Magpie

  She feels her hair being lifted and held back. Jake, she thinks again, feeling wretched that he is seeing her like this, that this is what she is reduced to.

  Way back, years before she met Jake, she had tried to ignore her illness. She had tried to ignore the manic episodes of work followed by the depression that hit her like a hammer blow, the times she heard voices speaking to her through the television and the microwave, telling her to do terrible things, that she wasn’t important enough to live, that even her own mother had abandoned her. She had tried to deal with it silently, behind closed doors. She hadn’t wanted to admit that she needed help for fear of being categorised as mad or scary or defective. It went on for months. But when it became impossible for her to paint, she had to get help because the only other way out was to kill herself and even in her darkest moments, Marisa knew that she would never be able to do it. She would fail even at that.

  The doctor had tried different meds, before arriving at the final dosage and type of pill that made Marisa feel better. Not wholly recovered, but balanced out, her jagged edges smoothed down with sandpaper, her technicolour imaginings dulled down to more manageable shades of grey. She was all right as long as she took her medication. But sometimes, she believed she could function without it, and then she would spiral and Jas would have to fish her back out of the dark place and take care of her, and so it continued until she found a purpose beyond herself. She signed up with a surrogacy agency and realised, for the first time in her life, she could do something entirely good. Her mother had abandoned her. That was a subtraction of love. But Marisa could provide an addition of it for another family. In this way, her life would regain its natural equilibrium. In this way, she would feel once again that she belonged and was useful and loved, if not for herself, then at least for what she could do.

  When she met Jake and Kate, she loved them both. She stopped taking the drugs because she was preparing her body for pregnancy. It was the sensible thing to do, she convinced herself. It was for the good of others. Besides, she had a stable family unit now. She was better.

  She lifts her head from the toilet bowl. Jake lets go of her hair.

  ‘Are you OK? Do you want some water?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, her voice croaky. ‘Yes please.’

  He leaves the bathroom and comes back with a glass. She sips it slowly. Then he helps her up and she shuffles back into bed, careful now not to disturb the baby she has remembered she is carrying. She is appalled by what she has done. They are the actions of a different person, she wants to say, but she can’t speak any more. She only wants to close her eyes. She steps into bed and rests her head against the expensive feather pillows and swims back into the tide of sleep. She doesn’t hear Jake leave.

  The next morning, Marisa rises feeling rested. She puts on a dressing gown someone has left hanging from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. It is soft and when she checks the label, she sees it is cashmere. She opens the blind. The window overlooks a long lawn, at the other end of which is a large red-brick gabled house. There are croquet hoops studding the ground and an abandoned wooden mallet lying on its side, indenting the grass. A sparrow pecks at a bowl on a wooden bird table. A rose bush climbs up the facade of the house, arching around the brickwork.

  Marisa fully examines her surroundings in the daylight. She does not recognise either the house at the end of the lawn or the cottage she has been staying in, but the silence and the space make it clear she’s in the countryside. She has no recollection of how she came to be here and yet she is calm, as though her emotions have been suspended in amber. Her head is fuzzy, the thoughts clouding at the edges like breath on a mirror, but the sensation is not unpleasant. It simply is.

  She walks into the next room. There is a U-shaped arrangement of kitchen units with beige cupboard doors and a spice rack filled with matching pots, each one with a circular silver lid. The cooker is an expensive make of the kind seen in the pages of interiors magazines. Beyond the kitchen is a lounge, furnished in the same neutral palette: a sofa the colour of honeycomb; rugs with grey chequered patterns; a vase on a coffee table that contains three dried branches of an honesty plant, the discs shimmering like monocle lenses. There are blankets in a basket by the fire and an open dresser lined with mismatched plates, and a television that fits into a bookshelf so that you almost wouldn’t notice it at first. The walls are hung with framed prints of flowers ripped out from long-ago botanical encyclopedias, the kind you could buy in a job lot from middlebrow antiques shops and second-hand booksellers.

