The Awkward Age Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Francesca Segal

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpt from “Poem for a Daughter” from Poems 1955–2005 by Anne Stevenson (Bloodaxe Books, 2005).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Segal, Francesca, 1980- author.

  Title: The awkward age : a novel / Francesca Segal.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016048993| ISBN 9780399576454 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399576478 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.E374 A97 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048993

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For GMA

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Three Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part Four Chapter 50

  Why does a mother need a daughter?

  Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,

  freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect

  than that bleating, razor-shaped cry

  that delivers a mother to her baby.

  The bloodcord snaps that held

  their sphere together. The child,

  tiny and alone, creates the mother.

  A woman’s life is her own

  until it is taken away

  by a first, particular cry.

  Then she is not alone

  but a part of the premises

  of everything there is:

  a time, a tribe, a war.

  —ANNE STEVENSON, “POEM FOR A DAUGHTER”

  part one

  1.

  The teenagers would fuck it up. Certainly they always tried; it was the only impulse Gwen and Nathan had in common, besides their hostility toward one another. This morning the thought of waking her daughter filled Julia with a particular foreboding, despite her own excitement about the weekend.

  They were all going to America, to James’s hometown, which Julia had imagined since meeting him. They had given one another their futures but she was greedy for his past, too; she would never know him young, but knowing Boston seemed the next best thing, a way to make up the impossible, inconceivable deficit of all the wasted days spent not loving him, before they’d met. She wanted to see the places that had mattered; to visit Harvard, where James had turned his tassel, had become a doctor, a husband, a father; had grown from unknown boy into the cherished man who now lay beside her, breathing steadily, facedown in his pillow, in their bed, on the top floor of what was now their home, a narrow Victorian terraced house in Gospel Oak, north London. She was looking forward to Boston. On the other hand, this holiday meant three intensive days with Nathan, who would no doubt take every opportunity to needle her with casual reminiscence about the halcyon days during which his father had been married to his mother. Meanwhile Julia’s own daughter, Gwen, would be dependably more difficult. Such had been the way.

  James stirred, smiled sleepily up at Julia, and hooked an arm round her waist. He drew her back to the horizontal, and began to mumble into her hair. A muscled thigh fell over hers, hot and marble-heavy, and she was pinioned.

  “The cab’s in an hour, we’ve got to get the kids up. I have to do the dog.”

  He shook his head, without opening his eyes. “Send the kids without us, let’s stay here. It’d serve them right for being pains in the rear end.”

  On cue, a thudding bass began beneath them, too loud for the rest of the terrace at this or any hour. Nathan was awake. Impossible to rouse most mornings he was home from boarding school, it seemed he could spring up before daylight when Boston—and an escape from her house, Julia suspected—lay ahead of him. Predictably, dispiritingly, Gwen’s voice now rose, shouting a sleep-slurred obscenity. At the sound of so many humans unexpectedly awake during his early shift, Mole began to bark with joy. The thump of tail on wooden boards was followed by a frantic scrabbling outside their bedroom door. “Shut up!” they then heard, and the dog and the rest of Gwen’s complaint were drowned out when Nathan turned up the volume.

  “When will they start to be nice to each other?”

  James had tipped forward and was fishing on the floor beside the bed for last night’s T-shirt, bare buttocks in the air. “Probably never,” he said cheerily, from this position. “But we can get rid of them soon. College. The army. Sell them into service.” When this got no reply he sat up again and said more gently, “Give it time, it hasn’t been very long. It’s a big change for both of them.”

  “Saskia’s been civilized. Why is your daughter an angel when mine is being such a nightmare?”

  “Saskia doesn’t have to live here,” James pointed out. He was squinting at his watch. “Cab’s in an hour and twenty. Have I got time for a run? I’ll take the dog.”

  He was out of bed, flexing and yawning, and Julia paused to look at him. It was extraordinary that this man now shared her bed. He was broad chested, solid, beautiful. At fifty-five he was still mostly blonde. He was tall, and square in the way that only Americans are square—as if r
aised, corn-fed and free-range, on strong sunshine and red meat and the earnest and deliberate pursuit of happiness. Her English imagination placed him in dungarees on a tractor, a piece of straw between white teeth, or tugging on the brim of his cap as he swaggered up to bat on a sun-bleached baseball diamond, a mixing of metaphors inspired mostly by her admiration for his height, and his shoulders. This visit to America would begin to set her imagery straight, and that he was, in reality, a Jewish obstetrician from a working-class neighborhood of Boston would remain a delightful incongruity. In surgical scrubs he looked outsized and vaguely alarming. He saved women’s lives. He saved Julia, every day.

