Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

  ‘Or rosé. I know some people like rosé,’ Annabelle added, as if it were an odd and slightly distasteful foible.

  ‘Red please,’ Kate said and then watched as everyone else had a glass of white.

  The conversation was dominated by Annabelle asking Jake interminable questions about his work and how so-and-so colleague was doing and what his plans were for the future and how was the flat and had he bought that bookshelf he liked and so on and so forth, all of it designed, Kate felt, to show how well she knew her son and how intimately involved she was in every aspect of his life and how there was no room for anyone else.

  Jake, who had no side to him, who couldn’t spot an ulterior motive even if it ran straight for him and wrestled him to the ground, chatted away easily and then helped himself to seconds while Annabelle commended his appetite.

  ‘Will you have some more, Kate?’ she asked, pushing the chicken dish towards her. ‘Please,’ she gestured. ‘You could do with some feeding up.’

  ‘I’m fine thank you, Annabelle. It was delicious though.’

  Annabelle drew herself up, shoulders pushed back and slid the dish back along the table.

  ‘Such a shame to have leftovers. I’ll give you some to take back with you, Jakey.’

  ‘Mmm, yes please. Thanks Mum.’

  Under the table, Kate clenched a fist and dug her nails into her palm.

  ‘More wine?’ Chris asked, and he started to pour even before she’d said yes. Kate quickly understood that her relationship with Jake’s mother would be made palatable by alcohol and wondered how long it had taken Chris to reach the same conclusion.

  They had coffee in the drawing room accompanied by a musty box of chocolates, presumably fished out from the back of a cupboard where they kept household presents they didn’t much care for. Kate picked up a praline truffle to be polite but noticed it had a coating of white sediment around the outside, suggesting it was several months out of date. She swallowed it in two bites, quickly so as not to taste it.

  Annabelle continued her conversational assault, while Chris, who had by now graduated from wine to whisky, nodded his head at various junctures to show he was listening. Annabelle outlined their plans for summer (Provence, then maybe ‘a jaunt’ to Seville although it was very hot at that time of year) and gave a comprehensive run-down of what Jake’s sisters were up to (Millie had just been promoted, Julia was enjoying Hong Kong more than she’d expected and Toad was heading up her university department in Dublin).

  ‘Why’s she called Toad?’ Kate asked.

  Annabelle, taken aback to be interrupted in full flow, gave a little cough.

  ‘Well, it’s her family nickname and we’ve never called her anything else, have we, Jakey?’

  ‘To be fair, I do tend to call her Olivia now.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘It just sounds odd if you call your sister after an amphibian in polite company.’

  Kate laughed.

  ‘It’s affectionate!’ Annabelle protested. ‘Anyway, Kate, in answer to your question, it’s because as a baby she used to make the strangest sound when she burped. More of a ribbit, really, and Julia was still so young she couldn’t say the name Olivia, so Toad seemed easier and quite sweet … you know how these things are.’

  Annabelle waved her hand, showing that what she meant by ‘these things’ could encompass all or none of the room’s contents.

  Kate didn’t actually know how these things were at all. She had never met a family willing to call their adult daughter Toad. It was a peculiar privilege of the posh to be able to give their progeny the most unflattering nicknames and for it not to affect their life chances. Kate had never had a nickname and found them infantilising and stupid. She even shuddered when Jake called her ‘babe’.

  The after-lunch chat dragged out for two more hours, during which Annabelle asked Kate precisely one question about her job, then talked over the answer. Eventually Jake found a gap in the conversation to say, ‘We’d best be going. It’s getting dark,’ and he walked over to Kate, took her hand and when she stood, he kissed her briefly on the lips right there, in front of his parents. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered into her ear.

  He didn’t let go of her hand as he led her into the hallway to pick up their coats. Annabelle was fussing over Jake and handing him an old Waitrose carrier bag filled with leftovers boxed up in Tupperware while Chris smiled benignly in the doorway. He was probably seeing double by now, Kate thought as she smiled back at him.

  ‘Darling,’ Annabelle said, as she pressed Jake to her in a lingering hug. ‘It was so wonderful to see you.’ Her voice started to break. ‘I miss you, you know. You must come home more often. I don’t like thinking of you up there in London all on your own.’

  ‘I’m not on my own,’ Jake said, pulling away. ‘I have Kate.’

  ‘Of course you do, but it’s not quite …’ Annabelle stopped herself. She dutifully gathered Kate up in an embrace. Kate could feel the locket of Annabelle’s necklace jut into her collarbone. She barely came up to Annabelle’s shoulders.

  ‘It’s been lovely to meet you, Kate,’ she said and sounded more sincere than she had for the entire day up to that point.

  ‘Thank you. It’s been really … nice to meet you too, Annabelle.’

  ‘Take care of my boy, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I will. You can absolutely trust me on that.’

  They got into the car, and waved out of the windows all the way back along the driveway. Jake indicated and turned left into the road.

  ‘Thank you. You were amazing,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen my mother be so …’

  Vicious, Kate thought. Cold. Patronising. Possessive.

