Chapter 2
TWO
We should have a party, Robin says.
A party, Nora repeats, from her place by the hob. She is frying onion, steaming up the windows as the rain falls outdoors. First week of February, now, and the frost is long gone; more rain, again, near relentless. Higher winds.
Isn’t a wedding a party in itself? she asks as she adds more oil, turns up the heat. Robin calls her a joy thief. She calls him a joy addict.
Shared smiles, then. Cooking smells.
All I’m thinking is a wedding’s expensive, Robin says. And takes years to plan.
Does it have to?
Well, I suppose not. But we could have a warm-up act, first. Celebrate this moment, right now. Carpe diem!
You’re very spontaneous these days, Nora says, and he says he knows, it’s his middle name. Or at least, he wishes it was. It’s far more inspiring than Brian.
Nora laughs. Tips a packet of spring greens into the wok.
I think it’d be great, Robin goes on. We could host it here, keep it simple.
He pulls his notebook out from his back pocket; a folded leather journal he carries everywhere. Engagement party, he narrates, elongating the vowels as he says it, and writes the words. First up, he says, the guest list.
Nora adds water chestnuts to the pan, starts mixing soy sauce with sesame oil as Robin reels off the names of their friends.
Old colleagues. Art school peers they’ve kept in touch with.
Shay, Jin. Henry who runs the bakery down the road.
And family, he says. All of mine, and Freya and Josie, of course.
I doubt they’ll come, Nora says.
We should invite them, all the same, he says.
More lines in his notebook, muted agreement in Nora’s throat. The wind outside flecking rain at the window. Ginger paste added, one teaspoon, when Robin says oh, hey, what about Bren?
The oil spits; stings Nora’s skin.
What, she says, as if she hasn’t heard the question.
Would you want to invite Bren?
Um, Nora says, as the sauce continues to spit; she turns down the heat. I don’t even know where he is right now, she says, and then wonders why she is saying this, when she does. Maybe New Zealand, actually. Which is a bit of a way to come, I reckon, for prosecco and pizza.
Robin, who is still scrawling in his notebook, looks up. Pizza?
I was thinking Alessandro’s, she says.
Yes, Nora, Robin says. That’s why I’m marrying you.
She smiles, again. The flame on the hob still too high.
Prosecco, though? Robin asks.
Isn’t that what people drink at engagement parties?
I think they drink whatever they want to drink.
Rum cocktails, then, Nora says. And red wine.
And olives! Robin says. The really good ones in the green can.
Don’t they cost the earth?
You only get engaged once, Nora, he says.
Twice, max, he adds, which was a joke she saw coming, but she laughs all the same.
Ignores the fridge magnets that Bren has sent her over the years, as she opens the door for the beansprouts.
They’re the one thing she can rely on him for; magnetic reminders that he still exists, after they’d once shared a bedroom wall, a school bus, long, lazy summers dangling their feet in the river.
All that reduced to an ad hoc parcel in the post, the occasional glitching video call, are you there?
I’ve lost you. When did I lose you? Things she’s asked herself, privately, away from a screen, as well.
When she’s staring out the train window after a long day at work.
Or if Robin’s working late so she’s taking a bath, staring at the flicker of a scented candle and thinking about things she tries not to.
As she reaches, now, for a bell pepper, redder than Bren’s hair, as Robin goes on listing the other people who are still present in their lives; Jemima, Gaya and Jack.
_
Robin wants an engagement party, she texts Shay later that night. She’s sitting at her craft table, littered with fabric swatches and calligraphy pens. Threads in black and cream and taupe, wound into an old shortbread tin.
It begins! Shay replies, after three waving dots. Are you hiring a hall, wearing a diamanté dress and coming up with a pun-worthy hashtag?
Three middle finger emojis from Nora. Laughing emoji from Shay.
We’re just hosting it here, Nora explains. I’m making the invitation right now; photo, then, of her desk, the blank page. Are you free, she asks, the last Saturday in Feb?
If I can bring a date, Shay says.
Horace won’t fit in our flat.
Then I’ll need to think about it, Shay says. More laughing emojis, then. Course, she says. Any excuse to spend some time with your barmy mother.
Hey, Nora texts back. She doesn’t like being called mother.
Jokes, and deliberate lightness; warmth, in Nora’s gut, alongside that tight twist, again, as if someone’s wringing out her abdomen.
