Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Nora is in the back room at the art café when Josie calls her. She puts down what she’s been working on and answers, worried because it’s a Thursday and they don’t usually speak on Thursdays; Josie always calls her on the first Wednesday of the month.
Nora? Josie says when she answers, as if to check she’s called the right number, and Nora asks her if everything’s all right. Tilts her head so her phone is balanced between her ear and shoulder, picks up her sewing again.
Fine, sweetheart, fine, Josie says. I’m just calling to tell you I’m throwing a little Easter lunch next Sunday, and I’d really like you to be there. With Robin, too, of course.
Nora goes back to her embroidery.
Pulls the thread through, without speaking.
It is early evening, and Shay is locking up for the night. The laptop screen is whistling with how hot it is in this back room, no window and no air.
Nora has been spending a lot of time in here lately. Thinking. Working. Pulling parts of herself out of her own head with a needle and thread; feeling something she hasn’t felt in a long while, the need to create art that means something. Maybe everything.
This is important to me, Nora, Josie is saying. It’s my invite, but it will be hosted at your mum’s – and she says it breezily, like this is of no consequence – because she has more shade in her garden, you see, and more chairs.
Nora’s needle darts back through the fabric, fish-like, flash of silver.
I’m not speaking to Freya at the moment, Josie, she says.
I know that, pet, and that’s why I thought you could work it ou –
We will, Nora says. Another time.
But you won’t, Josie says, and Nora hears the desperation in her voice, a manic pitch that’s been absent for a long time. I hate that you aren’t speaking! Life’s too short to fight like this, with the people you love most!
It really is so hot in this room. Nora looks down at the work on her knees, thinking, if only you knew the half of it, Jose.
Life might be short but it’s also your own, Nora says. And Freya needs to know that, Josie. She can’t just puppeteer my life when it suits her.
But your wedding! Josie says, not prying into Nora’s words – or else knowing, Nora suspects, whatever Freya has deigned to tell her. You’ll have to be talking by then, surely? And Bren said it was the twenty-second of April, which is only a couple of weeks away. That’s –
No, Nora says.
But it is. Today’s the sixth, and –
No, that’s not the date, Nora says. We didn’t book the venue, in the end.
Josie is silent.
Oh, she says.
Another stitch, with Nora’s needle.
Are you, Josie starts. Is everything.
Nora swallows, but finds she cannot answer.
She is still wearing her engagement ring; nothing has ended, officially.
But Robin has been distant ever since they got home from Devon, and she has been spending extra time in here, planning and thinking and working.
Giving him space, too, which she thought he might need, while still wrapping herself around him at night.
Saying she loves him. And he’s saying it back, but he’s also looking at her strangely when she walks through the door, as if he’s not sure who she is, any more.
But she’ll show him.
We’ll get back on track, Nora says, in the end, because she doesn’t want to give Josie another thing to worry about.
So you’re not on track, right now?
Nora sighs, puts down her needle. She can hear Shay stacking chairs, clearing space for the lino print class they’re running after hours.
I just feel so … daunted, by it all, Nora confesses, because she knows Josie won’t let her go without an admission. Marriage is so big and formal.
It doesn’t have to be, Josie tells her.
No, Nora says. Thinking of Jon, kissing Josie’s cheek and Freya’s neck, all in one afternoon. The glint of Josie’s wedding ring as she clung on to Freya’s arm, at his funeral.
I have to go, she says.
Sweetheart –
I don’t think we can come for Easter, Nora says. It’s too … I don’t …
She thinks of Bren. How they need to talk, sooner rather than later; how she’s been avoiding him, and what she has to tell him.
How Robin can barely be in the same room as her, right now, let alone in a garden with her mother and neighbours pretending all is fine, all is sunny and chirpy like the birdsong that’ll drift from the hedgerows.
Hot cross buns shared, chocolate eggs traded; whatever it is that Josie has planned.
But what Nora has come to realise is that you cannot boil certainty down to a single day, or destination – a wedding or funeral or accidental proposal.
