The Awkward Age Page 13

  The bleeding had been a surprise. She was not a demure and sedentary Victorian maiden. She had done school gymnastics and ridden horses; her own fingers had never encountered resistance. But there had been a great deal of blood, in disproportion to the pain, which had—a relief—been less than she’d expected. They had drawn apart and it had actually gushed from her, warm and shocking. This was not the pale spot of new womanhood. Hung outside the window in another place and time, these sheets would suggest the groom had dismembered, not deflowered, his new bride. Nathan had looked stricken, and his concern that she had not been truthful about it hurting had made it all the more embarrassing. “My poor baby,” he had whispered, his hand on her heart, and his pity had made her feel pitiable.

  The sheets were now stuffed into the kitchen sink and soaking in an improvised solution of washing-up liquid, peppermint hand soap, and hot water, and the contents of a sachet of something she had found in the back of a cupboard that claimed to restore net curtains to a wafting summer purity. Scrubbing had seemed to make it worse. While they soaked, she sat at the dining table in semidarkness, re-creating the watershed that had come hours before, when she had told Nathan she finally felt ready. Maybe you could go with Nathan. Well, maybe she would.

  21.

  “You must come to Paris,” the e-mail commanded, “and be part of the conversation. We’ll bring you over. You must come.” Pamela then forwarded the details of a travel agent in Stanmore named Joan Perelman whom, she said, would be in touch in due course. Joan was organizing a group booking for all nineteen of the conference attendees and had instructions to ensure that Mr. Alden be given the best room in the small hotel on the rue Christine. Joan would pop the information through Philip’s door.

  Alone in the half-gloom of his flat Philip chuckled, then launched a damp spluttering cough, and then, recovered, laughed again. Pamela almost certainly wished him to go to Paris not to converse with her biennial assembly of trainee holistic midwives, but to be paraded as some sort of animated fossil dug out of the obstetric field. He would be both pitied and pilloried, specimen of a genus they hoped to drive into extinction. Pamela had stepped up her campaign by offering first Eurostar tickets, then this hotel room, and finally a small honorarium, as well as the chance to attend as many of the lectures and seminars as he pleased. He did not please. He would not have gone, even had it not felt disloyal to Julia, who was at this moment on her way over, delivering what she claimed was a spare fish pie.

  At my age it would be irresponsible to commit to anything so far in advance, he wrote back, but thank you for thinking of me.

  Philip had last been to Paris in 1974, when the Fédération Internationale de Gynécologie et d’Obstétrique had offered him a fellowship and he had spent six weeks living alone, teaching a series of courses at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Iris and ten-year-old Daniel had stayed in London, aided by a homesick but willing Italian au pair. The final weekend of his tenure, after their long separation, Iris would join him, and two days later the au pair would deliver Daniel to Paris on her way home to Naples. Then the three Aldens would travel down to Nice for a week’s holiday.

  For those humid August days, he’d had his wife’s sustained, unbroken attention. He alone, perhaps for the first time since they’d married. They had walked in the Jardin des Tuileries and—though Iris, unlike Philip, had not grown up in a particularly religious household—had eaten their first shellfish together, the tight, slippery mussels flavored with transgression and daring. Iris had gone further and tasted dainty snails in garlic butter, while Philip had sipped a cold beer and told her about his teaching, and she had listened. Philip read le Monde to her, translating Watergate coverage badly, on the hoof. On Monday morning he had a brief return to reality, a final series of administrative meetings at FIGO, while Iris had gone to meet Daniel’s train, and to deliver the au pair into a second train that would take her home—forever, it turned out, for she did not return to them as she’d promised. When Philip had left the office on Monday afternoon, his wife and son had been waiting for him on a sunny street corner, and the next morning they boarded the train for Nice, where the precious bubble of happiness had miraculously held. In gold kaftan and roman sandals, Iris had been the most elegant woman on the beach. The most elegant woman, Philip thought, that he had ever seen. She would drift for idle, solitary walks along the shore, disappearing sometimes for hours, and each time as she receded into the distance he ached for her as if she was slipping from him forever, like Eurydice. This ache was at its most acute when he saw her returning. In those moments, when she was approaching but not yet close enough to hear his voice, he feared his heart might break with longing. Approaching, but not near enough. Never near enough. No, he would not go back to Paris.

