‘… and I’m going to have to go back to London to get to the office,’ he finishes, and she realises she has glazed over again without meaning to. It’s like asking someone for directions and not focusing on their answer and then being too embarrassed to ask again.
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I understand.’
He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses her knuckles.
‘Thank you. I’m just sorry it’s ruined our break.’
‘It hasn’t! There’s only so much sweating you can do in one weekend anyway. It’s fine, I’m ready to go.’
‘No, no, you shouldn’t have to come with me – stay here and make the most of it. We’ve got the room for another night.’
He is already gathering up his belongings from around the room, rolling up T-shirts and his pyjama bottoms into the executive case she gave him one Christmas.
‘But what about the car?’
‘I’ll go and deal with this and come back to pick you up on Sunday,’ Jake says. ‘We can stop somewhere for a pub lunch on our way back to London. Get some calories into you after this forced deprivation.’
She settles back against the pillows. Admittedly, it does sound tempting.
‘That’s a hassle for you,’ she says weakly.
‘It’s not. It would make me feel better if I knew you were here, having a nice time.’
He disappears into the bathroom and she can hear him putting his shaving cream and face-wash into his washbag.
‘I won’t have as nice a time without you.’
‘Nonsense,’ he says, coming back to the bed and nuzzling her neck. ‘I saw you eyeing up that man in the sauna yesterday. You were undressing him with your eyes.’
‘He was already undressed!’
‘Ah!’ he says, wagging his finger like Columbo. ‘So you admit it.’
She laughs and wraps her arms around his neck, drawing him close. He’s probably right: staying here for a bit longer on her own will enable her to relax properly. Plus she has her facial booked in for 3 p.m.
‘OK,’ she agrees. ‘Sounds like a plan.’
Jake leaves half an hour later, saying he’ll call her, and she waves him off quite happily, before stretching out across the double mattress and falling back asleep.
She sleeps for two more hours and is shocked, when she wakes, by the time. It has been difficult to rest at all in the last few months. No matter what time of day it is or where she finds herself, Kate’s thoughts always wander to Marisa and the baby. They don’t have another trip to Gloucestershire planned for three weeks.
Kate wraps herself tightly in her robe. One of the nice things about the spa is that you don’t have to get dressed: you can just wander around in your dressing gown. The dining room, when she reaches it, is full of similarly robed guests padding up to the brunch buffet with hair scraped back and dazed expressions on their faces as though they are members of the same peculiar cult.
She eats a gloopy bowl of Bircher muesli, accompanied by the obligatory decaffeinated coffee, and then finds a quiet spot to read the paper. Her phone is on airplane mode in her robe pocket. The spa discourages use of any mobiles in communal areas so she sneaks off to the loo to check it surreptitiously, expecting to find a message from Jake saying he got back to the office safely. There is nothing. Maybe it’s just taking a while to get through, she thinks, and slips the phone back into her pocket.
She goes for her facial and is asked to fill in a lengthy form detailing the ins and outs of her medical history. There, at the end of a series of questions about blood pressure and skin conditions, is the inevitable ‘Are you or is there any chance you could be pregnant?’ She ticks the box for ‘no’ and resists the temptation to write ‘… but it’s a long story’.
Her therapist is called Kasia, a neat, diminutive woman with soft brown eyes, wearing a black uniform with a Nehru collar. Kate is led down a long corridor and ushered into a treatment room, wheregeneric pan-pipe music is playing and the air is softly scented with herbs and citrus. Kasia leaves the room so that Kate can get comfortable and as she lies back on the massage table, she notices that the towels are heated. She closes her eyes and, when Kasia starts sweeping the tips of her cool fingers in circular motions across her cheeks and up to her forehead, she feels herself falling asleep.
Afterwards, her skin glows when she looks at it in the bedroom mirror. She lies back on the bed and lazily flicks on the television. She checks her phone – still nothing from Jake. It’s unusual, but not worryingly so. She places her mobile on the bedside table and resolves not to look at it for at least another hour. She refuses to be the kind of girlfriend who texts anxiously just because she hasn’t heard from her boyfriend when he’s probably got other things on his mind. She has never been that kind of woman before, and she is determined not to be now. She has noticed that, since everything that’s happened with Marisa, she is more likely to catastrophise even the most trivial occurrence. There’s nothing to worry about, Kate tells herself. Just be normal.
She watches a cookery programme where chefs from different parts of the country compete to make dishes in a banquet, and then she watches a quiz where celebrities she doesn’t recognise compete to make fools of themselves, and then she makes herself a cup of tea and contemplates going for a swim.
She looks at her phone. Still no text. She’s cross now and impatiently grabs it from the charging port and finds Jake’s name in her recent calls. The dialling tone sounds. Once. Twice. Three times. He picks up on the fourth.
‘Kate?’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’
She feels immediately silly.
