The Awkward Age Page 6

  Gwen nodded, fiercely. She turned aside in order to wipe her face with the back of her hand, noticing as she looked back that Nathan, too, wore an expression of genuine distress. He cleared his throat and repeated, more steadily, “Anyway. I just wanted to notify you that the jury have returned a unanimous verdict of Dickhood, and sentenced me accordingly.”

  “It’s okay,” Gwen said, because it was expected. But now that he was here she could not help herself from inviting him to annul the other words that had hurt so much this morning. She wanted them not repented but somehow actually un-said. “Did you really not like him at all?”

  Nathan missed this prompt. His sister was rarely angry with him and when she was forgave him in silence and without discussion. Valentina specialized in spectacular tantrums, in canceled or aggressively terminated phone calls, and on the infrequent occasion she knew herself to be in the wrong she would ring repeatedly until he picked up, imperiously demanding his forgiveness. These fights had not equipped him with a sophisticated understanding of how to nurture, or comfort. All he’d learned so far was to reassure women of their beauty and of their value to himself, neither of which seemed useful in this circumstance. In later years, in adulthood, he would have understood that he was meant to declare that Mole had been extraordinary and precious not only to Gwen but to humanity; had been the sweetest-tempered animal, the most intuitive, that there would never be another like him. Grief can be petty and voracious; it craves repeated assurance of the worthiness, the unique value of its subject. He would learn. At seventeen he did not understand the cue, and simply said, “I don’t really know about dogs.”

  “He wasn’t like other dogs,” Gwen said, let down, and started to cry again.

  “Come and sit on the roof and have a drink, I’ve got whiskey, and they’ve got hot apple cider downstairs at the bar. It’s only ten. If you get dressed, I can get one and make us hot toddies,” Nathan offered, anxious to distract her, reaching into a capacious pocket to produce a hipflask. He wanted her to feel better, and to know that he had been forgiven. He was keen to win back Julia’s approbation in order to deserve his father’s.

  “It’s late. What is it? I don’t really drink. And I only like Malibu.”

  “That’s probably because it’s the only thing you’ve ever tried,” said Nathan, reasonably. “Whiskey’s medicinal. It’s why I picked it, it’s reviving. Saint Bernards delivered it in the Alps. Or maybe that was brandy. Anyway.” Would this canine reference be enticing, or insensitive? “Come up. Five minutes?”

  She nodded her assent and elbowed the door closed, careful not to unclamp her arms from across her chest.

  • • •

  TEN MINUTES LATER they reunited on the roof beside a deep, square swimming pool. This had been drained for the winter, though the small round lights embedded into its walls still shone, filling the pool with overlapping rings of cold, turquoise light. A drift of tiny leaves had collected on the blue-tiled bottom.

  The chaise longues were stacked and shackled beneath tarpaulins for the winter, so Gwen and Nathan sat on the concrete lip of the deep end, cold seeping through coats and jeans. It was impossible to remain there and they both stood up almost immediately, casting around for alternatives. Nathan noticed a panel of switches by the elevator and began pressing them in turn, and eventually a large heater came on above the door. Gwen found two small aluminum coffee tables, icy to the touch and beaded with moisture from the damp air, and dragged these into the doorway where they could sit shielded from the wind and warmed, fractionally, by the buzzing fan. That morning James had presented her and Saskia each with a pair of yellow, faux-fur earmuffs, and she clamped hers tighter over her ears.

  Gwen’s few, tentative experiments with rum and pineapple juice had been uneventful. She had always mixed her own drinks at parties and, cautious about quantities, had used the tiny plastic screw cap of the lemonade bottle as her measure. She watched Nathan pouring long slugs of toffee-colored liquid into two white paper cups of hot apple juice. Far below, in the street, an ambulance wailed.

  Her first sip made her cough. “It’s burning,” she said, recovering herself, but immediately tried again. “It’s so grim, how can people drink this?”

  Nathan made a show of taking a swig straight from the hipflask. “It is rather smoky, it takes time to acquire a taste for it. I took it from a decanter in my mother’s house. The current man likes Scotch malts, apparently.”

  “Is that Wentworth guy her boyfriend?” Gwen asked. Something in Nathan’s careful enunciation of “Scotch malts,” a spitting quality, caught her attention.

  “Who knows. My mother is quite liberal with her favors.”

  Gwen giggled, shocked.

  “I speak only the truth. Boyfriend, who knows? But I mean,” Nathan continued, forcing an unsuccessful innuendo, “he keeps his whiskey at her house.”

  “Won’t your mum notice you took it?”

  “I didn’t take it. I used it for its proper purpose. I decanted it.”

  Gwen’s earmuffs were itching and she took them off, shaking out her hair. Nathan smiled.

  “Those look absolutely ridiculous.”

  “Take it up with your dad; he bought them.”

  “Well, no one ever claimed he was a sartorial genius.”

  “What does ‘sartorial’ mean? Why do you speak like that?” she demanded, made bolder by the dark, and by this unexpectedly companionable transgression.

  “You mean, with words? In sentences? It means ‘about or to do with clothes.’ It was the perfect word for the moment.”