An Easter lunch, to make nice. Life, she thinks, as she sits on the phone, needle in hand, is more than the finished piece; it includes all of the untied threads, all of the loose knots torn off with your teeth, all the callouses on your fingers where you stabbed yourself trying, got it wrong, tried again; kept on.
But it’s not just dinner, Josie says, and she still sounds desperate. I was hoping to make it a really special day. And it won’t be special without you, Nora.
Shay is singing now, as she finishes stacking chairs.
Mangled lyrics to a rock song, today could be the last day of your life.
And a part of it, Josie goes on, is that there’s something I’d like to share with you, Nora. Something that might make all of this easier on you.
It is a strange thing for her to say. A strange thing to be so earnest about, Nora thinks, when Josie can have no idea about the complexities that are weighing on her, here. What she’s been safekeeping, all these years, to protect her.
But even as she thinks this, even as she lays her needle down beside the laptop and lifts the fabric off her knees, she feels she is being unfair.
Because Josie’s mind is not any less than her own, or Bren’s, or Robin’s, just because her neurology is different.
She should not be so callous, so condescending – so Bren.
So she re-evaluates, breathes out, and says okay. What time.
And Josie brightens, instantly. As if they’d only been talking about the weather forecast: sunshine, predicted, for the bank holiday.
Oh, Nora, she says, I’m so glad.
I’ll have to check with Robin, first, Nora says. He’s been working a lot lately.
He can spare a day, surely, Josie says. Especially on a weekend! Tell him I’m making a cake, and your mum’s cooking. Not tofu, though – she promised.
Billow of Josie’s laughter then; Nora thinking of her mother’s wild eyes, the last time she saw her; the way she’s not replied to any of her texts since.
Could you wear a nice dress, for the occasion? Josie says. Maybe that linen one with the puffy sleeves, and the stitched sunflowers?
Sure, Nora says. Oddly specific, she thinks, but sure.
And Nora?
Yes?
It’s all going to be okay. I know you don’t believe me, pet. But all being together, like old times? And airing our truths? That’s the only way to make things lighter, I think. Going forward.
Nora stares at the blank laptop screen, unsure of how to respond. But then Josie hangs up and she is left with her questions in her throat, Shay’s off-key singing on the shop floor, and a sense that something, in the ether, is changing.
_
Although a change had occurred, already, after Devon.
As soon as she’d returned to work, things between her and Robin fragile – cracked – but not broken.
Because she didn’t want them broken, did she?
Did he? After she’d said no, to the venue, but after he’d – not lied, exactly – but hadn’t shared the whole truth?
Questions plaguing her, like a tangle of dead ends as she rode the train into London, trying to unpick the yarn of her life. Bren, now home. Robin, her home. Confusion where, surely, there should’ve been clarity.
She had walked into the café and Shay had taken one look at her and told her to go home, saying she couldn’t interact with customers with a face like that, and Nora had crumbled; told her all about the venue weekend.
How she couldn’t be at home right now, but couldn’t go anywhere else, either, not to Freya’s, not to Josie’s, and Shay had listened to every word then said take personal leave here, then, with an endless supply of mochas and Great Dane therapy and my moral support shrouded in tough love.
Nora had hugged her, for that. Misty-eyed.
And Shay had held her. Her purple hair smelling of papaya shampoo and ground coffee, as she told her that things would be fine – she’d figure it out – and did she want a pain au raisin, they were stale, from yesterday, needed eating.
Nora had said no to the pastry, but taken Shay’s advice. Dried her eyes and gone home early. Promised to come back with a clearer head.
She thinks about that now, as she leans her head against the glass of the train window, the lino workshop now over.
Thinks about how she arrived back at the flat to take a few hours for herself.
Let herself in only to hear Robin’s voice, when he’d told her he’d be on a photo shoot that day; how she’d frozen, with her key in the lock, and listened; yes, no, I know, keep the deposit, it’s fine.
She slipped off her shoes. Lingered with her guilt in the hall and felt sad that she had to, when she had never held back from him before.
Though they had, it seemed, hidden parts of themselves from one another, and that was a part of her confusion, here; that fog that had crept in, and wasn’t lifting.
More words, from Robin, as she waited. Sorry, thank you, okay.