks at her. ‘Yes, you do.’
‘But, anyway, I still don’t think that’s right,’ Maggie says.
‘You don’t think what’s right?’
‘Well, it’s like the April thing, isn’t it?’ she says, fiddling with one earring. ‘Catherine and I were best friends, weren’t we? She can’t really have thought that, or I would have known. I would have picked up on it, surely.’
‘Maybe,’ Sean says. ‘At any rate, the tapes certainly aren’t proving to be boring.’
‘No,’ Maggie says. ‘No, I can see that. But I still think you shouldn’t take them to heart. I still think we’re basically talking about morphine here.’
Sean nods thoughtfully. It crosses his mind that for many of these recordings, particularly the early ones, Catherine was hardly taking any drugs at all. She certainly wasn’t on morphine until the end. But then he decides to leave Maggie with the option to believe what she wants to believe. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
When Sean gets home that evening, he re-listens to all of Catherine’s tapes, just to be sure. But the sad truth is that, no, she doesn’t sound out of her mind. In fact, with the exception of the first tape, which was recorded last of all, she sounds perfectly compos mentis. Which would seem to imply that she really did spend much of their married life believing he had cheated on her. ‘What a shame she never asked,’ he murmurs sadly as he reaches for the next envelope in the series.
Snapshot #18
35mm format, colour. A small girl stands at the school gates, holding her mother’s hand. She is sucking her thumb and her cheeks are wet with tears.
They had argued, Sean remembers. They had argued at the school gates because Sean had felt that Catherine was doing just about everything that she shouldn’t be doing.
He had spent the preceding days attempting to reassure April. He had told her what fun school would be, how exciting learning things was. He had said that there would be toys and climbing frames and new friends to play with.
Catherine, for her part, had been all over the shop. And her unpredictability had peaked at the school gates when she had burst into tears and hugged April as if she was never going to see her again.
An onlooker might have thought she was putting the poor girl on a train to a concentration camp rather than dropping her at school for the day, such was her desperation. And April had picked up on all of it. She’d been terrified, a terror that she associated with school long after Catherine herself had got over it.
And so, just to make everything even worse, they had argued. Watched by other nervous parents and poor, tearful April, they’d had one of their rare all-out shouting matches.
Sean frowns as he tries to work out whether the dates match up with his hypothetical fling with Maggie. Because that would certainly explain a lot.
Had Catherine’s tears that day – indeed had the argument itself – been about Maggie, and not about April at all?
Cassette #18
Hello darling.
