Magpie

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, wondering if she will ever be able to stop saying the same two words over and over again to Jake’s parents.

  ‘No need to thank me. It’s what doctors do, isn’t it?’

  Kate starts to cry. She didn’t mean to, but she can’t help it. Jake puts his arm around her but it is Chris who steps forward and proffers a fabric handkerchief he has fished out of his trouser pocket. It is wrinkled but clean and she presses it to her face.

  ‘There, there,’ Chris says. ‘There’s no need to cry. It’s all in hand.’

  ‘It’s been a terrible shock,’ Annabelle comments to no one in particular before getting up to check a bubbling lasagne that has been cooking in the Aga.

  Kate hands back the handkerchief.

  ‘You OK ?’ Jake asks. ‘Take a few deep breaths.’

  I’m not a child, she wants to reply, but she doesn’t.

  ‘Let’s go see Marisa,’ she says.

  Jake stands and helps her up from the window seat.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ Annabelle says. ‘The lasagne will go cold.’

  The cottage is a single-storey outbuilding, converted from a set of stables. To get to it, they walk past the rusting croquet hoops and the lopsided bird table. The cottage windows are small and meanly proportioned, the ledges dotted with moss. There is an untended pot of geraniums outside the front door, the stems overgrown and straggly. The air feels damp and oppressive. This side of the garden seems darker and when Kate looks overhead she sees the branches of a vast, spreading tree above, silhouetted starkly against the white afternoon sky.

  Jake knocks on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ Marisa says, her voice muffled.

  They walk inside. Marisa is sitting on an armchair by an unlit wood-burning stove. She is cradling her belly – more pronounced now than it was even a fortnight ago. Her blonde hair falls in tendrils over her shoulders, partly shielding her face from them. She is wearing a cream shirt and white linen trousers. Kate realises that these are not her clothes, that they have been lent to her by Annabelle.

  When Marisa turns to them, she smiles in a way that Kate can only think of as beatific. The pain and rage that was there before has gone, to be replaced by unlined serenity. There are no dark circles under her eyes. Her face has lost its pinched quality and her cheeks have filled out. The Thomas Hardy milkmaid is back in abundance, Kate thinks, and although she should be relieved, she is also suspicious of the quickness of this transformation. In this light, Marisa looks slightly unreal, as though she is being inhabited by someone else.

  ‘Marisa,’ Jake says. ‘You look so well.’

  She levers herself up out of the armchair and comes over to them. Her walk is still the same as it always was: ungainly, as though she has just dismounted a horse. Marisa spreads her arms wide and before Kate can register what is about to happen, Marisa is hugging her. Kate feels the tautness of the other woman’s pregnant stomach and smells lemon verbena coming from her freshly washed hair.

  ‘Kate,’ Marisa says as she pulls back from the hug. ‘I’m so, so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?’

  ‘Of course,’ Kate replies, remembering the time that Annabelle asked her the very same question at her birthday lunch at The Wolseley. How curious that they should use exactly the same phrase. ‘It’s fine, Marisa. As long as you and the baby are safe.’

  ‘We are,’ Marisa says, still smiling but she can’t seem to meet Kate’s eye. ‘I’m so much better now. Thanks to Chris and Annabelle. And to you two.’

  ‘We’re so glad to hear that,’ Jake says. ‘You certainly look much better than the last time I saw you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Marisa says, biting the tip of one nail. ‘I’m sorry. I must have been in a right state.’

  That’s one way of putting it, Kate thinks.

  ‘No, no,’ Jake interjects, batting away the idea. A blush creeps up the back of his neck.

  ‘Come on in, won’t you?’ Marisa says, and ushers them to the sofa.

  Marisa asks Jake about the drive and he goes into unnecessary detail about which route they took and why. Kate is not sure what she expected but it definitely wasn’t this. She knew Marisa was calmer now, but she thought she would find her more dishevelled and weak, perhaps still in bed recovering from her breakdown. To see her acting the part of hostess, interacting with them both as if this were a natural situation, is eerie. The way she is speaking sounds fake, as though programmed by some unknown hand.

