Chapter 19 #2
Nora says fine. Eats a corner of cake. Says it’s good, thank you, and Josie says please don’t thank me, Nora, not today. Nothing has gone as I’d hoped.
I know the feeling, Nora says.
Josie looks at her with sympathy, her blue eyes like live wires, but Nora doesn’t want it. She just wants to get herself home; thinks about calling a taxi, now the buses have stopped running. But Josie’s hand is still shaking as she pours the milk, so Nora tries to focus: asks if she’s all right.
Oh, yes, pet. I’ve been all right for a long time now. No scares, with the tablets. No episodes.
But I mean right now, Nora says. You seem.
She nods at Josie’s tremor, as she drops a sugar cube into her cup.
Ah, Josie says, well. I suppose I am a little nervous.
Okay, Nora says.
I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Nora, for a while. See, today wasn’t just a day to lay Jon to rest, physically. But in other ways too.
The grandfather clock thunks from side to side. The rain patters on the window. Nora tells her this is all very cryptic.
It is, isn’t it, Josie says, as she stirs her tea. I hoped your mother would be here, to help, but she … decided against it, in the end. She’d never shy away from confrontation, our Freya, but sentimentality? She’d rather scoop out her ovaries with a spoon, I believe, was the phrasing she used.
This lands, but neither of them laugh. Josie sighs.
I hate to see you hurting, Nora, she says. Just like I hate to see my Bren hurting.
Nora takes a sugar cube for her own cup.
You’re the only one he’d come back for, Josie says. I always knew that. You were such a pair. Full of fun and adventure and spirit. It was nice to see, after he’d always been so reserved, always so … lonesome. It brought me a lot of joy. You and your mother both did, when we moved here.
Tea spinning, heady, in her teacup.
But I always knew he’d leave, Josie says.
I knew he’d have to spread his wings, away from me, and my …
limitations. And his dad encouraged it, bought him an atlas before he even knew the alphabet.
I’m proud of him, Nora, for being so brave.
I’m proud that his less-than-ideal childhood made him bolder, if anything, and not a mouse, like me.
Nora does not respond, because she thinks she knows what Josie is getting at. That Bren was always going to come home to her. Because Nora is his home. That she thinks Nora knows it, too, deep down.
But instead she says, I know it’s not conventional, having a son who spends his life elsewhere, like he does. But I’m not saddened by it, or resentful. I’m just happy I get to love him, wherever he is.
Josie looks out of the window, at the rain.
And anyway, she says, I rather think convention is overrated.
Nora forks off another corner of cake.
Freya’s rubbed off on you there, she says, and Josie looks at her over the table and says ah, no. See, that’s the thing, my love. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. If anything, I think I rubbed off on her.
Josie rests her hands on the polished wood table, then.
A table where Nora learned to crochet, has drunk tea and dunked biscuits, talked about sparrows and storms, fruit crumble and funerals, spilled milk and psychosis and paint colours.
It all seems to weigh between them, the years, the minutes, the knowledge of what is and what isn’t, and the moment is long and loaded.
Clunk of the grandfather clock, smatter of rain.
I know, you know, Josie says.
You know what, says Nora.
I know about Freya and Jon.
Another moment, then. Shorter than before. A moment where Nora thinks she must have misheard, so she reddens, clears her throat.
I actually suggested it, Josie says, and Nora coughs on some cake crumbs so that Josie has to stand up, pour her a glass of water from the crystal jug on the side. Flush of pink up her own throat.
Don’t say anything yet, Josie says, handing her the glass. Please, pet, just listen.
But Nora couldn’t speak, even if she wanted to.
You know I’m on a lot of medication, Josie begins, after she sits back down in her chair. A very high dose, for a lot of things I won’t go into. Embarrassing, really.
Nora shakes her head, still wordless.
And one of the side effects, when they upped my dose after Bren was born, was a lack of, shall we say … enthusiasm.
Josie lowers her eyes to the doily beneath her teacup. Smooths it down with her hands.
For a lot of things, she goes on. A lot of my old interests.
Wanting to go places, hike up hills, run the charity bake sales, all of it.
I became a hermit, as Jon affectionately coined it, but a happy one.
The voices quietened. The crying did, too.
