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“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret
never to be told”
The bird that gives its name to this novel is widely viewed in the UK as a bird of ill omen and those who see them are counseled to address them respectfully or even salute. A single magpie, especially one at a window, is often thought to be a harbinger of death. So it is no wonder that when Marisa, viewing the house she is about to move into with her new partner, has to duck a terrified magpie that has flown in through the window, she finds it unsettling. It is also characteristic that she denies being upset.
Marisa is in her twenties and has had a difficult life. Her mother left home when Marisa was about seven, taking her baby sister and leaving the elder child with her well-meaning but somewhat befuddled father. Now in her mid-twenties, she hopes to be about to solidify her relationship with Jake, who does something remunerative in the City, and is thinking of perhaps starting a family. She rather hopes to prove something about her mother's rejection of her when she was a child. Interestingly, she does not fix on marriage but on motherhood as the means to firm her life's path. In the meantime, she putters about the house and works on her line of bespoke picture books for children.
All seems to be going very well indeed until Jake tells her that he has lost a contract at work and they will have to take in a lodger to make up for his diminished income. The lodger is Kate, a woman in her mid-thirties, and one disturbingly comfortable about the house and especially about Jake. She makes Marisa uneasy at first and over time, increasingly wary. But things really fall apart when Marisa becomes pregnant and Kate takes far too great an interest in her condition. Over time, Marisa becomes increasingly convinced that Jake and Kate are not just having a fling, but intend to get rid of Marisa altogether once the baby is born. Finding the two of them entangled on the sofa is enough to send Marisa over the edge.
At this point, the narrative shifts to Kate, who is some years older than Marisa and who has been trying very hard to conceive a child with her partner, to no avail. Much of this section is devoted to the various stages of an unsuccessful journey through fertility treatments and the effect they have on the hopeful mother. This stressful experience is evidently rooted in Elizabeth Day's own life and it is illuminating. The reader is not only struck by the frustrations and sadness consequent on failure (no mention is made of the expense), but also on the toll the social hypervaluation of motherhood takes on the woman who does not conceive. Kate is an accomplished woman with a successful career. For years she was indifferent to the prospect of procreation. Then as her friends began to have babies, she seems to have lost confidence in her worth as a woman, as a human being. And it doesn't help that her mate embraced the idea of fatherhood with boyish enthusiasm.
Kate's narrative is the most compelling section in the book and it is a pity that its force is undercut by one of the most irritating conclusions I've had the misfortune to encounter lately. The problem, I think, is that Day was unable to find a way successfully to embed the issue of infertility inside the genre demands of the psychological thriller. And when convention rules, invention loses.
All the same, there is quite a lot here to satisfy. The central issue of the book is real and there is enough here to fuel a serious discussion. Just be prepared to give a regretful shrug at the finish.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2022
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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