‘You’ll have to forgive me but I’m quite old-fashioned about this kind of thing. I don’t entirely approve.’
It was Marisa’s turn to nod.
‘Living in sin, I suppose you’d call it,’ Marisa said.
‘Well, no,’ Annabelle said, taken aback. ‘I wouldn’t call it that. That wouldn’t be the right phrase. It’s just … in my day, things were done moretraditionally.’ She placed great emphasis on the final word. ‘One always faces challenges, doesn’t one?’ She stared at Marisa, her blueeyes steady and shrewd. ‘But if it’s what nature intended, then it’s what nature intended. There’s no point forcing it. One must go at the pace dictated to us.’
Marisa’s breath quickened. It was strange to feel so offended by someone whose good opinion she also craved. Annabelle lowered her head slowly. Her silence was more infuriating than her speech. In her right earlobe was a twinkle of studded gold. It probably cost more than Marisa’s entire outfit.
‘It might seem like we’re moving too fast to you,’ Marisa continued, ‘but it feels right to us, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’ There is still no reply from Annabelle. Marisa coughs. ‘I hope you can understand.’ No response. ‘In time, of course. We don’t mean to rush you.’
‘We?’ Annabelle gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. ‘You’re very possessive, aren’t you?’
Well why wouldn’t I be, Marisa thought. He’s my bloody boyfriend. Just because you’re his mother and you’ve never thought any woman would be good enough. If you cared so much about him, perhaps you shouldn’t have sent him away to school when he was seven fucking years old.
She thought all of this, but she didn’t say it. Her fury lodged in her flesh like a piece of buckshot. Her mouth set in a mutinous line.
‘Thank you for the coffee,’ Annabelle said, pushing the cup and saucer further across the table with such force that the coffee spilled out onto the wood. She wound the scarf back around her broad, swimmer’s shoulders and gathered herself up to her full height. Marisa, watching her, was reminded of a giant bird. A pelican, maybe, or an ostrich. A bird with beady eyes and an intrusive beak and an edge of malicious intent.
She followed Annabelle back up the stairs and neither of them spoke. At the front door, Annabelle turned and shook Marisa’s hand again.
‘Nice to meet you,’ she said.
In the distance, a siren sounded.
‘You too,’ Marisa lied. ‘See you again soon, I hope.’
Annabelle took a pair of dark glasses from her handbag and slid them onto her face. Her eyes disappeared behind shellacked black ovals.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ she said. Her voice, as she uttered this, was as polite as if she’d been observing the weather.
Annabelle walked down the steps into the street and Marisa watched her go: a tall silhouette in white. She shivered in the doorway. Even though it was a hot day, she noticed as she turned back into the hall that her arms were trailed with goosebumps.
4
She didn’t tell Jakeabout his mother’s visit for several days. She convinced herself it was because he was busy at work and she didn’t want to bother him. She claimed to be tired and went to bed before he got home. She would hear the front door shutting and then his footsteps padding around beneath her and she drifted off to the reassurance of these familiar sounds. In the mornings, she waited until Jake had left for the office before going downstairs for her coffee and toast and then starting work, stretching out the paper methodically to calm her thoughts.
But it was not his preoccupation that stopped Marisa from saying anything. It was her own humiliation. She had so wanted to make a good impression on Jake’s family when she met them. She had hoped an invitation would be issued at some point in the near future, perhaps to Sunday lunch in the house in the country or to some family gathering – a birthday or an anniversary – where Marisa would be able to wear a pretty dress with just the right amount of flounce and cleavage and she would insist on buying a bouquet of flowers, or perhaps a potted plant because it would last longer, and she would ask Jake what kind of wine his parents liked and he would laugh at her, kissing her forehead affectionately and he would tell her there was no need to go to so much effort. ‘They’ll adore you,’ he would have said. ‘How could they not?’
And when they got to lunch, his mother would embrace her warmly and say they’d heard so much about her and Marisa would offer to help with the cooking, which ‘smells delicious, Mrs Sturridge’.
‘Oh please, call me Annabelle,’ Jake’s mother would say, patting her arm conspiratorially, and telling Marisa that she was a guest and absolutely must not lift a finger but that she must sit down and look gorgeous and ‘Would someone please get this darling girl a strong gin and tonic?’ Annabelle would say, and her voice would be serious but her eyes would twinkle and Jake’s father would do the honours and pass Marisa a crystal tumbler, rattling with just the right amount of ice, and he would lower his voice and say to her, ‘You’re already a vast improvement on all the others.’
‘Dad,’ Jake would say, catching Marisa’s gaze and smiling with fondness. ‘Stop! You’re embarrassing her.’
‘No, no,’ Marisa would laugh. ‘It’s fine! I’m having a lovely time.’
That was how it was meant to happen. That was what she had hoped for: to make herself indispensable to both Jake and his family; no faults to be picked over; no reason for anyone to leave her behind.
‘I don’t know what we’d do without you,’ his parents would say. ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to this family.’
Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? Wasn’t that the appropriate plot climax? Wasn’t that going to be Marisa’s redemption, where she righted all the wrongs that had been inflicted on her, all the bad things she might unwittingly have done to send her mother and baby sister away? Wasn’t that how this was going to end?
Apparently not.
So she didn’t tell Jake until the weekend, when the two of them were in the garden. Jake, stripped to the waist, was in loose-fitting gym shorts. He liked to work out on Saturday mornings, ears plugged with headphones streaming angry hip-hop as he did goblet squats and press-ups and held a plank for at least one minute, sweat dripping off his torso and leaving damp dots all over the yoga mat. Marisa was sitting on the bench, her face partially obscured by the wide brim of a straw hat. The book she was reading was face-down next to her, the spine of it flexed so that she kept her place. It was one of the summer’s bestsellers, a book that everyone seemed to know about before they’d actually read it, but Marisa couldn’t get into it. The cover was a modernist painting, depicting a woman’s head with no eyes, nose or mouth so that the only way you knew it was female was by the hair: a severe, fringed bob, sensibly cut to just below where the ears shouldhave been. Marisa’s hair was long and golden: light brown which went lighter in the sun to caramel blonde. She liked her hair and took good care of it, shampooing it every day, then towel-drying it before applying conditioner that she would comb through before washing out. It had been so sunny lately that her skin was tanned, a spray of freckles across her nose.
She took off the hat and lifted her face up to the warmth, closing her eyes for a moment and thinking of what she had to paint before the end of the week in order to meet the deadline for Moses’s sixth birthday. After a few moments, a coolness crept over her face and she opened her eyes to see Jake standing there, casting a shadow. He was glinting with moisture and breathing hard. He wiped his face with the inside of his T-shirt.
