Page 7 of People In Love
Robin, who is still scrawling in his notebook, looks up. Pizza?
I was thinking Alessandro’s, she says.
Yes, Nora, Robin says.That’swhy I’m marrying you.
She smiles, again. The flame on the hob still too high.
Prosecco, though?Robin asks.
Isn’t that what people drink at engagement parties?
I think they drink whatever they want to drink.
Rum cocktails, then, Nora says. And red wine.
And olives! Robin says. The really good ones in the green can.
Don’t they cost the earth?
You only get engaged once, Nora, he says. Twice, max, headds, which was a joke she saw coming, but she laughs all the same. Ignores the fridge magnets that Bren has sent her over the years, as she opens the door for the beansprouts. They’re the one thing she can rely on him for; magnetic reminders that he still exists, after they’d once shared a bedroom wall, a school bus, long, lazy summers dangling their feet in the river. All that reduced to an ad hoc parcel in the post, the occasional glitching video call, are you there? I’ve lost you. When did I lose you? Things she’s asked herself, privately, away from a screen, as well. When she’s staring out the train window after a long day at work. Or if Robin’s working late so she’s taking a bath, staring at the flicker of a scented candle and thinking about things she tries not to. As she reaches, now, for a bell pepper, redder than Bren’s hair, as Robin goes on listing the other people who are still present in their lives; Jemima, Gaya and Jack.
_
Robin wants an engagement party, she texts Shay later that night. She’s sitting at her craft table, littered with fabric swatches and calligraphy pens. Threads in black and cream and taupe, wound into an old shortbread tin.
It begins! Shay replies, after three waving dots. Are you hiring a hall, wearing a diamanté dress and coming up with a pun-worthy hashtag?
Three middle finger emojis from Nora. Laughing emoji from Shay.
We’re just hosting it here, Nora explains. I’m making the invitation right now; photo, then, of her desk, the blank page. Are you free, she asks, the last Saturday in Feb?
If I can bring a date, Shay says.
Horace won’t fit in our flat.
Then I’ll need to think about it, Shay says. More laughing emojis, then. Course, she says. Any excuse to spend some time with your barmy mother.
Hey, Nora texts back. She doesn’t like being called mother.
Jokes, and deliberate lightness; warmth, in Nora’s gut, alongside that tight twist, again, as if someone’s wringing out her abdomen.
She puts her phone down and pulls a sheaf of paper towards her. Grabs a fine line pencil and writes something in elegant, looping font. Nora and Robin, she writes. Sitting in a tree. She draws some little trees, along the bottom, but no. Not right. New sheet of paper.
Nora and Robin, she tries again: PARTY PEOPLE.
But that’s not them, either; it’s undermining this thing they have planted, in a way that feels wrong to her, now. Years they’d spent, saying they did not care for marriage or weddings or being husband and wife – but now it is a choice they’ve made, and something to be sincere about.
Nora and Robin, she writes, are engaged.
There.
She outlines it in ink, chooses her darkest blue, the colour of late nights and deep waters. Once satisfied, she writes a smaller sentence:there will be pizza, above the date: a Saturday night three weeks from now, the address of their flat beneath. Then she takes it across the hall and hands it to Robin who looks up from his own work and says it looks stellar, thatshe’sstellar, his star. He turns it into a digital file on his laptop and the next day Nora sends it to all of their friends and her mother and Josie and even, in a moment of wild, hot abandon, to Bren, in an email she is fairly certain he will not read for months. And then she returns to her day.
_
A fortnight, then, of planning. Prepping, ordering pizzas for forty people, is that too much garlic bread,isthere such a thing as too much garlic bread? Valentine’s love hearts and teddies and roses in the windows as she walks to work; a candle-making workshop at the café, coffees made, spilled, mopped up, a drawing exhibition with Shay, one evening.
Another night spent with her mother when Robin is out late with work.
