‘The dentist was good?’
‘Yeah.’ She went to a private dentist yesterday to get a mould made for her new prosthetic tooth. The bruise on her head has healed. She’s sleeping better since her meeting with Jas, which she told Jake all about over the phone while he was in Gloucestershire. He said it made sense, given what Marisa is like now that she’s back on her medication – ‘So docile,’ he told Kate, whispering so as not to wake his parents in the next-door bedroom. ‘It’s as if she has no memory of this other person she was or of what she did to you.’
Back in London, Kate cleaned out Marisa’s room. She hoovered the floor, washed down the walls and the window, which had sticky imprints all over the glass. She threw out the leftover takeaway cartons and stripped the bed and left a scented candle lit in there for several hours. By the end of her efforts, the room seemed almost normal again and she could kid herself that nothing untoward had happened. Thegothic horror of a week earlier had receded into the distance and now belonged to another era.
She is not angry with Marisa. Neither of them are. They simply want her to be all right, this is what Kate keeps telling herself. That’s why it makes sense to keep Marisa where she is, they agree. That’s why Jake’s parents are monitoring her progress and ensuring she stays at the cottage. It’s for her own good, they decide. It’s for their baby’s protection. They have to do what they have to do.
‘So what was she like when you left her?’ Kate asks.
Jake shrugs. When he moves, he does so slowly, as though each muscle is a sandbag being hauled into place.
‘She seemed perfectly fine. That’s the strangest part of it. Back to the Marisa we met and liked and trusted, just like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘The power of medicine, I guess.’
‘And she can’t remember most of it?’
‘She remembers stopping taking the drugs almost as soon as she moved in, but that’s it.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Kate has heard this before, in multiple phone conversations with Jake over the last few days, but she needs him to repeat it in front of her. She waits for him to continue.
‘Says she wanted to prepare her body for the pregnancy, which I guess has a kind of twisted logic to it,’ he goes on. ‘To give her the benefit of the doubt, I think she was genuinely worried the drugs would damage the baby. Anyway, Dad was able to set her mind at rest on all that. Much safer to be taking them than not.’
The toast she has made him lies half eaten on the plate between them. Kate can’t remember ever having felt this distant from Jake. He is unreachable, and when she catches his eye there is none of his usual warmth there. He’s just tired, she reasons. He’s been through a lot. He’s still in shock. He’ll come back to me.
‘Can I get you something else?’ she asks.
‘You know what I really want?’
‘What?’
‘A proper drink. Do we have any whisky?’
They do. She pours it for him and puts in one of those fancy oversized square ice cubes they have in the freezer. No water.
‘But she doesn’t remember attacking me?’ Kate asks when the whisky is in his hands.
Jake drinks, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair as he swallows.
‘Nope,’ he says.
‘Convenient,’ Kate mutters under her breath.
‘Honestly, Kate, I don’t think she does. Dad says she’s likely to get these, sort of, psychotic breaks.’
Kate feels sick with the pressure of it all. The thought of her baby being this far away from her, in the belly of a woman with a history of psychosis and bipolar disorder is almost too much to bear. But she reasons that she can’t blame Marisa for her mental illness. The only person she blames is herself, for wanting a baby so much that it has led them into this situation.
‘Is it going to be OK?’ she whispers.
Jake comes to her side of the table and puts his arms around her.
‘It is, my love. It’s going to be fine. We’re through the worst.’
She presses her face into his neck, grateful for his tenderness.
‘We’ve just got to get through the next five months as best we can,’ he continues. His breath smells of peat fires. ‘Mum and Dad will keep an eye on her and we can go and visit at weekends. We need to keep her away from stress, which I think means away from this house and away from us for the rest of the pregnancy.’
‘And she’s OK with that?’
