Page 69 of Things We Never Said
Mid-afternoon, Mags came back – she was burnt to a crisp – and said that she wanted to go home, which we both took to mean that she wanted to return to the holiday apartment. But, no, she really meant home.
Ian stayed on, though not, of course, in the flat that we’d rented. We bumped into him coming out of a bar one evening. He was with a Greek guy who was even more beautiful than Ian was. He turned out, of course, to be the famous Dimitri. It’s a funny thing to say, but in that moment Ian made sense to me in a way he never really had before. I had that sort of ‘of course!’ feeling you sometimes get when Barry Manilow finally admits that he’s gay, or someone tells you that Michael Jackson has died. Of course he is. Of course he has.
You couldn’t fault Ian’s taste, though. Dimitri was incredibly good-looking. He had olive skin and jet-black hair and blue eyes that perfectly matched his open-necked denim shirt. I think he could have turned a few men’s heads even if they hadn’t been gay, to be honest. And he smelt incredible, a mixture of aftershave – something subtle – and a sort of salty, spicy Mediterranean animal smell. He smelt a bit like barbecue smoke and sea and sex, if that makes any sense.
Ian asked us if Mags was OK, and I had to be the one to tell him that she’d gone home.
‘If hell exists, I’ll go to hell for what I’ve done to her,’ he said, looking like he was about to cry.
And you replied, ‘Luckily for you, it doesn’t, then.’
I loved you for saying that, because it summed up the whole thing for me. It somehow nailed it shut.
We were there three more nights, I think, but I don’t remember any of it really. The whole thing seemed spoilt by the fact that we knew Mags was back in Cambridge crying her poor eyes out. I still wonder if we shouldn’t have changed our own flights and travelled back with her. I almost suggested it – in fact was about to suggest it, even – when Mags said something that upset me, causing me to keep schtum.
She told me that she had only ever been in love with Ian and, because I wanted her to realise that she’d been in love on more than one occasion and by consequence would be again, I challenged her on this until finally she admitted that it was true.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I was in love one other time. But he was married, so that doesn’t count.’
Well, it seemed obvious to me that she was talking about you. In fact, I was terrified that she was about to admit to the whole affair thing, bang in the middle of my summer holiday. It crossed my mind that she might have a vindictive streak – that she might think she’d feel better if she torpedoed our holiday by chucking everything out there in the open, so that we could all be miserable together. I thought, too, about the fact that she was now single again and, as such, was now dangerous again, as well.
So I selfishly decided to keep you safe from her for a couple more days while I did my best to prove to you how much better off you were with me. Plus, to be totally honest, which is supposed to be the whole point here, thinking about Ian and Dimitri together had made me feel strangely horny. They were both so very, very pretty ...
When we got back, I went down on the train to pick up April from Mum’s.
She was so happy there, Sean – it was as much as I could do to drag her home. It had been a hot fortnight and Mum said that they, too, had spent every day on the beach. When I asked April what she’d been eating, she said, ‘Chips and Coke and chocolate ice cream,’ which I knew, instantly, was the entire truth.
When I got back to Cambridge, I found you and Mags together, staring at the TV screen. Something strange was going on and you both looked concerned, and I worried, for a moment, that you were going to make some devastating announcement to me.
When I looked at the TV screen, it was covered with red percentage numbers that I didn’t understand. ‘We’ve crashed out of the ERM,’ you said. I had no idea what that meant but you looked pretty worried. It was the day after Black Wednesday.
Sean rolls onto his side and sunlight warms his face. He writhes and stretches and luxuriates in the sensation of the crisp white sheets against his skin. The odour of fresh coffee reaches his nostrils, mixed with something different, something spicy and tangy.
He rolls onto his back, stretches again, his arms above his head, and then opens his eyes. The sunlight flickers and strobes as the leaves of the tree outside bristle in the breeze.
He throws back the covers and stands. He yawns and then begins to walk towards the lounge, conscious as he leaves the bedroom of his nakedness yet aware by the time he arrives of the soft plush dressing gown he’s wearing.
A woman is in the kitchen area, a woman he loves. She’s in the process of squeezing oranges, and this, he realises, is the origin of the second, tangy odour he had detected on waking up. The woman is wearing one of his white work shirts and the sunlight is revealing the shadow of her enveloped body through the material.
‘Coffee and juice?’ she asks, and as she turns to face him, he realises that this is not Catherine. She is somehow of the same essence as Catherine, but she is not Catherine.
He turns to look at the picture window at the far end of the room and sees that the woman is now seated outside, waiting for him, so he crosses the room and pushes at the window, which glides effortlessly before vanishing into the wall. He steps onto the balcony and then grips the cold railings and looks down at the scene below.
Beneath him is the Cam, complete with rowers and punts and windsurfers, and beyond that a daffodil-spotted riverbank, and beyond that a vast sea of blue, dotted with tiny islands in a pink sunrise.
‘The sea!’ Sean gasps.
‘Yes, they moved it,’ the woman replies. ‘Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?’
‘They moved it,’ Sean repeats, and he begins to laugh, and once he has started, he can’t stop. He laughs and laughs and laughs. And when he opens his eyes to find himself in his usual, darkened bedroom, he realises that he is still laughing. He wipes the tears from his eyes and glances over at the alarm clock. It’s 6.48.
It is now ten o’clock on Saturday morning and Sean is out of bed, out of coffee and out of orange juice. So he makes Marmite on toast and a mug of tea instead and looks out at the rain-soaked garden and thinks about the dream.
It’s the first happy, sexy dream he has had since Catherine fell ill two years ago, and he wishes, in a way, that he could close his eyes and go back to that sunny apartment.
He tries to remember the woman’s face, but it’s a blur, like one of those frosted-window faces you see in crime documentaries.
But the flat he remembers and recognises. It was one of the Cantabrigian Rise units, albeit stretched to dream proportions and resituated on the Aegean. That sensation, of simply being happy, remains so sharp, so well remembered, and so lost to him now he’s awake, that it makes him want to cry. He reaches for his phone and flicks through the recent photo list until he comes to the picture of the ‘For Sale’ sign. And then he fetches the landline handset and dials the number.
