Kate empties a kettle of boiling water into a pot and mixes together paprika and something that looks like egg yolk into a bowl. What on earth is she doing with paprika and egg yolk? Marisa wonders. Well, at least her macaroni cheese won’t be as good as mine if she’s putting all that gunk in it.
Since the yoga class, this antipathy towards Kate has crept up on her, like a fog over an incoming tide, and now there is no escaping it. Also, she’s about to get her period, so her hormones are making her spiky and intolerant. In the kitchen, Kate fishes around in her pocket, removing a hair clip. Marisa watches as she scoops up her short dark hair into a tiny twisted coil, placing the clip at the highest point so that strands fall from its grip around her flushed cheeks. She is wearing a striped Breton top and flared jeans which Marisa could never wear without looking absurd and out of proportion. But Kate’s narrow hips and boyish figure lend themselves to fashionable clothes. Marisa assesses her own clothes: a faded ochre sundress brought back from aGreek island holiday that is baggy and comfortable and paint-spattered from an afternoon’s work. She is wearing no make-up because she hasn’t left the house all day. Her hair is held up with a paintbrush and needs a wash. On one wrist, she wears a silver charm bracelet she never takes off, the loops hanging with lucky horseshoes and miniature compasses. It was an eighteenth birthday gift from her father and although she had moved out by then, although she barely made the effort to keep in touch, he sent it to her in a padded envelope, inexpertly wrapped in tissue paper, with a card written in his familiar copperplate saying that the bracelet had once been her mother’s and she would want Marisa to have it.
In each of Kate’s earlobes she has several piercings, but the earrings she wears are delicate golden hoops, occasionally lined with tiny sparkly diamonds so that the overall effect is muted and elegant. Around her neck, she wears three thin chains in the same burnished gold and on the third chain – the longest – is a bulbous locket engraved with a single ‘K’. Marisa wonders what she keeps inside it. Paprika, probably.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ Kate looks over at her and Marisa realises that the snort of laughter she thought happened only inside her head did, in fact, make itself heard.
‘Nothing. Just something this guy said,’ and she waves at the TV screen.
‘Oh God, he’s such a fuckwit,’ Kate says, nonchalantly lobbing the swear word into the room, which is gradually filling with steam and the smell of melted cheese.
Again, it’s not that Marisa is particularly prudish and it’s not that she doesn’t swear herself, but still – if she were a new lodger in someone else’s house, she’s not sure that she would do so with quite such a lack of self-consciousness. Maybe she’s being unfair. Maybe.
‘Jake should be back at about 7.30 p.m.,’ she calls over from the sofa.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Kate says, not raising her head from the stove.
In the end, they hear the key rattling in the front-door lock at twenty to eight, by which time Kate has put the macaroni cheese in the oven, laid the table with napkins and wine glasses, and filled a jugwith water and sprigs of mint from the herb pots in the garden – ‘I just find it tastes fresher,’ she explained. ‘Don’t you think?’
Marisa, who had no strong opinions about mint in water, murmured a non-committal assent.
‘I’m back!’ Jake calls from the hallway.
He walks into the kitchen and goes straight to Kate, seeming not to see Marisa as he strides past.
‘Oh my God, Kate, that smells fantastic.’ He peers into the oven.
‘No opening the oven door until it’s done, please,’ Kate says, playfully smacking his hand away.
‘OK, OK, I promise.’
‘Hi,’ Marisa says. She watches the two of them, side by side, and she gets the most curious feeling that she is the odd one out.
‘Oh, hi Marisa.’ Jake grins at her, raising one hand in greeting.
He does not even come over to kiss her. She knows that if she doesn’t leave the room, she will embarrass herself by crying. She makes a bolt for the door and rushes upstairs, heading straight for her study, where she closes the door behind her and leans her back against it. The tears come, as she knew they would, and she doesn’t wipe them away. She allows herself a moment of mawkish self-indulgence, because she knows there is no reason to cry, not really, and it’s simply that she’s feeling frayed and anxious and tired. So tired. She’s been feeling tired for days now and can’t seem to shake it.
There is a knock on the door.
‘Marisa?’ It is Jake, his voice concerned and pleading. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, truly, I’m fine. I just needed a moment.’
There is silence on the other side of the door.
‘OK, well if you’re sure.’ She hears his intake of breath and can imagine the expression on his face that she knows so well: loving and concerned and worried he’s made a mess of things without knowing why he has. In many ways, he is still the seven-year-old boy who got sent away to boarding school. He needs as much parenting as loving, she thinks. And so does she. It’s why they are perfect for each other.
‘Don’t worry, Jake. Nothing’s wrong. I’ll be down in a second, justafter I’ve … I’ve … finished … answering this email,’ she concluded weakly.
‘All right. We’ll see you downstairs. No rush.’
She hears his footsteps recede and slumps to the ground. She is so exhausted that the last thing she feels like is making polite chit-chat with Kate in her perfectly judged smart-casual Breton top. She’ll give herself a couple of minutes to re-group, she thinks, and then she’ll go back. She walks to the bathroom and splashes cool water on her face, and it’s then that she sees the pregnancy test in her washbag. She thinks about her period, which was due days ago, and the fact that she’s been feeling so tired, and she thinks about how they’ve been diligently trying to get pregnant, and she’s astonished, then, that it has taken her so long to realise what the explanation could be.
She sits on the toilet waiting to piss and when her bladder begins to empty, she angles the lip of the pregnancy test into the stream of urine. After she’s done, she slides the pink plastic cap back on and places the test on the edge of the basin where it sits for the allotted number of minutes, and once her watch tells her it is time to check, she allows herself to look at the aperture which reveals two lines – two clear vertical purple dashes that tell her with incontrovertible certitude that she is pregnant.
She screams with joy and it is loud enough that Jake comes running back upstairs. This time, she lets him into the room.
8