  ‘… impressed.’

  She looked at him to discern a smile on his face, or a twist of the mouth indicative of held-back laughter or some discreet sign that he wasn’t being serious. There was none.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I knew she’d adore you.’

  ‘Wait, are you saying … you think … your mother acted in that way because she likes me?’

  Jake turned to her briefly, surprised.

  ‘Yes. She definitely likes you.’

  Kate was about to make a joke, something to puncture the absurdity of their conversation that would make Jake admit he’d only been winding her up, and yes, wasn’t his mother awful, and no, they never had to do that again. But she stopped herself. The set of Jake’s profile warned her against it. He was simply stating the facts as he believed them. He could not see that his mother had behaved like a proprietorial harpy, and to explain it to him would require the dismantling of over thirty years of toxic maternal influence. Annabelle had wound her way into his psyche like a twisting wisteria.

  ‘Oh,’ Kate said finally. ‘I’m glad. I wasn’t sure that she did, to be honest.’

  She chose her words with unfamiliar caution, trying to feel her way through the fog.

  ‘I think she can sense I’m serious about you and she’s not used to it.’

  ‘No?’ Kate asked, placing her hand on his knee where a few hours ago, she had seen his mother place hers. ‘What about all those many friends you’ve brought home and shown around the garden?’

  He winced.

  ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’ve only ever brought a couple of girls home and they pale in comparison to you.’

  ‘Do they?’

  He tilted his head to look at her.

  ‘They do.’

  He turned his eyes back to the road, and they drove for some minutes in companionable silence. She leaned forwards to turn the radio on, but just as she pressed the button, Jake spoke.

  ‘I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you,’ he said.

  She stared at him and her heart thudded with hope.

  ‘I know you don’t wan
t to get married,’ he added, hurriedly. It was true. Kate had told Jake from the outset that she did not want to be trapped in a patriarchal tradition, given her lack of religious faith and her feminism. He had laughed at her seriousness.

  ‘Fine with me,’ he’d said. ‘As luck would have it, I’ve never had ambitions to be a religiously zealous patriarch. It’d look rubbish on my CV.’

  Now, in the car he said: ‘I want to have a family with you. Our very own.’

  She leaned her head against his arm, feeling the smoothness of his frequently laundered shirt against her skin.

  ‘I want that too.’

  Kate marvelled at the truth of it: she wanted to have Jake’s children. It was a new sensation, and yet it felt as if it had been in her bones for a lifetime. How she felt about Annabelle or how Annabelle felt about her was irrelevant. She and Jake were the family unit now.

  Back then, it truly seemed as simple as that.

  15

  They planned it all meticulously. Kate would wait until the end of the year to come off birth control. By then, a couple of big movies would have come out and work would be less busy. They would start looking for a bigger house once Kate got pregnant. The flat was fine for two of them, and perhaps a small baby, but their family would soon expand and they could afford the space (or rather, as Kate reminded herself, Jake could).

  They went for walks through the park at weekends and talked about names they liked (Matilda for a girl, Leo for a boy) and how they would be different parents from their own mothers and fathers and what they thought about private schools – Kate was vehemently against; Jake believed that if they had enough money, they should obviously try and give their children the best education they could, but they agreed to disagree for the time being, as no decisions would have to be made for years after their baby was born.

  It felt so good having this joint project, something that they could always revert to discussing when conversation ran dry, a picture they could paint together, adding in details in the foreground here and there, choosing a different colour for this patch of sky and a thinner brush for the tiny figure that awaited them. It reassured Kate to be in a relationship with a man who was unafraid of long-term commitment, who believed in partnership and sharing and communication. After so many years dating men who fed her breadcrumbs of emotional attachment, it was a quiet revelation to be offered such plentiful nourishment. He had never once let her down, not even when his mother tried her hardest to separate them.

  After that strained Sunday lunch, Annabelle had subjected Jake to a barrage of phone calls, asking if he was sure about Kate, and how much he truly knew about her, and weren’t they moving a bit too quickly and she was only saying this because she loved him – he understood that, didn’t he? – and so on and so forth until Jake, despite his tendency always to give his mother the benefit of the doubt, was forced to start ignoring her number when it flashed up. Even Jake – kind, loving, filial Jake – couldn’t find enough time in the day to give Annabelle as much attention as she demanded. So then Annabelle began calling Kate, leaving voicemails inviting her for coffee the next time she was in town: ‘I’m popping up to Peter Jones and I’d love to see you. Just us girls.’

  Kate replied with non-committal texts and gradually the communication eased off.

  ‘She just doesn’t like the thought that she’s losing me,’ Jake said one evening as they sat on the ledge of the open kitchen window drinking Aperol Spritz and looking out over the London rooftops.

  ‘Mmm.’ Kate thought this was an inappropriate way for a mother to feel but she didn’t say anything.

  A pigeon was pecking at a roof tile a few feet away. She watched as the pigeon realised there was no food there, then puffed out its chest as if embarrassed and stalked off.

