July #7
She was as baffled as I was, and of course she hadn’t touched it.
But she promised to nip next door and help my mother look for it.
I expected her to call back right away and say she’d found it on the floor, that it had simply slipped off the side table and was hidden behind one of its legs.
Instead, it was almost an hour until my phone rang.
When I answered, she paused, and then she told me she’d found it in the freezer.
‘What?’
My body was a mess, and now so was my head. I thought back to the weekend away with my mother and asked Peggy if she’d noticed any other unusual behaviour.
‘Not unusual, no, though I haven’t been around all that much.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘Your mum didn’t tell you? I’ve been helping Nicole with the boys – you know she’s on her own now.’
Before she began criticising her daughter’s soon-to-be ex-husband : ‘She’s forgetting things, Peggy.’
‘Well, who doesn’t forget things?’
‘I think it might be more than that.’ In my head, I heard the faint whisper of the word I associated with my grandmother. My mother’s mother. One or two of my mother’s older, frailer friends. ‘She’s seventy.’
‘And I’m seventy-three!’
I bit down on my bottom lip. ‘I know, I’m sorry. I just wonder if it’s worth me taking her for a check-up, if only to rule it out.’ I didn’t have to say what I meant by ‘it’.
When Peggy didn’t respond, I told her I had a bad feeling.
A gut feeling?
‘Look, there’s nothing you can do tonight,’ she said, when I started to hypothesise.
She was right, and when she promised to keep a close eye on her, I tried to temporarily push my worries – and that word, rising in volume – to the back of my mind.
I was running late and only just changing when Daniel and Griz arrived.
As I attempted to conceal what felt like a mixing bowl beneath my most loose-fitting shirt, I heard Noah thanking Daniel for the wine, and Daniel offering to put it in the fridge.
I held my breath as I heard the fridge door swing open, then sighed aloud as it closed again, and Daniel started talking about something sports-related.
The saline solution had gone unnoticed. I was busy letting an alternate scenario play out in my head when Griz said my name and Noah called up to tell me they were here.
‘Cathy, how are you?’
I still had one foot on the stairs when Griz kissed my cheek.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said, holding onto her bare shoulders for balance, my eyes taking in her colourful crochet vest. ‘And you?’
‘Oh, you know, just trying to make it through the summer holidays without the children killing each other.’
I pushed out a ‘ha’ and followed her back into the kitchen.
‘Cathy, looking lovely as always.’
Well, now I knew that was nothing more than politeness. ‘Thanks, Daniel, good to see you.’
More kissing. Griz bent down to greet Tom, who was mewing at our ankles.
‘Yes, sorry it’s taken so long for us to get you guys over,’ added Noah, pouring wine from a bottle that was already chilled. When he got to the fourth glass, he paused, and then continued.
I hadn’t drunk since that weekend with my mother, just in case, and we hadn’t talked about how this evening was going to pan out. He was extending a glass towards me before I said, ‘Actually, I have a bit of a headache, so I think I’ll stick to water for now.’
I could have sworn Griz’s eyebrows rose infinitesimally, but I also could have imagined it.
‘Oh, before I forget,’ she said, reaching for her handbag and pulling out two or three neatly folded pieces of A4 paper. ‘From Allie.’
Whenever Noah and I saw Daniel and Griz without the children, Allie sent along some drawings for me.
I smiled at the underwater images of stripy fish, mottled crabs, stringy seaweed.
On the third sheet, a whale on a beach, with people standing around and pointing.
Speech bubbles were filled with ‘wow!’s and ‘amazing!’s.
I held it close to my chest. ‘Please thank her from me.’
Dinner that night was one of Noah’s staples, courtesy of a cookbook I’d given to him a couple of Christmases back : tomato and coconut cassoulet, with butter beans and basil and torn-up pieces of sourdough.
We milled around in the kitchen chatting while he cooked, and when we sat down to eat, candles flickering on the table, we were still sharing pleasantries about the unusually long stretch of time that had passed since we’d last seen each other.
‘How’s work going, Cathy?’ asked Daniel, helping himself to some extra bread from the cast-iron dish between us. ‘I still can’t believe there’s been a hidden whale in the painting all this time.’ He shook his head. ‘Incredible.’
I smiled, and so did Noah. ‘Thanks, Daniel, it is exciting. And it’s going well – I’ve uncovered most of it now.’
‘It must be fairly big news in the art world, a discovery like that?’
I was telling him how the press office was already making plans for a media announcement that would go out towards the end of the autumn when I heard Griz ask Noah how his research into the origins of the US-Vietnam War was going.
I put down my fork, dumbstruck. I hadn’t asked him the question myself.
Before Daniel had finished whatever he was saying, I looked at Noah and told him I was sorry.