  Marisa decides to make herself a cup of tea and take it outside, to feel the morning sun on her face. She boils the kettle and searches in the cupboards for a teabag. There is an open packet of Yorkshire Tea in one of them and half a jug of milk in the Smeg fridge. How thoughtful, Marisa thinks, for them to have put the milk there. She isn’t sure who ‘them’ might refer to exactly. There is Jake. There is the man who gives her medicine. And then the tall woman with the blue eyes. She must ask Jake who they are, and how long they are intending to stay here. Besides, Marisa thinks, where is Kate?

  The clarity she experienced last night has gone now. She can’t remember what she did to Kate, or the hallway or the bloody tiles or knocking the other woman unconscious in a fit of violent rage. She has blocked that memory out. Or maybe it has disappeared of its own accord, slipping through the cracks of her consciousness, until she is ready to examine it again. For now, it doesn’t exist in Marisa’s mind. For now, she has the immediacy of the current moment and the knowledge that she is Jake and Kate’s surrogate; that she stopped taking her medication and that something has happened to worry them. But now she is taking her pills again. She is restored to a capable self. Now they don’t need to worry. The baby is safe. This she knows in a deep, intractable part of her that no amount of outside interference can shake. The baby is fine.

  She pours milk into the tea, squashing the teabag against the side of the mug with the back of a spoon. She picks up the mug and walks to the door. It is one of those old stable doors that used to open in two parts, but someone has fused them together. She presses her thumb down on the iron lever and the door gives way. It opens onto a garden. The grass is twinkling with dew. She breathes in the cool outside air and tilts her face up to the feeble sunshine, feeling its weak warmth graze her cheeks.

  For the first time in a long while, she feels safe.

  28

  When Jake comes back to Richborne Terrace, he looks haggard. Kate makes him some hot buttered toast with raspberry jam and sits him down at the kitchen table, while she keeps up an inconsequential patter that she hopes will hide how concerned she is.

  ‘Kate,’ he says after a while. ‘Stop. You don’t need to make small talk with me.’

  She puts the plate of toast down in front of him and sits opposite. She hears it as a rebuke.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. His shoulders sag. His T-shirt smells of sweat. ‘Tell me how you are.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘The dentist was good?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She went to a private dentist yesterday to get a mould made for her new prosthetic tooth. The bruise on her head has healed. She’s sleeping better since her meeting with Jas, which she told Jake all about over the phone while he was in Gloucestershire. He said it made sense, given what Marisa is like now that she’s back on her medication – ‘So docile,’ he told Kate, whispering so as not to wake his parents in the next-door bedroom. ‘It’s as if she has no memory of this other person she was or of what she did to you.’

  Back in London, Kate cleaned out Marisa’s room. She hoovered the floor, washed down the walls and the window, which had sticky imprints all over the glass. She threw out the leftover takeaway cartons and stripped the bed and left a scented candle lit in there for several hours. By the end of her efforts, the room seemed almost normal again and she could kid herself that nothing untoward had happened. The gothic hor
ror of a week earlier had receded into the distance and now belonged to another era.

  She is not angry with Marisa. Neither of them are. They simply want her to be all right, this is what Kate keeps telling herself. That’s why it makes sense to keep Marisa where she is, they agree. That’s why Jake’s parents are monitoring her progress and ensuring she stays at the cottage. It’s for her own good, they decide. It’s for their baby’s protection. They have to do what they have to do.

  ‘So what was she like when you left her?’ Kate asks.

  Jake shrugs. When he moves, he does so slowly, as though each muscle is a sandbag being hauled into place.

  ‘She seemed perfectly fine. That’s the strangest part of it. Back to the Marisa we met and liked and trusted, just like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘The power of medicine, I guess.’

  ‘And she can’t remember most of it?’

