On cue, Jake launches into a little speech about how grateful they both are and how they couldn’t have navigated this without her. Annabelle pretends she doesn’t need to hear it, but she lets Jake carry on talking and Kate watches as she grows rosy and contented, fattened like a maggot by all the compliments.
When Jake comes to the end of his impromptu encomium, there is a significant silence. Kate has just polished off the last of her gin when she realises she is meant to speak. Annabelle is looking at her, her legs crossed and her eyebrows lightly raised.
‘Yes … just to, um, second all of that. We’re so, so grateful, Annabelle. To both of you. Thank you.’
Annabelle lowers her head, as though graciously accepting an honour.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’ll always be here for you, as you know. But it is nice to hear all of those things. We’ll get through it. We’ll get you your baby, that’s the main thing.’
Kate bites her tongue. She glances at Jake, who is sitting next to his mother, and she gets the most disconcerting feeling that she has been discussed privately, behind her back.
At that moment, Chris walks into the kitchen through the French windows.
‘Hello, hello,’ he says, shoulders sloping forwards slightly so that she can see the bald spot on the top of his head.
‘Shoes!’ Annabelle says and Chris obligingly unlaces his brogues and puts them to one side of the doormat so as not to trail mud across the tiles.
He kisses Kate on the cheek and shakes Jake’s hand.
‘She’s doing very well. I’ve told her you’re here and she’s looking forward to seeing you. You in particular, Kate.’
He smiles at her, his face benign, his manner as gentle and quiet as ever.
‘Thank you,’ she says, wondering if she will ever be able to stop saying the same two words over and over again to Jake’s parents.
‘No need to thank me. It’s what doctors do, isn’t it?’
Kate starts to cry. She didn’t mean to, but she can’t help it. Jake puts his arm around her but it is Chris who steps forward and proffers afabric handkerchief he has fished out of his trouser pocket. It is wrinkled but clean and she presses it to her face.
‘There, there,’ Chris says. ‘There’s no need to cry. It’s all in hand.’
‘It’s been a terrible shock,’ Annabelle comments to no one in particular before getting up to check a bubbling lasagne that has been cooking in the Aga.
Kate hands back the handkerchief.
‘You OK ?’ Jake asks. ‘Take a few deep breaths.’
I’m not a child, she wants to reply, but she doesn’t.
‘Let’s go see Marisa,’ she says.
Jake stands and helps her up from the window seat.
‘Don’t be too long,’ Annabelle says. ‘The lasagne will go cold.’
The cottage is a single-storey outbuilding, converted from a set of stables. To get to it, they walk past the rusting croquet hoops and the lopsided bird table. The cottage windows are small and meanly proportioned, the ledges dotted with moss. There is an untended pot of geraniums outside the front door, the stems overgrown and straggly. The air feels damp and oppressive. This side of the garden seems darker and when Kate looks overhead she sees the branches of a vast, spreading tree above, silhouetted starkly against the white afternoon sky.
Jake knocks on the door.
‘Come in,’ Marisa says, her voice muffled.
They walk inside. Marisa is sitting on an armchair by an unlit wood-burning stove. She is cradling her belly – more pronounced now than it was even a fortnight ago. Her blonde hair falls in tendrils over her shoulders, partly shielding her face from them. She is wearing a cream shirt and white linen trousers. Kate realises that these are not her clothes, that they have been lent to her by Annabelle.
When Marisa turns to them, she smiles in a way that Kate can only think of as beatific. The pain and rage that was there before has gone, to be replaced by unlined serenity. There are no dark circles under her eyes. Her face has lost its pinched quality and her cheeks have filled out. The Thomas Hardy milkmaid is back in abundance, Kate thinks, and although she should be relieved, she is also suspicious of the quickness of this transformation. In this light, Marisa looks slightly unreal, as though she is being inhabited by someone else.
‘Marisa,’ Jake says. ‘You look so well.’
She levers herself up out of the armchair and comes over to them. Her walk is still the same as it always was: ungainly, as though she has just dismounted a horse. Marisa spreads her arms wide and before Kate can register what is about to happen, Marisa is hugging her. Kate feels the tautness of the other woman’s pregnant stomach and smells lemon verbena coming from her freshly washed hair.
