Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

  Storks and cranes and herons. She is about to say something about it to Jake, but doesn’t. She decides that this weekend, she will try not to talk about anything baby-related.

  The spa lobby is a paean to faux beige marble, every surface unnaturally shiny and veined with pink. A uniformed man with a name badge that says his name is ‘Jamaar’ takes details of their car numberplate and asks whether they would like a morning newspaper. They are offered a detoxifying juice consisting of carrot, orange and ginger which, when Kate sips it, seems to fizz in her mouth with a fermented quality.

  ‘Lovely,’ she says, wincing.

  Their room is frigid with air conditioning. It overlooks the internal courtyard rather than the lake and there are no biscuits on the tea-tray, only herbal teabags. The double bed is overstuffed with cushions, arranged in a pyramid of descending size order. The en-suite is small and windowless and hanging on the back of the bathroom door are two of the requisite white fluffy robes, each one embroidered with CM in the same curlicued copperplate as the website. Instead of slippers, they are provided with unforgiving plastic flip-flops which are cold and heavy against her feet.

  ‘Shall we go for a sauna?’ Jake asks.

  ‘Sure.’

  She wants to stay in their room, lie on the bed watching TV and for him to hold her close and be affectionate but she puts on her one-piece bathing suit without murmur. The suit is an old one, bought cheaply online a few summers ago. It has red and white stripes, the material bobbling at the edges. It’s a bathing suit she wears for function rather than form and she regrets bringing it now, wishing instead she had chosen something that Jake would find more appealing. She doesn’t usually think like this. It had always been obvious to Kate that Jake found her attractive. Although he paid attention to her clothes and liked her style, he would compliment her when she least expected it – coming out of the shower in the morning or on her way back from the gym, her hair stiff with sweat. She can’t remember the last time he noticed her physical appearance.

  They sit and sweat in the sauna, heat prickling against her skin. She supposes this is the kind of thing they won’t be able to do when they have a baby, at least for a few years. An older man is in there with them – bare-chested, his flesh loose, slabs of his skin overlapping each other like some geological curiosity. Kate has always found it odd how most British people are uncomfortable making eye contact on public transport and yet will quite readily strip half naked and sit in a confined, airless space to sweat with strangers. The man levers himself upright, his bones creaking as he does so. He pushes open the door and a welcome gust of fresh air breezes across Kate’s reddening face.

  Jake ladles more water on the stones without asking.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks eventually.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he says too quickly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really. You just seem to have something on your mind.’

  He looks at her then and the corners of his eyes crease up in that familiar way.

  ‘Sorry, no. No, there’s nothing wrong. I guess I’m just a bit … you know, distracted.’

  She reaches out to massage the back of his neck.

  ‘That’s understandable. I am too. But everything’s OK. Marisa’s fine.’

  ‘Yes, she certainly seems better,’ Jake says. ‘Her cheeks are pinker.’

  ‘What?’

  He glances at her.

  ‘I just meant … on FaceTime.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were FaceTiming Marisa without me.’

  ‘No, no,’ he shakes his head. ‘I was FaceTiming with Mum, I mean, and Marisa was there.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kate removes her hand and lets it rest on her lap. ‘Annabelle knows how to FaceTime? That’s … unexpected.’

  She has lost count of the number of times Annabelle has launched into spontaneous disquisitions on the evils of modern technology and the incomprehensibility of ‘new-fangled’ modes of communication.

  ‘What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned phone call?’ Annabelle would say, self-righteous. ‘Or a handwritten letter, for that matter,’ and Kate made a mental note always to send a thank-you note after staying there. She thinks again of how on earth she is going to thank Annabelle for this latest intervention, given the magnitude of the favour. A pretty flower-framed notecard won’t cut it.

  ‘Yeah, I think Marisa showed her how to do it.’

  The sauna door opens again, and two giggling women with blonde highlighted hair walk in and splay themselves out in matching black bikinis. The women are tall and angular, flat-chested and narrow-waisted, with the long, lean limbs of fashion models. Kate is self-conscious in their presence and gathers her towel closer around her stomach. But, she wants to say, Marisa is hopeless at that kind of thing. Her phone has needed upgrading ever since they’ve known her. She glances at Jake and his face has closed up again, like a blind coming down over a shop awning. The sauna heat continues to rise.

  That night, she sleeps well for the first time in months. The room is quiet and, once they have worked out how to turn off the air conditioning, stays at an ambient temperature. When she turns on her side to face Jake in the morning, he smiles at her.

  ‘Hello there.’ He rests his hand on her cheek. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Kate says. ‘Really well.’

  ‘It’s because we sweated out all our stress.’

  ‘If that’s actually the reason, then we should totally look into getting a sauna at home.’

  He grins.

  ‘Do a basement extension like everyone else on the street, you mean?’

  It had been a source of shared amusement between them how much building work their neighbours engaged in. Kate had joked that having a Portakabin outside your front door was the new status symbol.

  ‘Great idea. Months of stressful construction work to build a relaxing sauna which can then alleviate the stress we didn’t have in the first place.’

