Magpie Page 3

  ‘What on earth is all this?’

  Marisa looked up to see her mother rushing into the room, already unbuttoning her blouse in readiness to feed the infant. Her mother still had that half-asleep look and her cheek was wrinkled where the edge of a cushion had pressed into her face.

  ‘Shush now, darling, shush, Mummy’s here.’

  She lifted Anna out of the cot and kissed her cheek with excruciating tenderness. Marisa started to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just wanted to see …’

  Her mother looked at Marisa absent-mindedly. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked, briskly, before lifting her breast out of her bra. She squeezed the nipple into the baby’s mouth but Anna wouldn’t settle and kept twisting her head out of the way.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked Marisa.

  ‘I wanted to see …’ Marisa started. And then she realised, quickly, with a child’s certain intuition, that there would be no way of explaining the experiment. That in order to preserve the sliver of maternal affection she still felt worthy of, she would have to lie. She stopped crying and the last two tears stilled and dried on her cheeks as if she had commanded it.

  ‘Anna was crying and so I came to see if I could make her stop so we wouldn’t wake you up,’ Marisa replied, the mistruth coming with frightening ease. It was the first big lie she’d ever told.

  ‘That’s so thoughtful of you, thank you, darling.’

  But she said it in a distracted way that meant it didn’t really count. All her focus was now on getting the baby to feed. Her mother sat in the nursing chair by the window, holding Anna close. Marisa watched the baby crying loudly, then more quietly, then hiccoughing to a stop and greedily taking the nipple between her lips and she thought how strange it was that two separate entities could be so connected, as if they were just one big human, pulsing with a life that did not involve her.

  She left the room without saying anything and then she placed the pin back in exactly the right compartment in her mother’s sewing box and no one noticed.

  3

  They decided to start trying for a family straight away. Marisa stopped taking birth control. When she saw the metallic rectangular packets of her pill, un-popped in the bottom of her washbag each morning, she felt a sense of rightness, a twinge of satisfaction that she was doing something so grown-up.

  ‘I can’t wait to have a baby,’ Jake blurted out one night over dinner. ‘I know that sounds weird.’ He swept back his hair, and left his hand resting at the back of his neck.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Marisa protested. ‘Why would it?’

  ‘Blokes aren’t meant to say stuff like that.’

  ‘That’s silly.’

  She had made macaroni cheese because he had told her once that it was his favourite childhood meal, and she had a recipe that used four different types of cheese and salty lardons sizzled up in the frying pan. She picked one of the lardons up and popped it in her mouth, licking the grease off her fingertips.

  ‘I can’t wait either and I don’t care if that makes me sound weird.’

  She smiled and reached across to stroke the top of his hand. He slid it away to pour her some more wine and their fingers bumped awkwardly against each other.

  ‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘Clearly I’m far too excited.’

  He tipped the wine bottle towards her glass, but she covered it with her palm.

  ‘No. Thank you. But … if we’re serious about this …’

  ‘You’re right. You’re right. Of course.’

  He placed the bottle back on its coaster and she could tell he was pleased. He was still in his work suit, although he had taken the jacket off and it hung from the back of the dining chair. He had loosened the tie as soon as he came through the door. The corners of his eyes were creased with tiredness. There had been a new deal going through at work, she knew, and the whole process had been stressful, but he never liked to talk about his job, instead asking Marisa how her day had been.

  ‘How’s the new book commission coming along?’ he asked, rolling up his sleeves before tucking into the food.

  ‘Yeah, great. You know, it makes such a difference having that room to work in – the light is just gorgeous.’

  ‘What’s the kid’s name for this one?’

  ‘Moses.’ She rolled her eyes. It was a source of amusement to both of them how the monied upper classes had turned towards the Old Testament as inspiration for their progeny’s names.

  She told him about the latest panel she’d been painting – a complicated scene involving twists of the princess’s braided hair. He forked pasta into his mouth as she talked and held her gaze, as if she were the most important person in the world to him, which, Marisa realised with a jolt of pure love, she was.

