Chapter 23 #4
“I don’t know. I think I’m going to probably sit here for a while longer and see if the answer comes to me.”
“Okay then,” Charlotte said, pulling herself up. She smoothed down her culottes. “I’ll be at home. Back for dinner?”
Maia looked up, squinting, the low evening sun in her eyes. “Yes, by seven,” she said, and Charlotte squeezed her shoulder and walked back up the beach.
Maia watched as the sun began to set. As the waves crashed nearer and nearer, cresting one shelf of pebbles, then encroaching onto the next.
When they landed just a few feet away, she took off her shoes, balanced them on a weathered post, and waded out into the Brighton sea, icy water biting at her skin.
When it was thigh high, her dress sticking to her, she took the letter from its envelope and pressed it to the surface of the water, watching the ink flow from its pages, until only smeared, disintegrating paper was left in her hands.
She would have liked it to take minutes, but it only required seconds.
She balled up the remnants, and then turned, and picked her way back up the beach, pebbles digging into the soles of her feet.
She tossed the salt-watered mass into a litter bin on the promenade, and it hit the metal with a soft thud.
Then she sat on the sea wall, put on her shoes, and walked back to her own life with Charlotte, leaving the father she once had to his.
Cora has been aged by the loss of Bear. By the lack of goodbye.
By being separated from Pearl and Lily in her grief.
But just like last time, when Vihaan was killed and Gordon imprisoned, it is Mehri who has stepped in to hold her up.
Mehri with whom she laughs and cries through the darkness.
Mehri who, as life begins to open back up again, gently leads her toward the light, like a creature emerging from hibernation.
Blood running colder, slower, but still, with a sense of having survived.
One evening, when she arrives at Mehri’s, they stand talking in the kitchen and Cora becomes aware of male voices, of there being someone else with Roland in the living room down the hall.
“Who is it?” she mouths, and Mehri tells her it’s a friend of Roland’s—Felix—who’s dropped by unexpectedly to lend him a stylus for his record player.
“You mean the guy I went on a date with?”
“A date?” Mehri says, as Cora shushes her. “Oh, yes. A date! Goodness, how long ago was that? Twenty years?” Mehri shakes her head in disbelief.
Cora knows their overlapping visits are a coincidence, but still, she feels awkward as she puts her head around the living-room door to say hello.
“Oh, Cora, isn’t it?” Felix says. “It’s great to see you again.
” His smile is instant and genuine, and nothing in his manner seems to suggest he harbors resentment—or, perhaps, any memory—that Cora hadn’t wanted to take things further.
He has a kind face, though Cora is surprised to find him so much older.
But then she reminds herself that she is too; they’re both nearing seventy.
“We’re about to start on dinner. Will you stay and eat with us, Felix?” Mehri asks.
The four of them pull together a meal, the crackle of vinyl in the background, Mehri and Roland bustling around the kitchen, as Cora and Felix chop vegetables at the table.
Cora tells him about Pearl, about how she takes the train down to Brighton to bake with her each week. “Mostly bready stuff. She likes to poke her fingers in the dough, shape it into animals. Cats mainly. She’s just got a kitten.”
“My stock-in-trade once. I’m retired now.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” She’d forgotten he was a vet.
“I used to enjoy hearing what their owners had called them. I always liked the times they’d gone for something human-sounding. Like Derek. Or Clive.”
“Well, Pearl’s called hers Cat.” She sees Felix smile.
“It’s not as unimaginative as it sounds,” Cora adds, and she somehow finds herself telling him more.
“We lost my son—Pearl’s father—during lockdown.
His name was Bear. I guess Cat is a nod to that.
He was—” She stops chopping and glances at the ceiling, trying to think of the right words.
“He was his name. Sort of soft, and cuddly, and kind. But also brave and strong.”
Felix puts down his knife and covers Cora’s hand with his own, while she rights herself.
She’s aware of Mehri and Roland in the background, still moving around the kitchen; for a moment, she’d forgotten they were there.
Mehri, she knows, will have been surprised to hear her talking so freely. She’s surprised herself.
“And is the cat like its name?” Felix asks.
“Oh, yes, just like it. It lives life on its own terms. But—and I don’t know how it’s done this—it’s made their house feel like a home again. When I think, for a long time, it didn’t.”
For a while Felix doesn’t say anything. Then he says, “Yes, I know that feeling. I lost my wife to cancer just before lockdown. Our house…it’s been a difficult place to spend so much time alone over the last few years.
A cat would have been nice. If only to hear the sound of it coming and going, using the litter tray. ”
It’s strange to realize how much they’ve lived through since they last met. That they’ve both suffered such losses. Cora has noticed a rawness about him, sees that his nerves, like hers, are close to the surface.
As the evening wears on, they grow tunnel-visioned, eager for what the other has to say. They barely notice when Roland and Mehri drift off to make a fruit salad, to talk to Fern on the phone. Cora briefly wonders if they’re being rude but knows their friends won’t mind.
They are serious, then light-hearted. At one point, Cora finds herself demonstrating a particular ballet move to illustrate a story from her youth. “I can’t tell you how many years it is since I’ve done that in front of someone,” she says, as she goes to sit back down.
“That’s true. We’ve been friends for thirty-five years, and I’ve never got so much as a plié out of you,” Mehri says as she comes back into the room. She stands behind Cora’s chair and bends to kiss her cheek. “We’re off to bed, azizam.”
“What time is it?”
“Oh, after midnight,” Mehri says.
“I hadn’t noticed it getting so late.” Cora taps her phone screen and sees it’s actually past one.
“The night is still young,” Mehri says, as she puts her wine glass beside the sink.
“Perhaps, if you’re not quite finished here, you could wash up before you let yourselves out?
” she adds, eyes sparkling. Then she turns to Felix, “It’s been lovely barely talking to you.
I can’t tell you the last time I’ve seen Cora having so much fun. You must come again.”
Mehri leaves them to the dishes, to each other. And later, Felix’s offer to walk Cora home, and her acceptance of it, is unthinking; they are already absorbed in a conversation that will continue to slowly unspool across all the years they have left.