Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Nora leaves Josie’s cottage to iron out her own life; hers and Robin’s.
To get back to him, put things right. Her mother is still asleep next door when she steps onto the driveway at six thirty, the curtains drawn.
There was no right moment to say anything the night prior when it was all about Jon, and then Bren, so she tries to communicate with her now, via text, on the train home.
Josie told me, is all she can manage. And then, I love you, which is something they do not say.
And she can see that Freya has read it due to the double ticks and must not know how to respond because there is no reply, no three waving dots, but then she sends her a single photograph, of the tomatoes in her greenhouse, red and shining.
Survived the Spotted Wilt, she tells her. I’ll make you my tomato jam.
Which is enough for now.
Because there is time, Nora decides. An entire lifetime to say what needs saying to her mother, but for now she has something to say to someone else.
Something to ask. Something to finalise, once and for all, as the train pulls into the station and terminates and her life feels like a drum roll, steady and quick-paced and building towards this next part, all change, please, all change.
_
She gets home early, like she’d promised.
She’d tried to reach him that morning but his phone was still off.
Out of charge, maybe, rather than because he still won’t speak to her.
She left him messages to explain all that had happened last night, while he’d been with Goose.
And despite everything, she feels calm. Knows – hopes – that right now, the morning after, she’ll be able to resolve everything.
The front door is not double locked, which surprises her; he’s beaten her home. Inside, though, she is met with a distinct quiet. No radio, or sound of the shower. Slither of a morning moon as she hangs up her keys. Says Robin? to no reply.
But there he is, sleeping on the sofa, with his laptop shut on his stomach. She crosses the threshold and sits down beside him; puts her hand over his.
It’s me, she says, and he stirs. I thought you were with Goose.
His eyes are still closed, and he sounds half asleep, still, like he’s struggling to rouse himself. She pushes his fringe back from his forehead. Tender, and gentle.
Came home after midnight, he says. Strange dreams.
Nora nods, though he can’t see her. Her thumb, calloused from her needle, caressing his own.
I’m so sorry, Robin, she says. About everything.
And at this, he opens one eye.
I’m not pulling back, she promises. I know there has been stuff … to explain. But it’s good stuff. Not bad, secret stuff.
The silence between them is soft, like the velvet sofa beneath them.
The sofa they took so long to pick out. A day in Ikea, to no avail, then the British Heart Foundation.
In the end, an old furniture store closing down with Reduced!
posters in its windows, this one, it’s the one, how do you know, I just know, Nora, don’t you?
Robin laces his long fingers through hers, in response. And it is this that tells her there will be no more fighting, this morning, which she was afraid there might have been. Would have faced into, if needed.
I promise, she says, when he has still not said anything.
How was, Robin asks, and fails, because there isn’t a verb for what happened; he must have read her messages, after all, listened to her voicemails.
Scattering the ashes of my long-dead neighbour who had an affair with my mother? Nora says, and Robin, bemused, says yes; he’s closed his eye again.
Revealing, she says. I’ve got a lot to tell you.
Robin makes a noise as if to say he’s listening, but she says not now. That she has something to show him, first.
She feels her mood lift as she says it. Feels the moment she’d been putting off – because she’d wanted to savour it, make it right – gradually arrive, like the sun rising after a long night. But Robin does not move. Seems close to sleep again.
Robin, she says, and he says mm? And she’s going to say what’s the matter.
But she knows, already; can’t expect him to feel fine, after the last few weeks.
The unexpected proposal, the planning and cancelling of a wedding, the adrenaline and the stress and the hurt on top of all the work and travel he’s always doing, shooting on location, editing back home, new clients, old ones.
Devon. Easter. Their fight in Freya’s porch, after what he’d overheard.
Which she can make right, if he’ll let her, this minute.
So she stands up, tugs on his hand.
Robin, she says, gently. Come on.
My head, he says.
She stares down at him, at their linked hands. His shirt is unbuttoned and she can see the snail trail of dark hair from his belly button, disappearing beneath the band of his jeans. You’ve still got a headache?
Really bad, he says.
Have you taken some painkillers, she says, to which he says yes, and before she can ask, he’s been eating dry toast, too, and sipping water. Which is what they do when they feel unwell; pop some pills, eat some toast, and it has always worked for them.
What I’ve got to show you will perk you up, she says, and he hears the promise in her voice, then; finally opens both eyes.
Should we talk, he says, after they have looked steadily at one another for several seconds. About what happened yesterday, with Bren?
Yes, Nora says. But afterwards. Please.
So he agrees, wordlessly. Lets her keep his hand in hers, lets her pull him up from the sofa and lead him out of the living room and through the kitchen out the back door, up the concrete steps into the yard.
Towards the shed which was meant to be his makeshift darkroom or her sewing studio which they never got around to converting; just sits there, spiderwebbed, rotting with rain.
Apple crates piled by the door, which they’d pilfered from supermarkets when they’d first moved in.
Some women have a lot of shoes, Robin said, as they carted her stuff from the moving van. You, Nora Harper, have a lot of yarn.
And now, she pushes open the door, ducks inside, and Robin follows. He is so tall he has to stoop, which disorientates him, says he must be dehydr –
But then he sees what she has brought him here to see, what is suspended in the centre of the shed on a wire hanger, covered in a sheet.
What is this, Robin asks her.
It’s my wedding dress, Nora says.
Your …?
I couldn’t find one that felt quite right, before, she says. None of it, really, felt right. But you did, Robin. You do.
She doesn’t say anything more, just yet. Instead she lifts the bed sheet – has to stand on her tiptoes – and then steps back with it bundled in her arms, the dress left spinning, slightly, like a ballerina in a music box.