  When they met she had been raising Gwen alone for five years, with the volatile intensity of hostages long held together. He had come to Julia for piano lessons and she had found, over time, that her weeks began to shape themselves around his classes. He had an easy charm and made her laugh. With a series of caveats she eventually agreed to coffee, ostensibly to discuss his musical progress (which was poor, if dogged). On their first date, timed to coincide with Gwen’s Geography field trip to study glaciated landscapes around Keswick, Julia had sat, prim and awkward and resistant, had spoken little but had drunk a great deal of red wine, and had eventually launched herself upon James in the taxi home with an alarming and volcanic hunger, and had spoken her first honest, unguarded words to him, hungover and ashamed the next morning. This was an English first date, as she remembered it. To James, its speed affirmed his growing conviction that they were meant to be together. For they were meant to be together. He was all she’d never dared to want.

  Until that time, Gwen had been absently polite when James arrived each week—just another of her mother’s students traipsing to the first-floor music room with Chopin nocturnes and a mediocre hand span—but overnight had sworn him mortal enemy, blood-deep rival, her father’s bitter adversary and her own. She had lost one parent, and would not yield her mother without a fight. Julia feared Gwen and feared for her, and had never before withstood her daughter’s rages. But she had uncovered a new, accidental source of strength: she had fallen in love. Despite the obstacles, James brought sunshine and she had begun to believe, with his help, that her own happiness could start to heal her daughter. This new relationship was entirely different from her marriage, and for that she was grateful. It made it simpler, somehow, to find for James a chamber in a heart that had for so long been only Gwen’s. James encouraged Julia to relax, to take him for granted, to believe that he was hers to grow old with, but she would not. Such wasteful complaisance would be unforgivable when their luck was too extraordinary. That their two fragile human hearts continued to beat each hour she knew to be a miracle. Joy was a passing alignment of stars, a flash of sun burning gold flames on water before the clouds came. Julia knew life to be a series of calamities. She waited for the piano to fall, the tornado to strike, and in the meantime her own pure happiness thrilled and frightened her. If only Gwen didn’t hate him so much.

  • • •

  JULIA CAME DOWN to find both children already in the kitchen, still in pajamas, still deftly, stubbornly ignoring each other. Nathan stood spooning porridge into his mouth before the open fridge door, staring into its cavern with steady interest, as if watching television. He had not yet styled his hair, which meant a lengthy tenure in the bathroom lay ahead. It stood electrified in thick dark tufts above his dark brows, and his milky complexion was slightly roughened by excessive unnecessary optimistic shaving. Julia had not yet grown accustomed to the boy’s minute interest in and attention to his own appearance, which far outstripped her daughter’s daily maintenance. The other day she had come upon him sprawled on the sofa while his girlfriend, Valentina, iced and plucked his eyebrows. He had waved in lordly greeting, unembarrassed.

  Gwen lay extended on the tiled floor beside Mole, stroking one of the Labrador’s black silky ears and whispering apologies for the upcoming disturbance. Mole yawned hugely in reply, black wax lips contracted, long pink tongue extended and curling upward. Gwen took this to be the end of the conversation and stood up. She was taller than her mother, taller even than Nathan. She had the alien, angular proportions of a fashion model, Julia knew, and desperately hoped the idea would never occur to her. In any case, Gwen moved not with grace but with clumsy, gangling awkwardness. It would be charitable to believe that she had yet to learn her own proportions, that she’d simply grown too quickly, but she had been almost six foot tall since she was thirteen—three years, now—and still she bumped into walls, and tripped over invisible objects, and banged her knees beneath tables. Today she had piled her exuberant red curls on her head and skewered the fat knot with a striped black-and-yellow pencil. She bent to brush her knees, vigorously. Her glasses slipped down her nose and she pushed them back up with her knuckle.

  “Must you?”

  “Must I what?”

  “Darling, you’re getting dog hair all over the kitchen.”

  Gwen gave a last swipe at her pajama bottoms. “It’s not my fault he sheds. Oh! So listen, I found my black jeans, they were—duh, duh duh!—in my school bag. The mystery is solved.”