  • • •

  “I TRIED A DIFFERENT ONE,” Julia explained, shuffling the empty ice cube trays and half-crushed foil takeaway containers in Philip’s freezer until she’d cleared space for the fish pie. “It’s got ketchup in it, which sounds suspicious, but we had it last night and it wasn’t bad, if I do say so myself, I just made a bit too much. You can put it in the oven frozen.”

  “Thank you, maidele. Whatever you make is always wonderful. Now tell me, you said you’re finally going back to Verbier this year; I’m thrilled. Who is playing in the festival?”

  “Everyone worth hearing, I just wish James could come. He’s on call that weekend but in any case now, with everything . . .” She drifted off. “My lovely Emmeline Whitten has a master class on the Sunday morning, which is the only reason I’m still going, and we’ll all have dinner that night, and I’ll fly back Monday.”

  “I think the last time I heard Emmeline was when you took us to the Wigmore.”

  “She’s doing so well in Moscow, Vera’s pleased. I wish James could hear her. Next time she’s playing nearish I’d love us to go together. It’s quite hard to imagine at the moment but—anyway. Gwen made shortbread so I grabbed the last bits for us, it’s very good. She’s taken to baking for Nathan every Friday.” She was able to say this neutrally, though everything about it was irritating.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, averting her gaze from Philip’s unsteady journey from kettle to sink to mug cupboard, and began to unwrap the foil parcel of biscuits. She had not known, on her way here, whether she wished to discuss Gwen and Nathan. It was all so sordid. Repellent. Worst of all was perhaps the small part of herself that found her daughter’s new disposition a welcome change. No more resentment or black moods. And, Gwen continued to make clear, no more interest in spending any time with her mother. Seeing them whispering, heads together exchanging confidences, stung like a deliberate, personal rejection. It made Julia feel excluded. It made her feel very, very old. But . . . Gwen seemed happier. “It’s all ongoing, you know,” she told Philip now, snapping a piece of shortbread in half and handing him the larger piece, “the romance of the century. She keeps telling me I just don’t understand. It’s true. I don’t. She was utterly incensed that I forbade them from carrying on with this relationship; she actually tried to lecture me on human rights, she gave me a horrid little speech that sounded precisely like Nathan. In any case I’ve stopped trying to forbid it because it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I just want her to think. I’ve never denied her anything I thought would make her happy, and you know I’ve always tried not to say no unnecessarily; all I want is for her to think through her decisions. What happens when they break up?”

  Philip sat down heavily opposite her, the wicker kitchen chair creaking ominously beneath him. “And what does she say?”

  “She’ll just say, ‘What happens if you and James break up?’ and then I may as well be talking to a wall because it’s the same conversation over and over; she just equates the two. It’s all about proving that they’re just like us. Just as important as we are, just as committed, just as much entitled to be together. She’s desperate to prove she doesn’t need parenting anymore. I�
��m apparently no longer required. I’ve been replaced.” She gave what she hoped would seem an easy, self-deprecatory laugh. “And now she’s taken to calling me Julia, the way Nathan and Saskia call their mother Pamela, which I’ve always found odd in any case, so now I’m not even her Mum anymore.”

  “She was very cross about James.”

  “So this is a revenge attack, you mean? I thought . . .” She trailed off. “It was so much pressure, always, all those years she felt responsible for me and I wanted her to just be a child now. Carefree, a little. I thought this would be a good thing for both of us, she was meant to feel liberated.”

  “And part of her must, I’m sure. Your happiness is good for her.”

