Cassette #8
Hello Fiancé.
So, the big day! The 27th of November, 1982. I was freezing in that dress, but I didn’t have a nice coat I could wear, so I grinned and put up with it. Just look at how young we were!
Looking at this photo now, I can see why Mum was so upset. We were too young to get married. And I was too young to have a baby. Not that I regret any of it, but lord, can you imagine how we would have felt if April had got pregnant at eighteen? You would have had a hissy-fit.
I found a couple of wedding photos, actually, but as they all also featured your mum and Perry looking as miserable as sin, I chose this one. But do hunt them out and have a look because Theresa and Alistair are in there as well and for some reason it quite cheered me up to see their faces again. I wonder where they are now?
God, the parents were a bit of a nightmare though, weren’t they?
Your dad was laid up with sciatica and your mum was furious, I think, because he wasn’t there. Well, that was the official version, anyway.
We all knew that the truth was simply that they thought I was too common for you, which is unsurprising in a way. My own mother thought that. God, I thought that!
I think your mum thought I was slutty because I’d got pregnant, too. As if that was something I could do on my own!
Anyway, you know when Mum came with me in the taxi? Well, I know how perfect you’ve always thought she is, but I have to tell you that even she tried to talk me out of getting married until the last possible moment. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she kept asking. “You don’t have to marry him just because he’s got you up the duff.” She always had a way with words, my mum. “Look at me!” she said. “I had you but didn’t marry the guy. Even I knew better than that!”
Unlike your mother, who was angry with me, mine thought it was all your fault, of course. “Just because he’s been irresponsible,” she said. “It’s not like we’re living in the fifties anymore. It’s not like he’s never heard of johnnies.”
In the end, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I told her about Phil. It was meant to shut her up. I told her that I didn’t even know who the father was.
She got upset then about what would happen if you found out. “He’ll dump you in a second,” she told me.
So I lied and said that you knew. I told her that you didn’t care. And that did the trick.
By the time that had sunk in, she had completely changed her mind about you; she had decided that you were the bee’s knees after all!
The ceremony was a bit lacklustre. This was, after all, Wolverhampton Civic Centre, not Canterbury Cathedral. But we didn’t give a damn, did we? We’d made it to the altar, or the registrar’s desk at any rate. We were in our little private bubble of happiness and we didn’t care about any of them.
Afterwards, we went back to the house for our little party. There were quite a few people, though I can only really remember Theresa and Alistair, oh, and that Welsh girl, Bronwen. That tall, bald guy, Dave, was there too, I think, but then he was always at all the parties. He was always wherever there was free beer. Alistair soon had music blasting out and everyone got drunk except your mother, but even she didn’t get me down for long.
She complained about the state of the house, I remember, and she was upset that there wasn’t a wedding cake, too. She moaned about the cigarette smoke and the loud music, but we just partied on regardless, dancing around her and Perry looking outraged together in the corner of the room.
At one point, I went over to try to get her involved. I was tipsy (we didn’t worry about drinking when pregnant back then and, thank God, April turned out just fine).
My mum was drunk on Alistair’s home-brew and stoned on Alistair’s joints, too. She was dancing around like a Dervish to Dexys Midnight Runners and I felt sorry for your poor Mum looking so out-of-it in the corner, watching us all dancing. I suddenly wanted us all to be friends.
So I grooved up to her and said something like, “Come on Cynthia, let your hair down a bit. You might as well.”
Now, I’ve never told you this because I knew it would upset you, but you’ve probably always wondered why we got off to such a bad start. Well, your mum didn’t want to be friends, that’s the thing. She said, “How dare you call me that. It’s Mrs Patrick to you.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking that this must be another one of those posh rules I knew so little about.
“And don’t think I don’t know what you are,” she said. Her voice was quite unpleasant. It was a sort of snarl, really. “I wasn’t born yesterday. I know exactly what you are.”
Theresa, who was watching all of this, swooped in to save me again. She yanked me back to the middle of the room where everyone was whooping and dancing to Come On Eileen. She leaned into my ear and said, “Don’t worry about her. She’s so uptight, she doesn’t even know what letting her hair down means.”
I glanced over at your mum – I was on the verge of tears – and she said something to Perry and pointed at me and Perry laughed.
Mum, who was dancing beside me, had noticed something was up. She leant in between Theresa and me and said, really loudly, “She probably hasn’t had a shag since Sean was conceived. That’s her trouble. She just needs a good bonk.”
All three of us fell about laughing.
I’m sorry, Sean, because that was a bit rude, really, wasn’t it? But it was better than me crying all over everyone, I suppose. And we were, after all, very drunk by then.
Anyway, that’s when I realised that your mum and I were never going to be mates. I found that out on my wedding day.
• • •
It is Sunday morning and Sean is at work.
He’s alone in the vast open-plan offices of Nicholson-Wallace and is enjoying the eerie silence of the place. Despite it being nearly eleven o’clock, it’s almost dark outside and his desk lamp casts a warm glow across his workspace.
Sean’s behind schedule on a retirement home he’s supposed to be working on. He’s been putting it off, he has just realised, because it reminds him of his mother, and being reminded of his mother makes him feel very angry at the moment.
Actually, thinking about his parents has almost always made him feel angry, but since last week’s tape, that feeling has become even more acute than normal.
He has always known that neither of his parents approved of his marriage to Catherine, but he always saw it as little more than part and parcel of their generalised disapproval of everything he did.
But he hadn’t known that his mother had actually had words with Catherine. He never knew that she had been rude to her, and on their wedding day to boot.
As he clicks on the corner of a window and resizes it to fit the proportions of the wall, a rattling sound startles him and he looks up to see that it has started to rain heavily. The wind is blowing the rain against the eastern windows with gusto.
The rain on the windows is actually a blessing in disguise, because Sean realises that he has forgotten an essential part of the brief for this job, namely that the windows must be cleanable from the inside, without ladders or any form of external access. He’ll just have to change the hinge mechanism so that they can flip over 180 degrees for cleaning purposes. He really needs to stop thinking about Catherine and his mother. He really needs to concentrate.
In a way he blamed Catherine a little for their fraught relationship, he realises. Oh, he blamed his mother more, but if he’s honest with himself, it was only because it was easier for him that way. It was Catherine he lived with, not his mother, after all.
He tries to think back to all the times he and Catherine had discussed his parents. Though he can’t remember actually having reproached her in any way, there were times, he reckons, when he could perhaps have been a little more understanding. He could have apologised more often for his parents’ behaviour.
The last tape message made him angry, specifically because he had wasted the entire Saturday visiting Cynthia in The Cedars. The message had made him wish he hadn’t bothered. It had made him want to never bother again.
But this familiar feeling puts him in conflict with himself. It pits the Sean who wants to be loyal to his dead wife against the Sean who feels obligated towards his parents no matter what they might have said or done. Lordy, those blood ties run deep.
It’s just before three when Sean gets home and though the sky is still threatening, the rain has now stopped.
On the doorstep, he finds a family sized apple crumble. It’s wrapped in a plastic bag which also contains a Post-It note from Maggie.
“Came to see you but you’re out! Which is a good thing! Eat this! Love Mags. xxx”
Sean lets himself into the house and peers into the empty refrigerator before heating up half of the apple crumble in the microwave. He had been intending to order a pizza but he finds himself suddenly too hungry to wait.
While he waits for the microwave to go “ping”, he pulls the box from the cupboard and retrieves the next envelope.