Page 101 of People In Love
Josie looks towards the urn, as if he’s sitting in his armchair, listening.
We werepartners. We said vows. We shared a bed, we had a child, we stuck by each other in my sickness and his health and made it work, because we talked, and adapted, made it through what might have seemed, to so many, like dead ends. I know I’m not the brightest button, Nora. I’m not smart or savvy or brave. But I am wise when it comes to this. Being married to someone is something I understand. It’s sharing the good and the bad, your innermost doubts, as well as your certainties. It’s not just lust, or passion.
That last word seems deliberate. Lands, like the first flake of snow.
It’s microwaving a curry when one of you is too tired to cook, Josie says, her voice earnest. It’s folding their underpants, or doing the shopping, getting their favourite pasta sauce, even if you don’t like it. It’s stacking the dishwasher together at night, and emptying it in the morning. It’s being bored by, and besotted with, the person you chose. And it is a choice, Nora, not just afeeling. It’s hundreds of tiny choices that say yes, we are in something, together. Even when it’s hard, or unglamorous. But, my god, it’s yours. Ours.
Nora looks at Josie across the table.
Her mother’s best friend. Her best friend’s mother.
I didn’t want to tell you all this just so you’ll forgive Freya and Jon, Josie says. But so you can see that yourownlife should be shared with the one you are most yourself with,Nora. The one you can talk to about uncomfortable things. The one who stands by you. Who doesn’t question who you are, or the tiny choices you make.
Nora holds herself completely still, at these words.
Says she knows.
But do you? Josie says. Because I’ve watched you wavering, these past few months – and she sounds sheepish, like she doesn’t want to overstep, but really, Nora thinks, there are no lines left to cross between them. Not sending out wedding invites? Not buying a dress, Bren said? Rethinking what it is that you want?
Thud of Nora’s heart, in time with the grandfather clock.
Ideas of what you want, though, Josie goes on, are often just that. Ideas. Notions. Freyathinksshe fell in love with my Jon. But sharing a life with someone, Nora; that’s what’s real. Do you see?
And Nora does. Did, already. To prove it, she takes her phone from the table, opens up what she has not yet shown to anyone and hands it over. And Josie looks down and frowns, and for a moment Nora worries she’s got this all wrong, that in fact Josie was pleading with her to choose her son, but then she looks up and smiles, and it is steady and relieved and understanding. Because this woman, Nora knows now, understands more than she’d ever given her credit for.
Oh, Nora, she says.
And Nora is going to respond but then there is the sound of a key in a lock, and Bren is calling out to his mother and the smell of recent rain is flooding in, fresh, from the open front door.
_
Mum, he calls, from the hallway, which is a name he has not said out loud for at least twelve years. His black shirt is soakedthrough. The shower came on suddenly, would’ve left him cold if he’d not been walking so fast, and then the downpour cleared and the sunset was luminous, blasting away all the dark. Which is what often happens, after a storm abroad. Everything shifting so suddenly, you get a glimpse of something through the weather you’d thought had set in.
But you don’t decide these things, he thought, as he walked around in the lifting rain. You are who you are, you can’t change that, just like you can’t control bad weather. But then, he figured, as the sun set, that doesn’t mean the view is not there, behind the cloud – something to see, or to reach for. And what if hewantedto be someone who reached for the good things, instead of running from the bad? What if hecoulddecide to do things another way?
What if he jumped?
Home, then, his wet shoes on the carpet as he calls her name; as he hears his mother rise from her chair. Making her way to the hall, where he is standing beside the photograph of his father that she never took down. And why would she, when feeling – remembering – is a part of keeping him close; means, he’s realised, you don’t have to let go.
Josie stops, like the rain, when she sees him. She looks worn out, and Bren is cold now he’s stopped moving but also burning with resolve, and he can’t take another moment to peer over the edge and he is sweating and breathless and then he sees Nora, too, with her wide eyes and flushed cheeks and something softer about her jaw.
His mother goes to speak, but he gets there first.
Why didn’t you do it before, he asks her. Scatter his ashes, after the funeral?
He tips his head in the direction of the urn on the bookshelf; the urn he’s pretended not to see for weeks. And Josie tugs down her cardigan a little, as if in preparation for something.Still in her summer dress and beige tights, her velvet slippers, the brooch his father bought her twinkling from her chest.
Nora is looking at him too, a few steps behind, but for once he is not looking at her as his mother lifts her chin and stares straight at him with her clear blue eyes.
Oh, Bren, she says, isn’t it obvious? I was waiting for you.
_
The garden at sunset is quiet and cast in shadow. Light touching the tops of the trees that line the river as it flows, as it always has, behind the old oak. Its trunk in the back of Freya’s; branches swung low into Josie’s. Jon’s shed. Freya’s greenhouse. Long grass, rose bushes, thorns and trellis and overgrown nettles.
Nora stands on the lawn with Bren while Josie unlatches the gate, goes next door and brings Freya through. She has changed into her artist’s smock – something oversized she wears to bed – and this is the first time Nora sees her, since she’s learned the truth. Feet in her gardening shoes. Wild hair curly-wet, post-shower. She feels an onrush of something that moves her even more than what they’re about to do, but she holds back, knowing that now is not the moment to reach out to her mother. To say she understands.
Josie goes back inside for her husband and the three others stand in silence while they wait. New buds on the trees. Sweet smell, after rain. Nora lets it all fill her. The relief of it, how she can mourn without the shame and the secret that had tainted her family and the man they’d all loved. A man who was Bren’s father, Josie’s husband, Freya’s lover, everything to all of them – even though, as she’s learned, nobody can ever be one person’s entirely.
