Marisa shakes her head prettily.
‘No, honestly, I’d be too embarrassed. It’s not ready yet.’
‘I understand,’ Jake says, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his arms with a groan. ‘It’s artistic prerogative. You must only show your work when it’s ready.’
Kate snorts. It’s all such nonsense. She’s fed up of everyone pandering to Marisa’s every whim, as though one misplaced word might send her teetering back into the abyss. It is hurtful, listening to her boyfriend and his mother suck up to Marisa as if Kate weren’t also sitting right there. It’s as if she doesn’t have any place here. It’s as if they’d find it easier if she didn’t exist.
The thought settles around her shoulders like a harness, buckles tightening themselves across her chest, and she realises her hands are gripping the arms of her chair, fingers curled under the edge of the wood like claws.
‘Are you OK, Kate?’ Marisa asks. When Kate looks up, she is met by Marisa’s gaze, a faint frown-line between her eyes. ‘You look a bit pale.’
‘What? No. I’m fine.’ She releases her hands and forces herself to breathe. ‘Sorry, I was miles away. Just thinking about this thing at work that’s stressing me out – there’s a big PR push next week before the Toronto Film Festival.’
The company had taken on too many films at the same time and she and her colleagues were currently besieged by deadlines. The time difference with Toronto didn’t help either. It was her fault, as she was the one in charge of shaping their promotional schedule, but she had wanted to prove something. She had wanted to show herself that she had worth outside of the surrogacy; that she was still good at her job.
‘There are a lot of premieres to organise apart from anything else, and you know what these high-maintenance types are like,’ she is telling Annabelle now. She doesn’t know why she’s gabbling. She wants to stop talking but can’t. ‘And, well, it’s hectic,’ she concludes, weakly.
‘Gracious,’ Annabelle says. ‘I hope you’ll start winding down before the baby comes. You can’t be handling all that with a newborn.’
‘Thank you, Annabelle,’ Kate says, with deliberate politeness. ‘I’m sure we’ll be OK.’
‘It wasn’t like that in my day. All you working women, with your full-time careers, wanting to have it all …’
Kate offers to make the teas. She turns on the cold water tap and watches it run for longer than she needs to before filling the kettle. Jake comes to help her, gathering mugs from the cupboard and loose-leaf tea from the pantry. He taps her on the elbow and mouths, ‘You OK?’ She nods.
‘Right, well I’ll get on with clearing the table then,’ Annabelle says.
Jake and Marisa simultaneously protest.
‘Oh no, you mustn’t do that, let me …’
‘You’ve made the whole lunch, Annabelle – I’ll clear up …’
But Annabelle has already started collecting the empty bowls, stacking each one with a bright, clattering sound that seems specifically designed to draw attention to itself. Marisa, hoisting herself out of her seat, lumbers over to the dishwasher and opens the door, sliding out the cutlery tray in readiness.
It is as she is waiting for the kettle to boil that Kate turns around and sees the two women standing side by side in front of the dishwasher. From the back, they look almost identical in their navy tops and their light, pinned-up hair. Both of them are broad-shouldered and strong-limbed, narrow waists curving into wider hips exactly as women are biologically designed to be. The similarity is so pronounced that Kate wonders why she has never properly noticed it until now. She shivers and looks away. Heat from the kettle has steamed the window. Her vision blurs and when she makes the tea, her hand shakes as she pours.
31
After that, Kate decidesto stay away from the red-brick house in the country as much as possible and Jake handles the day-to-day dealings with Annabelle. Being around Annabelle has always made Kate question her own strength of mind, and she feels drained by every encounter. If she doesn’t interact with her, Annabelle loses the power to hurt her, Kate reasons.
Jake tells her that she’s taken his mother’s comments out of context, that she’s in danger of losing perspective by ‘obsessing over every tiny perceived slight’ and that she needs to give herself space ‘for her own peace of mind’. Jake says all this kindly, insisting he is on her side, and she nods silently, not wanting to make the situation harder than it currently is. Besides, they both end up wanting the same thing, which is for Kate not to be around his mother more than she absolutely has to be. But inside, Kate is worried.
She calls Ajesh. They haven’t seen each other for months. After he brought Jake to her thirtieth, they hung out as a threesome a few times, but something about it didn’t quite work. It always felt as if one person never fully belonged, as though the re-establishment of different lines of intimacy could never be triangulated.
Kate hadn’t really noticed when they fell out of each other’s lives. In the early days of her romance with Jake, the relationship between the two of them had seemed the most important thing in her life, and a lot of her friends had fallen by the wayside. She only became aware of what had happened when it was already too late: her contemporaries were having babies at just the same time as she was having to contend with infertility and surrogacy and she found she had no time or inclination to keep up with WhatsApp groups and shared voicenotes andregular coffees after yoga or evening glasses of Pinot. She was an unreliable friend, and perhaps a resentful one. She had never got the knack of cultivating a closeness to other women. They seemed to feel that Kate didn’t need them, but she did – it was simply that she could not express her own neediness without feeling bitter about their uncomplicated paths to motherhood.
Ajesh was different. He had no desire to settle down and had never had a girlfriend for longer than six months. His own unpredictability meant that Kate didn’t feel judged for her failure to return phone calls or emails. He would dip in and out of her life at irregular intervals, having just returned from a hiking trip around Bhutan or an Ayurvedic retreat in Somerset, and they would stay in touch in a tenuous sort of way.
When she calls him and he answers, and she hears his voice for the first time in ages, she realises she is lonely and longing for his flirty irreverence. Everything else has become so serious. She wants Ajesh to remind her she exists as her own person; that she is fun and not just insecure and preoccupied.
When she meets him for coffee on the Southbank, she tells him about her dealings with Annabelle, without going into detail about anything that has happened with Marisa. She likes Ajesh but she doesn’t fully trust him, and she and Jake have agreed that the fewer people who know about Marisa’s breakdown, the better. It is precarious enough already, without unwanted outside intervention. So she explains that Marisa is staying in the countryside with Jake’s parents, so that she can get regular fresh air and be out of London, and so that they can maintain a closeness to her without overstepping any boundaries. She brings him up to date on Annabelle’s antics.
‘Mate, it’s not good for you to be around toxic people,’ Ajesh says. They are sitting on the outside terrace of the Royal Festival Hall so that Ajesh can smoke.
‘Want one?’ he asks as he rolls himself a thin cigarette. It is windy and yet he licks the paper with practised ease, not losing a single wisp of tobacco. At university, Ajesh was always the best person to roll joints at a party. He would call them ‘dense but chic’ which got shortened to ‘DBC’ in their friendship group.
‘No thanks.’
