‘Hi.’
She wasn’t sure how to greet him, so she held out her arm to shake his hand, which he did while looking her directly in the eyes. He made no motion to lean forward and graze her cheek, and she was relieved when he sat back down on his side of the table, and she took a chair opposite him with just the right amount of distance between them.
He smelled of freshly washed laundry. No cologne. His face was uncomplicated: a defined chin and boyish cheeks. Kind eyes. A smattering of sandy-coloured stubble. He had looks you could imagine ageing well and at the same time you could see instantly what sort of a child he had been. Underneath his T-shirt was a ripple of muscle, but it was muscle that didn’t like to announce itself. It was not gym-obsessive muscle, but the understated strength of a man who could, if required, be counted on to push a car whose engine had given out.
In the cafe, Jake took quiet charge. He asked Marisa what she’d like to order, and then conveyed this desire to the waitress as if Marisa might find it too much bother to do it herself. She liked that. Shecould imagine Jas rolling her eyes at her lack of feminist outrage. Her tea arrived in a glass pot on a wooden tray with a rectangular egg-timer.
‘I don’t know if you’ve had our tea before,’ the waitress said. She had a tiny gold stud on the side of her nose. Marisa shook her head. ‘Right, OK, so you need to let it brew for three minutes to get the full flavour.’ The waitress turned the egg-timer upside down. Inside, the fine, black sand started to trickle down.
‘Wow,’ Jake said as soon as the waitress had left them to it. ‘That’s a complicated cup of tea.’
Marisa laughed.
‘I’m more of an English Breakfast man myself,’ he said.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ she replied, playful but not too much.
After that, the conversation came easily, passing between them fluidly like the egg-timer grains. They spoke about upbringings. He was the oldest of four, with three younger sisters, he told her. He was close to his mother, raised in Gloucestershire, ‘and still a country boy at heart’.
‘Do you go in for all those country pursuits?’
He laughed.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actuallysaycountry pursuits. I mean, outside the pages of a Victorian novel, that is.’ He looked at her, unblinking. ‘It’s very quaint.’
She flushed.
‘Don’t worry, it’s charming. And no, not really. I’ve been to the odd pheasant shoot but fox hunting is not really my thing. I quite like … foxes.’
He caught her eye and Marisa was left with the distinct impression that he meant to refer to her when he spoke the word.
He brought up the subject of children. It was unusual for a man to mention it, even more so on a first date and given their age difference – Marisa was twenty-eight and Jake eleven years older.
‘But, you know, I want to be able to play football with my kids,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be the only dad at the school gates getting his hips replaced.’
‘You’re not that old!’ Marisa said.
‘Well …’
Jake stretched back, resting one arm on the table and placing the other on the back of his chair. He had an effortless capacity to inhabit a space. She liked the way he could have been carved out of blocks of wood.
The cafe was beginning to fill with the thrum of the lunchtime rush: mothers pushing buggies and businessmen in suits and young women in glasses and cropped jeans carrying laptops in rucksacks. Jake and Marisa had to raise their voices to hear each other over the clattering of chrome chairs and hissing of the espresso machine.
‘To be honest, I’ve always wanted kids young,’ Marisa said. ‘I think I told you, my mum was twenty-one when she had me and …’ She let the thought drift, annoyed with herself for having said something she did not particularly want to share. She couldn’t remember what she’d told him on their first meeting and Marisa did not want to reveal too much. Her mind ballooned with an image of her beautiful but dishevelled mother, dungaree dress unbuttoned so that her breast could slip out to feed the mewling baby, and Marisa had to make a conscious effort to remove the memory so that she could return to the conversation in the cafe with Jake. Don’t go there, she told herself. Come back. You are here, right now, with this man. Do not fuck this up like you have done before.
She took a breath and smiled and fiddled with her teaspoon.
‘I just think it would be great – a couple of kids, a dog …’ Marisa said and as she did so, she took a risk. She leaned forward casually and grazed his wrist with the tips of her fingers. She felt a crackle of energy, a fission of some sort, as if two molecules had collided and meshed and sparked into a new thing.
Jake looked surprised. She removed her hand quickly and carried on talking as if nothing had happened, while all the time suspecting that everything had.
Later, he will tell her that he knew from the moment she reached across and touched his arm that Marisa was ‘the one’. She thought the phrase sounded like something she usually put in her hand-drawn fairytales, but it turned out to be true.
2
She moved into the houseon a day Jake was at work. She didn’t mind doing it by herself. She set up her studio in a small box-room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. The previous tenant had used it as a makeshift gym, and when she unpacked her desk and her paints, she noticed a circular weight on the floor of the cupboard that must once have been affixed to a barbell. She used it as a doorstop.
Marisa had ordered cardboard boxes and bubble wrap online, and she had packed all her possessions with fastidious care, ensuring each one of her favourite mugs was insulated from damage and hanging her clothes in the special containers sent by the removal company. Jake had told her not to bother with crockery. ‘We’ve already got everything we need,’ he said, and she noticed the casual possessive pronoun with delight.
