She returned to the scene she’d been working on, with the princess high up in a grey-bricked tower, her blonde hair tumbling down to the ground in a long plait. She flicked her brush in the jam jar of water and dropped the tip into pink paint and started with the princess’s expression: her mouth an ‘o’ of surprise and anticipation as she waited for Prince Moses to climb up and save her. Marisa gave the princess blue eyes and freckled cheeks. The prince was trickier and had to be painted with brown, curly hair, tufts of it sticking out at angles. She had a photo of Moses propped up on her desk and tried as much as possible to make the prince look like an idealised version of him. Real-life Moses was plump, with an unfortunate overbite that Marisa glossed over as she worked, subtly improving the child’s features and getting quiet satisfaction from doing so.
It was as she was painting his left eye, making it look ever so slightly less bulbous and staring than it did in the photo, that the doorbell rang. She sat up, startled. The doorbell had never rung before while she’d been in the house. Her shoulders tensed. Marisa didn’t like to be interrupted mid-flow. She listened intently, wondering whether whoever it was would turn and go away. It must be charity leafletters, she thought, or Jehovah’s Witnesses trying their luck or … The doorbell sounded again.
‘Fuck,’ she said out loud, dropping her brush into the water pot where wisps of brown paint stained the liquid. Prince Moses would just have to wait.
She ran downstairs in the sandals she always wore when she worked – comfortable, Germanic things with moulded footbeds that held the shape of her sole exactly. The front door had a spy-hole three-quarters of the way up the wood. Marisa pressed her eye to it and blinked. She could make out a female form, an older woman with her back turned to her.
She opened the door.
‘Yes?’ she said.
The woman turned around. She was tall, elegant, probably about sixty. Her face had the delicate sheen of expensive skincare. She was wearing discreet make-up: a touch of mascara, a dusting of blush and a pinky-red lipstick. Along each eyelid, a contour of shimmery beige powder.
‘You must be Marisa,’ the woman said, unsmiling.
‘Yes,’ Marisa said for the second time.
‘I’m Jake’s mother, Annabelle.’ She held out her hand with such grace that Marisa almost expected her to be wearing gloves, despite the warm summer weather. Marisa shook her hand, feeling the bright, hard pressure of a signet ring on her little finger.
‘Oh! It’s such a pleasure to meet you at last!’
Marisa was a flurry of exclamation. Annabelle assessed her coolly from the doorstep,
‘I wasn’t expecting you …’ Marisa continued and everything she said sounded foolish and unnecessary. Stop speaking, she told herself. Just shut up. ‘Were you in the neighbourhood, or … to what do we – I mean, I – owe the honour?’
Why was she talking like this? She realised she was nervous. Jake was close to his mother but evasive about her in their conversations.
‘Things with my mother are a bit …’ he said on one of their first dates. ‘Let’s just say she’s a tricky character.’
‘How so?’
He had hesitated. ‘She struggles to see things from other people’s points of view.’
She hadn’t pursued it. She and Jake existed in such a bubble that she had never felt the need to meet any of his family. Besides, it had all been so quick.
‘Are you going to invite me in?’ Annabelle was saying. ‘I’d be most grateful.’
‘Of course, of course. Sorry. Forgetting myself there.’
She ushered Annabelle in and gestured down the tiled hallway.
‘The kitchen’s in the basement,’ she explained. Annabelle walkeddown the stairs with her shoulders pressed back, one finger on the banister as if assessing it for dust. Marisa followed in her wake, her sandals feeling ugly compared to Annabelle’s chic espadrilles.
‘I just fell in love with the original features,’ Marisa said, lapsing into meaningless chit-chat to counteract the unsettling silence. ‘The cornicing …’
‘I shouldn’t think that’s original,’ Annabelle replied, glancing at the ceiling rose around the light fitting. ‘It’s most likely a later addition made to look old. I suppose a developer did the whole place up for rental, did they?’
‘Um … I don’t …’
‘Looks like it. These floorboards aren’t real wood.’
Annabelle walked deeper into the kitchen, towards the glass doors giving into the garden where she paused and stared at the patch of lawn.
‘Needs watering.’ She turned and assessed the stove. ‘Goodness gracious, what on earth is that?’
Annabelle was pointing towards the mirrored splashback.
‘It’s—’
