The Awkward Age Page 12

“Julia’s relationships are her own affair,” Iris said, breezily, and he heard in the background the clamor and a thumping bass line that betrayed she was in Selfridges. “Julia and Thing threw two teenagers into one another’s paths and no doubt instructed them to be nice to one another, so in a sense they’re only following instructions. Meanwhile it is really about time that Gwen had a little romantic interest, even if she might have been a little more discerning. It was becoming peculiar.”

  “She’s sixteen!”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old woman. Sixteen is the new thirty, according to the papers. Of course, it’s none of it rational when we are meant to believe that sixty is the new thirty-five, but still.”

  “Those headlines are appalling. I’m content to be old. One of the privileges of being old is that I get to behave as if I’m old.”

  “Well, I used to write those headlines so they don’t appall me in the slightest. What is the source of your information? By the way, I’m buying you a polo shirt as we speak.”

  “Gwen’s blog. I don’t need anything. I don’t wear polo shirts.”

  “Sales. Dregs. Very nice, though, it’s a sort of slub cotton. Bit see-through but it’s for under things. I looked at the blog a few days ago.”

  “This went up today. They’re arm in arm, and Julia and James are in the background with their hands to their ears in paroxysms of a very Munch-like horror. She’s made a public declaration.”

  “I hardly think public, I’m sure we’re the only people who read that thing.”

  “Well, I was phoning to ask about the party line, whether you think we ought to know or not to know. When we speak to her mother.”

  “Oh, it’s always better not to know. Never know anything at all, you taught me that. See no evil, and all that. In my case it was the truth as well as the party line, until you telephoned. Ought someone to put her on the Pill?”

  Alone in his dusky living room, Philip covered his eyes with his hand. “Iris. I sincerely hope it’s not necessary.”

  “If you don’t want to hear my opinions, I don’t know why you always solicit them. Navy blue or black? I don’t see you in black.”

  “Not black,” Philip agreed, and rang off, exhausted.

  • • •

  NATHAN HAD BEEN THERE, embedded in her family like a sleeper cell, and Julia had welcomed him. She ironed his school shirts and drove him to the dentist, and had recently risked hypothermia on the sidelines of a rugby match watching as Westminster, in startling salmon pink, played a dirty and tedious game against UCS. She kept the house stocked with imported American breakfast cereals, and fruit loaf. She had tried. And then he seduced her daughter.

  Since Christmas Day she had found it difficult to address him with civility. He would make polite, ingratiating conversation and she would be assailed by an image of him, conniving and predatory, pawing at Gwen like a middle-aged office roué. The laundry nauseated her; she lifted an escaped pair of his boxer shorts into the washing machine between clenched toes. Their existence was an affront. That he put them on, and took them off, in her house was appalling. She had not voiced her fantasy solution—that Nathan should move back to America to live with his mother—but on Boxing Day she had suggested to James that Nathan stay at school full time instead of coming back for weekends, thinking it seemed not only the obvious but also the most desirable solution. But James had frowned and said that he couldn’t ban his son from home. They would simply have to stay strong, and keep saying no. Yet allowing them under the same roof, even two nights a week, even after a family meeting in which James had reiterated their absolute and unwavering opposition, seemed a tacit permission.

  The depth of her initial distress had startled her, as had the white rage that followed it. How dare they? How dare they? And the relationship persisted, flourishing against the odds, and against the express wishes of all but its participants. On and on it went, from strength to strength, however much Julia demanded they stop. It was high treason to recall that Nathan had not long ago been equally devoted to Valentina, whom Gwen, with flamboyant geographic inaccuracy and conflation, had taken to calling the Demon Barber of Seville. The new allegiance had wiped out all that had come before.

