The Awkward Age Page 16

  26.

  “Well obviously she’ll have to get rid of it,” said Iris equably, just as Julia had known she would. She waited for the rest of the address while her mother-in-law clicked sweetener tablets into her teacup. Julia felt almost giddy with relief to be in Iris’s living room, awaiting judgment and a brisk shot of fortitude. In her mother-in-law’s presence there was nothing that did not seem obvious or manageable. It was healing to be spoken to in the imperative.

  Philip had been the one to tell Iris the news, and had therefore taken the unrestrained brunt of her wrath and disappointment. It was with Philip that Iris had also wept, once, briefly and in silence. Nonetheless, Iris did not understand the extended lamentations. She saw merely an unpleasant, regrettable expedient they would all hasten to forget once it was over. A young woman’s future hung in the balance. On one side an education, choice, independence. On the other Iris saw the scale loaded with all the heavy, dark weight of the past. Biology as destiny: it no longer had to be. If that maddening child had any grasp of her generation’s privilege, she might have been more respectful of the sovereign miracle of contraception. She ought, Iris thought furiously, to have cherished it. Worshipped it. The Pill was golden liberty, deliverance from both the baby and the scalpel, and this needless mess was due entirely to Gwendolen’s own stupidity and ingratitude. Never mind. It was not too late.

  “She’s got herself into a horribly foolish situation but all that matters now is that she be forbidden from doing something far stupider. If you don’t like the place that Thing’s pal found, then that ex-wife of his will know the right women’s clinic, surely. God’s teeth, what I wouldn’t give for a cigarette right now.” Iris took a prim sip of tea. “If that girl undoes my Allen Carr, she’ll really learn what trouble looks like.”

  Julia had not moved to speak, and so Iris continued, “Look. Mistakes happen. This is truly one of Gwendolen’s more spectacular balls-ups, I will give you that, but it can’t possibly be allowed to dictate the rest of her life. You are her mother—no more fluffy Fabian philosophies and all that utter guff you thought would be so healing. Trust the child. I’ve always known it was a nonsense but I now see in serious circumstances it’s positively dangerous. We’ve watched and we’ve said nothing till now, but really, Julia, there must be limits. Teenagers have no impulse control, it’s a neurological fact. What on earth does she know about anything? It’s not at all the same as letting her choose her own bedtime or have marshmallows for dinner. You must save her from herself now, and you simply cannot allow this madness to proceed.” Iris gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Julia? God help us, you’re not suffering a sudden bout of Catholicism?”

  Julia came to life. “No! How can you even— No, of course not, you know I don’t think there’s any other sensible course, it’s— She’s just being so, so intransigent. Every time we talk she ends up screaming. She is absolutely deaf to sense.”

  “Then you must be louder,” said Iris, stoutly. “Time is ticking.”

  “Believe me, I’m well aware. I spent half the night writing her a letter, and I left it on her pillow yesterday and she came down looking sort of grave and pious and told me very calmly that she knew I only wanted the best for her but that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Nathan was in tears this morning, he’s frantic, Saskia apparently e-mailed her and even Pamela’s spoken to her, not that she has any influence, but she’s at least full of fire and statistics, and Gwen put the phone down on her. I don’t know what to do, I can’t reach her. I don’t know how to make her see what she’s doing to her future. And to my future, not that she seems particularly concerned about that. I can’t actually force her, can I? Can I? You can’t force someone. What if she really did regret it for the rest of her life? It would be unimaginable. But this—this is unimaginable. It’s all unimaginable. I’d give anything to rewind, I’m longing to make it all just go away.”

