Kate marvelled at the truth of it: she wanted to have Jake’s children. It was a new sensation, and yet it felt as if it had been in her bones for a lifetime. How she felt about Annabelle or how Annabelle felt about her was irrelevant. She and Jake were the family unit now.
Back then, it truly seemed as simple as that.
15
They planned it all meticulously.Kate would wait until the end of the year to come off birth control. By then, a couple of big movies would have come out and work would be less busy. They would start looking for a bigger house once Kate got pregnant. The flat was fine for two of them, and perhaps a small baby, but their family would soon expand and they could afford the space (or rather, as Kate reminded herself, Jake could).
They went for walks through the park at weekends and talked about names they liked (Matilda for a girl, Leo for a boy) and how they would be different parents from their own mothers and fathers and what they thought about private schools – Kate was vehemently against; Jake believed that if they had enough money, they should obviously try and give their children the best education they could, but they agreed to disagree for the time being, as no decisions would have to be made for years after their baby was born.
It felt so good having this joint project, something that they could always revert to discussing when conversation ran dry, a picture they could paint together, adding in details in the foreground here and there, choosing a different colour for this patch of sky and a thinner brush for the tiny figure that awaited them. It reassured Kate to be in a relationship with a man who was unafraid of long-term commitment, who believed in partnership and sharing and communication. After so many years dating men who fed her breadcrumbs of emotional attachment, it was a quiet revelation to be offered such plentiful nourishment. He had never once let her down, not even when his mother tried her hardest to separate them.
After that strained Sunday lunch, Annabelle had subjected Jake to abarrage of phone calls, asking if he was sure about Kate, and how much he truly knew about her, and weren’t they moving a bit too quickly and she was only saying this because she loved him – he understood that, didn’t he? – and so on and so forth until Jake, despite his tendency always to give his mother the benefit of the doubt, was forced to start ignoring her number when it flashed up. Even Jake – kind, loving, filial Jake – couldn’t find enough time in the day to give Annabelle as much attention as she demanded. So then Annabelle began calling Kate, leaving voicemails inviting her for coffee the next time she was in town: ‘I’m popping up to Peter Jones and I’d love to see you. Just us girls.’
Kate replied with non-committal texts and gradually the communication eased off.
‘She just doesn’t like the thought that she’s losing me,’ Jake said one evening as they sat on the ledge of the open kitchen window drinking Aperol Spritz and looking out over the London rooftops.
‘Mmm.’ Kate thought this was an inappropriate way for a mother to feel but she didn’t say anything.
A pigeon was pecking at a roof tile a few feet away. She watched as the pigeon realised there was no food there, then puffed out its chest as if embarrassed and stalked off.
‘She’ll love you, just you wait. There’s part of her that already does. It’s just that you’re both actually quite—’
‘Don’t say it, Jake.’
‘What?’
‘You were about to say we’re both actually quite similar.’
He laughed, brushing a hand through his hair, fluffing it up like the pigeon’s feathers.
‘I was.’
‘Which is a) not true and b) if it were true would make you into some kind of creep with a serious Oedipus complex.’
‘Fair point.’
‘Let’s leave it that we’re never going to be that close, but it’s fine because she lives in Tewkesbury.’
He nodded, then said, ‘It’s why my sisters moved away.’
‘Sensible.’
He held out his glass to cheers her.
‘Here’s to us.’
‘To us.’
‘We don’t need anyone else,’ Jake said, looking straight at her in that way he had.
‘We don’t.’
They cheersed, taking great care to maintain eye contact because everyone knew that otherwise it was seven years’ bad sex and they intended to be doing a lot of it from then on.
She came off the pill in January, after a boozy festive fortnight of parties and work lunches and a particularly drunken Christmas Day, with just the two of them in the flat opening bottles of Cabernet in front of the television and eating too much brandy butter. It had been bliss. But, back at work, the familiar New Year lethargy seeped in. She decided to do Dry January just as the temperature dropped to below freezing and the nights were drawing in. She reminded herself that she was detoxifying her system for a good reason, but the days felt long and her sleep patterns too short.
When she wasn’t pregnant by February, she didn’t think much of it. Her hormonal levels were rebalancing after a year on the pill, Kate told herself, and January had been exhausting. In March, she reassured herself by searching online for the average amount of time it took a woman of her age to get pregnant and realised she’d been setting her hopes too high. Apparently you had to give it at least a year.
