Page 66 of Things We Never Said
‘Oh, fair enough,’ Maggie says. ‘God, chivalry. It ain’t what it used to be.’
Snapshot #20
35mm format, colour. A man, woman and child are posing for a photo. Behind them, the glass pyramid of the Louvre museum is lit up against the night sky.
Paris! Their first ever trip abroad as a family. It had been the first time Sean had ever thought about parallel lives, about the fact that there were a million other lives they could live if they just chose to.
He’d loved Paris. He loved the food and the architecture – he had even managed to love the snooty waiters they seemed to encounter everywhere.
Catherine had been in a state of constant ecstasy over every single thing, whether it was the Louvre itself, a funky chair in a bistro, the tiny tubes of toothpaste provided by the hotel or the fact that the waiters still wore white shirts and waistcoats. She had spent the entire three days raving about everything she saw.
Even April, who Sean had been worried about taking along, had been on her absolute best behaviour. She’d even learnt some French words and said ‘Bonjour’ to almost every person whose path they crossed. And in central Paris that was a lot of people.
The thought had come to him, he remembers, when they were sitting in the sunshine opposite the Fontaine des Innocents waiting for their very expensive, very tiny coffees to be delivered.
A man who looked a bit like Sean had stridden purposefully past. He’d been smoking and left a blue trail of Gauloises smoke behind him. He had been carrying a baguette, the top of which he’d snapped off and popped into his mouth as he walked past them, with visible pleasure. And Sean had thought,Why don’t we live here? Why do we live in England? What’s stopping us learning French and moving to Paris?With Britain being in the EU it was easy to move just about anywhere, wasn’t it? That was the whole point.
It was all just daydreaming, of course. It was a life change that was so complex that Sean couldn’t even envisage how he might put it into practice. Especially with a wife and daughter to worry about. But that feeling, his Paris-envy, as he nicknamed it in his own head, had stayed with him for many months after they got home to their ‘pleasant little lives in Cambridge’, as he’d suddenly come to see them.
Cassette #20
Hello Sean.
Today, as you can see, we’re in Paris. I think it’s ’90 but it might be ’91. For once, I failed to be my usual organised self, so there’s no clue pencilled on the back.
Anyway, it was one of the absolute high points for me. It’s such a cliché to say that Paris is romantic, but boy is it ever. Neither of us was having affairs and neither of us was unhappy at work, and April became, for three days only, this perfectly behaved little child. On top of all that, we got sunshine, too!
We walked along a canal somewhere at some point and I remember I looked across at you and my heart fluttered and I thought,Oh good, it’s still there. I had doubted, for a moment. Forgive me.
I don’t remember that many specifics of the weekend except that the whole place seemed to glow in the April sunshine and everything was beautiful and chic and delicious.
You started smoking again briefly – you had stopped for some time, but the smell of Gauloises was everywhere and you just couldn’t help yourself, or so you said. I think you thought it would make you into a Parisian or something. April kept asking what Daddy was doing, and I kept saying ‘a bad thing’. But she liked it. ‘It looks pretty,’ she said, ‘like Thomas the Tank Engine.’
We had a gorgeous meal with a horrible waiter. I remember that. And I bet you do, too.
You made the unforgivable mistake of pouring wine into your water glass and he came bustling out of the back to tell you off. ‘You ruin it!’ he kept saying. ‘You English! You know nothing!’ So of course we both cracked up laughing, which made things even worse. But it’s one of the fondest memories I have of the trip. Isn’t that peculiar?
He was lovely to April, though. I remember that because it seemed like the exact opposite of home. Here in England, there’s nothing more likely to get a waiter’s back up than taking your seven-year-old to a posh restaurant. But Monsieur Wrong Glass, as we called him, brought her a booster seat and special kiddy-sized portions and then a handful of complimentary chocolates at the end.
I think he felt sorry for poor April being brought up by such terrible heathens that we didn’t even know our water glasses from our wine glasses. All that fuss! It was the cheapest wine on the menu, too!
Sean plays the tape over and over and over again, but all he can hear is that one phrase:Neither of us was having affairs.
Does that mean what he thinks it means, or could it just have been a slip of the tongue? Is it even possible to wait until next Sunday to find out? Does he want to carry on listening at all, anymore?
Once he has convinced himself that there are no further clues, not in Catherine’s tone of voice, nor in her choice of words, he pushes the Dictaphone to one side and stares at the photo.
He looks at little April in her blue plastic mac. (The red one April had wanted reminded Catherine too much ofDon’t Look Now.) She’s smiling and waving in the photo. They all are.
He tries to remember who took the photo. A random passer-by, presumably.
And then eventually, without any conscious decision having been taken, he slides his phone across the tabletop and calls Maggie.
It’s Dave who answers. He tells Sean that Maggie is occupied for a few minutes, which Sean takes to mean that she’s on the loo.
He’s just reaching for the Dictaphone again when his phone starts to vibrate.
‘Mags?’