  Behind her Nathan had begun to whistle “Yankee Doodle,” softly, out of tune. Julia carried the kettle to the sink, fantasizing about coffee and silence. “Good morning, Nathan,” she said, in his direction. Then to Gwen, remembering, “Have you got the dog stuff together for Grandpa?”

  Gwen nodded toward the door. “There. He said just bring food and tablets, he’d use his own bowls.”

  Nathan was still gazing into the fridge. Misty cold expensive air reached Julia. Eventually he extracted a basket of raspberries, which he then began to plop one by one into the saucepan of remaining porridge bubbling over on the hob. Julia averted her eyes. She had stayed up late last night, cleaning the kitchen.

  “Oatmeal?” he offered, extending the saucepan toward her.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I might have some,” said Gwen, freed by her mother’s presence to speak to him directly. “But you’re meant to wash raspberries, they’re covered in stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t take undue risks in that case,” said Nathan, tipping the mess into his own bowl. He scraped the pan then set it, empty and encrusted, back on the hob. Their methods varied but on balance the children were equally rude to one another, and James had told Julia he thought they could be safely left to duke it out between themselves. Privately, she was inclined to blame Nathan, who goaded.

  Julia sipped scalding coffee and went through her list again. The windows had been done; she had taken out the rubbish but there would be more generated by the children; something needed to be done about the heating. James would happily do it all when he returned, but she had grown used to running her household alone, and could not bring herself to tempt fate by depending upon him. They were really leaving, and it would soon become clear whether this idea of a family trip had been foolhardy or inspired.

  Nathan took out a chopping board and announced his intention to make a vegetable omelet, following this with the news that he had never attempted an omelet before, but how hard, after all, could it be? It was important to travel on a good, square meal. He was back in the fridge, taking out eggs, butter, milk, tomatoes, several zucchini, and the whole cheese drawer, which Julia knew from experience was almost impossible to get back onto its plastic runners once it had been removed. Had James been here he would have put a robust and efficient kibosh on this plan as Nathan was unlikely to starve between Gospel Oak and Terminal Five, and had not yet finished packing. But James was not yet back from his jog, and Julia had so far avoided disciplining or even advising his son. She looked at her watch. The morning was slipping from her grasp, and they still had to drop the dog with Philip.

  2.

  All this cohabitation was new. The house in Queen’s Crescent had been home to Julia Alden since before Gwen’s birth. She and Daniel had bought it when she was heavily pregnant, moon
-faced and cumbrous as she unpacked boxes and helped Daniel to paint the baby’s room in pale willow and stronger mint greens. The room would become a grassy landscape against which their tiny, red-faced, orange-haired daughter would resemble a furious, insomniac leprechaun, demanding and bewitching in equal measure. When Daniel died five years ago, succumbing in six months to the efficient liver cancer he had long before managed to beat with such misleading ease, Julia could not bring herself to move. Queen’s Crescent was where he was, or wasn’t, and his palpable absence had been all that she and Gwen had of him. She was no longer on speaking terms with her own bitter and disappointed mother but Daniel’s parents, Philip and Iris, had helped her with the practicalities. How they felt about this latest development was an uncertainty that made her anxious; asked directly, they were unfailingly elegant and generous. Iris Alden had for some time been suggesting, hinting, commanding that Julia ought to “move on.” It was unhealthy for Julia and Gwen to live in such intense and inward symbiosis, Iris had reproved her daughter-in-law, and each now needed a man around, for different, equally valid reasons. But “moving on” was abstract, where “moving in” was concrete, deliberate, and unavoidable. Julia had first met James through Philip Alden, who had befriended him at an obstetric conference. This ought to have eased her conscience, but didn’t. Philip had recommended her to James as a piano teacher, not a life partner. When she found the time Julia worried for her in-laws, in between worrying about everything else.

  Along with five suitcases, several crates of expensive red wine, twelve cardboard boxes of books (many of which proved to be the U.S. paperback editions of novels already in the house), an elaborate sound system with large, freestanding speakers, and a cherished American coffee maker, James Fuller and his son, Nathan, had arrived one afternoon in the balmy golden light and warmth of early September, and for the eleven weeks since then, the household had been black with tension and thunder. Gwen was constitutionally incapable of concealing her loathing and distress; Nathan, a year older and slightly more socially sophisticated, was equally unhappy but would not admit it. To Julia he was obsequious and detectably patronizing.