  ‘It’s difficult to get the texture right. Hair’s tricky to paint.’

  ‘This is what I like about you,’ Jake said. ‘You introduce me to a whole new world I wouldn’t have a clue about otherwise. Hair being complicated to paint. Huh. Who’d have thought it?’

  Despite Jas’s warning, Marisa enjoyed the fact that she and Jake were still getting to know each other in this intimate way. Every day under the same roof was another layer unpeeled. With every stripping back, their oneness felt more solid, as if revelation were also fortification.

  Marisa cleared the plates, stacking them on top of each other. His was wiped clean. Hers still had remnants on it. She’d been talking too much.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Jake said. ‘Let me,’ and he lifted the plates from her, stroking her hand as he did so.

  He was not a tactile man. Jake did not like to walk arm in arm while strolling down the street or to kiss her at home even when there was nobody watching. Still, she thought, as she watched him bend to load the dishwasher, she would rather have the straightforwardness of his love than any amount of superficial tactility.

  He put the kettle on. She took pleasure in watching him move, the reassuring heft of his broad shoulders and the stockiness of his legs, the hardness of his muscular thighs. Her mind wandered to them making love, her legs wrapped around his back and him thrusting into her, biting the lobe of her ear as she felt the undiluted force of him inside her. She had never felt such a physical connection with any man. Her previous lovers had, she now realised, been too pliant and unsure of themselves. She had an image in her mind’s eye of Jake’s head, dipping down between her legs, his tongue circling her clitoris, intently focused on the task of making her wet. She thought of him flipping her over onto her front and guiding his way into her from behind so that her insides felt stretched and complete, as if everything had slotted into place.

  ‘Penny for them,’ he said, standing behind the kitchen island.

  ‘Mmm?’ Marisa glanced towards him. ‘Sorry, miles away. I was just …’

  ‘Yes?’ Jake cocked his eyebrow flirtatiously and she knew he was imagining exactly the same as she was.

  ‘Thinking,’ she grinned.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’

  The next morning, Jake got up early to go to work. She slept in so she didn’t see him at breakfast. She padded downstairs and put a capsule in the coffee machine, which gurgled and spat out an espresso. Light filtered through the sliding doors and on the lawn outside were two magpies, strutting around each other, pecking the grass with jittery movements as if they knew they were being watched. She remembered the first time she’d come to see the house and the bird that had flown indoors.

  One for sorrow, Marisa thought, two for joy. It was a sign, she told herself. She might be pregnant already, the glowing seed of it taking root in her womb. For a long time after her mother left, Marisa had thought she didn’t want children of her own. She felt so lonely with her father and confused by the unpredictable nature of his domestic routine that she nurtured a spiky resentment against her sister Anna, blaming he
r for everything that had happened. It had all been fine before the baby came along.

  She had once tried to talk to her father about it, but although he was a kind man, who loved her in his own way, he had been undone by his marriage ending and pottered around the creaking house with a permanently distracted air.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said in bed one evening, when he shuffled into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight. He was wearing a dirty bathrobe tied with a coloured length of rope and on his feet were a pair of red knitted socks that she remembered her mother using every Christmas for stockings left at the end of her bed.

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Did Anna make Mummy leave?’

  Her father looked startled and his watery eyes widened.

  ‘What a strange question,’ he said as he sat on the edge of her bed, too far away for her to touch him. ‘She’s just a baby. Anna couldn’t make your mother do anything she didn’t want to do.’ And then, in a quieter, more defeated voice, he added: ‘No one could.’

  Marisa actually wanted a reply to a different question altogether, one she was too afraid to ask. She nodded her head in what she hoped was a grown-up way.

  ‘I understand, Daddy,’ Marisa said, even though she didn’t.

  He pressed down on the mattress to lever himself upwards. As he walked towards her bedroom door, she experienced a late surge of courage.

  ‘But Daddy,’ she said.

  He stopped, resting one hand on the doorknob, and waited.

  ‘Do you … do you … miss them?’

