He lapses into silence. She rests her head against his solid, comforting shoulder and exhales.
‘I know,’ she murmurs. ‘I know that now.’
‘Jakey,’ Annabelle says, ‘don’t listen to this rubbish. She’s talking nonsense. I never said—’
‘You can’t dismissbothof us as mad,’ Kate replies. ‘You might just get away with one. But two begins to look a lot like carelessness.’ And then, looking straight at her, she adds, ‘Don’t you think, dear?’
On the sofa, Annabelle is withered, her cheeks sunken. Her eyes radiate anger.
‘Oh come on,’ Annabelle says, looking at Chris now. ‘Marisa’s drugged up to the eyeballs. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’
Chris says nothing. He looks ashamed.
‘I know what I’m saying,’ Marisa says, coming to stand next to Kate. She knocks one of the helium balloons out of the way as she does so, and then this woman who has caused Kate so much angst and sadness, who has also given her so much hope and optimism, who has scared her and mystified her in equal measure, does something wholly unexpected. She takes Kate’s hand in hers.
‘What you’ve said about me and Jake, about me being the real mother – none of that’s true, Annabelle,’ Marisa says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ She talks slowly. ‘This is Kate’s baby. It always has been. It always will be. Jake and Kate are the parents.’
Kate squeezes Marisa’s hand so strongly it feels as though she might never let go and then Kate begins to cry again. Jake places his arm around her shoulders. Finally he speaks.
‘Mum,’ Jake says, his voice tight and throttled. ‘This is outrageous. I came up here without Kate because you told me it was the best way to protect her and protect our baby.’
Annabelle turns to her son. Her hands are clasped in her lap and she raises them, palms cupped, beseeching.
‘Oh, Jakey,’ she says. ‘I thought that’s what you wanted. You and Marisa were getting on so well, you see, and I … well, I …’
‘You what? You tried to manipulate us,’ he cries. ‘I’ve always defended you, always done what you wanted.’
His voice is cracking. He sounds so helpless that Kate wants to defend him. But this is something Jake has to do for himself.
‘You’ve gone too far this time,’ he says. ‘Too far. How could you? Howcouldyou do this?’
‘Now steady on, old chap,’ Chris says, and his mildness is absurd. Kate wants to take Chris by the shoulders and shake him until he is forced to reckon with life as it actually is, rather than choosing to believe in the fabricated reality his wife has created.
‘This is why your daughters don’t talk to you,’ Jake is saying to his mother now, his voice rising to a shout. ‘This is why they can’t fucking stand the sight of you. They always said to me I’d see it one day, that you’re a raging narcissist who treats us all like fucking chess pieces.’
‘Shush, Jake, shush,’ Chris says. ‘There’s no need to bring all that up. You know how much it hurts your mother.’
‘I don’t care!’ he shouts and then he is kicking the coffee table so that it upends and the sickly blue cake lands in a messy gloop on the red-threaded rug. ‘She’s hurt me! She’s hurt us! She’s hurt Kate in the most unimaginable way …’
Kate tries to grab his arm and lead him out of this claustrophobic house but he frees himself from her grip, walks to the shelves by the fireplace and before she can stop him, he slams his arm onto the sideboard and with one violent sweep, he clears the surface of all its silver and wooden-framed photographs. They clatter and smash to the ground. All the shared moments of grinning, gap-toothed toddlers and sepia-tinted weddings and first days at school and official graduation portraits and the silent, smiling sisters and a long-ago family summer holiday spent on a boat near the Scilly Isles, the wind whipping their cheeks pink, a younger Annabelle’s hair tied up in a patterned silk scarf, her eyes obscured by dark glasses, her smile fixed and lipsticked as though nothing would ever go wrong under her watch.
Chris and Annabelle are huddled together now on the sofa, Annabelle softly sobbing into a handkerchief, Chris shaking his head with confusion. Outside, it has grown dark. Kate takes Jake by the hand. He is sweating and has a faraway look on his face. She strokes the back of his neck and sees him come back to her with a flick of a switch. They leave the room. They tell Marisa to pack her bags. They are taking her back to London with them.
Annabelle makes no protest. She and Chris stay seated, their features gradually obscured by the falling dusk, two flawed people, fitted into each other’s failings like ivy burrowing into the loosening gaps between brick. You couldn’t cut back the ivy without risking the house falling down. But the stone would crumble eventually, weakened by the insistent force of the plant pushing its thickening stem into every soft place. And then there would be collapse; a cloud of imploded stone. That was how it ended.
Kate closes the door to the drawing room behind her. When Marisa re-emerges with her wheeled suitcase in tow, Kate hugs her tightly. No further words need to be said. They understand each other now.
The three of them get into the car. Kate sits in the back so Marisa can take the front passenger seat. She watches as Jake slots the key into the ignition and pulls out into the driveway. There is a muffled moon in the sky and condensation on the windscreen. He turns the heating up and the radio on. She does not twist her head back to look at the red-brick house as they go. She lets it disappear and recede in her mind, imagines a watery tide rising up to claim it, sees the white pediments and the grey roof tiles and the sooted chimney turrets overlapped by a deepening sea. She lets it sink. She breathes.
She watches the two people sitting in front of her. Two blonde heads, side by side.
Kate’s limbs are heavy. She could fall asleep now if she wanted and she knows Marisa and Jake would talk quietly so as not to disturb her and that Jake would dial down the radio volume and take extra care not to judder the car when he brakes and she knows that he would wake her up when they arrived back home and the three of them would walk into the house and have a cup of tea together around the kitchen table and talk about everything that has happened today.
It would feel safe.
It would feel right.
It would feel like family.