  ‘Kate, can I get you a tea?’ Marisa asks.

  ‘No. No thanks. I’m fine.’

  ‘I wanted to say … well, to explain really,’ Marisa says, fiddling with the corner of a blue patterned cushion on the chair. ‘That what you witnessed is entirely out of character for me. I didn’t want to tell you about my mental health history, for obvious reasons. I thought it would put you off.’

  ‘Yeah, well. It would have done,’ Kate says. She is frustrated, and can feel a tension rising within her. She realises now that she wanted some sort of showdown, a closure as dramatic as the event, and that this is being denied her.

  Jake places his hand over Kate’s, which she interprets as a warning to calm down. How fucking dare he? Kate thinks, and takes her hand back. It didn’t happen to him, did it? She was the one Marisa had targeted, so surely it was up to Kate how she responded.

  ‘I can understand that,’ Marisa says, looking at her vaguely. ‘It’s why I didn’t tell the surrogacy agency either. I thought I had it under control, and I did. But I liked you guys so much – loved you, even – and you were doing so much for me, asking me to move in and all that, and I just wanted everything to be perfect for you and I was feeling so much better, much more myself, and I felt that stopping the drugs would, you know, be beneficial to the pregnancy. I thought I’d be fine. I genuinely did. I’d been fine for so long.’

  ‘That’s not the impression Jas gave,’ Kate says.

  Marisa gazes at her, but any surprise she might feel at this revelation seems to take too long to reach her.

  ‘Oh. You’ve met Jas?’ She smiles again and the smile, like everything else about her, is slightly off. ‘She’s great, isn’t she? But she has her own issues. I’d take what she says with a pinch of salt.’

  Jake clears his throat. He is cross with Kate, she can tell. They agreed that the key thing was to keep Marisa calm, not to contradict her or make her feel bad. Their priority was the baby, he said, not extracting the necessary penance. They had to let that go.

  ‘Anyway, let’s not dwell on the past,’ he says now. ‘The main thing is you’re safe, you’re back on your meds and we’re so happy you’re able to rest here while you carry our baby to term.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate says. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You are happy staying here, aren’t you?’ Jake looks at Marisa and his face is so earnest Kate can only marvel at how well he is playing this.

  ‘Oh yes, I am,’ Marisa replies. She rubs her belly in a circular motion. ‘The baby is too, I can feel it.’

  ‘And you’re eating well and taking the necessary supplements?’ Kate asks.

  Marisa nods.

  ‘I promise you that your baby is s-s-safe with me, Kate,’ she says, stammering in a way Kate hasn’t heard before. ‘I’ll go for all the scans at the local hospital – Chris has already arranged that – and of course, you’re always welcome down here. Any time.’

  ‘Thank you, Marisa,’ Jake says, giving an obsequious little bow of the head.

  Kate twists her hands into her jeans pockets, picking at the denim seams. The gall of the woman, inviting Jake to his family home! She stands abruptly. Marisa, cow-eyed, stares at her.

  ‘We’d better go, Jake. Your mother doesn’t want the lasagne to get cold.’

  They leave, and Jake, ever polite, tells Marisa not to get up. She stays seated and tells them she will see them soon and th
en she lowers her head again, letting her hair fall across one side of her face as they go. She waits pliantly for them to close the door behind them. They walk back to the main house, catching the smell of freshly baked lasagne on the breeze.

  29

  Over the next few weeks, Kate tries as much as possible to ignore her own mounting unease. She clears out the rest of Marisa’s room and repaints it, going to her local hardware store for roller trays and brushes. She puts on old leggings and a cheap T-shirt and does it all over the course of a single weekend, lining the skirting board with tape, covering the floor with newspaper and using a different thickness of paintbrush for the fiddly bits around the light switch and the shelving unit. She listens to podcasts as she does so – mother and baby interviews with successful bloggers-turned-authors who talk about creative stimulation and at-home crafting. She tries not to think of Marisa’s empty gaze, the detachment she noticed when they saw her. When the room is done, it smells fresh and new and looks brighter than before, and Kate is calmer for having done something tangible. The painting helped her to erase her memories of the past Marisa and concentrate on the one they now spoke to every other day on the phone, who said all the right things about eating healthily and Annabelle giving her spinach from the vegetable garden and yes, she was fine, thank you, and no, they didn’t need to worry about her.

