Chapter 10
TEN
One week has passed since. One week of no messages from Bren, and several from Freya, at first: please, Nora, answer your phone, can we talk about this, before those messages dried up, too.
A new strategy, probably, a freezing out from her principled, prickly mother: fine. Nora merely ignored her harder.
You’ve been quiet, Robin says on the Friday night, as they eat takeaway noodles straight from the foil. Gyoza in a plastic tray, salmon-pink slices of ginger. Miso in a cup, cloudy and hot on the coffee table.
Just tired, she tells him. He’s been away on a shoot all week; she’d not had the energy to tell him about Bren and Freya, when she’d got home last weekend.
He’d been giddy because of the venue, their newly confirmed wedding date.
She hadn’t wanted to ruin that. And then by the Sunday he was gone for an antiques roadshow, and she’d been left alone to think and work and catch the train into the city each day, springtime lightening the mornings, prolonging the evenings, like her own understanding of her past and present. Nothing quite normal, any more.
I meant all week, Robin says. Normally you shower me with snapshots of your day. Your breakfast. Funny typos. Strangers wearing excellent hats.
Nora takes a mouthful of noodles, chewing as he says a particular highlight was when she found a pink rhinestone on the floor of the flat, when neither of them owns anything bespeckled with rhinestones.
You just wanted to use the word bespeckled, didn’t you, she says, after she’s swallowed, and Robin laughs.
I used the word buffeted, this week, too, he admits. It was a proud moment.
He is being gentle, and not prying; sitting beside her with ease, his shirt unbuttoned. An animated fantasy playing on the television.
I discovered something, this week, she says, because it’s the right time to say it. And because if she tells him – the way she tells him everything – she’ll surely be able to make sense of it.
Oh yeah?
Yeah. It shouldn’t be important, but it feels. I don’t know.
Robin mutes the television.
Is it Bren-related, he asks her, and she looks at him quickly, her heart quick too. He puts the cup of miso down on the coffee table. He seems like he’s got a lot of … baggage, he says. For someone who seems to think he travels light.
That’s perfectly put, she says. And very observant.
I am a photographer, Robin says, feigning conceit. Leaning over for another gyoza. But his stuff isn’t your stuff, Nora. You know that, right?
Nora nods, prodding around in her noodles with her chopsticks.
She can’t quite recall how much she’s told Robin, in the past, about Bren and his childhood.
That they’d roam the farmers’ fields together, sure, spend hours climbing trees, talking on the swings.
Because that’s what teenagers do. Not because Josie was having an episode, and he needed to be kept out of the house.
Tears sometimes streaked on his cheeks that she never once acknowledged, because he’d wipe them away when he saw her.
I think it’s hard for him, being home, she says. With everything.
Robin nods, a fleck of soy sauce on his chin.
His dad dying, you mean?
Yeah. But that’s only one part of it. I glimpsed what it must have been like, growing up with Josie.
A mother who was okay one day, then really not, the next.
And then when Jon died – his name, she thinks, almost hard to say out loud – so suddenly, when he was the one who, in Bren’s mind, held everything together …
She can’t finish. That man’s a mirage to her, now. All the good things about him, as dead to her as he is, like his lifeless body the coroner came to take away.
It was pretty tragic, she says. And I think Bren’s cut himself off from that tragedy, and everyone else in his life.
Except you, Robin says.
Yeah, Nora says. She eats more noodles, tries to find a way to tell him about the phone call, which with this context, surely, explains why it’s so unsettling – it’s about Bren’s heart, not hers, and it’s only bothering her because she cares, and who wouldn’t care about a guy like Bren who doesn’t even know himself how much he’s hurting – but then Robin asks her a question, in an even voice. Do you have feelings for him?
Nora splutters on a nub of wasabi.
What do you mean!
I mean the boy next door has returned after a decade away, Robin says. The boy you planned to travel the world with. Who looks at you, by the way, like he wants to eat you.
He does not.
He does, he says, and his expression is neutral, nothing smug or possessive in the line of his mouth. I just wondered if it was messing with you, a bit. That’s all.