  “You could have just said, ‘No one ever claimed he knows about clothes.’”

  “Orwell would admire your commitment to simplicity.”

  “I’m not simple!”

  “I never said you were any such thing. You are quite complex, in fact. Like all women,” he added, loftily.

  She clamped the earmuffs back on, defiant.

  “You look like a Fraggle with those things on your head.”

  “I never watched it. Didn’t the main one have red hair?”

  “Yes. How come you’re actually wearing a gift my execrated father bought you?”

  “I’m not even going to ask you what that word means.” She shrugged, her hands in her pockets. “My ears were cold. And I’m trying to adjust, isn’t that what we’re meant to be doing? Adjusting to our new family. My mum wants me to be nice to him, so I’m trying to be nice to him.”

  “I wouldn’t expend too much energy adjusting,” Nathan said. He was typing on his phone as he spoke, and did not look up. “It’ll last till it lasts, and then who knows.”

  Gwen fell silent. She had never—not once—considered the possibility of the relationship “not lasting.” Adult relationships lasted forever or until someone died, which was precisely why James’s appearance had been so devastating. The idea that it could just end and life could return to normal was thrilling. She and her mother could slip back into old, easy ways, the soft comfort of favorite jeans after this stiff, unnatural costume.

  “Why d’you think it won’t last?”

  “I can think of a hundred reasons. First of all, I don’t believe in marriage.”

  “They’re not married!” cried Gwen, horrified.

  “You are terribly literal. I don’t believe in lifelong monogamous cohabitation, then.”

  “I don’t think it matters if you believe in it, I think it matters if they believe in it.”

  “Well my father obviously doesn’t either or he’d still be married to my mother.”

  Gwen considered this—it made James sound rather threatening. “Who broke up with who?”

  “Whom. Who broke up with whom. In any case,” Nathan said, easily, “it was never all that clear. I think it’s one of those absurdly passionate can’t-live-with, can’t-live-without things. When Mom lived in London Dad was
always randomly staying over. She’d have chucked some boyfriend or other and then on Sunday morning Dad would be there, all jolly and making pancakes and wearing some weird old clothes that he hadn’t bothered packing when he moved out. It doesn’t bear thinking about. People over forty should be forced into celibacy. It’s so wrong.”

  “So why aren’t they still married?”

  “Oh, I’d not be surprised if they got back together properly at some point, when they’re living in the same country again.” And then, as if discussing his own children he added, with indulgent fondness, “I’ve given up second-guessing. Nothing with those two would surprise me. Don’t look so freaked, it’s not like he’d ever be unfaithful to your mother or anything. He’s utterly besotted right now. I just don’t believe anything lasts, that’s all.”

  Gwen’s fantasy scenarios of getting rid of James involved her mother listening to reason and evicting him. She did not like to think of Julia being abandoned for a seductress who lured him back with pancakes and a restoration of his former family life. Then she remembered Mole, and to her dismay she felt a lump begin to form in her throat.

  Nathan glanced at her. “That girl Fraggle was quite hot. Red.”

  “Being ginger’s awful,” she said, crossly.

  “Red was her name, I mean. Red hair’s pretty.” He moved the small table he was sitting on until it was immediately next to hers and reached out to lift a strand from her shoulder. Gwen thrust her hands deeper into her pockets. His face was very close to hers, inspecting a curl beneath the dull yellow light.

  “Not bad,” he said, and she felt his gaze, slightly unfocused, shift away from the lock of hair that lay in his gloved hand.

  There followed a fraction of a second in which Gwen felt he might kiss her. And a fraction of a second later, she realized that she had misunderstood, but that this had been—just for one, painful instant—what she wanted. She felt herself flush. Nathan’s face remained inches away from hers but he was still, with a show of great interest, studying the color of her hair. Then he looked up at her, but did not sit back.

  “I like red,” he said, quietly, so close that his breath tickled her lips. He was twirling the strand around his finger.

  She looked back at him and thought—I’m drunk. I am humiliatingly drunk, on two-thirds of a paper cup of lukewarm apple juice and whiskey. He is almost my stepbrother. And what if it’s illegal? At that moment he lifted his hand to her cheek and drew her face toward him, and their lips met.

  A border crossed. A new territory and uncharted anxieties. His tongue, unexpectedly firm, was in her mouth where it remained, probing her own. She did not know whether it was permissible to close her lips, briefly, now that they were parted, and wondered, too, when she might be able to pause for a moment in order to swallow. But if they paused, they would have to speak to one another and that, when it came, would be excruciating. Their heads were tilted to the right—was there a prearranged moment at which one was expected to rotate ninety degrees and incline the other way, left to left? Nathan did not seem to want to stop, nor appear to suffer any salivary concerns.

  So this was it. And it had not happened in the dark, buttered-popcorn recesses of a cinema, or years before, beneath the rolling swell of disco lights on the dance floor of a bar mitzvah, to a soundtrack of a power ballad and the envious whoops and giggles of spectating friends. It had happened in America on an icy hotel rooftop, with a boy much more experienced than she, a little older, very much cooler, who might or might not have a girlfriend and to whom she might or might not be related. It was possible she had been, until tonight, the only sixteen-year-old in London who had not yet kissed a boy, but she already knew that this tale, when she recounted it to an envious Katy, would be worth the wait.