  Jake is relieved. Kate is disquieted by the rapidity of the change, but she tells herself she’s over-analysing. She admires Jake’s ability to compartmentalise. He is able to move on, closing the lid on the messiness of the recent past to focus almost entirely on the future and the arrival of their longed-for baby. Sometimes, she wonders: what else would he be able to box away like this?

  The more she thinks this, the more there grows an unacknowledged distance between them. One month passes in this way, then two. Time assumes an elastic, gloopy quality and the seasons merge into one. She forgets to check her watch and goes to bed earlier, waking when the sun rises instead of sleeping in. She gets to work before anyone else is in the office, drafting press releases and arranging screenings weeks ahead of time. At one junket, she sits in on the day’s interviews with the film’s star and she stares out of the window, wondering what kind of mother she will be, whether she will be able to cope with the sleepless nights and the endless loads of laundry. Will her child love her as much as she will love them? Will becoming parents drive a further wedge between her and Jake? How will she know what to do? What if she cannot soothe her baby’s cries? What if, deep down, her baby knows Kate is not its real mother?

  She lets the interview overrun and a colleague has to knock on the door to tell the journalist their time is up. Kate apologises to the actor, a man with speckled grey hair in his fifties who is still getting action-hero parts that would be denied his female contemporaries.

  ‘Just don’t let it happen again,’ the actor says, his tone one of forced reasonableness.

  In the past, she would have been mortified. Now, she no longer cares. Everything other than the baby seems trivial.

  They make regular visits to Gloucestershire, where lunch with the parents is combined with an afternoon spent in the cottage with Marisa. They go for scans and check-ups at the local hospital with Chris in attendance. They find out they are expecting a boy, which makes Jake cry and Kate laugh with delight at how real it all is. Once, they drive Marisa back to London with them for a catch-up with Mr Abadi, but Kate spends the whole length of the journey being terrified that Marisa might hurl herself out of the car. Mr Abadi, genial as ever, is pleased with the pregnancy’s progress. When he asks them if they have any concerns, or anything they want to tell him that might have happened in the interim since their last visit, all three of them shake their heads and fail to catch each other’s eye. They drive back to Gloucestershire that same evening and Kate is relieved to hand Marisa back over to the care of Jake’s parents. She feels bad about this, as if she is lacking some maternal spirit that should make her want to be next to her baby at all times, and she worries that it means she won’t bond with her son when he arrives. It is another thing she tries not to think about: the fact that her child will have no genetic link to her. ‘Your baby is your baby as soon as you hold it in your arms,’ the internet forums keep saying. And yet, she can’t shake the worry that their son will inherit Marisa’s mental illness. Everything seems so fragile, as though it could be taken away from her in an instant – because it almost was.

  ‘You worry too much,’ Jake says when she tries to speak to him about it. ‘It’s all going to be fine. The best thing you can do is relax and make sure you have plenty of sleep now before the baby comes.’

  It’s not that he is dismissive, exactly; more that in his eagerness to placate her, and his insistence that everything will be fine, Kate feels her fears are being sidelined as unnecessary or overwrought. Is she being hysterical? Or is Jake simply making her feel like that? She isn’t sure any more; has lost faith in her own judgement. Their joint reliance on Annabelle and Chris also means that she feels outnumbered three to one. They are the family. She is on the outside.

  As if to compound the feeling of exclusion, Annabelle calls one evening and delivers unexpected news. Kate listens in while Jake murmurs and says, ‘No, no I understand … yes of course.’ When she asks to speak to Annabelle herself, Jake shakes his head silently and walks into the garden, pressing his phone to his ear, shielding his mouth with a cupped hand so that she can’t even make out the words formed by his lips.

  When he comes back inside, he tells her that Annabelle feels Marisa is ‘unsettled’.

