‘She’s not going to understand.’
‘She isn’t,’ Kate agreed. ‘But she doesn’t have to.’
It was, in the end, quite easily decided. Kate mentioned it to Marisa the next day over the phone.
‘Kate, oh my goodness, that’s so generous. Are you sure?’
Her voice was breathless, as if she had just been out for a run.
‘We’re positive. It would be lovely to have you with us. But we don’t want you to feel under any obligation. Why don’t you comeround and see the house and your room and then you can make up your mind?’
‘I’d love that.’
They made a date for the following afternoon. Jake was unable to get out of a work meeting but Kate’s hours were more flexible and she could easily be there to show Marisa around. She felt excited waiting for Marisa to ring the front doorbell, and she spent a couple of hours that morning cleaning and making everything look as inviting as possible. In the spare room, she changed the bedlinen and put a selection of her favourite books on the shelves. Downstairs, she lit scented candles and wiped down the kitchen surfaces.
When Marisa arrived, they hugged and Kate invited her in and started showing her round as if she were an estate agent. She pointed out the double-glazing which made it quiet, the two bathrooms (which meant Marisa would have her own) and the fact that hers and Jake’s bedroom was on a different floor, for added privacy.
‘Oh, it’s so beautiful,’ Marisa enthused. ‘The light is just gorgeous.’
In the kitchen, Kate opened the glass doors into the garden and a magpie flew in without warning so that Kate had to swerve and duck her head. In the flurry that followed, the bird caught its wing on a vase which crashed to the ground, and then flew back outside. Kate, who had never liked birds and found them full of all sorts of sinister premonitions, tried to make light of it.
‘Good riddance!’ she said, as the bird flew higher into the sky before disappearing from view. ‘I hope that didn’t put you off?’
Marisa said it hadn’t at all, and not to worry, and if Kate and Jake were really sure then she’d love to move in for the next few months while they went on their surrogacy adventure together. Kate hugged her again, so tightly that she could feel the beat of the other woman’s heart. When she pulled back, Marisa looked at her oddly, as though her eyes had lost focus, as though her mind had taken her somewhere else. It was a fleeting moment, and Marisa’s face cleared almost as soon as Kate had noticed it.
Where had she gone, Kate wondered.
She saw Marisa out, watching as the other woman walked down the street, taking out her phone to text someone on her way to the tube, and then Kate closed the door and stood for a while in the hallway, pleased with herself for how well it had gone.
They helped Marisa move in, hiring a van and lugging boxes down the narrow stairs from her flat and piling them high in the back. They drove across the city with the radio on and Marisa seemed to know all the words to the pop songs. She had a nice singing voice, Kate thought, and this was another thing that made her happy about the genetic inheritance she would be giving their child. Marisa unpacked quickly and methodically and by that evening, it was all done and she was ensconced in their house, sitting across from them at the kitchen table and it felt as though it had always been this way. It felt, Kate realised, like family.
Marisa set a slanted architect’s table up by the spare window and worked long hours in her room, emerging for dinner with paint in her hair, wearing sandals and loose-fitting work clothes. She said she was sleeping better than she had done in years and her face filled out and the darkness beneath her eyes disappeared.
Jake and Kate, aware of this new presence in their home, did their best to make Marisa feel welcome. They were solicitous, always asking if she wanted cups of tea or the odd glass of wine, and they agreed they would not be ‘couply’ in front of her. They stopped being tactile or showing affection to each other so that Marisa wouldn’t feel the odd one out. At night, they had sex quietly, not wanting her to hear.
It went on in this way for three weeks, maybe four. Afterwards, Kate could never recall when exactly she got the first inkling that all was not as it seemed. It started with small things – gestures and actions that would have been almost impossible to discern at the time, but which in retrospect appeared all to be leading up to an inevitable end point.
There was the way Marisa moved her mugs to the front of the cupboard, pushing Kate’s favourite coffee cups to the back, and the way she used the basin in the master bathroom to brush her teeth rather than the smaller one upstairs they had allotted her. She liked totake a lengthy soak in their tub before going to bed but she never cleaned the bath out after using it. She downloaded TV programmes from their Apple account without asking. Once, Kate had found her in their bedroom, sitting at Kate’s dressing table, trying on her jewellery.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Kate!’ Marisa had said. Her manner was light, as if it were no big deal. ‘I just love these particular earrings you have and wanted to see if they suited me. You don’t mind, do you?’
And Kate felt there was no option but to say, ‘No, of course not.’
Kate told herself she was being controlling. Why shouldn’t Marisa treat their house as her home? Wasn’t that what they’d encouraged her to do? Besides, Kate was wary of upsetting her. She was desperate not to lose this chance they’d worked so hard towards. Marisa was their perfect surrogate, she kept telling herself. Whatever Marisa wanted to do, and however she wanted to act, Kate would have to deal with it in as compassionate and generous a way as possible until they had their baby. This was the most important thing, and it guided her every action. Don’t upset the status quo. Don’t do anything that will cause offence. Don’t forget how fragile everything is just beneath the surface.
But Marisa subtly kept expanding her reach around the house. She asked if she could put some of her books on the shelves and Jake readily agreed. When Kate came down to the sitting room, she saw that Marisa had removed Kate’s beloved collection of grey-spined Persephone novels and had left them piled untidily on the floor. The shelf was now taken over by weighty art tomes on photography and the female nude – the kind of books no one read, but wanted to be seen to own.
Once, when Kate had a work meeting nearby, she had popped home in the middle of the day. She noticed as soon as she walked through the door that her running shoes had been moved from the hallway where she always kept them. Marisa came down the stairs, looking distracted.
‘Oh,’ Marisa said. ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone.’
Kate tried to make light of it.
‘I do live here!’
‘I know. I just … I’m used to having my own creative space during the day, you know?’
Excuse me for breathing, Kate thought, as Marisa turned and went back upstairs.