I’ve been working on it since we got back from Devon, she says.
It’s something I tried on and liked, mostly, at that vintage place, but it needed some …
tweaking. I let it out a bit, because I’ll want to eat a lot of cake, on the day, obviously, and I talked with some textile artists about how to embroider into this particular fabric, which wasn’t easy, like I’d thought it would be.
Note of worry in her voice, as she talks; longing for him to see what this means.
I broke a load of needles, she goes on. The material’s so much thicker than it looks, but at the same time, I wanted it to feel lightweight, like I was wearing pyjamas, you know?
And I’ve managed that, I think. I removed some of the underskirt, see, here.
Then I started the embroidery, which is what took the time, really, because I got a bit carried away, but I couldn’t tell you about it because I didn’t want you to know until it was done.
Robin is still staring at the dress, as if he can’t hear what she’s saying.
I saw all those surprises you were planning, Nora tells him, in your notebook.
And I just … wanted to do the same, for you.
I didn’t want you to think I’d marry you out of, I don’t know, pity, or to smooth things over.
Or in any sort of gung-ho, why not, reaction.
I want to marry you because I really want to marry you, Robin.
She feels like she’s botching this. Stumbling through it.
Saying the word marry, too much.
That’s what you were doing? he says. All those hours you’ve been working late?
Nora nods; skims the skirt with her fingertips.
She would like him to touch it, too, or better yet, touch her.
She wants to look into his face and watch him realise that she was not pulling back from him, before.
On printed invites, maybe, and a shiny venue, deposits and harpists and fanfare and fuss.
But not this. Not all the things that they share, which she has embroidered into the gown, by hand.
Do you like it, she asks him as it twirls, slowly, on the ceiling hook. Or is it … too much, do you think?
She had only meant to embroider one line, from their favourite film, along the inseam.
Had then darned another into the hem, and had planned to stop there, but there was so much more that kept coming to her, like the lines in his notebook that must have kept coming to him.
So she kept going. Adding in-jokes about bare feet and croissants and musicals, the phone number to their local takeaway, co-ordinates of the bench where he’d proposed with a ring that was not his but became hers.
It was all there. On and on she had sewed, in the back room of her art café, for three weeks, instead of finalising her events timetable, instead of serving customers coffee or hosting workshops, because this, Nora, is more important, Shay had said, and she was right.
Is that … your yunomi mug, Robin asks.
Broken, but forever in our hearts, Nora jokes. Or on this dress, at least.
She thinks this moment of lightness might coax a smile out of him, but it only leads to more silence. Some kind of struggle, in his face. The dress hanging heavy between them.
I’m so sorry, Robin, she says again. I’m sorry if I’ve been vague, instead of clear.
But I’ve been thinking and planning and wanting so badly to make it perfect, wanting this thing we’re doing to feel like us.
And stuff with Freya and Josie and Bren got tangled up in the rush of it all, and I didn’t know how I felt, until we slowed down, and I could catch my breath.
Robin looks at her, now. At last.
I want to do this, Robin, Nora tells him. But I don’t want to do it with people judging, or questioning our decisions. I don’t want to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, or catch my mother rolling her eyes, or pose for pictures when we know you could be taking better ones.
She pauses, still hoping for his smile.
I know you got so excited about an all-singing, all-dancing wedding day, she says.
But I also know this proposal … this whole …
decision, to spend our lives together, wasn’t ever a decision, for me.
It just happened. Which is something that scared me, before, but now I think that’s the way it should be.
Life happens, and you don’t wait for it.
And we haven’t been waiting. We’ve been doing it, haven’t we?
And I want to keep doing it, just the same.
I want to hang art on our walls and cook great meals and come home to you, every night, so we can go to bed early and stay up late talking and then complain we’re tired because we stayed up late talking, and do it all again, and again, until we’re old.
I want this to be about me and you, Robin, not a big fussy day that gets away from us.
Her words are pouring out of her, and she’ll keep going if she has to, but Robin steps towards her, presses his thumb to her mouth.
I know what you’re going to say, he murmurs, and his pupils are huge, Nora thinks, dark and dilated.
You’re going to say we don’t need to get married, after all, aren’t you?
That you can wear this dress, on a Friday night, or at birthday parties, and we can just go on being us, as we are.
That we don’t need to get married, to do that.
Nora tilts her head, so she can speak round his thumb.
No, she says. The opposite, actually. I think we should do it tomorrow. Just us.
Silence, again. Sunlight. Silk of the spiderwebs on the ceiling.
I never cancelled the registry office, Nora tells him.
The legal bit we had to do, before the twenty-second?
It’s still happening. Our slot’s at half past ten.
And we’ll need two witnesses, but I figured we could ask Goose and Shay, maybe, or just pull strangers off the street, like they do in the movies.
Robin steps back, looking stupefied, and it is funny, it is adorable, he is funny and adorable and too tall for this shed and too perfectly hers like he always has been, in his unbuttoned shirt with his uncombed hair, as if she’d woken him in the middle of the night.
You’re asking me if I’ll marry you?
I’m asking you if you’ll marry me, Robin.
And there it is, finally. That big Robin smile.
As he says well, he’ll have to think about it.
And she laughs, and throws her arms round his neck and he holds her close with her wedding dress beside them on its hanger, black thread and ivory lining and words and poems and the stuff of real love stories darned into this one picture-perfect moment that she has pulled off, in spite of everything, a moment that leaves no room for doubt, or stalling, or anyone else: for anything that’s not in their arms, right now.