There are two pillows underneath her head. They feel expensive, stuffed with feathers rather than foam. She thinks of where the feathers come from, of whether they pluck young birds and leave them shivering. Or whether they wait for the birds to die, or perhaps they’ve been killedalready and the feathers would go to waste otherwise? She imagines passing through a swirling, white tunnel of feathers, reaching out to try and catch one in her hand but they keep escaping her reach. The feathers blow and twist out of her grasp until they recede into the distance and then disappear and she is left floating in blankness.
‘Marisa.’
She hears her name being spoken as if from the opposite side of a chasm. The voice echoes towards her. She opens her eyes and stares into the face of a younger man. Light blond-brown hair, sandy stubble. It is a face of notable symmetry, apart from one distinct eyebrow hair curling out of place. She knows this face and yet she cannot place it.
‘How are you?’
Marisa looks at him, waiting for the answer to come to her. The man seems worried, a deep crinkle appearing just above his right eye and then the worry passes and distils itself into a kind of sadness. His moods pass across his face like changing weather. He sits on the edge of the bed, causing the mattress to dip, and then he takes her hand in his and strokes it with his thumb.
‘Marisa,’ he says again. ‘Do you remember what happened?’
For a few seconds, she doesn’t. For a few seconds, she is still a child waiting for her parents to come and get her. For a few seconds longer, she lives in this protective limbo, as though her mind has chosen to give her a more palatable story to digest until she feels strong enough to be confronted with the actuality of what has happened. And then, she remembers.
‘Jake,’ she says.
The memories collapse around her, nuclear dust from an atomic mushroom cloud. The pregnancy. Her illness. The medication she stopped taking. The hallway. Kate, unconscious, her legs tied up with rope. Blood on the tiles. Jake. Her Jake. Except he isn’t hers. He is Kate’s and everything she did in order to make that not so now rises up inside her with such force that she has to lever herself out of bed and run to the bathroom. She kneels down in front of the toilet bowl and vomits.
She feels her hair being lifted and held back. Jake, she thinks again, feeling wretched that he is seeing her like this, that this is what she is reduced to.
Way back, years before she met Jake, she had tried to ignore her illness. She had tried to ignore the manic episodes of work followed by the depression that hit her like a hammer blow, the times she heard voices speaking to her through the television and the microwave, telling her to do terrible things, that she wasn’t important enough to live, that even her own mother had abandoned her. She had tried to deal with it silently, behind closed doors. She hadn’t wanted to admit that she needed help for fear of being categorised as mad or scary or defective. It went on for months. But when it became impossible for her to paint, she had to get help because the only other way out was to kill herself and even in her darkest moments, Marisa knew that she would never be able to do it. She would fail even at that.
The doctor had tried different meds, before arriving at the final dosage and type of pill that made Marisa feel better. Not wholly recovered, but balanced out, her jagged edges smoothed down with sandpaper, her technicolour imaginings dulled down to more manageable shades of grey. She was all right as long as she took her medication. But sometimes, she believed she could function without it, and then she would spiral and Jas would have to fish her back out of the dark place and take care of her, and so it continued until she found a purpose beyond herself. She signed up with a surrogacy agency and realised, for the first time in her life, she could do something entirely good. Her mother had abandoned her. That was a subtraction of love. But Marisa could provide an addition of it for another family. In this way, her life would regain its natural equilibrium. In this way, she would feel once again that she belonged and was useful and loved, if not for herself, then at least for what she could do.
When she met Jake and Kate, she loved them both. She stopped taking the drugs because she was preparing her body for pregnancy. It was thesensiblething to do, she convinced herself. It was for the good of others. Besides, she had a stable family unit now. She wasbetter.
She lifts her head from the toilet bowl. Jake lets go of her hair.
‘Are you OK? Do you want some water?’
‘Yes,’ she says, her voice croaky. ‘Yes please.’