  “I know, you and Iris both keep telling me but do you really think so?”

  Philip considered. “Certainly your unhappiness wasn’t good for her. Or you. But you must remember, you’re in charge, not the children. You say you don’t feel you can stop them but—I suppose I don’t quite understand why not. I know you find it hard, but perhaps you might try putting your foot down harder, even so?”

  “She can’t push me away forever.” This had begun as a question, but she tried to turn it into a statement of her own confidence.

  “What does James say?”

  Julia shrugged. She and James had not had very satisfactory discussions on the subject, lately. As long as Nathan’s schoolwork wasn’t compromised and the children obeyed his basic rules—no canoodling in front of the parents, no overnight room sharing or closed bedroom doors—James seemed willing to make the best of it. He was content to catch up on patient notes in the living room while in the kitchen his son and her daughter made dinner together, and giggled, loudly. He was happy to accept that for the moment, under admittedly peculiar circumstances, Gwen was being friendly to him. Valentina had been allowed to stay over, and the thought of his son as a sexually active being did not affront or appall him. Julia had wanted his outrage to endure as hers had, and felt let down that it hadn’t. He listened to her when she confided in him. He’d held her when, a few nights earlier, she’d succumbed to tears that she could not explain. She could not bring herself to admit to him that the intensity of her daughter’s need had been precious in those years alone, and that she ached for it now that it was over. But she had brought this rejection upon herself, for she had reached outward for James, shattering the covenant of their solitude. She could not regret it—James had brought her back to life. Gwen was only doing what Julia herself had already done.

  “Nathan’s incredibly ambitious, and James is incredibly ambitious for him, which maybe explains it—he can actually put quite a lot of pressure on him I think, without meaning to. James was the first person in his family to go to university so he’s quite obsessed with it, and Pamela’s just as bad for all her hippy-dippy nonsense—but anyway Nathan studies very hard, and now Gwen’s started to work whenever he works. She just really wants to please him. Her teachers are certainly thrilled with her, and of course that’s good for her confidence, but it’s hard not to feel . . . I hate that she wouldn’t feel good enough as she is, for anyone. She ought not to have to contort herself to please him. I’m just holding my breath, waiting for it to implode.”

  Philip said, after a moment’s thought, “Do you think it might implode imminently?”

  “They’re very settled, not that that means much with teenagers. Gwen’s happy as a clam, and he was with the last one for two years. There’s not much we can do, in practice. We can’t lock them into their rooms after we’re asleep, so we’ve had to just settle for stating our position and—it’s nauseating, we’ve had to absolutely forbid them on the tacit understanding that they’ll—I can’t actually bear thinking about it. Don’t you think she’s far, far too young to be sexually active? Thank God he boards on school nights, I just wish I could convince James he should stay all term.”

  “I don’t know, maidele, it does seem very young to me but a great deal has changed since my day.”

  “I’m utterly exhausted. When he’s at home I find myself staying up later and later, as if I could somehow stay up late enough to make it impossible. I know Verbier is weeks away and it’s only two nights but I can’t bear the idea of leaving them. I’m longing to cancel.” Julia frowned. “I miss her like, like a limb. But all I’ve ever wanted was for her to be happy, and she keeps telling me how happy she is. Endlessly.”

  22.

  Gwen could not remember a time when she’d worked with more deliberate, sustained exertion. Revision went by in a strange, feverish blur during which she sweated through light cotton tops like a boxer and ran dry a series of brand new ballpoint pens with the manic vigor of her practice papers. Nathan was home for the Easter holidays and she thrilled at his pride in her. Among Nathan’s friends it was cool to work hard, and the competitive indifference that Gwen imbibed at her own school had backfired unexpectedly when she’d tried it on him. “I did nothing for my GCSE’s last year,” she’d once said to him, casually, and he’d looked at her oddly and said, “That was dumb. Why not? You’re a more focused person than that.” It was gratifying to be observed and then described as any sort of person, even if the portrait wasn’t always immediately familiar or recognizable—it made her feel seen, and reminded her that he was close enough to see her. So when he told her that he knew she didn’t only prioritize “clay and shit,” she believed him. She did not yet know what sort of person she was becoming, and was happy to take his word for it. Inside she sometimes feared she was no sort of person at all, only a wisp, and Nathan’s observations were reassuring anchors, giving solid boundaries to her self.