She puts her phone down and pulls a sheaf of paper towards her. Grabs a fine line pencil and writes something in elegant, looping font. Nora and Robin, she writes. Sitting in a tree. She draws some little trees, along the bottom, but no. Not right. New sheet of paper.
Nora and Robin, she tries again: PARTY PEOPLE.
But that’s not them, either; it’s undermining this thing they have planted, in a way that feels wrong to her, now. Years they’d spent, saying they did not care for marriage or weddings or being husband and wife – but now it is a choice they’ve made, and something to be sincere about.
Nora and Robin, she writes, are engaged.
There.
She outlines it in ink, chooses her darkest blue, the colour of late nights and deep waters.
Once satisfied, she writes a smaller sentence: there will be pizza, above the date: a Saturday night three weeks from now, the address of their flat beneath.
Then she takes it across the hall and hands it to Robin who looks up from his own work and says it looks stellar, that she’s stellar, his star.
He turns it into a digital file on his laptop and the next day Nora sends it to all of their friends and her mother and Josie and even, in a moment of wild, hot abandon, to Bren, in an email she is fairly certain he will not read for months. And then she returns to her day.
_
A fortnight, then, of planning. Prepping, ordering pizzas for forty people, is that too much garlic bread, is there such a thing as too much garlic bread?
Valentine’s love hearts and teddies and roses in the windows as she walks to work; a candle-making workshop at the café, coffees made, spilled, mopped up, a drawing exhibition with Shay, one evening.
Another night spent with her mother when Robin is out late with work.
Braised chickpeas for dinner, passing comment about how she won’t be coming to the party, you don’t mind, do you darl, in case something happens next door, because Josie won’t come, can’t leave the house, as we all know, best not.
And Nora nods with the chickpeas mushed in her mouth and says sure, even though Freya goes to work at the hospice every day – some nights, even, when she’s working the late shift – and Josie is just fine, which actually means Freya doesn’t want to mark her engagement, and that’s fine, too, but still Nora feels something small and sharp lodged inside her, like the grit that got stuck under her palm when she fell off her bike, once, in the driveway.
Feels it, still, as she gets into her childhood bed that night, the wall still plastered with art postcards, Rothko, Kahlo and Sheila Hicks, colour is in my blood.
A dreamcatcher, in the window.
And her final thought, before she drifts off, is of knocking on the wall to see if Bren would knock back, and when she wakes for a moment she is sixteen and her first thought is to wonder if he’s awake, too, on the other side.
But then she is actually awake and thirty-one years old, and Robin has messaged her, overnight.
Said he’s home. Said he misses her. Said can she pick up some ginger ale, for the cocktails, on her way home?
Sure, she says. Dresses for work, checks her emails on the train.
Still no reply from Bren.
_
A week later, and she’s wearing a satin dress and embroidered waistcoat.
Something she’d made at art school as a wannabe textile artist, darned with abstract shapes and large pockets.
Applies eyeliner, though she rarely wears make-up, blusher not needed, when she’s naturally rosy-cheeked.
Some occasions call for a little effort, though, and agreeing to marry your partner of nine years, she thinks, is one of them.
Nora has decorated the flat with fairy lights.
Robin has made a playlist. They have revised the pizza order three times and she’s panic-bought more crisps and made an installation of Polaroid photographs; memories, captured, with all of the friends who have RSVP’d for tonight – a surprisingly large number – pegged onto a stretch of string in the living room, for people to take home after the party.
WEDDING CHEESE, Shay said, when Nora had mentioned the idea. This is a strong Cheddar, on the cheese scale. I’ll let you know when you reach ripe levels of Camembert.
But Nora didn’t mind. Has always been partial to a cheeseboard.
It looks marvellous, Robin says now, wrapping his hands around Nora’s waist from behind and resting his chin on her shoulder.
It is an hour before the party starts and he has shaved and smells good, of oakmoss and sandalwood, the cold night air, where he’s had the bathroom window open.
They straighten cushions, drape more lights, have to stop themselves eating all the olives, and then the doorbell chimes an hour early.
Who on earth, Nora says.
Probably my cousin Pete, says Robin. Never been to a party in his life.
That’s so sad, Nora says.
You’ll feel less sad when you meet him, Robin says, but when he opens the door it is Freya, laden with cotton tote bags. I’m not staying, she says. I’ve just brought some essentials, for the Bloody Marys.