  Yet since that first awful discovery the children had done little to which she could reasonably object. Unprompted, they began to spend Sunday afternoons doing homework together at the dining table. Gwen developed academic aspirations, in direct contravention of her previously asserted philosophies. Julia more than once overheard Nathan meticulously explaining a concept—once subtracting vectors, another time the factors that limit photosynthesis. He introduced Gwen to the programs he watched, the podcasts he downloaded, and the two of them spent hours glued to the screen of a shared laptop or listening together with a headphone splitter, deaf to the other members of the household. What could Julia say? How could she stop them listening to a podcast? Once indolent, Gwen was now industrious; once furious with James, she was now sunny and acquiescent. Beneath the heat of Nathan’s attention she flourished like a hothouse plant, and after the third weekend during which Julia had exhausted herself lying rigid, listening for forbidden nighttime visits and had heard nothing, she had been forced to admit defeat. Not aloud—she could never give the children the satisfaction. But the truth was that forbidding feelings had got them nowhere. They could forbid only their public expression.

  Since James had moved in Julia had suffered her daughter’s resentment and unhappiness. Now, seeing Gwen’s small, private smile as she hunched over her laptop typing messages made her heart hurt in a way that was harder to define. There was a new hauteur in Gwen’s address; a new, polite formality that stung, even though it was almost certainly intended to sting. Blog readers were treated to a dramatic sequence of scenes in which Gwen and Nathan stood firm against the family’s disapproval and finally won them over by making pancakes, and Gwen reported that the online community was thrilled by her new love, that several fans had only expected as much and had long been rooting for the cohabiting teenagers to find one another. Julia felt far away from her daughter, excluded for the first time from her confidence, punished for daring to betray that she was a woman, and not simply a mother. Yet only six weeks had passed—six exhausting weekends—and in that short time Gwen had unfurled, had stopped scowling, had started laughing at James’s jokes, and once again helped to clear the table after dinner, even if James had cooked. And so Julia began to hold her tongue. She missed her child. She missed being needed, even when that need was expressed in baleful stares and tantrums. As a parent it was impossible to foresee anything but snares and brambles along this path, and almost certainly she ought to protect Gwen from her own foolishness by continuing to forbid, by creating obstacles, by allowing herself to be the enemy. But she needed James, and wanted him, and when Gwen was occupied and contented then he and she were granted space for one another. Harmony was hard to resist, however distasteful the price.

  19.

  To overhear Julia arguing with her daughter was an exercise in restraint and took James back to the bad old days of early cohabitation. Only now did he realize how acquiescent Gwen had been of late and remembered, with an unpleasant jolt, how unappealing he found her when she wasn’t getting her own way. Her wheedling, which veered from pleading to explosive rage and back to infantile beseeching again, wore on his nerves like tinnitus. And stamina was her secret weapon, for Julia would be exhausted and would run out of arguments, and seemed never to wise to this tactic. Instead, she followed her daughter down any conversational avenue she led, negotiating and reasoning and never drawing an end with a firm and final stand. “You don’t need to make a case for the defense, you can just put your foot down,” James would advise in their fraught postmortems, but could say nothing when she explained that with Gwen it was more complicated. From this he was to infer that a dead parent was a trump card, and his hands were tied. Rarely sober, his own father had worked selling
used trucks at a lot in Dorchester. His sporadic commission had kept the Fullers narrowly solvent and when he died James had won for it no special treatment, except the further reduction of the already minuscule possibility of his going to college. His mother, a pediatrician’s receptionist, had adored and cherished her only child with an intensity he recognized, but she would not for one moment have stood for the kind of backtalk Julia endured. It had all been long ago and in a land far over the sea, however, and would not, he knew, lend sufficient weight to his argument. He would have to pretend that he considered her judgments reasonable. Julia felt she owed reparations for allowing her daughter’s father to die, and so Gwen continued behaving like a despot, and James had to watch as guilty Julia humbled and abased herself before her implacable little household goddess. They had their dance long choreographed; his past forays between them in an argument had ended, predictably, in both of them rounding on him, united and enflamed. Today, with Gwen deep into one of her campaigns, he hid behind his newspaper and did his best not to listen. He could not bear to hear his gentle Julia beleaguered.

