Magpie

  ‘I feel like we’re dating,’ Jake said. He poured her a glass of rosé.

  She squinted at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that I’m over-analysing each of her texts because I want to show we’re interested but I don’t want to come across as too keen.’

  She laughed. ‘You are silly.’

  The wine and the sunshine had given her a pleasant light-headedness. She rested her head against his shoulder. ‘The only person you’re dating is me.’

  He held her closer to him.

  ‘Thank goodness.’

  They arranged to meet Marisa in a cafe at the weekend, the daylight rendezvous feeling appropriate and unthreatening. Kate dressed in clothes that were presentable but not too fashionable because she wanted to appear her most dependable and stable self. She settled for a white linen shirt and boyfriend cut jeans with trainers. Jake wore a grey T-shirt and his favourite chinos. They arrived half an hour before the allotted time so that they could settle in and quell their anxiety, and they chose a table by the window so that Marisa could see them easily when she walked in.

  When she arrived, she smiled at them and made her way over to the table.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. Her hair was down over her shoulders. Out of fancy dress, she looked even more wholesome than Kate had remembered. She was in a pink cotton sundress and the straps kept slipping down her tanned arms. The top button was undone, revealing a triangle of bright blue bra. Looking at her, the one word that Kate kept returning to was ‘ripe’. She knew, instinctively, that this woman would carry their baby; that she was the one and this knowledge calmed her. It suddenly made a peculiar kind of sense that their struggles had led them here, as though their baby had been waiting to be born until Marisa came along.

  ‘So nice to see you again,’ Jake said, shaking her hand.

  They ordered drinks and Marisa’s tea came with all sorts of unnecessary paraphernalia including a tiny egg-timer and a Japanese-style tray and a lengthy explanation from the waitress of how long to let it brew.

  ‘Wow,’ Jake said. ‘That’s a complicated cup of tea.’

  They laughed.

  ‘I’m more of an English Breakfast man myself,’ Jake continued. Kate felt a twinge of affection for how he had taken on the difficult business of breaking the ice so that she didn’t have to. She wanted to stay silent for a bit, and simply observe.

  Jake and Marisa talked about their respective families and their upbringings, and Marisa painted an idyllic picture of a contented childhood. Her parents, she said, were still happily married (‘It makes it quite difficult to live up to, to be honest,’ she added) and she and her younger sister, Anna, were very close.

  ‘And what do you do for a living?’ Kate asked.

  ‘I write and illustrate children’s books.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so wonderful!’

  Kate was thrilled she was creative. That had been one of the things she had worried about: that her more artistic genes would not be passed on to the baby.

  ‘Thank you! I mean, it’s not like I’m Roald Dahl or anything. I get commissions from parents or family members to write personalised fairytales for their children.’

  ‘How does that work?’

  Marisa flicked her hair back over her shoulders. It was long and wavy, the kind of hair you see on models advertising suntan lotion on the beach.

  ‘They send me a couple of photos and some key characteristics and I go from there.’

  She told them she called her business Telling Tales and they both commended her on the cleverness of the name. Under the table, Jake grazed his knee against Kate’s and she clasped onto his thigh, not quite believing that this was going as well as it was.

  They didn’t mention the surrogacy until they had finished their drinks and it was Marisa who brought it up.

  ‘I know that we’re at the very early stages of this, but I just wanted to put it out there that I really like you guys and would love to be able to help you by being your surrogate. If you wanted that, of course.’ She giggled and her face flushed. ‘No pressure!’

  Kate’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘That’s such a—’ Her voice broke. ‘Such a generous and incredible thing to hear. Thank you. Excuse me.’

  She didn’t want to cry in front of Marisa, so she made her way to the toilet, where she put the loo seat down and sat there for a few minutes, blotting at her cheeks with balled-up loo roll. She took some deep breaths. There was a sign on the back of the door for baby yoga.

  ‘Unleash your inner mama goddess,’ it read and there was a photograph of a broad-hipped woman in a kaftan holding a chubby baby up to the sky. Kate had seen the poster before and it had always enraged her. It seemed so smug, so tone-deaf, so badly misaligned with what she was going through that she had to stop herself from tearing it down. It was like those posts on Instagram of photogenic baby bumps and minuscule newborns that made Kate want to scream and wish there was a trigger warning for pregnancy content. But today, she stared at the poster and believed that one day this could be her.

  She fished out her phone from her jeans pocket and texted Jake.

  ‘I think she’s the one, don’t you?’

  She pressed send and waited. There was a rattling at the door, so she flushed the loo and washed her hands, placing them under the dryer so that the person outside knew there wasn’t long to wait. Her phone vibrated.

  ‘Sure do x’

  Kate left the cubicle, grinning broadly at the woman waiting outside.

  ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. It was as she was walking back through the bustling cafe that she saw, in the flicker of a moment, Marisa reach out across the table and graze Jake’s wrist with her hand. It was a quick gesture, as if to emphasise a conversational point, and Kate thought no more about it as she went back to her seat and told Marisa how lucky they felt to have met her.

