Page 58 of People In Love
Which is what she’d have said to Bren, she thinks. Yes, I can do that. I can fly out to be with you. Which disturbs something inside of her; stirs the certainty she has felt, for so long, into a swirl of something else. Churning her up as they finish the film. As they brush their teeth, read for a while by their bedside lamps and then, when they are flicked off and she is still abnormally quiet, Robin curls himself around her. Asks, with his face in her hair, if she ever considered telling Bren, about Freya and Jon.
Their blinds are not fully closed, and the street light slats are silver-white on the wall. Cold colour, like the feeling inside her, as she says no. She would never. She couldn’t risk his mum finding out, and anyway, what good would it do? Bren can’t handle the normal hard things, as it is. One parent dying. Another on meds. If he found out his hero was not a hero at all, not the man who made things okay, embodied something solid, in his life, it would break him. Like it would Josie.
Like it did you, Robin says, into the dark.
Which is meant to be caring, Nora knows. Empathetic. Is meant to remind her that he sees her and still knows, intimately, those dark corners that she showed him, all those years ago. But it is only once he’s fallen asleep, still holding her, that she can let her tears fall. She cries silently about all of it, the history, the betrayals, the stirred-up love and regret. Not knowing how she got here, or where she should go; what’s haunted her, always, stepping into a new shade of light.
_
And then it’s the last week of March and another Sunday rolls around, which is usually the day she’d go to Freya’s, if hermum wasn’t on shift at the hospice. She’d take ingredients, often, do the cooking, or else be subjected to whatever spread her mother would throw together – tomatoes, of course, sliced cold or stewed with red peppers; hummus, flatbreads, anything she could scrounge from the reduced section. But for the third week in a row, Nora will not be going for lunch. She will not be cooking for or eating with her mother this Sunday, and this feels painful and strange and Robin knows this, too, so on waking nuzzles into her neck, says right. What shall we do with our day?
He smells warm, of tea and toast. She reaches for her phone, checks her weather app.
Glorious sun predicted all morning, before a downpour – the start of another named storm, come the afternoon. An excellent excuse to curl up by the fire with a Pixar movie, Robin says. Proverbially, he says, when she points out they don’t have a fireplace.
And while she agrees, she also feels the pull to something more extreme – she is craving the cold water, some alone time. So she pulls on her swimsuit, tells Robin she’s going to the lido while the sun’s out. Are you okay, he asks her, as she packs her swim bag, and she says she’s fine, why?
It’s still a novelty that we won’t be spending our Sunday being lectured on mussel farming, Robin says. Or misogyny.
I know, Nora says.
It’s okay if you’re kind of sad as well as pleased about that.
I’m not, she says, throwing spare underwear into her bag. I’m just angry.
Angry is a kind of sad.
Robin, can you stop being soperceptivefor once, she says. I just want to go for a swim, not a therapy session.
Robin lies back on his pillows, says okay. Sure. She kisses him roughly on the forehead and leaves, walks down theconcrete path with her chest tight, that anger ebbing into guilt. She texts him that she’s sorry. She loves him. Sorry again.
He replies immediately with three tortoise emojis.
Little snapper turtle, he calls her, sometimes. When she’s tired or hungry or hormonal. With relief, she puts her phone away and walks to the pool, feels everything falling through her, like she’s an hourglass. Like she’s being tipped over, and turned upright, over and over again.
_
An hour later she walks up the steps from the changing room to the edge of the pool. It’s not the Hampstead Mixed Pond, but it’s still got a certain charm. Cool air, smell of wet grass. She lowers herself in and, alongside the other lone swimmers doing lengths, finds herself musing that everyone, surely, must have someone like Bren. Someone from their past, who would throw a question mark over everything if they showed up at the wrong – or maybe the right – moment.
Surely it is not just her.
And surely it does not mean that things need to change.
Another lap. Another thought.
Because she believed she was someone who knew herself. All that art and sewing, years without a mobile phone and so forced into introspection; has no aversion, she is certain, to her own shortcomings. But what if, she thinks, as she glides through the water, she doesn’t know herself at all. What if she is just someone who thinks too hard.
Someone who wouldn’t jump.
She swims for an hour, but then lane swimming is over, the sun gone. Nora gets out, dries off, dresses and walks with wet hair towards the high street. Clouds purpling, now, thestorm brewing. She buys some bits for lunch, thinking less under the supermarket lighting, then swings by the haberdashery, stocks up on black thread. Buys a new blue she can’t resist. Periwinkle. Lovely to say, like pumpernickel. Something Robin will appreciate when she shares that with him, at home. It could be her something blue, stitched into her skirts, she thinks, as she pays. She hasn’t been thinking about the wedding nearly enough.
And just as she steps outside, the heavens break and the rain comes and she has to run and shelter beneath a bus stop, wetter than she was in the pool, even, aghast at how sudden it came down.
How the day could turn like that, in a second.
Coat soaked and shoes sopping, she texts Robin to say she’ll be late. The weather, crazy. Light that proverbial fire.
She waits, but there are no ticks to register he’s read it. He’s probably making a playlist for the wedding, or watching flash mob groomsmen dances online, and she gets this feeling, at the thought, the urge to run back into the rain. An urge she ignores as a bus pulls up along the kerb, slow and heaving. Then the doors hiss open and there’s a woman descending the steps with a pram, another person helping her lift it, a guy with red hair and a blue coat and Nora jolts; sits upright, and stares.