  “Please. Julia, please. You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand and I’m sad, too, it’s just bad timing. If it was any other night, of course we’d go but James booked these Rossini tickets months ago. We’ve got flights. I’m so sorry, darling.” Julia reached to tuck a disobedient curl behind Gwen’s ear but Gwen twitched away violently. She was frustrated, and increasingly desperate. This was not the first iteration of this exchange, not even the second or third, and preliminary attempts to reason with her mother had devolved to this—whining. It was fun for nobody, but it had won her bigger victories in the past. Across the room, James stifled the urge to stuff his fist into his mouth.

  “But he’s only here this one night! For the first time in years. It’s Art Garfunkel, do you even understand?” Gwen flung herself down on the sofa. She glared across the room at the armchair in which James sat hidden behind his paper, and then hissed, “If it was a weekend with me in Milan and James asked you to, you’d cancel.”

  Julia felt a stab of pity at her daughter’s wounded face and wondered, for a moment, whether this was true. She said, sotto voce, “That’s not the case at all. You can’t possibly believe that.”

  “It is. You put him first in everything. You guys go to boring classical music stuff all the time, you’re going to that Verbier festival thing, and this is one single night. He’s so old! You know he’ll retire and this will literally be the last chance ever. I’ll pay for it! And I’ll pay you back for the other tickets, and the flights. I’ll use my bat mitzvah money.”

  The celebrated bat mitzvah fund—one hundred and twenty-five pounds deposited three years ago in a Post Office account—was always Gwen’s last resort, the straw at which she clutched for independence. It had been “used” to pay for hosting her web domain and for a great deal of the expensive art supplies she needed for the early stages of her blog; it had been drawn upon again when she had so longed for a pair of white Converse that she claimed she could not survive another day. Julia fought a momentary smile, but her resolve was buoyed by the utter impossibility of what Gwen asked. James had booked the La Scala tickets almost six months ago—in the last days of August they were to spend the weekend in Milan to see Otello, which had not been staged there since 1870, perhaps because it needed not one but three spectacular lead tenors. The Otello seats made it easy to defend her choice. To be alone in Italy with James would be a dream—long private hours, Prosecco, the heat, and the music. She would not yield it for anything. Of all the nights for Art Garfunkel to come to London this was the only one, all summer, that was out of the question.

  Gwen was looking hopefully at her mother. “I’ll pay you back; I promise. And you can go to the thingy thing concert another night.”

  “Dolly.”

  “I don’t even get it, it’s so pathetic. You’re obsessed with us not being left alone together even for five minutes and then suddenly today I find out you’ve got summer plans to go to Italy for a whole weekend. So it’s totally fine for us to stay here by ourselves if you get to go to the opera and Verbier, or whatever. It’s like, insane double standards. So we are allowed, now.”

  “I’m afraid,” boomed a disembodied voice from behind a newspaper, “that I’ll be here when your mother is in Verbier, and for Milan we’ll find a suitably obtrusive chaperone. The arrangements predate the current regime. Don’t get too excited, kiddo.”

  “Maybe you could go with Nathan,” Julia suggested, and felt cheapened even as she said it. To her astonishment Gwen simply gave a melancholy shrug. Then she said, softly, “Mummy, I don’t want to go with Nathan. The whole point was to go together,” and Julia’s heart fractured, yet again.

  20.

