Page 81 of People In Love
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 bythen,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 stillwearing 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 asher, 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 hasplanned. 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.