  Iris set her teacup and saucer down on a large, hardcover copy of Le Corbusier’s The Modulor, which sat at the top of a stack on a gold silk ottoman beside her. She began to speak more slowly, as if to a person of limited understanding. “The ‘someone’ in question is a child, and not a particularly mature or clear-headed one. Your language is problematic. Of course one can’t force someone but one ought to direct one’s minor children and take responsibility for their lives, it’s a mother’s job. If you want to discuss lifelong regret, I suggest you try imagining this: all her little girlfriends lining up in mortar boards to collect their degrees, or shouldering backpacks to binge-drink on Vietnamese beaches, or throwing their first dinner parties after a day in some jolly little graduate scheme, and I urge you to picture alongside it our young Gwendolen alone, for you and I both know she will be alone—these boys don’t stick around for five minutes—alone with a screaming toddler at her knee, hanging up laundry.”

  Julia nodded and said nothing, and Iris began to look mutinous. She had begun with her usual affectation of serenity but Julia was vexing her. “Well?”

  “I know,” said Julia, quietly. “It would be a tragedy.”

  “Well then for God’s sake, stave it off! If you’re all so worried about lifelong regret for this hypothetical infant then no wonder she feels she ought to keep it, you might as well start putting it down for schools. Not that it will be going to private school, of course, having grown up in ignorance and penury.”

  “I can’t actually drag her there by the hair! What am I meant to do? I’ve made the appointment and I’ll try to find a way to get her there. There’s only a few weeks left before it’s too late. Oh, God. I should never have let this happen in the first place and then we wouldn’t be here. I feel culpable. I’ve made an appointment to talk to a family therapist next week. I know we should have separated them, but the idea of James moving out again—”

  “No self-flagellation please, thank you very much; this is entirely Gwendolen’s fault. But you can fix it.”

  “And Nathan’s,” said Julia, ignoring the second assertion. In the last days she had longed more than ever to dispatch James’s monstrous, con artist, sex offender of a son to a life of hard labor in the colonies, or even to the lesser sentence of a life burying eggshells and peeing on compost heaps under his mother’s permanent charge in Boston. She wished, with clear precision, to murder him. The vivid violence of her imagination shocked her. She saw house fires and gas leaks. She saw him jaunty and carefree, mown down into a cartoon two dimensions by a speeding bus. She was too angry with her daughter to allow herself safely to feel or even approach it; Nathan, therefore, received the full force of her fury. Fury was more bearable than sorrow.

  “I will apportion him precisely twenty-three percent of the blame. Nathan wasn’t the one, after all, who ‘forgot’ to take the Pill.” Iris left her hands frozen where they had risen on either side of her face, fingers held in drooping peace signs around the stinging, crucial word.

  “I can’t deal with accusations of deliberate idiocy right now. I do know what it looks like.”

  “For the moment why it happened is irrelevant; now we find ourselves here. Listen to me. Do you know a single person in our milieu, a single girl of our acquaintance lucky enough to be from a privileged, educated north London family of means who has had a baby under these circumstances? Don’t be so arrogant as to assume we’re the only ones; it’s statistically impossible that no one we know has had a daughter run into a bit of trouble. But they don’t go leaving letters around like the tooth fairy, they deal with it, Julia. The parents deal with it. And the girls chalk it up to experience and go on to university and careers and marriages and there’s no harm done.”

  Composed until this moment, Julia suddenly covered her face and began to sob. “I’ve lost her. I don’t know how to get her back.”

  “Oh, darling.” Iris’s expression remained stern but her voice softened. She sighed. She felt less equipped to deal with Julia’s grief; it was moving beyond her remit. “
Listen to me. You’re very happy, in case you’d lost sight of it amid all this mess. You’re happy for the first time since . . .” She abandoned this sentence, and began to readjust the gold watch that hung loosely on her left wrist, rotating it, checking and then rechecking the clasp. This was one of her forbidden paths of thought, leading only into snares and brambles. Back up, back out. Yet it was indisputable that Julia was in many ways better suited to this large, affable American than she had been to Iris’s beloved son, and she was stung with sudden furious envy for Daniel. Daniel had been fiery and impetuous and brilliant—her captivating, flame-haired boy. Julia was unchallenging, far too passive for him, and they had argued, and she had not stood up to him as he’d needed. Her wilting would further aggravate him and they would then limp on for days in unresolved, unignorable tension while little Gwen, attuned and vibrating with every mounting bar of pressure, would prance between them like a court jester, exhausting herself in her efforts to effect a reconciliation. Daniel should have married someone with a bit of spice. Instead he’d chosen this pale flower and she had gone about looking harried. Julia had softened and unfurled. Yes—Iris had talked herself free of danger—it was no insult to Daniel to concede that she and anodyne Thing were a better fit. She drew in a deep breath and looked down at her hands. On the left a grape-colored chip of ruby set in ornately engraved eight-carat plate that had once been Philip’s mother’s—the thin, scuffed gold of her wedding band now retired to her right ring finger, where Philip also wore his.

