JAKE:‘You’re amazing and I love you. Whatever happens, please remember that.’
Reading his words, her heart seems to start pumping and squeezing in the pit of her stomach.
20 August
KATE:‘Going to be late tonight. Don’t wait up.’
The casual proprietorship is what strikes Marisa. The idea that he’d be waiting up so that – what? – they could have a quickie on the downstairs sofa while she was sound asleep upstairs?
12 September
KATE:‘Worried about Marisa. She seems edgy.’
JAKE:‘It’s all under control. You worry too much. xxxxx’
KATE:‘OK’
15 October
KATE:‘Jesus, Jake. She just turned up at my work.’
JAKE:‘WHAT?’
KATE:‘So freaked out.’
JAKE:‘Going to call you.’
Marisa scrolls down until the last messages. She stares at the screen, wondering if those three dots will emerge again, whether one of them will type out a further incriminating message. She thinks of Kate, hernarrow hips and her slight figure, the way she looks like a ballerina from certain angles. Kate is all discipline, from the amount of food she eats to the rigorous nature of her exercise routine and the way she insists on going through her diary every Sunday night to run through her meetings and appointments. Marisa doesn’t have a diary on her phone. She has a battered old paper notebook, filled with scribbles and rubbed-out thoughts.
What is she going to do? In a cheap film – the kind that she watches on cable channels in the afternoons lying on the sofa when she should be working, the kind that are called things likeMy Lover’s MurderorThe Story of Heidi Brown– there would be no doubt. The wronged woman would pack her bags and leave the house in a fit of righteous indignation. But Marisa has nowhere to go. Her rented flat was given up as soon as she moved in with Jake. She hasn’t been paid for weeks because she has neglected her work. She seems to have lost the desire for it. Tracking Kate’s every move has taken up more time than she had anticipated, and what little she has left over she spends napping or staring into space, thinking.
She doesn’t want to give up her nice house and her nice standard of living. She has got used to it. She has lost touch with Jas, although maybe she could get back in touch and ask to stay. Jas would probably say yes. But the humiliation of having to explain everything that has happened is too much for her. She hasn’t spoken to her father for years.
And yet, she can’t stay with Jake, can she? She will have to confront him and they will have a screaming row and … then what? What if he calls her bluff and tells her it’s over and that he sees a future with Kate? Marisa will be a single mother, in a shitty little flat, with Jake visiting every other weekend. It’s unconscionable. She and Jake aren’t even married. He pays the rent. She has no legal rights.
‘Count to ten,’ she imagines her mother saying, leaning over Marisa in bed so that a strand of her long blonde hair – hair just like Marisa’s is now – falls forwards and tickles her collarbone. ‘Count to ten, my darling, and then see how you feel.’
That is what she will do, Marisa decides. She will count to ten, over and over again, until she works out what to do next.
Part Two
12
Kate gets back first. The house is dark when she turns her key in the door, its windows blank. The temperature is cool. The central heating hasn’t kicked in yet. She must remember to tell Jake to re-programme it now that winter is approaching. He’s good at that sort of stuff.
The first thing she does when she gets across the threshold, before she even takes off her coat, is to draw the curtains in the sitting room. She doesn’t like the thought of passersby being able to peer into her home from the street, the inside light spreading out so that the inhabitants are on full display.
She hangs her parka on one of the hooks lining the hallway. She still hasn’t thought to turn on the lights. It is as she is removing her scarf and ruffling her hair free of her beanie hat that she hears it: a scuffle and then a creak.
Kate stills, halting her breath, listening intently as the darkness tunes her ears into a higher frequency. A faraway car horn sounds. Outside, someone has turned on a radio and she can just make out its tinny jingle.
No more noises come. Probably just the clatter of an old house, she thinks. She’s still getting used to it. Before, she had lived in new-build apartment blocks with concierges at the door. She hadn’t liked the sterility of the interiors, but she had felt safe there.
The Richborne Terrace house, by contrast, has history built into its brickwork. She researched it once, using the online census to discover that in 1901, it was occupied by J. Humphrey, a retired lighterman and his wife and three children and – surprisingly – another family of four, headed by one Patrick Lancton, a postman. It stands opposite alow-rise block of maisonettes, the result of two World War II bombs obliterating the original houses. Kate doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she doesn’t not believe in them either. Sometimes she wonders if she can sense another presence next to her, a shuffling elderly figure, his hands roughened from years on the river, powering barges up and down the murky Thames waters.
In the hallway, she shivers.
Outside, the sky has leached itself of colour. The clocks went back last month and the days have become shorter since then. It’s 6 p.m., but it feels like midnight. Even the moon, which she can just make out through the glass above the door, is dulled by grey wisps of cloud.
