After the initial thrill has subsided, Marisa finds the early weeks of pregnancy tiresome. She is shattered and heaviness oozes through her veins, settling slowly into the pit of her stomach where it gurgles and splutters at inopportune moments. The first trimester is a constant disconnectedness, as if she is not quite inhabiting her body. Her normal food proclivities shift overnight. The thought of a green vegetable makes her want to throw up. She can eat hummus and bread and anything else beige in colour and that’s about it. She does not feel the inner calm she had anticipated from all the baby books and the health magazines that talked about pregnancy glow. Instead, she is overwhelmed by the admin: the leaflets that appear through the letterbox as soon as she has informed her GP, the pamphlets in Comic Sans advising her to book into antenatal classes and proselytising the merits of breastfeeding. She dutifully attends all the requisite hospital appointments, Jake sitting next to her, puppyish in his enthusiasm. She goes back to the pregnancy yoga class and grits her teeth as Carys talks about Mother Earth and maternal energies and the goddess within all of us.
At home, she spends a lot of time in bed or reclining on the sofa. She watches daytime television and subscribes to an internet service that means she can get the latest reality shows from America. There is one, following the lives of cabin crew on a luxury yacht, that she becomes inexplicably involved in and she finds herself opening up her laptop over breakfast to catch up on the latest romantic entanglements between the male and female deckhand, or the chef’s travails after being presented with a preference sheet listing the no-gluten dietary requirements of the next oligarch client.
‘I don’t know how you can watch that stuff!’ Kate says one morning. She says it jokingly, but Marisa hears the judgement underlying it. Kate watchesNewsnightand listens to Radio 4. Kate eats a single piece of toasted rye bread spread thinly with Marmite before heading to the office each morning. Marisa can’t face anything other than croissants for breakfast. She worries, stupidly, about putting on weight.
She works for a bit every day but her paintings lack energy. She can’t seem to wield the paintbrush in a way that brings children to life and she gets frustrated, ripping up more than she keeps and tossing fistfuls of paper into the wastebasket.
Jake can’t understand her listlessness. He goes to work as usual and when he comes home in the evenings, he brings her treats: a perfectly ripe nectarine one day that she doesn’t want, so he eats it instead and she watches the juice trickle down his chin and feels rage that he is so clueless and so entitled in his cluelessness. Imagine just being able to eat a nectarine and not even wipe the juice away! An American classmate of hers at school once described an overweight uncle as ‘lummoxy’ and this is the word that comes to Marisa’s mind as she watches Jake move solidly around the house, leaving a trail of unwashed mugs on coffee tables and counter-tops, safe in the knowledge that she will be the one to put them in the dishwasher. He is used to people doing things for him, she realises. He belongs to that cadre of Englishmen who have never had to worry about learning the rules because they are the ones who make them.
At night, in bed, she is filled with self-loathing and remorse about her unkind thoughts. Jake is lovely, she reminds herself. He is kind. He is good. She can trust him. He is supportive and excited and wants to have this baby with her. She catches him sometimes looking at her from across the room, his face suffused with pleasure.
‘I think your tummy’s poking out a bit,’ he says as they drink coffee in the garden one morning. She allows herself only one coffee a day now, and sips it as slowly as she can to make it last. The late-summer sunshine is eking out the last of its pale light and the patio stones are the yellow-white of a once-clean flannel.
Marisa looks down at her stomach. She sees no difference, and it adds to her feeling of unreality. How can she possibly be building a person inside when there is no external evidence? She glances at Jake and can see he is willing a pregnancy bump into existence. He is so desperate for it to be happening. He has never been good at waiting. Impatience, he had once told her, was his most obvious flaw. On the bench, she smiles, places her coffee cup on the ground and then rearranges herself, subtly jutting out her stomach slightly.
‘Yes,’ she lies. ‘I think it is.’
Jake leans forward, putting his lips close to her belly button.
‘Hello my little darling,’ he whispers. ‘I can’t wait to meet you.’
She looks down at Jake’s head, tracing the feathery point where his hair meets neatly in a V at the nape of his neck and she can smell his soapy freshness and she feels a cresting of love for him.
‘I love you,’ Jake tells her tummy.
‘Love you too,’ she whispers.
So then everything is all right again, and when he leaves for the office, Marisa has a spurt of motivation and completes the twin princesses’ fairytale by lunchtime, forgetting for five straight hours that she is pregnant at all. Part of her is worried that things will change when they have a baby, and that Jake won’t have enough bandwidth to love her as much as he does now. She is anxious, she realises, that in giving him the thing he most desires, he will have no use for her.
‘You’re being silly,’ she says out loud, into the empty room, and the certainty of her own voice is comforting.
Downstairs, she hears the front door slam shut. And then, unmistakably, she hears Kate’s voice.
‘Hello?’
Marisa walks onto the landing, her paintbrush still in hand.
‘Kate,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
In the hallway, Kate stands silhouetted against the tiles. From her vantage point one floor up, Marisa sees the other woman in foreshortened perspective, her head fractionally too large for her body. Kate is wearing a polka-dot jumpsuit, the sleeves rolled up to reveal her thin wrists. A leather belt with an oversized gold buckle sits tightly aroundher slender waist. Marisa has never been able to wear belts. She doesn’t understand them. They look strange and self-conscious on her, as if she is trying too hard to be someone she isn’t. She would never wear polka-dots either, being wary of patterns and the way they accentuate her curves, making her feel lumpen and oafish when she wants to be girlish and light, attending casually thrown-together picnics in fields of wildflowers. Like Kate, in fact. Kate would look just right at a picnic. A fashionable one, of course, in an East London park with salted almonds and craft beer.
‘No,’ Kate is saying, ruffling her hair so that her fringe shakes itself out at an angle across her left eyebrow. ‘I had a meeting and wanted to pop back to change. These’ – Kate points at the shiny black shoes – ‘are not conducive to walking quickly. Not conducive to walking full stop, to be honest.’
On Kate’s feet are strappy heels with pointed toes. She doesn’t normally wear smart shoes and Marisa is struck again by how chic she looks.
‘Cool,’ Marisa says, immediately regretting the choice of word. ‘I’m just in the middle of something, so …’
‘Fancy a coffee?’
Kate looks up at her, a pleading quality to her face.
‘Oh. Well.’ The worst part of working from home is that you can never come up with a suitable excuse. ‘I’ve already had my one coffee of the day, so …’
‘A herbal tea then?’
There is a tiny pause.
‘I’d love a chat,’ Kate continues. ‘But I totally understand if you’re busy. Sorry.’