  “My darling girl, I do know.” Here she paused, certain that Philip Alden would caution her not to sermonize. “You won’t lose her, the two of you are part of one another, which is precisely why this must hurt so much. And you and Thing have enough on your plates. In not very long you’ll be carefree together, and you’ll be starting an entirely different sort of life. You cannot allow Gwendolen to sabotage everything and destroy her own life in the process. Believe me, that would do your relationship with her no good either.”

  Julia wiped her cheeks, and nodded.

  Enough, thought Iris, suddenly overcome with irritation and unwilling to mourn a catastrophe while it could still be headed off at the pass. All this ululating and rending of collars was simply wasted energy. “Anyway. Your plans are your own business and are for you and Thing to discuss once the nest is actually empty. In the meantime”—she looked steadily at Julia—“before the children go forth, you must forbid them from multiplying. Deal with it.”

  27.

  “What about up here?” Nathan offered, pointing toward a patch of balding grass beneath a giant sycamore. It was less crowded than the larger clearing they had just passed, in which he’d spotted a group of local teenagers he half knew and urgently wished to avoid. A damp chill remained in the air, but an unexpected wash of pale April sunshine had drawn hopeful crowds to the Heath. Nathan’s parents had given him a series of coaching sessions prior to this outing, and he had set out determined to act upon them.

  “Ugh. You’re so lucky you get to escape to school. I wish I could escape from Mum and— Julia and James. They’re probably desperate to get rid of me anyway. I’m so sick of crying and being yelled at and groveling and then crying again, it’s not exactly relaxing.”

  “I don’t think the throwing up is majorly helpful. Maybe you should consider quitting that.”

  “Okay, I’ll think about giving up, but it’s just been so much fun. I feel human again today, though.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, with feeling. It had been dreadful to watch her heave, with the surreal guilt and awe that his own ejaculation could have such terrible power.

  They sat down on the seam of shadow that fell across the grass, Nathan in the sun, Gwen in the full shade. She had showered and put in her contact lenses and looked pretty and fresh faced again, in a pair of heart-shaped cerise Lolita sunglasses and a denim jacket on which she’d long ago embroidered a seam of prancing, rainbow-tailed unicorns. She had been cheerful since they’d been alone together. Sucking intermittently on an orange lollipop, she looked the picture of youthful innocence. Here was someone he recognized.

  “I’m sorry this has all got so crazy,” she said, after a while. The lolly clicked against her teeth as she removed it to speak. “I just get so frustrated that they don’t get it. And I know I’m superhormonal so it seems like I don’t know what I mean because I keep crying but I do, I just express myself badly. It’s like, insanely clear in my head. They’re both so rigid, it’s like they refuse to see that people can take different paths from them. From them? From theirs? Anyway. I think”—she paused to tuck the sweet back into one cheek—“I think sometimes it can be very hard for parents to see signs that their babies have become adults.”

  Nathan saw the truth in this statement, and also its dishonesty. Their parents were not upset because their children were growing up but because they had done something infantile. He had never felt less like an adult. This was most acute when he spoke on the phone with his mother, longing for the stifling warmth and reassurance of her soft arms around him. Last night he’d dreamed he had been entrusted with a minute baby in a jam jar. The jar had smashed, and the baby lay gasping and suffocating at his feet like a tiny landed minnow.