  ‘Apparently it’s all sinking in – what she did, I mean,’ he explains. ‘And she’s feeling so guilty about what she’s done that she always feels she has to apologise when she sees us. To you in particular.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So Mum thinks it might be better if we eased off the visits. Spaced them out a bit.’

  ‘OK.’

  Kate is clipped, a little angry that Annabelle, once again, is interfering in things that aren’t her business.

  ‘I honestly don’t think it’s Mum sticking her oar in,’ Jake says, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I think, as Marisa recovers, she’s becoming more aware of what she put us through and she feels … a bit … awkward, I guess?’

  Kate chews at a hangnail. It has been splitting off from her cuticle for days and the pain is both sharp and precise.

  ‘Right,’ she says again.

  ‘If anything, it’s a good sign,’ Jake insists. ‘It shows she’s getting better. We can worry less. And those trips to Gloucestershire are knackering.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So we’ll just go a bit less often, that’s all.’

  Kate accepts it. She has to trust Annabelle, as much as it feels against her natural inclination to do so. And, she reasons, she can still call Marisa whenever she wants. The problem is that Marisa rarely picks up, and when Kate once asked her why, she said that the reception was terrible and often she didn’t hear her phone ringing. Kate doesn’t want to push it. She doesn’t want to push anything with anyone at the moment. One misstep and the whole edifice will come crashing down.

  So Jake suggests a spa break. She laughs when he mentions it.

  ‘A spa break?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  He looks at her, brow rumpled.

  ‘Sorry, it’s a lovely idea. I suppose it’s just a bit out of the blue given … everything.’ She stops herself saying what she really thinks. Spas and fluffy robes and cucumber-infused water belong to a past world. She isn’t in the mood, she wants to say. That’s the kind of thing unencumbered, romantically minded couples do in the first flush of a relationship, not a couple attempting to deal with the fact their surrogate has severe mental health issues.

  ‘That’s exactly why we should go,’ he says. ‘I’ll take care of it. Some time away will do us good before our
baby boy comes. Who knows when we’ll get the chance again after he’s here?’

  ‘You’re right,’ she replies, allowing herself to be convinced.

  He books a spa an hour’s drive from London. They are offering a weekend package deal, which includes what the website describes as ‘two mini-treatments’ – facials and massages at twenty-five minutes each. Anything else is ‘extra’.

  ‘Do they feed us?’ Kate asks, only half joking. ‘Or is that extra too?’

  ‘All meals included,’ Jake replies, not taking his eyes from the bright white flicker of the computer screen. ‘Vegan and macrobiotic options.’

  ‘No alcohol, I’m guessing. Maybe we should take our own?’

  ‘Ha.’

  Jake double clicks on the superior double room option, then enters his card details.

  ‘Congratulations!’ the screen flashes up. ‘We look forward to welcoming you for your stay at Charlton Manor.’

  ‘Terrible font,’ Kate says, pointing out the flouncy grey copperplate. Jake is a font geek.

  He laughs.

  ‘The worst.’

  Charlton Manor is set on the edge of a large lake and as they drive to the car park, a darting movement catches Kate’s eye and she turns just in time to see a heron separate itself from the reeds with a sudden startle of wings and beak, its brown-grey silhouette stark against the dusty sky.

  She recalls a drawing on the wall in Mr Abadi’s office, the corners of the paper misshapen by four small bulges of Blu Tack. It was of a stork, flying with a baby tucked into a polka-dot handkerchief sling knotted around its beak. The lines were firm, black and adult, but a child had clearly coloured it in with scribbles of yellow and red and blue pencil. ‘Thank you from the Traynor family’ was written across the bottom in block capitals.

  The drawing had stayed with her, and afterwards she had looked up the significance of storks as harbingers of birth. She found an ancient Greek myth involving the goddess Hera who grew jealous of a beautiful queen and transformed her into a crane. The heartbroken queen sought to retrieve her child from Hera’s clutches, which is why the Greeks depicted the bird with a baby dangling from its beak. Later retellings mistakenly identified the bird as a stork. In Egyptian mythology, she learned, storks had been associated with the birth of the world, but again this was an error: it had been a heron in the original legend.