‘I mean, I’d quite like to have a baby before I’m eighty-five.’
He let his hands drop. The light outside was fading and she could see his profile, studded against the gloom, the dip and bulge of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to be flippant. I’m not flippant about this.’
‘I know you’re not.’ He was still gazing at the floor, staring at the faded red and gold patterned rug. ‘You’re talking as if you’re at death’s door. You’re thirty-one, it’s not as if there isn’t time.’
‘No, I know. You’re right.’
It was better having spoken about it. She was relieved and felt closer to Jake than she had done in months. She tossed back the duvet cover and clambered onto his lap, putting her arms around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. He stroked her back.
‘It’s going to be OK.’
She believed him. She always had.
Christmas was not as bad as Kate had feared. Annabelle’s cooking was as atrocious as ever, but her conversation seemed less aggressive, as though she had run out of fight. She asked Kate a handful of questions about herself this time, including what her favourite book was and when Kate saidMiddlemarch, Annabelle dissolved into ecstasies of agreement.
‘That bit when they’re on their honeymoon,’ Annabelle said, cheeks glowing from her after-dinner brandy, ‘and Dorothea says she thought love was going to be like an ocean, but it turns out to be nothing more than a basin … oh, it’sperfect.’
Chris, who was sitting in his usual corner of the drawing room letting most things wash over him was suddenly roused.
‘Steady on,’ he said.
They all laughed and Kate was surprised, not just by Annabelle’s literary taste but at the warmth she felt in that moment.
Of course, Annabelle played all her usual tricks too, insisting on placing Jake next to her at every meal, recalling long-ago family anecdotes that excluded Kate in their re-telling and at one point getting out an old photograph album filled with pictures of Jake and his ex-girlfriend.
‘Oh, how funny, I’d forgotten we had so many photos of you and Charlotte,’ Annabelle said. ‘I only wanted to show you the funniest picture of Toad … now where is it …’ She placed the album on the dinner table, angled so that Kate could see it clearly and she continued to flick through the pages, stopping occasionally to say, ‘Charlotte was such a sweet girl, wasn’t she?’ and ‘Jakey, you look so young and handsome and happy there!’ and ‘What happened to Charlotte? Are you still in touch with her?’
Jake shook his head. ‘No idea, Mum.’
‘Shame. I’d love to see her again.’
Underneath the table, Jake squeezed Kate’s hand.
But Kate found it funny more than hurtful. Annabelle’s jabs were so unsubtle that it would have felt almost churlish to get upset.
When the two of them returned to London, laden down once again with tin-foil packages of leftover turkey and an old cream tub repurposed to contain a dozen devils on horseback, Kate was astonished to find that she had quite enjoyed herself. More than that, she was relaxed.
‘That wasn’t too bad,’ she said to Jake on the drive back.
‘Told you. Mum thinks you’re great.’ Then he grinned. ‘She just can’t admit it to herself yet.’
16
Months passed and still she wasn’t pregnant.In April, her period was a few days late and she bought a test from their local pharmacy and sat on the toilet seat trying not to let herself get excited, trying not to allow herself to believe that this, surely, was their time. She placed the cap back on the test and waited for the lines to appear. The minutes passed, and she stared at the small oval aperture. One line made itself visible, a pale mark like a charcoal stroke on blotting paper. Her breath caught in the top of her throat as she waited for a second one to join it, but it never came and instead the single marking grew darker and darker until its presence seemed to taunt her with the indisputable absence alongside it, like a tree on a sunlit street that doesn’t cast a shadow. It looked so wrong, Kate thought. She kept checking the packet the test came in, which had a visual key denoting that one line meant not pregnant, two lines meant pregnant, and she wondered if, in her haste to unwrap it, she had misread the instructions. She hadn’t. The truth was staring her in the face.
She started to cry and was consumed by her own perceived stupidity for believing it would be different. What was the point of hope when it existed only to be extinguished, month after painful month? She threw the test in the bin and didn’t tell Jake. The next morning, her period came. She got drunk that night, on tequila mixed with pre-made margarita mix, the alcohol hitting the back of her throat like a well-landed punch.
Jake found the pregnancy test in the bathroom bin and asked her about it, and when she told him, he held her in his arms and stroked her hair, but she felt numb.
Slowly but perceptibly, Kate cloaked her emotions in cynicism. It was a form of self-protection. When another friend announced their pregnancy, uploading blurry twelve-week scans to Facebook, she groaned and cracked a bitter joke with Jake. She crossed the street to avoid women walking with toddlers, their dimpled fists held in bigger, adult hands. She started to complain about babies crying in restaurants and to avoid social gatherings where she knew there would be newborns that Kate would be expected to coo over and interact with. It was all too painful.
It was Jake who suggested they start looking for houses, as a way of taking their mind off it.
‘We shouldn’t put our lives on hold while we wait to get pregnant,’ he said. ‘It’s causing way more stress than it needs to.’
‘It’s pretty desperate if you genuinely think buying a house is going to belessstressful than this,’ she said, blankly.