  Gwen turned to him to speak again and he took the lollipop from her hand, crunched it between his molars and then grinned at her, handing back the remaining shard on its paper stick. She liked these small, exclusive familiarities, he knew, liked sharing his spoon, or his toothbrush, enjoyed the ostentatious intimacy of licking a swelling drop of ice cream from his wrist, or passing chewing gum mouth to mouth. Or carrying his child, he thought, and found himself shaking his head involuntarily, as if the thought could be dislodged like water from his ears. He desperately needed her to listen.

  “Tell me honestly what you want.” Gwen began to peel at the damp stick with a fingernail. “I go mental when they ask because they’re so judgmental and it’s none of their business, but it’s different just us. This is our decision.”

  “Okay,” began Nathan, slowly. “Well, right now we’re talking about, like, a grain of rice.”

  Spoken by James or Julia, this would have tripped Gwen into a spasm of white rage, but alone with Nathan, she did not feel defensive. Nathan was not a threat. To compare it to a grain of rice did not reduce it to the insignificance of a grain of rice. Her chin lifted a fraction.

  “But it’s actually more like a grape by now than a grain of rice. So okay, what if you did cast the deciding vote? What if it was your body?” He noticed her hands slipped beneath her jacket to her lower belly, still muscled, still firm. It was unimaginable that beneath the sleek concavity of her navel could be anything so sinister and alien. Then her hand moved from her own stomach to his, demonstrating, inviting.

  He lay down on his back, though the hard ground was cold beneath him. It was easier to speak freely if he shut her out, and instead watched the crimson capillaries of his closed eyelids. “We’ve talked about it. I think to have it would be a major-league mistake. I can’t make you do anything.” This was the dutiful line, and he discharged it with feeling. “But I think it would be a huge mistake. We’re way too young. It’s a nightmare. Neither of us has finished school, and I’d want any son of mine to have everything I have. We’ve been insanely privileged, really. And I’d want to provide my kids with what I’ve had, you know, educationally, and travel; I’ve lived in two countries already . . .” Here he tapered off because, apart from having a vague awareness that his parents had argued over his own monstrously expensive school fees, he was at a loss to articulate the innumerable ways in which he felt ill-equipped for parenthood. It came down only to this—he didn’t want it. He could do it, he felt. If there were nuclear war, or the aliens came and it fell upon him to repopulate the earth with his bevy of flaxen-haired warrior-women, he would step up. But unless he found himself in those circumstances, where in any case he would have awesome weapons and iron
-hard biceps and a life-and-death battle against evil forces, and the cameras never showed screaming infants but instead dwelt on the necessary and heroic adrenaline-charged trysts amid the rubble; unless it would be like that, he did not want children. Not now, maybe never. Panic like a trapped sparrow fluttered in his chest.

  “I know.” She nodded in enthusiastic agreement, as if warming to an established theme. “I know, totally. And we could have waited and got married first and been all organized and— But I mean, this happened now, so plans change.”

  It had not escaped Nathan’s notice that she had begun to speak as if their lives together were inevitable, already planned and committed. Just weeks before, he remembered her saying something about a possible barbecue, if they were still together by summer. At the time he had been touched, and happy she saw their relationship continuing. He was at his best with a girlfriend, fortified by the knowledge that there was one person who would dependably choose him first. But now the conditional tense had been entirely abandoned. He had, apparently without noticing, acquired a wife. Still, they could not talk sensibly if she was defensive. “I never knew you wanted kids so young,” he said, carefully.

  “I guess I hadn’t thought about it until this happened”—she had flopped onto her back beside him but sat up again, speaking urgently—“and maybe some parts aren’t ideal but it just feels right, it’s like my whole life is clear suddenly, and makes sense. I know I probably sound crazy but it’s like it was meant to happen. This is everything.”

  He gave a dry chuckle, frowning and pinching the bridge of his nose, a position in which he looked, for a moment, exactly like his father. He sniffed. His eyes were stinging in the sun and watering, inexplicably. “This was meant to happen, you think?”