  20

  They spent a lot of time together over the next three months, as advised by Carol. They went for picnics. They attended surrogacy conferences. They visited art galleries and museums and went on cinema dates, where Jake and Kate would sit either side of Marisa so as not to make her feel awkward. They had dozens of conversations about what the surrogacy would entail and how they would make it work so that they were all three of them as clear as they could be. They thrashed out a surrogacy agreement between the three of them, whereby Marisa Grover would transfer legal parenthood to Kate Samuel and Jake Sturridge after their baby was born. Marisa always referred to it as ‘your baby’. She knew all about the medical procedures that she would have to undergo to have her eggs retrieved and fertilised with Jake’s sperm and reassured Kate that she wasn’t daunted by the prospect.

  ‘I just want to make sure you’re OK with it all. Sorry for all the questions,’ Kate said one evening when the three of them were walking along the river, through Battersea Park.

  ‘Oh gosh, I totally understand,’ Marisa replied. ‘But I guess I did think long and hard about wanting to do this before I met you, so I think I do know what I’m getting into.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Jake said.

  Everything Marisa told them was perfect. It felt, at points, as though they had invented her, as though she were too good to be true.

  There was just one thing that Kate wanted to change, and that was Marisa’s living arrangement. She had told them she rented a flat in north London, but when they visited her there Kate was taken aback to find that it was more like a bedsit than a flat. The bedroom contained the galley kitchen and the bathroom was barely bigger than a cupboard. It smelled of cooked food and bad plumbing. Kate could hear the thump of loud music coming from above. It was damp and poky and the front window looked out directly onto a main road. The glass was grimy from exhaust fumes.

  ‘What if Marisa came to live with us?’ Kate asked Jake later that evening.
They were sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, drinking wine and watching a Netflix documentary about the doping scandal in cycling.

  ‘Mmm?’ Jake didn’t hear her at first. He reached for the remote control and pressed pause. ‘What was that?’

  She held her wine glass by the stem, gently swilling it so the liquid left a mark on the side.

  ‘I was wondering if it made sense to ask Marisa to move in with us.’

  Jake, who had reached to take a crisp from the bowl on the low table in front of them, halted the movement mid-air. He sat back and burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’

  Kate looked at him levelly.

  He realised she wasn’t joking and his face became serious again.

  ‘Um. Wow. OK. I hadn’t expected that. OK. Let me just digest it for a second.’

  The TV switched into screensaver mode and was filled with images of slow-moving dolphins underwater.

  ‘I’ve just been thinking about it, and I don’t really love the idea of her being so far away from us …’

  ‘It’s not that far.’

  ‘No, I know, but we both work long hours and it would be easier having her closer. That’s the practical argument,’ she said, knowing how Jake’s mind worked. ‘The emotional one is that I also don’t love the idea of her being on her own, without a family support unit. They all live in the country, don’t they? Besides, it would be much easier to keep an eye on her and check she’s eating healthily and taking her supplements and all that stuff.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And given that it’s illegal to pay for surrogacy, beyond reasonable expenses anyway, this would be a way of thanking her for this enormous fucking thing she’s doing for us.’

  Jake was quiet, but she could sense his mood had shifted from disbelief to logical assessment.

  ‘We could give her the spare room and she could set up her studio there. There’s more than enough space.’

  Jake went to pour himself another glass of wine but found the bottle was empty. He stood up and walked to the wine rack, removing a screw-top red which he brought back to the sofa, offering her some as he sat back down.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, holding out her glass.

  She was quiet, allowing the idea to percolate.

  ‘OK,’ Jake said.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘I think it’s a good idea.’

  Kate rolled across to him and kissed him all over his face.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you think so too. Thank you thank you thank you.’

  Jake laughed and kissed her back on the mouth. He tasted of tannins.

  ‘Assuming Marisa agrees,’ he said, holding her by the shoulders. ‘What do we tell everyone else?’

  ‘I guess … that she’s a lodger?’

  ‘Even my mother?’

  Kate went back to her side of the sofa.

  ‘No, I think we should tell Annabelle the truth.’

  Jake shook his head.

  ‘She’s not going to understand.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Kate agreed. ‘But she doesn’t have to.’

  It was, in the end, quite easily decided. Kate mentioned it to Marisa the next day over the phone.

  ‘Kate, oh my goodness, that’s so generous. Are you sure?’

  Her voice was breathless, as if she had just been out for a run.

  ‘We’re positive. It would be lovely to have you with us. But we don’t want you to feel under any obligation. Why don’t you come round and see the house and your room and then you can make up your mind?’

  ‘I’d love that.’

  They made a date for the following afternoon. Jake was unable to get out of a work meeting but Kate’s hours were more flexible and she could easily be there to show Marisa around. She felt excited waiting for Marisa to ring the front doorbell, and she spent a couple of hours that morning cleaning and making everything look as inviting as possible. In the spare room, she changed the bedlinen and put a selection of her favourite books on the shelves. Downstairs, she lit scented candles and wiped down the kitchen surfaces.