  Now it felt good, and the AS exams would all go fine, she felt. Tests were a different proposition if you had prepared for them; when the answers were not mysterious but obvious, and merely had to be transcribed from brain to page. She sat down to dinner ravenous each evening and meanwhile she was even getting the hang of sex. They had now done it eleven times. Since Nathan was home she was barely sleeping—the parents policed them, and it was usually long after midnight before it was safe for him to sneak in undetected. Yet during the days she felt wired, inspired, and as if she’d slammed back five espressos instead of the single mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream that she allowed herself each afternoon, at their three o’clock study break.

  And then she ground to a halt. On the final weekend of the holidays she found herself listless and exhausted. It was as if she had paced a perfect marathon only to be told over the loudspeaker as the finish line approached that the new goal was thirty miles, and the final leg must be sprinted. The fuel tank, once bursting, was empty. It was all she could do to get out of bed late on Saturday morning, and this she did only when Nathan sat on the floor outside her bedroom door playing an old reggae tune filled with sunshine and goodwill, on repeat. With the pillow over her head she bellowed at him to go away but he merely increased the volume. A rumor had swirled around that this year’s French oral questions were about the environment—possibly vivisection, possibly carbon footprints—and Nathan was insisting she prepare the relevant vocabulary.

  When she finally came down Julia was sitting at the dining table reading the newspaper, and James was making blueberry buckwheat pancakes as brain food for the final push.

  “You’re being an arsehole,” Gwen said to Nathan, who was still whistling snatches of the song with which he’d eventually roused her. “None of you get how tired I am. You try revising hours and hours every single day and see how you’d feel.”

  “I did,” Nathan told her, “I do. I’ve already done an hour of stats while you were snoring. It was awesome, I rocked it.”

  “Please don’t bicker this morning.” Julia was keen to launch the day in an atmosphere of studious calm. “And, Gwen, please don’t swear.”

  “‘Arse’ isn’t swearing.”

  James ladled more batter into the frying pan. “And yet the British way does sound more o
ffensive. “‘Ass’ is somehow more innocent.”

  “That’s because it means donkey,” Gwen told him, and then laid her forehead on her crossed arms on the kitchen table and closed her eyes.

  “I think ‘asshole’ has become the pan-Atlantic standard; ‘arsehole’ is for sure on the decline. It’s inevitable.” Here Nathan paused to spear a pancake from the stack beside his father and transfer one edge of it directly to his mouth. “With the dominance of American vernacular in the media I think ‘arse’ is over.” Gwen burrowed her face deeper into the crook of her elbow.

  Nathan had stayed up the night before doing a series of practice Physics papers and it had been four a.m. before he’d made it to bed. Despite this, he had been awake bright and early to help his girlfriend. He tried again. “Come on, baby, allons. Effet de serre?”

  “Dunno.”

  “You do, you knew it yesterday. When you fart you contribute to the . . .” He gestured for someone, anyone, to complete this prompt.

  “You’re so close to the end, darling, and you’ve done so well,” Julia coaxed, putting a plate down in front of her daughter, though Gwen felt she could not have been clearer that she did not want to eat. She pushed it toward Nathan.

  “Just think, in a month or two they’ll all be over and you’ll be free. You can have a lie-in every single day this summer, you’re almost there, Dolly. Can I make you something else? Do you want eggs?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Do you want to walk to Starbucks for an early frap?” Nathan asked. “I’ll test you while we walk? I need a break from my stuff.”