Mostly. And being content at home was easier than leaving the house, because if I did, that’s when things got hard. But I also struggled to. Um.
Josie is fiddling now with a button on her cardigan.
Show any interest in the romantic dealings one might have with one’s husband, she says, colour patching on her neck. Even if one loved that husband very much. And he loved her back, till his dying day. A day that, as you know, came too soon.
Nora stares at her.
Josie touches her collar, as if too hot.
We tried a few things, but it was no use.
After it had been a very long time, with no signs of improvement – Bren was young, but not so young that we didn’t have any opportunity to …
well. I’d been reading up about this new medication they’d put me on, you see.
And I saw something on daytime television.
One of these chat shows with all the shouting and the drama but it’s all very human, really, when you get to the root of the thing.
She waits for a response, here, but Nora’s face has gone numb.
I thought about it. A lot. And then I suggested he get his needs met, elsewhere.
It really was fine with me. I worried our marriage might not survive, otherwise.
We were both so young, still. It might have, of course.
Jon said he didn’t need to … well. But I would rather it was out in the open, than he be driven to … betrayal.
Nora can’t help it. She is blushing more deeply now, mainly because Josie is, and there is not enough cake or water to busy herself with, so she has to simply sit and let the pieces slot into place in her mind; has to look at Josie touching her neck again, her wedding ring still on her left hand.
We said nothing more about it for years, Josie says.
He left the military and we moved here, as you know.
Bren was at his new school, and Jon was scratching around in that shed of his, doing odd jobs for the neighbours, laying down Freya’s decking, and the two of them just …
hit it off, I suppose. Hard not to, when she is who she is.
So bright, and brilliant. And funny. Gosh, she made him laugh.
Made us both laugh, in fact. So we … revisited the situation.
Nora’s numbness is receding. Now it feels as if the walls might close in, like in the video game Bren used to play in the next room, crushing the cartoon on screen unless you could figure out the right set of moves.
You … planned it? she manages.
Planned is a strong term, Josie says, with a small smile. There wasn’t any organisation involved. No guidebooks, or Post-it notes.
Nora blinks, and Josie smiles wider, says remember? You and Bren were so into your Post-it notes, when you were planning your trip. Orange for him, green for you. Blue for maybes. You had a lot of maybes.
Then she says sorry, she’s getting off topic. And she has wondered whether she should’ve explained, over the years. When the best time might have been, to do that.
Freya and I have talked about it, of course, Josie says, shrugging her birdlike shoulders, but it always felt a bit irrelevant, pet. It wouldn’t have been right, when you were young. You and Bren were such good friends, too. We didn’t want to make anything …
Weird, Nora says.
I see the irony, Josie admits. I know it’s messy, Nora. Except it didn’t really feel that way, to us. Freya was so … Freya. We assumed she’d be open to something … unusual.
If Nora could snort right now, she would, but instead she just sits there, red-faced. Cake abandoned on her plate.
This is uncomfortable, Josie says, isn’t it.
No, Nora says. Well, yes. But I’m more. Just. Baffled.
Josie laughs at this, and there is a flicker, in Nora’s mind, at how Robin would have laughed at that adjective, too.
I would’ve been, as well, Josie admits. If it hadn’t been my idea.
So Freya agreed? Nora says. To this … set-up?
Not at first, Josie says, and she picks up her fork, finally eats some of her own cake.
There was chemistry there, and so once we’d decided as a couple, Jon went to her, one day.
In her greenhouse. She wanted to talk to me separately, afterwards, to be sure it was all legitimate.
It was, to this day, the strangest conversation I’ve ever had.
Stranger than this? Nora says, and Josie nods.
And then things happened, Josie says. Organically, after that.
I didn’t want to know the details, so they were always discreet, but it was all above board, shall we say.
It was an uncommon but remarkable thing, Nora.
What it brought us, as a three. Such closeness. Such an understanding, between friends.
Nora swallows, can’t even imagine.
But she tries. Her mind opening, a little. Letting in a sliver of light.
Freya and I became even closer after Jon died, Josie says. Because of this private history between us, I suspect, which we never planned to share with anyone. Until we found out you already knew.
Josie sits up straighter in her chair.