  When Marisa arrived, they hugged and Kate invited her in and started showing her round as if she were an estate agent. She pointed out the double-glazing which made it quiet, the two bathrooms (which meant Marisa would have her own) and the fact that hers and Jake’s bedroom was on a different floor, for added privacy.

  ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful,’ Marisa enthused. ‘The light is just gorgeous.’

  In the kitchen, Kate opened the glass doors into the garden and a magpie flew in without warning so that Kate had to swerve and duck her head. In the flurry that followed, the bird caught its wing on a vase which crashed to the ground, and then flew back outside. Kate, who had never liked birds and found them full of all sorts of sinister premonitions, tried to make light of it.

  ‘Good riddance!’ she said, as the bird flew higher into the sky before disappearing from view. ‘I hope that didn’t put you off?’

  Marisa said it hadn’t at all, and not to worry, and if Kate and Jake were really sure then she’d love to move in for the next few months while they went on their surrogacy adventure together. Kate hugged her again, so tightly that she could feel the beat of the other woman’s heart. When she pulled back, Marisa looked at her oddly, as though her eyes had lost focus, as though her mind had taken her somewhere else. It was a fleeting moment, and Marisa’s face cleared almost as soon as Kate had noticed it.

  Where had she gone, Kate wondered.

  She saw Marisa out, watching as the other woman walked down the street, taking out her phone to text someone on her way to the tube, and then Kate closed the door and stood for a while in the hallway, pleased with herself for how well it had gone.

  They helped Marisa move in, hiring a van and lugging boxes down the narrow stairs from her flat and piling them high in the back. They drove across the city with the radio on and Marisa seemed to know all the words to the pop songs. She had a nice singing voice, Kate thought, and this was another thing that made her happy about the genetic inheritance she would be giving their child. Marisa unpacked quickly and methodically and by that evening, it was all done and she was ensconced in their house, sitting across from them at the kitchen table and it felt as though it had always been this way. It felt, Kate realised, like family.

  Marisa set a slanted architect’s table up by the spare window and worked long hours in her room, emerging for dinner with paint in her hair, wearing sandals and loose-fitting work clothes. She said she was sleeping better than she had done in years and her face filled out and the darkness beneath her eyes disappeared.

  Jake and Kate, aware of this new presence in their home, did their best to make Marisa feel welcome. They were solicitous, always asking if she wanted cups of tea or the odd glass of wine, and they agreed they would not be ‘couply’ in front of her. They stopped being tactile or showing affection to each other so that Marisa wouldn’t feel the odd one out. At night, they had sex quietly, not wanting her to hear.

  It went on in this way for three weeks, maybe four. Afterwards, Kate could never recall when exactly she got the first inkling that all was not as it seemed. It started with small things – gestures and actions that would have been almost impossible to discern at the time, but which in retrospect appeared all to be leading up to an inevitable end point.

  There was the way Marisa moved her mugs to the front of the cupboard, pushing Kate’s favourite coffee cups to the back, and the way she used the basin in the master bathroom to brush her teeth rather than the smaller one upstairs they had allotted her. She liked to take a lengthy soak in their tub before going to bed but she never cleaned the bath out after using it. She downloaded TV programmes from their Apple account without asking. Once, Kate had found her in their bedroom, sitting at Kate’s dressing table, trying on her jewellery.

  ‘Oh, I’m so s
orry, Kate!’ Marisa had said. Her manner was light, as if it were no big deal. ‘I just love these particular earrings you have and wanted to see if they suited me. You don’t mind, do you?’

  And Kate felt there was no option but to say, ‘No, of course not.’

  Kate told herself she was being controlling. Why shouldn’t Marisa treat their house as her home? Wasn’t that what they’d encouraged her to do? Besides, Kate was wary of upsetting her. She was desperate not to lose this chance they’d worked so hard towards. Marisa was their perfect surrogate, she kept telling herself. Whatever Marisa wanted to do, and however she wanted to act, Kate would have to deal with it in as compassionate and generous a way as possible until they had their baby. This was the most important thing, and it guided her every action. Don’t upset the status quo. Don’t do anything that will cause offence. Don’t forget how fragile everything is just beneath the surface.

  But Marisa subtly kept expanding her reach around the house. She asked if she could put some of her books on the shelves and Jake readily agreed. When Kate came down to the sitting room, she saw that Marisa had removed Kate’s beloved collection of grey-spined Persephone novels and had left them piled untidily on the floor. The shelf was now taken over by weighty art tomes on photography and the female nude – the kind of books no one read, but wanted to be seen to own.

  Once, when Kate had a work meeting nearby, she had popped home in the middle of the day. She noticed as soon as she walked through the door that her running shoes had been moved from the hallway where she always kept them. Marisa came down the stairs, looking distracted.

  ‘Oh,’ Marisa said. ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone.’