  Nathan’s hand was at the back of her neck, pulling her toward him with a new and surprising insistence. In a moment of tentative confidence she pulled away, swallowed furtively, and performed her revolution, right to left, her neck relieved of its increasing tension in the chill. After the successful execution of this move she started to relax. The racing of her mind began to slow, and she found herself thinking, with a flash of new triumph, that her mother, James, Katy, and Valentina would all be horrified, for different, precious, valid reasons.

  9.

  Philip had lost his Andrew-and-Fergie commemorative mug, one of the treasured possessions of his recent years. Gwen had accepted his attachment to this object without judgment. Julia was bemused, while Iris found it risible, and an embarrassment. Philip didn’t mind. If they wished to believe he had lately become an ardent collector of royalist memorabilia, so be it. Iris need not have the family monopoly on caprice, and it was considerably less humiliating than the truth: that he was a man whose surgeon’s hands had been seized by arthritis and who hoped—correctly, it turned out—that a two-handled mug would mean he could once again drink tea first thing in the morning. He had happened to mention that it was missing, and Gwen had raced over to help him hunt.

  “Well, where did you last have it?” Gwen demanded, her hands planted on her hips. She had painted a butterfly on the back of her left hand and every now and then glanced down at her own handiwork with admiration. She spun on her heels in place, scanning the room, and her hair, in two fat braids, thumped against her back and chest as she turned. It was a pleasing sensation and she did this several times back and forth. “Can’t we put some more light on?”

  “It is on. It really doesn’t matter, darling,” Philip said, gesturing for her to sit down again. She peered around once more without moving and then flopped back on the sofa, pulling her phone out of the marsupial pouch of her sweater. “Let’s find another one on eBay, I’ll bid on a few to make sure. Oh! Maybe they’ve got Charles and Diana?”

  “Later, later. It must be somewhere. Tell me how you are, first. How have you been?”

  “I’m okay.” Gwen shrugged, tucking her phone away again. “School’s boring. You know.”

  “Your blog was very moving,” Philip told her. “The portraits were beautiful. I don’t know how you think of these things. Beautiful. You made your grandmother cry.”

  “Really?” Gwen brightened. “Is that possible?”

  “It’s possible. Not frequent, but it happens. You moved us both.”

  Gwen had depicted herself and Julia hand in hand in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, beneath a gallery of portraits of Mole, tiny, recognizable Old Masters in which an elderly black Labrador had replaced those old familiar faces. Mole, peacock-blue-and-gold robed in His Studio; an uncertain, white-turbaned Berber King Mole; Mole in the brass-buttoned, double-breasted uniform of the Arles postman.

  The dog’s final, rattling breath had slayed Philip, though he had remained calm and professional with the pretty, sorrowful young vet while she had wielded her terrible needle. He did not tell Gwen that when he had seen her portraits he had wept until fat tears had fallen onto his keyboard. When he had collected himself he had called Iris and they had agreed that their granddaughter was a genius. “Memento mori,” Iris had said, thoughtfully, and he had agreed, though these days he needed no such prompt.

  Gwen was looking at him, her expression solemn. “I wanted to say—thank you so much for taking care of him. I’m glad he was with you. You’re the only person—you are very soothing, you know, Grandpa. I’m sure Mole loved you.”

  “And I him. Thank you, maidele. I do promise you, I made the decision that felt moral.”

  “Oh, I know,” Gwen said, with a decisive nod. “I’d have felt awful if you’d kept him suffering for me. It would have been so selfish. You’re a dog person, I totally trust you. And a doctor.”

  “You’re anything but selfish.”

  “I dunno.” Gwen drew her brows together in a frown. “I’m trying not to be but sometimes I just am, without realizing. I get upset about things and then that upsets Mum, and then I feel bad, but I never know it’s happening
till after it’s happened, you know? Suddenly we’re having a huge fight and I don’t even know how. And then I can’t talk to her properly because we’re literally never alone. Ever. We used to get ten milliseconds in the car on the way to pottery, but now James comes with, and they go to the gym together during my lesson. The gym. I mean, Mum in the gym is so beyond ridiculous, it’s so try-hard, it’s only because James is obsessed with it. She doesn’t even have leggings; she goes in, like, linen trousers. So we literally have to whisper in the bathroom or whatever, and I get upset and then she gets sad and worried and feels torn, and then I get upset she’s upset. I’m not joking, I have to physically kidnap her to talk to her anymore.” She had begun to look brooding. Philip saw his son’s defiant dark eyes flash in his granddaughter’s face.

  “It sounds like you miss her. Have you talked about it?”

  “Maybe a squillion times and she just says it’s an ‘adjustment period.’ If I need to say something private, I message her now, but she’s so rubbish-texting it’s painful, I can see her across the room and she’ll be spending five hours typing three words so it’s actual parental abuse to make her do it. You text superquickly. You’re amazing.” She said this with some pride.

  “I use voice recognition. It’s why my punctuation is sometimes a bit strange.”