  ‘She’ll love you, just you wait. There’s part of her that already does. It’s just that you’re both actually quite—’

  ‘Don’t say it, Jake.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were about to say we’re both actually quite similar.’

  He laughed, brushing a hand through his hair, fluffing it up like the pigeon’s feathers.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Which is a) not true and b) if it were true would make you into some kind of creep with a serious Oedipus complex.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘Let’s leave it that we’re never going to be that close, but it’s fine because she lives in Tewkesbury.’

  He nodded, then said, ‘It’s why my sisters moved away.’

  ‘Sensible.’

  He held out his glass to cheers her.

  ‘Here’s to us.’

  ‘To us.’

  ‘We don’t need anyone else,’ Jake said, looking straight at her in that way he had.

  ‘We don’t.’

  They cheersed, taking great care to maintain eye contact because everyone knew that otherwise it was seven years’ bad sex and they intended to be doing a lot of it from then on.

  She came off the pill in January, after a boozy festive fortnight of parties and work lunches and a particularly drunken Christmas Day, with just the two of them in the flat opening bottles of Cabernet in front of the television and eating too much brandy butter. It had been bliss. But, back at work, the familiar New Year lethargy seeped in. She decided to do Dry January just as the temperature dropped to below freezing and the nights were drawing in. She reminded herself that she was detoxifying her system for a good reason, but the days felt long and her sleep patterns too short.

  When she wasn’t pregnant by February, she didn’t think much of it. Her hormonal levels were rebalancing after a year on the pill, Kate told herself, and January had been exhausting. In March, she reassured herself by searching online for the average amount of time it took a woman of her age to get pregnant and realised she’d been setting her hopes too high. Apparently you had to give it at least a year.

  April came and went. Then May. In June, she felt angry when blood stained her underwear and she had to retrieve the tampons from the bathroom cupboard. When she got her period again in July, she cried. She hadn’t realised how much she had wanted to be pregnant until she started trying. But they’d talked about it for so long, and had made all their plans, and now she was frustrated that her body was holding everything up. She didn’t talk to Jake about it, and he didn’t ask.

  Instead, she bought ovulation sticks from Boots, and dutifully pissed on them every morning to check her HCG levels in order to monitor when she might be releasing an egg. HCG stood for human chorionic gonadotropin, she learned on the internet. The internet also revealed that rubbing the trouser bulge of a Parisian statue, piercing the left side of her nose and having sex on the Cerne Abbas Giant would all potentially help her to get pregnant. She laughed at the suggestions, but remembered them in spite of herself.

  In August, they went on holiday to Mykonos and she gave herself a month off. ‘Just relax’ was all anyone ever said when she confided that they were trying for a baby. ‘You’ll go on holiday, get drunk one night, have sex and you’ll be pregnant before you know it. You just need to stop stressing.’

  But in the effort to stop stressing, Kate ended up being more preoccupied. She was tense all holiday, and when Jake asked what was wrong, she didn’t want to tell him. She felt ashamed of herself and believed it to be her fault.

  Back home, they fell out of the habit of having sex regularly and September and October passed in a flurry of opportunities missed. She worked late, but without any passion for what she was doing. In November, Kate was determined that she would initiate sex at all the most fertile moments in her cycle, but it was difficult to do this in a way that seemed natural or sensual because she was in her head so much of the time they were actually making love. Would this be the time they conceived, she would ask herself as Jake fucked her, and would she know, would she feel any differently, would there
be some cosmic sign that this was it? And should she stay lying down for half an hour afterwards as she had read you were meant to, so that the sperm had time to make their way up her cervix? And should she put her legs up to help them along? Except that would look ridiculous and still she didn’t want to let on to Jake that she cared so much. She didn’t want him to be as obsessed as she was, and yet at the same time she worried that he was fixated on a baby and she was letting him down. All of this whirred through her mind when they had sex and when Jake was on the verge of coming, she sometimes pretended she was too so that it would be over, so that he would have ejaculated inside her without this prolonged attempt to turn her on, which seemed unnecessary now. What did her own pleasure count when she was failing so conspicuously to do the thing other women did without thinking?

  Then it was December again and a whole year had passed, and they had agreed to go to Annabelle and Chris’s for Christmas and Kate was dreading it, but they packed up the car and made the trip to the farmhouse-that-wasn’t-a-farmhouse and when they arrived, Kate was so shattered she made her excuses and went straight to bed. She knew Annabelle would prefer to have her out of the way, and she cried into the lace-trimmed pillow at how alone she felt.

  She fell into a deep sleep, waking half an hour later when there was a knock at the door. Jake walked in, with a cup of tea in his hand. He placed the saucer down on the bedside table and came to sit next to her. He stroked the hair out of her eyes and his hand felt cool against her hot forehead.

  ‘You OK?’

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak without crying.

  ‘You don’t seem OK, Kate. You seem sad. You’ve seemed sad for months.’

  She didn’t say anything. From her pillow, she could smell the earthy steam of the tea.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  Kate was going to say no, but she stopped herself when she realised she did want to talk about it. She wanted to talk about it very much.