‘Yes, yes, fine. Just, you know, I hadn’t heard from you.’
‘Oh … sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you. Are you having a nice day?’
He seems distracted and she imagines him hunched in front of his computer screen, analysing a spreadsheet of numbers. But then she hears a whooshing sound in the background. Then another. Cars.
‘Wait, are you driving?’
‘Um. Yeah. Yeah. But don’t worry, you’re on speakerphone.’
‘You’re not in the office?’
‘No.’
‘But I just was there, I mean,’ he says. There is a ticking sound and she realises he must have turned on the indicator. ‘And now I’ve got to meet a client.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t realised you’d driven all the way in. I thought you’d go home then get the tube.’
‘No time,’ he says curtly. His tone is unconvincing.
‘Where’s your client meeting?’
‘Sorry, what was that …?’
‘Your client meeting,’ she repeats, enunciating the words even more clearly. ‘Where is it?’
‘It’s, erm, God knows – I had to put it in the satnav. In the countryside somewhere. One of those billionaire second homes, you know what it’s like.’
She doesn’t know what it’s like, Kate wants to say, but she stops herself. She’s letting her thoughts run away with her. There is no reason to be suspicious.
‘You still there?’ Jake asks, tinny on the other end of the line.
‘Yeah, still here.’
‘You know I love you, don’t you? There’s nothing to worry about, OK? Sorry I didn’t call earlier but I’ve just been busy.’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll text you later. I promise.’
When the call ends, she switches her phone off and leaves it in the room while she goes for a swim. She tells herself she won’t check it again until tomorrow and this time, she doesn’t.
30
‘Do you really think it’s a good ideato leave it so long between visits?’ she asks Jake. It is a weekday evening and he is working out in the garden.
‘I think we have to be guided by what Marisa feels comfortable with, to be honest,’ he says, panting between words. He is using a new set of complicated straps, holding one black loop in each fist, hanging back at a 45-degree angle and then pulling himself back up with a grunt. The straps are a new purchase and look like a pair of oversized car seatbelts with patches of neon material sewn on at random. Someone had recommended the workout to Jake at the gym and he had hung the straps around an iron bar, which he had installed at the weekend with large nuts and bolts in the brickwork above the garden doors. The event had required a lot of noisy drilling and afterwards, she had swept away the fine sandy drizzle of stone from the patio.
‘Are you enjoying your new contraption?’ Kate asks now, raising her voice so it can be heard from the kitchen. She pours herself a generous glass of Malbec from an already opened bottle on the counter.
‘Yup,’ he says, his voice straining. He turns around and pushes his feet through the straps, then flips into a plank position. His biceps bulge, like a mouse wriggling to escape from a python’s stomach. He launches into rapid press-ups. ‘Bodyweight. Is. Key,’ he says between breaths.
She goes outside and sits on the bench, sipping her wine while watching him. Jake’s borderline obsession with exercise has always amused her. Since the spa weekend there have been a few more unplanned absences – late nights at the office, and a work conference one weekend that necessitated an overnight stay. Before the fertilitytreatment, he regularly had business trips that took him away for several nights at a time, but he stopped going on these in order to support her and be around for appointments. Now that there is less need for his presence, the usual routine has been resumed, and she finds she is missing him in ways she didn’t expect.
After the press-ups, Jake shrugs himself into a greying hoodie with ‘Harvard’ written in an arch across the front. He has never been to Harvard but the hoodie is so old now that he can’t remember where it came from. He comes to sit next to her and she feels the heat and smell of his sweat, mossy like a forest.
‘Don’t worry about the visits,’ he says, mopping his face with a towel. ‘Let’s go down this Saturday if you’re stressed.’
‘I’m not stressed, I just …’ She lets the thought hang.