  ‘She remembers stopping taking the drugs almost as soon as she moved in, but that’s it.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  Kate has heard this before, in multiple phone conversations with Jake over the last few days, but she needs him to repeat it in front of her. She waits for him to continue.

  ‘Says she wanted to prepare her body for the pregnancy, which I guess has a kind of twisted logic to it,’ he goes on. ‘To give her the benefit of the doubt, I think she was genuinely worried the drugs would damage the baby. Anyway, Dad was able to set her mind at rest on all that. Much safer to be taking them than not.’

  The toast she has made him lies half eaten on the plate between them. Kate can’t remember ever having felt this distant from Jake. He is unreachable, and when she catches his eye there is none of his usual warmth there. He’s just tired, she reasons. He’s been through a lot. He’s still in shock. He’ll come back to me.

  ‘Can I get you something else?’ she asks.

  ‘You know what I really want?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A proper drink. Do we have any whisky?’

  They do. She pours it for him and puts in one of those fancy oversized square ice cubes they have in the freezer. No water.

  ‘But she doesn’t remember attacking me?’ Kate asks when the whisky is in his hands.

  Jake drinks, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair as he swallows.

  ‘Nope,’ he says.

  ‘Convenient,’ Kate mutters under her breath.

  ‘Honestly, Kate, I don’t think she does. Dad says she’s likely to get these, sort of, psychotic breaks.’

  Kate feels sick with the pressure of it all. The thought of her baby being this far away from her, in the belly of a woman with a history of psychosis and bipolar disorder is almost too much to bear. But she reasons that she can’t blame Marisa for her mental illness. The only person she blames is herself, for wanting a baby so much that it has led them into this situation.

  ‘Is it going to be OK?’ she whispers.

  Jake comes to her side of the table and puts his arms around her.

  ‘It is, my love. It’s going to be fine. We’re through the worst.’

  She presses her face into his neck, grateful for his tenderness.

  ‘We’ve just got to get through the next five months as best we can,’ he continues. His breath smells of peat fires. ‘Mum and Dad will keep an eye on her and we can go and visit at weekends. We need to keep her away from stress, which I think means away from this house and away from us for the rest of the pregnancy.’

  ‘And she’s OK with that?’

  Jake nods.

  ‘She’s had it explained to her. She understands. I don’t think she particularly wants to come back. Too many uncomfortable truths.’

  Kate lifts her head and brushes a strand of hair away from her forehead. Her throat is dry.

  ‘You’re right. I need to be strong.’

  ‘We both do,’ he says. ‘And we can be because we have each other, OK?’

  They drive up at the weekend. It is a strange echo of the first time Kate met Jake’s parents. Once again, she takes inordinate care with her clothes, without wanting it to seem as though she has. Once again, she feels a nervousness in her chest that she is at pains to ignore and deny. Once again, she rehearses possible conversations in her head. But this time, they are conversations with Marisa, not Annabelle and Chris.

  Jake’s parents have been in regular contact since taking Marisa in as their unofficial lodger. They have been unquestioning in their support. Annabelle has not complained about the situation once.

  ‘Are you sure we’re not imposing?’ Kate said to her on the phone a few nights earlier. ‘I’m so sorry to have lumbered you with this.’

  ‘Not at all. Marisa is no trouble now. She’s actually very pleasant.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Kate said, surprised. ‘Thank you. I know you had your doubts about the surrogacy route, but—’

  ‘Whatever I felt about it is in the past,’ Annabelle cut her off. ‘It’s family first and that’s all there is to it.’

  Kate was unsettled when she ended the call. She put it down to the fact that she was unused to Annabelle being so kind, and tried to allow herself to be comforted by this new facet of the older woman’s character. Jake had told her they wanted to do it.

  ‘That’s the thing you have to understand about my mother,’ he said. ‘Family is everything to her. She sees you as family now.’