  She felt a sob rising up her gullet and had to swallow hard.

  ‘I do,’ he said, without turning round. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She thought her father would come back and comfort her but instead he said ‘Hmph,’ like the sound the sofa would make if you sat on it too heavily, and he walked out of her bedroom. Moments later, she could hear him brushing his teeth and running a bath. Shortly after that, the hallway light switched off.

  She lay awake for a long time, feeling the slug-trail of tears on her face, and she made a promise to herself that she would never talk about it again. She would pretend not to mind, and in this way, she would grow strong and careless and no one else would ever be able to hurt her.

  So Marisa had never wanted to be a mother. But then, at some point in her mid-twenties, without any explicit reason for a change of heart, she realised that having her own baby would be a way of reclaiming the past and making it better. It became something she wanted very much indeed.

  And so she had signed up to every single app and website and forum she could. She was strategic, choosing only to pursue the people who had openly stated their seriousness about having children. Everyone had been a disappointment until Jake.

  She drank her coffee, sitting on one of the Scandinavian-designed chairs at the long kitchen dining table. The legs were spindly and angled but the chairs were more comfortable than they looked. She finished the espresso and, invigorated by caffeine, she went upstairs to the studio. She took out a fresh sheet of watercolour paper. She’d forgotten to stock up on the 300gsm, so each morning she had been undertaking the laborious task of stretching sheets for the next day’s painting. She took her plastic tray, walked up to the master bathroom, and filled it a few inches, holding it gingerly as she walked back downstairs to the studio.

  She set out the wooden board on her drawing table, and cut the tape to size. She pressed the sheet of paper down to the base of the plastic tray, feeling the coolness of the water lapping at her wrists. Stretching paper like this was time-consuming but Marisa liked the meditative process of it. It was a task that took exactly as long as it took. There was no rushing it.

  She wetted the board with a sponge, lifted the paper out by one corner, allowing the excess to drip off. She bent the sheet, the bottom of it curving as she lowered it onto the board. Then she moistened the brown tape and stuck it along each edge, gently running her fingers over it to make sure all the air bubbles were removed but not so forcefully that it stretched the tape. When she was satisfied, Marisa put it to one side where she would leave it to dry overnight.

  She returned to the scene she’d been working on, with the princess high up in a grey-bricked tower, her blonde hair tumbling down to the ground in a long plait. She flicked her brush in the jam jar of water and dropped the tip into pink paint and started with the princess’s expression: her mouth an ‘o’ of surprise and anticipation as she waited for Prince Moses to climb up and save her. Marisa gave the princess blue eyes and freckled cheeks. The prince was trickier and had to be painted with brown, curly hair, tufts of it sticking out at angles. She had a photo of Moses propped up on her desk and tried as much as possible to make the prince look like an idealised version of him. Real-life Moses was plump, with an unfortunate overbite that Marisa glossed over as she worked, subtly improving the child’s features and getting quiet satisfaction from doing so.

  It was as she was painting his left eye, making it look ever so slightly less bulbous and staring than it did in the photo, that the doorbell rang. She sat up, startled. The doorbell had never rung before while she’d been in the house. Her shoulders tensed. Marisa didn’t like to be interrupted mid-flow. She listened intently, wondering whether whoever it was would turn and go away. It must be charity leafletters, she thought, or Jehovah’s Witnesses trying their luck or … The doorbell sounded again.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said out loud, dropping her brush into the water pot where wisps of brown paint stained the liquid. Prince Moses would just have to wait.

  She ran downstairs in the sandals she always wore when she worked – comfortable, Germanic things with moulded footbeds that held the shape of her sole exactly. The front door had a spy-hole three-quarters of the way up the wood. Marisa pressed her eye to it and blinked. She could make out a female form, an older woman with her back turned to her.

  She opened the door.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  The woman turned around. She was tall, elegant, probably about sixty. Her face had the delicate sheen of expensive skincare. She was wearing discreet make-up: a touch of mascara, a dusting of blush and a pinky-red lipstick. Along each eyelid, a contour of shimmery beige powder.

