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Over the next few weeks,Kate tries as much as possible to ignore her own mounting unease. She clears out the rest of Marisa’s room and repaints it, going to her local hardware store for roller trays and brushes. She puts on old leggings and a cheap T-shirt and does it all over the course of a single weekend, lining the skirting board with tape, covering the floor with newspaper and using a different thickness of paintbrush for the fiddly bits around the light switch and the shelving unit. She listens to podcasts as she does so – mother and baby interviews with successful bloggers-turned-authors who talk about creative stimulation and at-home crafting. She tries not to think of Marisa’s empty gaze, the detachment she noticed when they saw her. When the room is done, it smells fresh and new and looks brighter than before, and Kate is calmer for having done something tangible. The painting helped her to erase her memories of the past Marisa and concentrate on the one they now spoke to every other day on the phone, who said all the right things about eating healthily and Annabelle giving her spinach from the vegetable garden and yes, she was fine, thank you, and no, they didn’t need to worry about her.
Jake is relieved. Kate is disquieted by the rapidity of the change, but she tells herself she’s over-analysing. She admires Jake’s ability to compartmentalise. He is able to move on, closing the lid on the messiness of the recent past to focus almost entirely on the future and the arrival of their longed-for baby. Sometimes, she wonders: what else would he be able to box away like this?
The more she thinks this, the more there grows an unacknowledged distance between them. One month passes in this way, then two. Time assumes an elastic, gloopy quality and the seasons merge into one. Sheforgets to check her watch and goes to bed earlier, waking when the sun rises instead of sleeping in. She gets to work before anyone else is in the office, drafting press releases and arranging screenings weeks ahead of time. At one junket, she sits in on the day’s interviews with the film’s star and she stares out of the window, wondering what kind of mother she will be, whether she will be able to cope with the sleepless nights and the endless loads of laundry. Will her child love her as much as she will love them? Will becoming parents drive a further wedge between her and Jake? How will she know what to do? What if she cannot soothe her baby’s cries? What if, deep down, her baby knows Kate is not its real mother?
She lets the interview overrun and a colleague has to knock on the door to tell the journalist their time is up. Kate apologises to the actor, a man with speckled grey hair in his fifties who is still getting action-hero parts that would be denied his female contemporaries.
‘Just don’t let it happen again,’ the actor says, his tone one of forced reasonableness.
In the past, she would have been mortified. Now, she no longer cares. Everything other than the baby seems trivial.
They make regular visits to Gloucestershire, where lunch with the parents is combined with an afternoon spent in the cottage with Marisa. They go for scans and check-ups at the local hospital with Chris in attendance. They find out they are expecting a boy, which makes Jake cry and Kate laugh with delight at how real it all is. Once, they drive Marisa back to London with them for a catch-up with Mr Abadi, but Kate spends the whole length of the journey being terrified that Marisa might hurl herself out of the car. Mr Abadi, genial as ever, is pleased with the pregnancy’s progress. When he asks them if they have any concerns, or anything they want to tell him that might have happened in the interim since their last visit, all three of them shake their heads and fail to catch each other’s eye. They drive back to Gloucestershire that same evening and Kate is relieved to hand Marisa back over to the care of Jake’s parents. She feels bad about this, as if she is lacking some maternal spirit that should make her want to be next to her baby at all times, and she worries that it means she won’t bondwith her son when he arrives. It is another thing she tries not to think about: the fact that her child will have no genetic link to her. ‘Your baby is your baby as soon as you hold it in your arms,’ the internet forums keep saying. And yet, she can’t shake the worry that their son will inherit Marisa’s mental illness. Everything seems so fragile, as though it could be taken away from her in an instant – because it almost was.
‘You worry too much,’ Jake says when she tries to speak to him about it. ‘It’s all going to be fine. The best thing you can do is relax and make sure you have plenty of sleep now before the baby comes.’
It’s not that he is dismissive, exactly; more that in his eagerness to placate her, and his insistence that everything will be fine, Kate feels her fears are being sidelined as unnecessary or overwrought. Is she being hysterical? Or is Jake simply making her feel like that? She isn’t sure any more; has lost faith in her own judgement. Their joint reliance on Annabelle and Chris also means that she feels outnumbered three to one. They are the family. She is on the outside.
As if to compound the feeling of exclusion, Annabelle calls one evening and delivers unexpected news. Kate listens in while Jake murmurs and says, ‘No, no I understand … yes of course.’ When she asks to speak to Annabelle herself, Jake shakes his head silently and walks into the garden, pressing his phone to his ear, shielding his mouth with a cupped hand so that she can’t even make out the words formed by his lips.
When he comes back inside, he tells her that Annabelle feels Marisa is ‘unsettled’.
‘Apparently it’s all sinking in – what she did, I mean,’ he explains. ‘And she’s feeling so guilty about what she’s done that she always feels she has to apologise when she sees us. To you in particular.’
‘Right.’
‘So Mum thinks it might be better if we eased off the visits. Spaced them out a bit.’
‘OK.’
Kate is clipped, a little angry that Annabelle, once again, is interfering in things that aren’t her business.
‘I honestly don’t think it’s Mum sticking her oar in,’ Jake says, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I think, as Marisa recovers, she’s becoming more aware of what she put us through and she feels … a bit … awkward, I guess?’
Kate chews at a hangnail. It has been splitting off from her cuticle for days and the pain is both sharp and precise.
‘Right,’ she says again.
‘If anything, it’s agoodsign,’ Jake insists. ‘It shows she’s getting better. We can worry less. And those trips to Gloucestershire are knackering.’
‘That’s true.’
‘So we’ll just go a bit less often, that’s all.’
Kate accepts it. She has to trust Annabelle, as much as it feels against her natural inclination to do so. And, she reasons, she can still call Marisa whenever she wants. The problem is that Marisa rarely picks up, and when Kate once asked her why, she said that the reception was terrible and often she didn’t hear her phone ringing. Kate doesn’t want to push it. She doesn’t want to push anything with anyone at the moment. One misstep and the whole edifice will come crashing down.
So Jake suggests a spa break. She laughs when he mentions it.
‘Aspabreak?’
‘Yes, why not?’
He looks at her, brow rumpled.
‘Sorry, it’s a lovely idea. I suppose it’s just a bit out of the blue given … everything.’ She stops herself saying what she really thinks. Spas and fluffy robes and cucumber-infused water belong to a past world. She isn’t in the mood, she wants to say. That’s the kind of thing unencumbered, romantically minded couples do in the first flush of a relationship, not a couple attempting to deal with the fact their surrogate has severe mental health issues.
‘That’s exactly why we should go,’ he says. ‘I’ll take care of it. Some time away will do us good before our baby boy comes. Who knows when we’ll get the chance again after he’s here?’