  Kate wasn’t sure that was the case. To her mind, Annabelle was doing all this for Jake, not for her. But, she reasoned, the motivation didn’t matter as long as the outcome was the same.

  In the car to Gloucestershire, Kate and Jake don’t speak. They’re listening instead to the audiobook of a new novel that has just been longlisted for a prestigious literary prize, but Kate keeps losing the thread of the plot. Jake takes one hand off the steering wheel and rests it on her thigh. She concentrates on the blur of field and hedgerow passing by her window.

  When they get to the house, Annabelle opens the door and gives them both a quick hug. She is wearing an overflowing linen blouse, black velvet leggings with stirrup straps looping underneath each foot, and quilted ballerina pumps. Small gold and ruby earrings. Her make-up, as ever, is impeccable.

  ‘You look fantastic,’ Kate says, warmly. She is aware that she is trying to charm because she knows that she owes Annabelle now, and that the debt will never fully be repaid.

  ‘Oh,’ Annabelle says. ‘Really? Thank you.’

  There are no reciprocal compliments. The Annabelle that Kate saw on her doorstep a fortnight ago, the one stripped of her usual armour, pale-faced and worried for both of them, who was simultaneously capable and compassionate, has vanished.

  ‘Jakey, you look tired, darling.’ Annabelle says, leading them through to the kitchen where the table has been set with the ‘casual’ crockery set and patterned paper napkins.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum. How’s she been?’

  Annabelle leans against the Aga, spreading her hands across the silver railing.

  ‘Marisa?’

  Who else? Kate thinks.

  ‘She’s doing really well.’ There is an unexpected softness to Annabelle’s voice. ‘She’s been good as gold, really.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Kate says. ‘Can we see her?’

  She isn’t sure why she’s asking. This is why they have come, after all.

  Annabelle looks offended, as though she expected more preamble, a little foreplay before the act itself.

  ‘Of course,’ she says, her voice clipped. ‘I’d leave it for a few minutes. Chris is with her now, doing his thing. Now,’ Annabelle looks at them brightly. ‘Drinks?’

  She makes them each a gin and tonic, one with less gin for Jake, who has to remind her he is driving (‘Oh you don’t need to worry about that once you’ve had a meal,’ Annabelle says airily). They sit on the L-shaped window seat, the
cushions made out of the same chintz pattern that dominates the sitting room. Kate sips her gin and tonic, frustrated by this social charade. She suspects Annabelle is rather enjoying her role as gatekeeper.

  On cue, Jake launches into a little speech about how grateful they both are and how they couldn’t have navigated this without her. Annabelle pretends she doesn’t need to hear it, but she lets Jake carry on talking and Kate watches as she grows rosy and contented, fattened like a maggot by all the compliments.

  When Jake comes to the end of his impromptu encomium, there is a significant silence. Kate has just polished off the last of her gin when she realises she is meant to speak. Annabelle is looking at her, her legs crossed and her eyebrows lightly raised.

  ‘Yes … just to, um, second all of that. We’re so, so grateful, Annabelle. To both of you. Thank you.’

  Annabelle lowers her head, as though graciously accepting an honour.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’ll always be here for you, as you know. But it is nice to hear all of those things. We’ll get through it. We’ll get you your baby, that’s the main thing.’

  Kate bites her tongue. She glances at Jake, who is sitting next to his mother, and she gets the most disconcerting feeling that she has been discussed privately, behind her back.

  At that moment, Chris walks into the kitchen through the French windows.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ he says, shoulders sloping forwards slightly so that she can see the bald spot on the top of his head.

  ‘Shoes!’ Annabelle says and Chris obligingly unlaces his brogues and puts them to one side of the doormat so as not to trail mud across the tiles.

  He kisses Kate on the cheek and shakes Jake’s hand.

  ‘She’s doing very well. I’ve told her you’re here and she’s looking forward to seeing you. You in particular, Kate.’

  He smiles at her, his face benign, his manner as gentle and quiet as ever.