He put the kettle on. She took pleasure in watching him move, the reassuring heft of his broad shoulders and the stockiness of his legs, the hardness of his muscular thighs. Her mind wandered to them making love, her legs wrapped around his back and him thrusting into her, biting the lobe of her ear as she felt the undiluted force of him inside her. She had never felt such a physical connection with any man. Her previous lovers had, she now realised, been too pliant and unsure of themselves. She had an image in her mind’s eye of Jake’s head, dipping down between her legs, his tongue circling her clitoris, intently focused on the task of making her wet. She thought of him flipping her over onto her front and guiding his way into her from behind so that her insides felt stretched and complete, as if everything had slotted into place.
‘Penny for them,’ he said, standing behind the kitchen island.
‘Mmm?’ Marisa glanced towards him. ‘Sorry, miles away. I was just …’
‘Yes?’ Jake cocked his eyebrow flirtatiously and she knew he was imagining exactly the same as she was.
‘Thinking,’ she grinned.
‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’
The next morning, Jake got up early to go to work. She slept in so she didn’t see him at breakfast. She padded downstairs and put a capsule in the coffee machine, which gurgled and spat out an espresso. Light filtered through the sliding doors and on the lawn outside were two magpies, strutting around each other, pecking the grass with jittery movements as if they knew they were being watched. She remembered the first time she’d come to see the house and the bird that had flown indoors.
One for sorrow, Marisa thought, two for joy. It was a sign, she told herself. She might be pregnant already, the glowing seed of it taking root in her womb. For a long time after her mother left, Marisa had thought she didn’t want children of her own. She felt so lonely withher father and confused by the unpredictable nature of his domestic routine that she nurtured a spiky resentment against her sister Anna, blaming her for everything that had happened. It had all been fine before the baby came along.
She had once tried to talk to her father about it, but although he was a kind man, who loved her in his own way, he had been undone by his marriage ending and pottered around the creaking house with a permanently distracted air.
‘Daddy,’ she said in bed one evening, when he shuffled into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight. He was wearing a dirty bathrobe tied with a coloured length of rope and on his feet were a pair of red knitted socks that she remembered her mother using every Christmas for stockings left at the end of her bed.
‘Yes, darling?’
‘Did Anna make Mummy leave?’
Her father looked startled and his watery eyes widened.
‘What a strange question,’ he said as he sat on the edge of her bed, too far away for her to touch him. ‘She’s just a baby. Anna couldn’t make your mother do anything she didn’t want to do.’ And then, in a quieter, more defeated voice, he added: ‘No one could.’
Marisa actually wanted a reply to a different question altogether, one she was too afraid to ask. She nodded her head in what she hoped was a grown-up way.
‘I understand, Daddy,’ Marisa said, even though she didn’t.
He pressed down on the mattress to lever himself upwards. As he walked towards her bedroom door, she experienced a late surge of courage.
‘But Daddy,’ she said.
He stopped, resting one hand on the doorknob, and waited.
‘Do you … do you … miss them?’
She felt a sob rising up her gullet and had to swallow hard.
‘I do,’ he said, without turning round. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
She thought her father would come back and comfort her but instead he said ‘Hmph,’ like the sound the sofa would make if you saton it too heavily, and he walked out of her bedroom. Moments later, she could hear him brushing his teeth and running a bath. Shortly after that, the hallway light switched off.
She lay awake for a long time, feeling the slug-trail of tears on her face, and she made a promise to herself that she would never talk about it again. She would pretend not to mind, and in this way, she would grow strong and careless and no one else would ever be able to hurt her.
So Marisa had never wanted to be a mother. But then, at some point in her mid-twenties, without any explicit reason for a change of heart, she realised that having her own baby would be a way of reclaiming the past and making it better. It became something she wanted very much indeed.
And so she had signed up to every single app and website and forum she could. She was strategic, choosing only to pursue the people who had openly stated their seriousness about having children. Everyone had been a disappointment until Jake.
She drank her coffee, sitting on one of the Scandinavian-designed chairs at the long kitchen dining table. The legs were spindly and angled but the chairs were more comfortable than they looked. She finished the espresso and, invigorated by caffeine, she went upstairs to the studio. She took out a fresh sheet of watercolour paper. She’d forgotten to stock up on the 300gsm, so each morning she had been undertaking the laborious task of stretching sheets for the next day’s painting. She took her plastic tray, walked up to the master bathroom, and filled it a few inches, holding it gingerly as she walked back downstairs to the studio.
She set out the wooden board on her drawing table, and cut the tape to size. She pressed the sheet of paper down to the base of the plastic tray, feeling the coolness of the water lapping at her wrists. Stretching paper like this was time-consuming but Marisa liked the meditative process of it. It was a task that took exactly as long as it took. There was no rushing it.
She wetted the board with a sponge, lifted the paper out by one corner, allowing the excess to drip off. She bent the sheet, the bottomof it curving as she lowered it onto the board. Then she moistened the brown tape and stuck it along each edge, gently running her fingers over it to make sure all the air bubbles were removed but not so forcefully that it stretched the tape. When she was satisfied, Marisa put it to one side where she would leave it to dry overnight.