  ‘You must be Marisa,’ the woman said, unsmiling.

  ‘Yes,’ Marisa said for the second time.

  ‘I’m Jake’s mother, Annabelle.’ She held out her hand with such grace that Marisa almost expected her to be wearing gloves, despite the warm summer weather. Marisa shook her hand, feeling the bright, hard pressure of a signet ring on her little finger.

  ‘Oh! It’s such a pleasure to meet you at last!’

  Marisa was a flurry of exclamation. Annabelle assessed her coolly from the doorstep,

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you …’ Marisa continued and everything she said sounded foolish and unnecessary. Stop speaking, she told herself. Just shut up. ‘Were you in the neighbourhood, or … to what do we – I mean, I – owe the honour?’

  Why was she talking like this? She realised she was nervous. Jake was close to his mother but evasive about her in their conversations.

  ‘Things with my mother are a bit …’ he said on one of their first dates. ‘Let’s just say she’s a tricky character.’

  ‘How so?’

  He had hesitated. ‘She struggles to see things from other people’s points of view.’

  She hadn’t pursued it. She and Jake existed in such a bubble that she had never felt the need to meet any of his family. Besides, it had all been so quick.

  ‘Are you going to invite me in?’ Annabelle was saying. ‘I’d be most grateful.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Sorry. Forgetting myself there.’

  She ushered Annabelle in and gestured down the tiled hallway.

  ‘The kitchen’s in the basement,’ she explained. Annabelle walked down the stairs with h
er shoulders pressed back, one finger on the banister as if assessing it for dust. Marisa followed in her wake, her sandals feeling ugly compared to Annabelle’s chic espadrilles.

  ‘I just fell in love with the original features,’ Marisa said, lapsing into meaningless chit-chat to counteract the unsettling silence. ‘The cornicing …’

  ‘I shouldn’t think that’s original,’ Annabelle replied, glancing at the ceiling rose around the light fitting. ‘It’s most likely a later addition made to look old. I suppose a developer did the whole place up for rental, did they?’

  ‘Um … I don’t …’

  ‘Looks like it. These floorboards aren’t real wood.’

  Annabelle walked deeper into the kitchen, towards the glass doors giving into the garden where she paused and stared at the patch of lawn.

  ‘Needs watering.’ She turned and assessed the stove. ‘Goodness gracious, what on earth is that?’

  Annabelle was pointing towards the mirrored splashback.

  ‘It’s—’

  ‘What a very strange idea, to want to look at yourself while you’re cooking.’

  Annabelle smiled, lips parting to reveal large teeth. Marisa was reminded of the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in a storybook she had owned as a child.

  ‘Are we sitting here?’ Annabelle pointed at the kitchen table, which now looked shabby and pockmarked with mug rings. There was a scattering of breadcrumbs at one end where Marisa hadn’t cleaned up properly after her breakfast.

  ‘Yes. Can I get you a cup of—’

  ‘Coffee. Black.’ Annabelle sat down, unwinding her printed Indian shawl from her shoulders. ‘Thanks.’

  Although Annabelle didn’t much like it, the mirrored splashback gave Marisa the chance to assess the woman she already thought of as her mother-in-law. Under the shawl, Annabelle was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned to reveal papery, tanned skin and a long gold necklace threaded with semi-precious stones. Her pale trousers stopped just above her ankle and were frayed at the hem in a way that looked fashionable rather than ragged. Her hair was white-blonde, swept back into a chignon kept in place by a tortoiseshell clip. Her profile was that of a ballerina in repose: jutting nose, chin tilted upwards, taut cheeks and an alertness that suggested a woman used to being looked at. She must have been very striking, Marisa thought, but there was something that stopped her being fully beautiful, some sense of unease or defensiveness that you could just about make out in the vertical frown-lines between her eyebrows or the discernible clench of her jaw. It was as if Annabelle had learned how to be beautiful from the pages of a book but had never quite got the hang of it.