Page 80 of People In Love
Easter, then, is all he says, by way of response.
Easter, Freya says back, with a nod.
FIFTEEN
You cancel some things. Things you’d organised for her, because she is always organising things for others, birthday teas for Josie and Sunday lunches for Freya, home-made gifts via air mail for Bren, hand-knitted hats for Horace, even, Shay’s dog. And you’d thought it would be special to make plans centred around her, for a change. Her, instead of her strong-willed mother and old neighbours that cause chaos without meaning to. Her, with her good, solid heart that seems lost, right now. Like your own.
You make the calls, craft the emails. Can’t ask Nora to help because she didn’t know about all the bookings you’d made. But you do ask her what she wants to do about the registry office, the legal bit she herself had secured.
Should we cancel the registrar, you ask her, a few days after you get home from Devon.
Which is really you asking: should we cancel this entire thing.
And Nora is quiet as she eats her dinner. Chewing slowly, like she’s got toothache. As if her mouth is bruised, likeyour arm, which is feeling less tender but everything else is off, now, including her face, which looks different to you, somehow, as she does not say yes or no or what do you mean.
In the end, she suggests you postpone.
I think we need time, she says, taking your hand. Which is her sayingsheneeds time, but if nine years wasn’t enough, then how much longer will she need?
Small nod of your head, though. Yeah. Because what else is there to say. What more is there to do, when you won’t walk away. Want her, and this, and the life you have built, and this is not a movie with the nice guy giving an empowered speech on a tabletop or tipping her backwards and kissing her in the rain, sometimes things have no structure, no narrative arc, but just are, just continue as they should. You are you, and she is her, and life goes on like it always has and you find you don’t have the energy, the headspace, the gumption, to demand any more while everything feels so wrong and at the same time, nothing has changed.
So you go to work. You have dinner, you go to bed, you do it again the next day and the next. Things are subdued and there is less laughing and she lies close to you at night still, but even with her head on your pillow, her toothpaste breath mingled with yours, you can feel yourself pulling away. Not meeting her eye. And you notice her, too, staring into space. Spending long hours at her café, staying late when she’s usually home.
She is here, but not with you. You are here, but not yourself.
It’s like we’re two branches floating on the surface of a river, you would say to Goose, if you felt able to talk to him about this. Like we’re both caught on the same current, but she is either ahead or behind and there’s nothing you can do to keep pace. All you can do is keep afloat. Trust that you’ll wash up on the same bank downstream, which means saying nothing. Which means not having the big animated movie moment that demands an answer,theanswer, because what is the question, when she’d already answered it, but in fact you hadn’t asked? It hurts your head to think about it. When you think about explaining to your friends, your family – your parents, god help you – so you don’t.
You have dinner, go to bed, get up, do it again.
Hurt. Hope. Endure tension headaches as you edit your photographs, cancel the plans, don’t send out the invites she’d made. Hug her back when she hugs you goodbye before work, which she does, long and loving, her face not looking like hers but itisher, it is Nora, in your bed, in your hallway, walking down the road to catch her train as you stand at the window and cancel more plans and wonder what the hell’s going on.
SIXTEEN
Nora is in the back room at the art café when Josie calls her. She puts down what she’s been working on and answers, worried because it’s a Thursday and they don’t usually speak on Thursdays; Josie always calls her on the first Wednesday of the month.
Nora? Josie says when she answers, as if to check she’s called the right number, and Nora asks her if everything’s all right. Tilts her head so her phone is balanced between her ear and shoulder, picks up her sewing again.
Fine, sweetheart, fine, Josie says. I’m just calling to tell you I’m throwing a little Easter lunch next Sunday, and I’d really like you to be there. With Robin, too, of course.
Nora goes back to her embroidery.
Pulls the thread through, without speaking.
It is early evening, and Shay is locking up for the night. The laptop screen is whistling with how hot it is in this back room, no window and no air.
Nora has been spending a lot of time in here lately. Thinking. Working. Pulling parts of herself out of her own head with a needle and thread; feeling something she hasn’t felt in a long while, the need to create art that means something. Maybe everything.
This is important to me, Nora, Josie is saying. It’smyinvite,but it will be hosted at your mum’s – and she says it breezily, like this is of no consequence – because she has more shade in her garden, you see, and more chairs.
Nora’s needle darts back through the fabric, fish-like, flash of silver.
I’m not speaking to Freya at the moment, Josie, she says.
I know that, pet, and that’s why I thought you could work it ou –
We will, Nora says. Another time.
But youwon’t, Josie says, and Nora hears the desperation in her voice, a manic pitch that’s been absent for a long time. Ihatethat you aren’t speaking! Life’s too short to fight like this, with the people you love most!
