Chapter 9 #3
Again, with the spontaneity! Freya says. She is wearing a kaftan over her thermals, tonight, and has a few twigs in her hair; she must have been pilfering crops from the local daffodil farm. Not a Sunday, is it?
She lays the daffodils on the side and starts pulling jam jars off the shelves, filling them with water from the tap. Nora, while she does so, finds her voice. Says no.
What’s up then, darl?
A complex question; a complex answer. Nora has been trying to find the right words since she’d left Bren in the restaurant, before their food arrived.
Unable to eat, unable to think straight.
On the train and on the bus and for god knows how long at this wobbling table.
Wondering how to lay out all the hurt and assumptions and whys, the room pressing in on her, the lucky cat waving back and forth. Taunting.
Freya glances round, plucking a stem or two from the bouquets.
Has something happened? she asks, but Nora can’t answer.
Is it Robin? her mother presses. Or the wedding?
No, Nora says, her anger, dammed behind years of silence, now surging forward. No, it’s nothing to do with the wedding.
Okay, Freya says, in a suit-yourself kind of voice, turning back to her jam jars once more. I was just asking.
Were you? Or were you implying, yet again, that there’s some kind of problem with me wanting to marry the man I love?
It is like she is reminding herself of this.
Like she has to say it out loud.
Is this a chat for the greenh –
I don’t want to go near your damn greenhouse! Nora bursts out, and Freya turns, her eyebrows arched into her hair. You pretend you’re all wise and stoic, you tell me to come back to my centre and breathe out all the bullshit but you know what, Freya? You’re the one that’s full of it.
Nora’s voice is not measured, like she’d wanted. She wants to throw plates and jam jars and lucky cats, but words, it seems, are the easiest choice. Freya looks bewildered. What was that, Nora knows she is thinking. What is this.
We’ve been over this, Freya says. And I’ve made my peace with it. Marriage isn’t for me, but –
Right, Nora says, her anger a crashing wave now, salt in her wounds as she says you just prefer having affairs with men who are already married.
There is no sound, after she’s said this.
Not a breath from either of them.
And Nora’s adrenaline retreats, now that she cannot take it back, now that she’s put it out there, finally, but she forces herself to keep staring at her mother, who stares right back, her face white.
I know, Freya, Nora says. I saw you and Jon, that time. In our bathroom.
Whatever you thought you saw –
Don’t do that, Nora says, and her mother sees how serious this is, hears it, in her daughter’s voice, and stops talking.
But Nora has only begun. All of it finally rushing out, even though this wasn’t what brought her here, not what she came to throw out into the room like the plates she still wants to smash, the sea shells, the greenhouse walls, this farce her mother has built for them both, their family friends, all lies.
Don’t pretend, Nora says. I know what I saw. I don’t know what it was, between you, and actually, I don’t want to know – don’t want to think about it – but you definitely weren’t just friends.
And with this, it seems, Freya can’t argue.
But I’m not here to get into that, Nora says, because she isn’t; she’d made a choice, long ago, to lock all that away, but the lid has been blown off, tonight. Collateral damage. I’m here, she says, to ask you something else.
Nora – but Nora says no, and her mother falls silent again.
Did you answer a call from Bren, the day he left, Nora asks.
A blink. A beat. A wave back and forth from the cat.
I told you –
You told me he called to say goodbye, Nora says. Sorry and goodbye.
Freya is looking at her, desperate, and for a slice of a second Nora wants, so badly, to be wrong.
Would give anything, in fact, for Bren to be the one who had wronged her, the way she’d always thought, because she has tried to ignore the thing with Jon but the call with Bren feels bigger, almost, because it’s her, because it’s him: because it’s them.
He says he called here and left me a message, she says, asking me to join him. Did you take that message.
I’m –
Did you take that message, Freya?
I didn’t know what to do, her mother says, and her voice is unlike her own: soft, and pleading. Jon had just … died, and …
A roaring, now, in Nora’s ears.
I know it looks bad, Freya says, I know you must have drawn conclusions, but there’s more to it – and then he died –
I know he fucking died! I know!
Tears, now, in Nora’s throat. With grief, or rage.
He died and I hated him! Nora says. Bren’s dad!
Our friend! But after I saw you together, I couldn’t look at him, I felt so – sick, and ashamed – and then his fucking heart gave out and I didn’t know what to do with that, Freya, so I’ve kept it quiet all this time for Josie, not for you, d’you understand?
Because it would kill her. It’d fucking kill her.
No tears, from Freya. No reply.
And then my – my best –
But there is no language, for what Bren was; what he is, still.
– he left! Without me! And I was heartbroken! And it turns out you caused that, Freya! Why! I want to know why! Are you really so against me being with someone? So sour about being a bitter, lonely spinster that you had to stop me being with him, away from here? Away from you?
Yes! Freya cries, and her eyes are wild. Yes, Nora! Jon died! Out of nowhere! I was in shock, you have to understand that! I was devastated, but I had to hold it together – I had to be there for –
Don’t pretend you’re her friend, Nora near-spits. What kind of friend would do that, to someone?
Her mother lets out a winded noise, at this, puts her head in her hands. Nora stays rigid in the chair, and they stay like that, heartbeats like deadened drums, until Freya lowers her palms.
And then Bren phoned the landline, she murmurs, and he said all of these things. How he felt. Where he would wait, for you. And I was grieving, Nora, I was bereft, and I – I couldn’t have you leaving me, too.
The silence stretches like time itself, then. Twelve whole years of it.
I didn’t mean t –
Didn’t mean to what? Sabotage my entire life? Let me think that what I had with Bren was nothing? Watch me meet someone else, get engaged to someone else, someone I wouldn’t have even met if you hadn’t hidden that phone call –
But you did meet him! And you’re happy!
That is so not the point.
Be with Bren, then! He’s back, now!
Freya, listen to yourself. I am not like you. I am not willing to play with people’s lives like that. I can’t just swap Robin for Bren, Jesus, nothing is that simple, and if you thi –
I know it’s not! Really, I do! If you would just –
No, Nora says again, and she stands up, shoves the chair back so hard it collides with the kitchen counter; she hears the backboard split. It’s a chair they’d painted together when she was little; yellow, like the daffodils, splintered now on the floor.
You were eighteen, Nora, Freya says, following her into the hall. I couldn’t have known it would hurt you so badly, for so long. I couldn’t have known he’d have stayed in touch, or turned up, like this, out of the blue.
It’s not out of the blue, though, is it? We – Bren and I – we –
She is dizzy, with all of it. With what they are, or should have been.
Best friends, promised for more; knowing that, without needing to say it, because they felt it, she’d thought they’d felt it.
Second-guessed it, felt rejected, ever since.
Freya keeps talking while Nora tugs on her shoes.
Making excuses, defending herself, but she doesn’t want to hear it.
Flashes of the people she’d cared about – Josie’s face, Jon’s laugh, Freya touching his arm and him kissing her neck and Nora’s world shattering as she glimpsed them, from the stairs – Bren on the swings and in her room and halfway across the world but huge in her heart, across the table, saying he’d wanted her with him – had always wanted her, with him – and then she’s out the door, the air cutting cold on her face.
She needs to move. She has to get away. She understands, truly, for the first time, why Bren walked out the way he did; because things can hurt, for so long, then all at once become too much.
And so she walks out, too. Her mother calling behind her, from the porch, Nora, please, I didn’t want to lose you, and her saying, well, Freya, twelve years too late? It looks like you just did.