‘You’re right,’ she replies, allowing herself to be convinced.
He books a spa an hour’s drive from London. They are offering a weekend package deal, which includes what the website describes as ‘two mini-treatments’ – facials and massages at twenty-five minutes each. Anything else is ‘extra’.
‘Do they feed us?’ Kate asks, only half joking. ‘Or is that extra too?’
‘All meals included,’ Jake replies, not taking his eyes from the bright white flicker of the computer screen. ‘Vegan and macrobiotic options.’
‘No alcohol, I’m guessing. Maybe we should take our own?’
‘Ha.’
Jake double clicks on the superior double room option, then enters his card details.
‘Congratulations!’ the screen flashes up. ‘We look forward to welcoming you for your stay at Charlton Manor.’
‘Terrible font,’ Kate says, pointing out the flouncy grey copperplate. Jake is a font geek.
He laughs.
‘The worst.’
Charlton Manor is set on the edge of a large lake and as they drive to the car park, a darting movement catches Kate’s eye and she turns just in time to see a heron separate itself from the reeds with a sudden startle of wings and beak, its brown-grey silhouette stark against the dusty sky.
She recalls a drawing on the wall in Mr Abadi’s office, the corners of the paper misshapen by four small bulges of Blu Tack. It was of a stork, flying with a baby tucked into a polka-dot handkerchief sling knotted around its beak. The lines were firm, black and adult, but a child had clearly coloured it in with scribbles of yellow and red and blue pencil. ‘Thank you from the Traynor family’ was written across the bottom in block capitals.
The drawing had stayed with her, and afterwards she had looked up the significance of storks as harbingers of birth. She found an ancient Greek myth involving the goddess Hera who grew jealous of a beautiful queen and transformed her into a crane. The heartbroken queen sought to retrieve her child from Hera’s clutches, which is why theGreeks depicted the bird with a baby dangling from its beak. Later retellings mistakenly identified the bird as a stork. In Egyptian mythology, she learned, storks had been associated with the birth of the world, but again this was an error: it had been a heron in the original legend.
Storks and cranes and herons. She is about to say something about it to Jake, but doesn’t. She decides that this weekend, she will try not to talk about anything baby-related.
The spa lobby is a paean to faux beige marble, every surface unnaturally shiny and veined with pink. A uniformed man with a name badge that says his name is ‘Jamaar’ takes details of their car numberplate and asks whether they would like a morning newspaper. They are offered a detoxifying juice consisting of carrot, orange and ginger which, when Kate sips it, seems to fizz in her mouth with a fermented quality.
‘Lovely,’ she says, wincing.
Their room is frigid with air conditioning. It overlooks the internal courtyard rather than the lake and there are no biscuits on the tea-tray, only herbal teabags. The double bed is overstuffed with cushions, arranged in a pyramid of descending size order. The en-suite is small and windowless and hanging on the back of the bathroom door are two of the requisite white fluffy robes, each one embroidered with CM in the same curlicued copperplate as the website. Instead of slippers, they are provided with unforgiving plastic flip-flops which are cold and heavy against her feet.
‘Shall we go for a sauna?’ Jake asks.
‘Sure.’
She wants to stay in their room, lie on the bed watching TV and for him to hold her close and be affectionate but she puts on her one-piece bathing suit without murmur. The suit is an old one, bought cheaply online a few summers ago. It has red and white stripes, the material bobbling at the edges. It’s a bathing suit she wears for function rather than form and she regrets bringing it now, wishing instead she had chosen something that Jake would find more appealing. She doesn’t usually think like this. It had always been obvious to Kate that Jakefound her attractive. Although he paid attention to her clothes and liked her style, he would compliment her when she least expected it – coming out of the shower in the morning or on her way back from the gym, her hair stiff with sweat. She can’t remember the last time he noticed her physical appearance.
They sit and sweat in the sauna, heat prickling against her skin. She supposes this is the kind of thing they won’t be able to do when they have a baby, at least for a few years. An older man is in there with them – bare-chested, his flesh loose, slabs of his skin overlapping each other like some geological curiosity. Kate has always found it odd how most British people are uncomfortable making eye contact on public transport and yet will quite readily strip half naked and sit in a confined, airless space to sweat with strangers. The man levers himself upright, his bones creaking as he does so. He pushes open the door and a welcome gust of fresh air breezes across Kate’s reddening face.
Jake ladles more water on the stones without asking.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks eventually.
‘Yes, of course,’ he says too quickly. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, nothing really. You just seem to have something on your mind.’
He looks at her then and the corners of his eyes crease up in that familiar way.
‘Sorry, no. No, there’s nothing wrong. I guess I’m just a bit … you know, distracted.’
She reaches out to massage the back of his neck.
‘That’s understandable. I am too. But everything’s OK. Marisa’s fine.’
