Chapter I I. The house was perfect. Well, not perfect exactly, because houses never are, but the imperfections were ones Marisa could live with. The flooring, which had clearly been bought in bulk by the developer, was a shade too light, the wood laminate a touch too smooth to pass for real. The plantation shutters were plastic and layered with thin spores of dust. Someone had made the odd decision to put a bathroom on the second floor with doors that led out onto a roof terrace. Marisa stood on this terrace, her sandals shadowed on biscuit-colored patio stones, and she looked down to the garden below, which had a strip of lawn lined with potted plants, the soil newly turned. She noticed the quiet, which was rare for London, especially when you were this close to a main road.
When she commented on this, the woman who was showing her around nodded. "Yes, it''s got a lovely sense of calm to it." It was this that ultimately persuaded her. Marisa''s own childhood had been studded through with noise. In her memories, it was always the sound she remembered first. The discordant hesitations as her father attempted to play the piano. The slamming of an oven door, the jangle of an overloaded dishwasher shelf. The raised voices of her parents'' arguing.
The shrill caterwaul of her newborn sister''s crying. And then, when Marisa''s mother had left, baby clamped to her, the house in the countryside had fallen silent. There had been little explanation. Her mother had hugged Marisa tightly before leaving, whispering into her ear that she would return for her just as soon as she''d "got back on her feet." Marisa remembered how she looked down at her mother''s shoes, wondering what was wrong with them. They were a pair of penny loafers, the coin glinting through the oxblood leather. She had tried, once, to winkle out the penny with stubby fingers, but it hadn''t come loose. Marisa wanted to know why her mother was going.
Most of all, she wanted to know what was going to happen to her and why she was being left behind. She was seven. Her father had worn pajamas and slippers for a succession of long, stuffy days and his stubble had grown out into a patchy beard. In those sludgy, ill-defined weeks after her mother had left, Marisa tried to load the dishwasher the way her mother had liked, rinsing off the plates and putting the knives in handle-first. After a while, she grew tired of the domesticity and left the dirty crockery piled up in the sink. And then, four years later, she had been sent to boarding school and there had been a whole different set of noises to contend with. This house was the antidote to all of that, she saw now. She had examined it online, zooming in to look at the gray front door and the steps leading up to it.
The brick was the color of toasted hazelnuts. The road was, in the parlance of estate agents, "leafy" and in a prime catchment area for the local school that had been rated "outstanding" by the Office for Standards in Education. That was important, because they were going to get pregnant as soon as they moved in together. That had been the plan, and thinking back to her discussions with Jake, she felt an unspooling of tension, as if a warm stone had been placed in the palm of her hand. Jake was her safety, her berth, her rock, her anchor. She had used all these words to describe him, albeit not to his face, as he wasn''t given to shows of emotion. This was partly what had drawn her to him: his solidity was uncompromising. He showed her how much he loved her through the things that he did, rather than the words he said.
She knew Jake mistrusted overt displays of affection because he found them insincere. After Marisa''s childhood, where passion was deployed by her mother like heavy artillery in a battle with no clear end, she was relieved by Jake''s undemonstrative nature. The house felt right for them: a sanctuary of sorts, but light-filled and blank enough to imbue with their own character. The kitchen was in the original basement, every possible dividing wall knocked out so that the room stretched outward like a beach. There was a midcentury walnut table with eight spindly legged chairs, and low-slung lights with pale enamel-blue shades over the island unit. An industrial-sized cooker that looked like it could be used to launch a rocket. A fridge buffed to a perfect metallic shine, with a built-in water system that dispensed ice cubes when you slotted your glass into place. A vast television hung on the white wall, an inky-black square with a dot of red light in the corner as if it were a painting that had just been sold.
The woman said she felt Marisa was just the right person to move into the house. Marisa smiled. "These things can be so." Marisa searched for the right word. "Instinctive, I guess?" "Instinctive." The woman nodded. "Exactly." It was when the woman opened the glass doors into the garden that the bird flew in.