Worry leaked across his face and his upper body became eerily still. Instead of putting down his own fork, he gripped it tight, his knuckles turning bone white. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘I haven’t asked you about the book in weeks.’
He physically relaxed, his shoulders falling from his ears, and scooped up another mouthful. ‘That’s OK,’ he said, kindly, ‘you’ve had a lot on your mind.’
‘Has work been very full-on, Cathy?’ asked Griz, turning to look at me.
‘Well, yes,’ I said, letting my gaze fall to my plate, contemplating, if only for a second, ‘and then there have been the injections.’
For a moment, nobody said anything. I kept my eyes on my plate, and the burnt basil leaf pressed like a flower on its outer edge.
‘Cathy.’
I looked up at Noah, who was sitting opposite me. He was tired, I realised, the bags under his eyes unusually pronounced, as if they were ferrying something.
‘What do you mean, “the injections”?’ asked Griz.
‘Oh, Cathy,’ said Daniel, solemn, his lips curling upwards as he continued, ‘I had a feeling those DAA meetings might have been in vein …’
He laughed at his own joke. Griz smiled. Noah didn’t.
I craned my neck, and then I said it, out loud, for the first time, to people who weren’t my husband or my mother or my doctor : ‘Actually, I’m freezing my eggs.’
I heard the scrape of a chair leg, wood on wood.
Noah had stuck small felt patches to the four feet of each chair to prevent them from scratching the floorboards, but I wasn’t wholly convinced that they worked.
The scrape had come from Daniel, who was sitting further back from the table now.
He was wiping the corners of his mouth with his linen napkin, which he proceeded to fold up and put on his plate, even though there was sauce there and we still had the salad to come.
I felt my fingers itch and held them securely together on my lap.
It was Griz who broke the silence, asking, tentatively, ‘But only recently you were saying you didn’t want children?’ As if to double-check that she was correct in her understanding of the situation, she added : ‘Both of you.’
I looked again at Noah, whose expression was blank. He caught my eye and gave a slight nod of the head that said, Over to you.
‘Well, we,’ I began, stumbling over the pronoun, ‘I decided it would be sensible to have an option. You know, just in case we …’ There it was again. This time I held firm. ‘Just in case we change our minds.’
‘Oh right, that makes sense,’ said Griz, too quickly, sensing, I suspected, that this was a sticky subject, and thoughtfully trying to move the conversation along. But it was too sticky. More than sticky. Thorny, with the potential to draw blood. She was nodding at Daniel, who looked less certain.
‘But you don’t want kids now?’ he asked.
Noah reached for the salad bowl and gave the leaves a toss, making sure they were all coated with the oily dressing, before tumbling some onto his plate. He passed the bowl to Griz, who thanked him, smiling, still overcompensating.
I gave her a small smile in return.
‘Noah?’ asked Daniel, looking at his brother. When he didn’t reply, and Griz shook her head at him, he said that he was sorry, he just didn’t understand.
‘You and me both,’ said Noah, stabbing some leaves with his fork and funnelling them into his mouth without cutting them first.
I felt my belly flop, and shook my head at the salad bowl, which Griz then passed straight to Daniel.
We carried on eating for a few minutes, then Noah stood up and started to clear our plates. Before he took mine, I picked up the burnt basil leaf and put it on my tongue. I kept it there for a few seconds, thankful for something else to focus on, before chewing it into nothing.
When he returned to the table with a couple of those fancy chocolate bars and some mixed berries in a white bowl with a scalloped edge, conversation gradually started up again.
Not between me and Noah, though. That night, the only time he looked at me was after Daniel and Griz had left, when I asked if he still felt comfortable piercing my stomach. He didn’t answer, but he did do it.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as, without a word, he stood up from the bathroom floor and started walking away. ‘Noah, I’m sorry.’
He paused in the threshold, one hand on the doorway, and finally, without turning around, he spoke. ‘I’m not sure where we go from here.’
The words swept the air out of my lungs.
He stayed where he was. ‘It’s impossible.’
That word, even more than the others … I gripped at the tiles with my fingertips. ‘What is?’
‘This. The situation. Our situation.’
‘No,’ I said, growing increasingly breathless. ‘Please don’t say that.’
‘Why not?’ He pressed his palms to the sides of his head, as if it was starting to ache. ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’
Air. I needed air.
‘This can only end one way, Cathy.’ Still clutching his head, he asked, his voice cracking, ‘Are you planning on leaving me?’
‘No, Noah!’
He turned around and dropped his arms to his sides when he saw my face.
‘No!’
He walked towards me, crouched down in front, and held onto my shoulders. ‘Hang on, just breathe, Cathy.’
I did as he said.
‘Slowly.’
I closed my eyes, and gradually, I started to feel better. When I opened them, I repeated myself : ‘Please don’t say that.’