  He kisses her, holding her close and letting his hands slide down to her back. They have gentle, quick, uncomplicated sex and then he gets up to fill the kettle from the bathroom tap and puts it on to boil.

  ‘Herbal tea?’ he asks as she props herself up against the pillows. ‘Or would you prefer a herbal tea?’

  ‘Um, OK, let me think. I’ll have a herbal tea, please. But only if it’s really weak and doesn’t taste of anything.’

  She watches him walk around the room, naked apart from those silly flip-flops he’s put on because his feet feel the cold. She marvels at his lack of self-consciousness. He has a good body: tall and broad with a pronounced rump and the merest hint of a thirty-something paunch, but he appears unaware of his physicality in these moments in a way that a woman never would be. A woman, Kate thinks, would be worried about her flabby belly or her wide thighs or the fact that her breasts are more saggy than she’d like and she would assume she was being monitored by the male eyes in the room. Yet Jake treats his body as his own, inhabiting it with confidence.

  Jake’s phone beeps. He picks it up, unhooking it from the sleek black charging device on the bedside table. He becomes instantly absorbed in its screen and doesn’t notice the kettle boiling. Kate wraps her robe around her and finishes making the tea. She hands him a cup, which he takes from her without raising his head.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, thanks,’ he says, drinking the tea. ‘It’s … annoying … it’s a work thing.’

  He taps rapidly at the phone screen, typing out text with his thumbs. When he sends it, the phone makes a swooshing sound and he returns to the room and to her.

  ‘Kate, I’m really sorry but’ – instinctively, she fears the worst. Her stomach plummets – ‘there’s an issue at work. This deal we’ve been doing with the oil company …’

  Oh, is that all, she thinks, relieved. She nods as if she knows what he’s talking ab
out. She is sure he must have told her but she never fully listens when he mentions work because much of the technicality washes over her. It is so removed from her own existence that she doesn’t feel she can understand it or offer anything useful to the conversation. Besides, Jake always has work issues, so there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just more of the same.

  ‘… and I’m going to have to go back to London to get to the office,’ he finishes, and she realises she has glazed over again without meaning to. It’s like asking someone for directions and not focusing on their answer and then being too embarrassed to ask again.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I understand.’

  He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses her knuckles.

  ‘Thank you. I’m just sorry it’s ruined our break.’

  ‘It hasn’t! There’s only so much sweating you can do in one weekend anyway. It’s fine, I’m ready to go.’

  ‘No, no, you shouldn’t have to come with me – stay here and make the most of it. We’ve got the room for another night.’

  He is already gathering up his belongings from around the room, rolling up T-shirts and his pyjama bottoms into the executive case she gave him one Christmas.

  ‘But what about the car?’

  ‘I’ll go and deal with this and come back to pick you up on Sunday,’ Jake says. ‘We can stop somewhere for a pub lunch on our way back to London. Get some calories into you after this forced deprivation.’

  She settles back against the pillows. Admittedly, it does sound tempting.

  ‘That’s a hassle for you,’ she says weakly.

  ‘It’s not. It would make me feel better if I knew you were here, having a nice time.’

  He disappears into the bathroom and she can hear him putting his shaving cream and face-wash into his washbag.

  ‘I won’t have as nice a time without you.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he says, coming back to the bed and nuzzling her neck. ‘I saw you eyeing up that man in the sauna yesterday. You were undressing him with your eyes.’

  ‘He was already undressed!’

  ‘Ah!’ he says, wagging his finger like Columbo. ‘So you admit it.’

  She laughs and wraps her arms around his neck, drawing him close. He’s probably right: staying here for a bit longer on her own will enable her to relax properly. Plus she has her facial booked in for 3 p.m.

  ‘OK,’ she agrees. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  Jake leaves half an hour later, saying he’ll call her, and she waves him off quite happily, before stretching out across the double mattress and falling back asleep.

  She sleeps for two more hours and is shocked, when she wakes, by the time. It has been difficult to rest at all in the last few months. No matter what time of day it is or where she finds herself, Kate’s thoughts always wander to Marisa and the baby. They don’t have another trip to Gloucestershire planned for three weeks.

  Kate wraps herself tightly in her robe. One of the nice things about the spa is that you don’t have to get dressed: you can just wander around in your dressing gown. The dining room, when she reaches it, is full of similarly robed guests padding up to the brunch buffet with hair scraped back and dazed expressions on their faces as though they are members of the same peculiar cult.

  She eats a gloopy bowl of Bircher muesli, accompanied by the obligatory decaffeinated coffee, and then finds a quiet spot to read the paper. Her phone is on airplane mode in her robe pocket. The spa discourages use of any mobiles in communal areas so she sneaks off to the loo to check it surreptitiously, expecting to find a message from Jake saying he got back to the office safely. There is nothing. Maybe it’s just taking a while to get through, she thinks, and slips the phone back into her pocket.