Nora watches him dig for a prawn in his own noodles.
The television flicks to a new scene, and she feels warm and too full and she should just tell him.
She should just say yes, she’s mixed up.
She’s confused, because of what she’s found out this past week, and wouldn’t anyone feel the same, and because it’s Robin he’ll understand and talk it out and things will be fine and how they’re meant to be.
But what if they’re not. What if this unpeels a layer she can’t put back, so instead she says, in a level voice: there was never anything between Bren and me.
Not officially, Robin says.
Not at all, Nora says. He’s. I’m.
These prawns are so good, tonight, Robin says. Not as salty as last time.
He keeps eating; Nora blinks, takes a moment. Then he looks up, picks up her train of thought. You said you discovered something, he prompts. This week.
Yes, she says. I found out that he … wanted me to go with him. The day he left, and everything, he phoned my house, and spoke to Freya. Told her.
That he didn’t want to go, without me.
Didn’t want to do anything without me.
That I should join him, like we’d planned, she says.
And he explained why he had to leave so suddenly.
Because of how it was, at home, for him.
Which I guess I always knew, on some level, but it hurt so much that he’d never explained himself.
I just figured he found it easier to ignore the whole thing.
Or pretend I was the one in the wrong, for being so sensitive.
Robin is watching her as she talks. Watching her realise, now she’s saying it out loud, that she might start crying.
All this time, I’ve been mad at him for going, without saying so – and he’s been mad at me, for ignoring him, and not giving him an answer. When it was Freya, who didn’t pass on his message. Got lucky, I guess, when we were both too wounded to talk about it.
Another scene starts up on the television. Nora watches it, and Robin keeps watching her, his chopsticks still poised in his hand.
That’s … terrible, he says, after a stretch of quiet.
I know, Nora says, her voice quiet, too.
But why would she do that?
She said, Nora tells him, that she couldn’t lose me, as well.
Little shrug, then. Just one shoulder, like Bren, rubbing off on her.
Because Robin knows about Freya and Jon; is the only person on earth she has told, late one night when they were baring their souls and their secrets, because it’s what you do when you’re falling in love and want to know every corner of the person you’re lying in bed with.
Although she has regretted telling him, sometimes.
Worried what he thinks of her mother, or of Nora herself, for saying nothing.
Because is it cowardly, to stay silent? To not rock the fragile boat that could so easily sink, even when there was nothing wrong, when Josie’s son was home and her husband was alive and her friend had not betrayed her, and still she took anti-psychotics, still she stopped driving, still she couldn’t cope when the boiler broke or a cat caught a dove in the back garden and she’d cry and cry and cry.
Are you … okay, Robin asks her, and Nora lifts her wet eyes to his.
I could barely look at her, she tells him, meaning Freya. And Bren and I … we’ve not spoken, since we realised. I guess neither of us knows what to say. And I just feel, she says, blinking her tears back. A lot of things.
You wouldn’t be Nora, if you didn’t, Robin says.
And she is grateful for his faith in her.
For not questioning her again, about Bren.
For understanding the shock of the phone call and the second betrayal of her mother and not prying into what that means, what does it mean, she does not know, she wants to finish dinner and watch the film and just carry on as they were.
Robin does not unmute the television, and Nora does not finish her noodles. She does, however, take the last gyoza when he offers it.
I’m guessing we’re still okay for the twenty-second of April, he says, after they’ve eaten.
And it is teasing, she thinks, but also a good question, and Nora says yeah, of course, without pausing to wonder whether that is a good answer.
It’s fine, she says. She’s just not sure, now, whether Freya will be there.
Robin has been stacking their empty takeaway dishes, but stops at this, cocks his head. Really? he says. I know what she did was wrong, Nora, but she’s your mother.
And a liar, Nora says. Standing up, taking the stacked trays in one hand, the leftover noodles in the other. In the kitchen, she puts the latter in a Tupperware. Wondering if, by not being entirely honest with him – with herself, even, about all this – all of what – she is a liar, too.