Page 114 of People In Love
I think so, says Bren, in his mother’s kitchen. It was touch and go.
Why didn’t you say so, on the phone?!
Nora didn’t want anyone to panic.
Panic! Too right I’d have panicked! My son-in-law, dressed to the nines for his wedding day, ends up having brain surgery, instead?! Panic ensues! Panic is appropriate! Panic is the only plausible reaction!
Freya, calm down.
Stop panicking, you mean?
It is late. There are two plates on the table where the mothers have shared dinner without him; presuming he was on a plane somewhere over South-East Asia, by now. Bren has collected things that Nora might need, from next door: a toothbrush, a change of clothes from the selection she leaves at her mother’s, and he’s just downing a glass of water, the sound of the dishwasher normalising the otherwise surreal set of circumstances that have brought him back home.
It was you, wasn’t it, Bren, Freya says, as Bren puts his glass down. You poisoned him, as a part of your master plan, to make Nora yours?
But Bren cannot even laugh.
Something has happened to him, since that moment in the waiting room. Since he saw everything he had wondered about, crystallised into a real possibility. Nora, without Robin. Nora, with her own world collapsing. And everything has slowed for him, since.
Everything has clarified.
Freya stands up, then, and pats down the pockets of her dungarees. Bren is leaning on the kitchen counter, his rucksack abandoned somewhere. At the hospital, he thinks. In the waiting room where he’d left it. He realises, with detached interest, that this doesn’t matter to him.
Where are my car keys, Freya asks.
In the bamboo bowl, Josie guesses, in your hall?
I think the two of them might need some space, actually, Bren says.
Jackson Pollocks to that, Freya says. You give people space when they’re grieving, or heartbroken. Not when they don’t die and you need to tell them how glad you are about that.
The surgeon said he needs rest, Bren insists.
We can be restful company, can’t we? I’d like to see him, this son-in-law of mine! And my daughter, in her wedding dress.
They didn’t actually get married, Bren says.
But for all intents and purposes, Freya says, today is their wedding day. D’you know, she says to Josie, I never realised howokayI would feel about Nora marrying Robin, until it transpired she might not.
Same, Bren thinks. But does not say.
Shall we take grapes? Josie asks, after a short silence.
Nobody wants grapes, Josephine, Freya says. A stiff drink, maybe. Champagne? What is it one gifts, at a wedding, where nobody got married but nobody died, either?
There is a longer silence then, as the reality of this lands for all of them. That lucky cat, being lucky. Waving its left-hand paw.
_
Goose says he’ll come back tomorrow, with their parents, first thing. Please don’t, Robin groans, but it is tentative, his heart not in it, because the realisation of all that has happened – or nearly happened – is setting in. At Nora’s request, Bren has staved off a visit from Freya and Josie, too, so once Goose is gone the two of them are left alone. To try to sleep. To hold each other, knowing that sleep won’t come.
You couldn’t write this, Nora says, curled onto the bed beside him. She is still in her wedding dress, too tired to get changed into the clothes Bren had dropped off.
You could stitch it, though, Robin says. Maybe along that bit, there.
He points to a swathe of fabric where there is space for something more. A new date. A new line. A new part of their story. She likes the negative space between the black thread:could’ve kept stitching, forever, but she’d had to draw a line somewhere, show him the work when it felt done. Except they aren’t done. Won’t ever be. That’s the point of a shared story, she’s realised.
Life advice, Robin poses, tracing the blank space at her waist. Never clean the gutters, unsupervised.