  Swiss Cottage Library did not become more romantic in miniature, but Gwen could think of no other way to represent the day’s events. Certainly she had no desire to record the morning’s argument, in which her mother had made it clear, once and for all, where her traitorous priorities lay. Maybe you could go with Nathan, she had suggested, not simply missing the point but readily giving up custody or care of her daughter and forgetting, erasing, a precious long-ago memory. Gwen did not usually like old people’s music but when she was eleven they had gone to hear Simon and Garfunkel, and it had been a magical evening in a dark, hard year. The concert, held outdoors in Hyde Park, had been hot and dry and perfect, and the first glimpse of a possible future in which they might once again, one day, be happy. Gwen had shut her eyes tightly and tried to feel the passion her mother felt for this strange, folksy music, had tried to let the simple melodies, the unexpected rhythms of the language, move in her blood. At eleven she was already the same height as Julia but she had hunched over and drawn closer under Julia’s arm and had felt safe, and hopeful. Couples stood around them interlocked, swaying, and her father wasn’t there to sway and sing alongside her mother but she was there, she told herself, and after a while she had straightened her spine and stood up to her full height and put her arm, instead, around her mother. In the days that followed, Gwen taught herself the words to every song they’d heard, and learned to love them. They would be okay. They would be a family again, just the two of them. But Julia had made it clear that James was her only priority.

  Her mother had needed a vessel for her love and energies, and now no longer needed to be needed. But it wasn’t fair—she had lulled Gwen into believing that she would always be there. Gwen had offered up her life, her sorrows and pleasures, her preoccupations and requirements, had worked busily to keep her mother fulfilled and contented, and her being had formed around this belief, molded like ivy around a solid trunk. Now, Julia had withdrawn. Without her mother at her center she wavered. If she had seemed sturdy, it had been Julia firm beneath her.

  She already had several sets of small bookshelves usually used for scenes in her mother’s music room, and these just needed populating with cardboard concertinas, decorated with some fine cross-hatching to imply the microscopic titles on the folded projections of tiny spines. She set up a shoebox to be the reading room and assembled all the paraphernalia to scatter on her tiny desk and on Nathan’s—mobile phones, some pens and pencils and even a lined and ring-bound notepad she had painstakingly constructed long ago for use in an imagined, flashback scene showing her grandmother at work as a journalist. All that remained to make were some textbooks to indicate homework, and the subtle nod to the real incident—the tiny paper airplane on which she had written her explosive missive and, heart pounding, sent it sailing over the wall between their carrels like a kamikaze. It was time, she’d decided, to grow up.

  She wanted the blog to capture the formative events in her life, good or bad, while as much as possible sparing the humdrum, or repetitious. This was not the way her friends depicted themselves on the Internet but she had no interest in varnishing her life as they did, glamorous moments threaded one after another like
an endless string of glossy and identical fake pearls. That, after all, was not brave, and was also definitely not Art. She wanted wit, or poignancy, or meaning. This was her coming-of-age story, after all, and one day when the story was over and life had acquired stability—perhaps when she was twenty-five, or twenty-six—its coherence and powerful narrative thrust would be united into a book, or possibly an animated television program, her own history reenacted by tiny clay figures in shoebox worlds. It would be an album of memories. It would be proof that she had been, and felt, and lived.

  But tonight something had happened and though it was momentous, she was at a loss as to how to honor it. Her grandfather read her blog. Her traitorous mother read her blog, and in any case thought this landmark long behind her. Meanwhile, she had a more pressing and practical problem for it was very late, and she did not know what to do about the bedsheets.

  • • •

  ALREADY THE NIGHT’S EVENTS seemed distant. She examined her own feelings and found only deflation, and a sense of anticlimax. If she thought too long, she could summon a quiet, mawkish grief for her own innocence.

  The true secret turned out to be that there was no secret. She had thought that sex would be something else, yet already could no longer articulate what that something else could have been. Instead it was what it was—the putting of parts into other, tighter parts. She had wanted to advance their intimacy, to elect Nathan as the central person in her new, adult life; she had wanted them to cleave together conclusively and could think of no more conclusive way than this. He had been loving, and gentle, and tender. He had whispered endearments, had held her face and looked into her eyes, and had shown he thought of no one and nothing but her. But when it was over she had felt weepy, and though Nathan had stroked her hair and told her he loved her and that she was beautiful, she had needed more reassurance than he could give. She had expected the intensity of his focus upon her in those few, vital moments to be the way he’d always look at her now, forever, and when his breathing had slowed and eventually his talk had gone back to normal she felt crushed. It was all meant to be different now, and wasn’t.