  She goes for her facial and is asked to fill in a lengthy form detailing the ins and outs of her medical history. There, at the end of a series of questions about blood pressure and skin conditions, is the inevitable ‘Are you or is there any chance you could be pregnant?’ She ticks the box for ‘no’ and resists the temptation to write ‘… but it’s a long story’.

  Her therapist is called Kasia, a neat, diminutive woman with soft brown eyes, wearing a black uniform with a Nehru collar. Kate is led down a long corridor and ushered into a treatment room, where generic pan-pipe music is playing and the air is softly scented with herbs and citrus. Kasia leaves the room so that Kate can get comfortable and as she lies back on the massage table, she notices that the towels are heated. She closes her eyes and, when Kasia starts sweeping the tips of her cool fingers in circular motions across her cheeks and up to her forehead, she feels herself falling asleep.

  Afterwards, her skin glows when she looks at it in the bedroom mirror. She lies back on the bed and lazily flicks on the television. She checks her phone – still nothing from Jake. It’s unusual, but not worryingly so. She places her mobile on the bedside table and resolves not to look at it for at least another hour. She refuses to be the kind of girlfriend who texts anxiously just because she hasn’t heard from her boyfriend when he’s probably got other things on his mind. She has never been that kind of woman before, and she is determined not to be now. She has noticed that, since everything that’s happened with Marisa, she is more likely to catastrophise even the most trivial occurrence. There’s nothing to worry about, Kate tells herself. Just be normal.

  She watches a cookery programme where chefs from different parts of the country compete to make dishes in a banquet, and then she watches a quiz where celebrities she doesn’t recognise compete to make fools of themselves, and then she makes herself a cup of tea and contemplates going for a swim.

  She looks at her phone. Still no text. She’s cross now and impatiently grabs it from the charging port and finds Jake’s name in her recent calls. The dialling tone sounds. Once. Twice. Three times. He picks up on the fourth.

  ‘Kate?’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’

  She feels immediately silly.

  ‘Yes, yes, fine. Just, you know, I hadn’t heard from you.’

  ‘Oh … sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you. Are you having a nice day?’

  He seems distracted and she imagines him hunched in front of his computer screen, analysing a spreadsheet of numbers. But then she hears a whooshing sound in the background. Then another. Cars.

  ‘Wait, are you driving?’

  ‘Um. Yeah. Yeah. But don’t worry, you’re on speakerphone.’

  ‘You’re not in the office?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I just was there, I mean,’ he says. There is a ticking sound and she realises he must have turned on the indicator. ‘And now I’ve got to meet a client.’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t realised you’d driven all the way in. I thought you’d go home then get the tube.’

  ‘No time,’ he says curtly. His tone is unconvincing.

  ‘Where’s your client meeting?’

  ‘Sorry, what was that …?’

  ‘Your client meeting,’ she repeats, enunciating the words even more clearly. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s, erm, God knows – I had to put it in the satnav. In the countryside somewhere. One of those billionaire second homes, you know what it’s like.’

  She doesn’t know what it’s like, Kate wants to say, but she stops herself. She’s letting her thoughts run away with her. There is no reason to be suspicious.

  ‘You still there?’ Jake asks, tinny on the other end of the line.

  ‘Yeah, still here.’

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you? There’s nothing to worry about, OK? Sorry I didn’t call earlier but I’ve just been busy.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll text you later. I promise.’

  When the call ends, she switches her phone off and leaves it in the room while she goes for a swim. She tells herself she won’t check it again until tomor
row and this time, she doesn’t.

  30

  ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea to leave it so long between visits?’ she asks Jake. It is a weekday evening and he is working out in the garden.

  ‘I think we have to be guided by what Marisa feels comfortable with, to be honest,’ he says, panting between words. He is using a new set of complicated straps, holding one black loop in each fist, hanging back at a 45-degree angle and then pulling himself back up with a grunt. The straps are a new purchase and look like a pair of oversized car seatbelts with patches of neon material sewn on at random. Someone had recommended the workout to Jake at the gym and he had hung the straps around an iron bar, which he had installed at the weekend with large nuts and bolts in the brickwork above the garden doors. The event had required a lot of noisy drilling and afterwards, she had swept away the fine sandy drizzle of stone from the patio.

  ‘Are you enjoying your new contraption?’ Kate asks now, raising her voice so it can be heard from the kitchen. She pours herself a generous glass of Malbec from an already opened bottle on the counter.

  ‘Yup,’ he says, his voice straining. He turns around and pushes his feet through the straps, then flips into a plank position. His biceps bulge, like a mouse wriggling to escape from a python’s stomach. He launches into rapid press-ups. ‘Bodyweight. Is. Key,’ he says between breaths.

  She goes outside and sits on the bench, sipping her wine while watching him. Jake’s borderline obsession with exercise has always amused her. Since the spa weekend there have been a few more unplanned absences – late nights at the office, and a work conference one weekend that necessitated an overnight stay. Before the fertility treatment, he regularly had business trips that took him away for several nights at a time, but he stopped going on these in order to support her and be around for appointments. Now that there is less need for his presence, the usual routine has been resumed, and she finds she is missing him in ways she didn’t expect.