It swooped in low and fast so that neither of them had a chance to stop it. The woman ducked, shielding her head with her hand. Marisa winced. She hated birds. The flap of their wings. The sharpness of their beaks. The smallness of their dead pebble eyes. A magpie.
Black and white with petrol-streak purple across its feathers. The bird flapped around, panicked by its sudden incarceration. It was large, almost the size of a crow. It seemed to stare right at her. For a moment, Marisa panicked that the bird was going to launch itself at her face, but then it darted up into the corner of the ceiling farthest away from where they were standing. "Shoo!" the woman shouted, walking toward the bird, raising her arms up and down by her sides to scare it off. "Shoo!" "I don''t think--" Marisa started. She had been going to say that she didn''t think it was wise to scare it, but the bird shot off before she could finish the thought.
The tip of its wing crashed into a small, intricately painted vase on the top of the bookshelf. The vase teetered and then fell, splintering into pieces on the floor, shards of it gathering along the skirting board. Then, as if some spell had been broken, the bird seemed to understand where it was. It flew in a straight line out of the open doors, passing so close to Marisa''s face that she could feel the atomic weight of its movement in a gust of displaced breeze. It smelled mossy and slightly rotten. She imagined for a moment that she could sense the tickle of a feather, as if the magpie had grazed against her cheek in the mad flurry of flight. "Good riddance!" the woman shouted after it, sliding the doors swiftly shut. The doors slotted into place with a sucking sound, and the muted noises of faraway traffic were cut off.
The woman and Marisa existed once again in the centrifugal force of their glass-and-concrete bubble. It felt peaceful but also unnatural. "I hope that didn''t put you off," the woman said. "No." Marisa smiled. "Sorry about the vase, though." The woman waved her hand as if to show it was of no great significance. "These things happen.
" They shook hands warmly and Marisa told the woman she would have a think and then she would be in touch. In truth, she didn''t need to think about it. Jake was happy to leave decisions like this to her. He was unfussy about where they lived, he said; he just wanted her to be happy and for there to be enough room to start a family as soon as they moved in. He saw it as her domain, and although Marisa should have felt indignant at this retrograde parceling up of the domestic, she secretly liked it. On the street, she took out her phone to message him. Seen the house. Love it.
Feels right. She did not add kisses. This was not their way. She wasn''t sure if she''d hear back from him straightaway, as he was in meetings all day. "Back-to-back," he had said, warning her there might be a delay and not to worry about it. Jake worked for a consultancy firm in the city. Beyond that, Marisa had no clear idea of what he did, except she knew it was about making companies more streamlined and efficient, and there was a lot of travel involved, although not always to glamorous places. Recently, he had spent several weeks in Nottingham working for a pharmaceutical firm.
"Surprisingly good midcentury furniture shops," was all he''d said. "How are the books?" he''d ask, and she''d tell him about the orders she''d got that week via her website from doting parents or aunts or godmothers wanting personalized storybooks for their little darlings. Marisa had a range of seven stories you could choose from online--there was the sleeping-princess story, the dragon-slaying prince, the fearless adventurer, the naughty jungle monkey, and so on. You could type in the name of your child, upload a recent photograph and provide some defining characteristics, and Marisa would illustrate each book accordingly. Her website was called Telling Tales, and when it had launched last year, it was featured in some of the major glossy magazines. The Instagram account had several thousand followers and a blue tick. Marisa enjoyed the work because it was repetitive enough not to have to think too much and yet creative enough to be stimulating. It didn''t make her a fortune, despite what her carefully filtered Instagram tiles might have had people believe, and over the last few months, orders had slowed and she''d struggled to pay her rent.
Which was why, when Jake suggested they move in together, she had jumped at the chance. That, and the fact she was in love with him, obviously. "Whoa, Ris, where did you find him.