He leaves the bathroom and comes back with a glass. She sips it slowly. Then he helps her up and she shuffles back into bed, careful now not to disturb the baby she has remembered she is carrying. She is appalled by what she has done. They are the actions of a different person, she wants to say, but she can’t speak any more. She only wants to close her eyes. She steps into bed and rests her head against the expensive feather pillows and swims back into the tide of sleep. She doesn’t hear Jake leave.
The next morning, Marisa rises feeling rested. She puts on a dressing gown someone has left hanging from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. It is soft and when she checks the label, she sees it is cashmere. She opens the blind. The window overlooks a long lawn, at the other end of which is a large red-brick gabled house. There are croquet hoops studding the ground and an abandoned wooden mallet lying on its side, indenting the grass. A sparrow pecks at a bowl on a wooden bird table. A rose bush climbs up the facade of the house, arching around the brickwork.
Marisa fully examines her surroundings in the daylight. She does not recognise either the house at the end of the lawn or the cottage she has been staying in, but the silence and the space make it clear she’s in the countryside. She has no recollection of how she came to be here and yet she is calm, as though her emotions have been suspended in amber. Her head is fuzzy, the thoughts clouding at the edges like breath on a mirror, but the sensation is not unpleasant. It simply is.
She walks into the next room. There is a U-shaped arrangement of kitchen units with beige cupboard doors and a spice rack filled with matching pots, each one with a circular silver lid. The cooker is an expensive make of the kind seen in the pages of interiors magazines. Beyond the kitchen is a lounge, furnished in the same neutral palette: a sofa the colour of honeycomb; rugs with grey chequered patterns; a vase on a coffee table that contains three dried branches of an honestyplant, the discs shimmering like monocle lenses. There are blankets in a basket by the fire and an open dresser lined with mismatched plates, and a television that fits into a bookshelf so that you almost wouldn’t notice it at first. The walls are hung with framed prints of flowers ripped out from long-ago botanical encyclopedias, the kind you could buy in a job lot from middlebrow antiques shops and second-hand booksellers.
Marisa decides to make herself a cup of tea and take it outside, to feel the morning sun on her face. She boils the kettle and searches in the cupboards for a teabag. There is an open packet of Yorkshire Tea in one of them and half a jug of milk in the Smeg fridge. How thoughtful, Marisa thinks, for them to have put the milk there. She isn’t sure who ‘them’ might refer to exactly. There is Jake. There is the man who gives her medicine. And then the tall woman with the blue eyes. She must ask Jake who they are, and how long they are intending to stay here. Besides, Marisa thinks, where is Kate?
The clarity she experienced last night has gone now. She can’t remember what she did to Kate, or the hallway or the bloody tiles or knocking the other woman unconscious in a fit of violent rage. She has blocked that memory out. Or maybe it has disappeared of its own accord, slipping through the cracks of her consciousness, until she is ready to examine it again. For now, it doesn’t exist in Marisa’s mind. For now, she has the immediacy of the current moment and the knowledge that she is Jake and Kate’s surrogate; that she stopped taking her medication and that something has happened to worry them. But now she is taking her pills again. She is restored to a capable self. Now they don’t need to worry. The baby is safe. This she knows in a deep, intractable part of her that no amount of outside interference can shake. The baby is fine.
She pours milk into the tea, squashing the teabag against the side of the mug with the back of a spoon. She picks up the mug and walks to the door. It is one of those old stable doors that used to open in two parts, but someone has fused them together. She presses her thumb down on the iron lever and the door gives way. It opens onto a garden. The grass is twinkling with dew. She breathes in the cool outside airand tilts her face up to the feeble sunshine, feeling its weak warmth graze her cheeks.
For the first time in a long while, she feels safe.
28
When Jake comes backto Richborne Terrace, he looks haggard. Kate makes him some hot buttered toast with raspberry jam and sits him down at the kitchen table, while she keeps up an inconsequential patter that she hopes will hide how concerned she is.
‘Kate,’ he says after a while. ‘Stop. You don’t need to make small talk with me.’
She puts the plate of toast down in front of him and sits opposite. She hears it as a rebuke.
‘Sorry,’ he says. His shoulders sag. His T-shirt smells of sweat. ‘Tell me how you are.’
‘I’m OK.’
