The Awkward Age Read online

  “Punctuation’s so not important, Grandpa,” said Gwen loyally, and Philip, who wished to differ, held his tongue. Instead he asked, “And the rest of last weekend, apart from what must have been the very hard parts? How did you find Boston? Your mother says you get on well with James’s daughter.”

  “Saskia’s awesome, she’s coming for Christmas I think, because her mother, you know Pamela? She’s coming over, too, to visit her sister. She is a total and complete psycho. It literally scares me how mental she is. No wonder James is a total wet blanket, I think she ate his brain when they got married. She’s like, terrifying.”

  Philip laughed and began to reach forward, painstakingly, for the lemon biscuits Gwen had made him, and she sprang forward and handed him the plate. “Terrifying in what sense?”

  “She just throws herself around all the time, it’s gross. Nathan is convinced it’s because she’s still in love with wimpy James, but I mean, good luck with that when he’s clearly obsessed with Mum, which I said and he was like, I know, I know, for now.”

  “So you and Nathan are friends now? That sounds like progress.”

  Gwen opened her mouth to speak and then clamped it shut with such sudden contraction that he heard the hollow thock of teeth closing together. “Not friends, he’s lame. But we’re stuck with each other, so everyone keeps saying.”

  10.

  They had been to collect Gwen from a visit to her grandfather’s, and when Philip had appeared at the threshold to wave good-bye, Julia was moved by the warmth with which he’d greeted James.

  The two men had met at a conference on neonatal health. Their rooms had been side by side in an isolated block at the far end of campus, and each morning, Philip had reported, the blond American next door had knocked and invited him to walk to breakfast. Together they had crossed the neat triangular slices of lawn that lay between redbrick faculty clusters, and in the refectory Philip would find them seats while James had lined up for their oily, lukewarm fried eggs. When the conference ended James had offered Philip a lift back to London, and over coffee in an M4 service station had mentioned that he was considering music lessons. There had been no music in his house growing up, he’d confided, only the low susurrations of financial anxiety and the dissonance of raised voices. Was it a foolish aspiration, in his fifties? Philip had carefully lowered his cup and felt in his breast pocket for a pen. A surgeon should take care of his fingers, he had counseled. James absolutely must learn to play the piano. He had pushed Julia’s e-mail address into James’s hands.

  James was a terrible, determined pianist, combining exuberance with Julia’s first true experience of a tin ear. He strode in tired from the hospital but in lessons seemed inexhaustible. He claimed to practice relentlessly, yet made no progress. He grinned, and swore, and hunched over to redouble his efforts. When a phrase defeated him he played it louder. He charmed her, but she knew he did not see her.

  And then for his fourth or fifth lesson he’d arrived to find her stapling programs for her students’ winter concert. The youngest, only five, would open with “When the Saints Go Marching In”; Susannah Gowers, who at twelve was the eldest, was rounding off the night with Mozart’s Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332. James had picked up a stiff white card.

  “A recital.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many students playing?”

  “All of them. Sixteen, in total.”

  He’d run his finger down the list, frowning. Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Bach again. “When am I?”

  She willed away the bubble of laughter rising in her throat. It was a four p.m. children’s concert in a school hall, on a sticky Pearl River upright. There would be orange soda and pink wafers. There would be proud parents filming, most of whom themselves were younger than James Fuller.

  “Don’t worry at all, and definitely don’t waste paper printing them again; you can just pencil it in. Perhaps I should perform the Schubert we’ve been working on? Or something new? I think you should decide what would work best for me. What about ‘Für Elise’?” He was grave, respectful. He regarded her unblinking.

  “I”—she was defeated into acquiescence by her own bitter disappointment; she had liked him, and he was deranged—“if you like,” she said, weakly.

  “Great.” He sat down at the piano and began to murder the first few bars of the Fantasie. “And I’ve been thinking,” he called over his shoulder, jaunty, like a music hall entertainer, “I’m going to sit for my grade three. I think I’m almost ready, what do you think?”

  Julia had made a strangled noise, and it was then that James had laid his forehead against the music stand and begun to shake with silent laughter. He gasped out, “‘Für Elise!’” and she caught up. He was not deranged. He was wonderful and foolish, and he had spectacular muscled shoulders, and she was smitten. Later that day he had called, between patients, and suggested coffee. She did not know whether the life-altering generosity of Philip’s introduction had been deliberate, and she could never ask. The belief shimmered in and out of certainty. She wondered whether she would ever be able to sense if Philip found it painful or distasteful to see them together.

  • • •

  JULIA ENTERED THE KITCHEN to find Nathan and an apparently reinstated Valentina sitting at the table, playing cards. This weekend there had been no trace of her, an unprecedented period of serenity in the household. Under normal circumstances, if she wasn’t at their dinner table, she was interrupting it with calls and text messages, and it had been a relief to be free of her pouting and huffing, her air of bored pretension. She batted sooty lashes at James, addressed Julia as if condescending to a member of household staff, and rarely deigned to speak to Gwen at all. Julia had felt cautiously hopeful that without her Nathan might be a nicer boy, and so it had proved. He had been more relaxed, able to act his age and to drop his air of world-wearied, supercilious cynicism. It could not be a coincidence that Gwen and Nathan had been getting on so much better. On Friday night the children had volunteered to go shopping together for supper, and later Nathan had sat with them watching at least ten minutes of one of Gwen’s favored reality shows without once suggesting that the devoted followers of such programs must be lobotomized morons. James had heard from Pamela (who had heard from Saskia) that Nathan and Valentina had broken up. If true, this would have been radical, and auspicious. But now it was Sunday evening and here she was, barefoot and back in their kitchen.

  It was Valentina’s pointed look toward the refrigerator, accompanied by a stifled, fey little giggle, that first attracted Julia’s attention to the blackboard on the back of the fridge door. When the fancy took her Gwen would write notes on this board, or practice her various calligraphies, or paint rainbows or self-portraits with chalk-dusted fingertips. Frequently she drew elaborate illustrations of the shopping list. “Grapes,” Julia would write, and the next day a vine would climb and twine around the letters, heavy with misty bunches. If Julia reminded herself to pick up some cottage cheese, she might find a drawing of a thatched and rose-wrapped little chalet perched upon a wheel of generously perforated Emmenthal. Julia had always treasured these artworks, begun, like so much else, in the months after Daniel’s death, another form of silent communication, and another small way in which they worked to make one another smile. Family traditions could go some way toward making two people feel like a family. Gwen’s rendering of a winsome, smiling anchovy had remained in one corner for months.

  Today, a new, tertiary commentary had appeared. In Julia’s handwriting it said, “Olive oil, mushrooms, cheddar.” James had written “Spuds,” which Gwen had then rubbed out and replaced with a drawing of a potato. She had made her own additions to the list but several of these, “MAYONAISE” and “TOMATOS”—had since been amended in thick red chalk to their correct spelling by a third, unknown hand. A drawing of an anthropomorphized fish finger that had been there for days had been wiped away and in its place,
in ornately serifed uppercase, the words, “5/7. TRY HARDER NEXT TIME.”

  Julia frowned at Nathan but from his face it seemed he, too, had only just noticed. Beside him she saw Valentina widen her eyes, and pout. She snapped a card down on the table and looked back at her hand with an expression of rather camp, exaggerated innocence, then raked her fingers through her long hair and pulled it forward over her shoulders, and stretched. “Hello, Julia,” she said, sweetly.

  James came in, unzipping his coat, and betraying no surprise at seeing Valentina in the kitchen, for which Julia admired him. She moved to get a damp cloth to wipe the blackboard, but at that moment Gwen appeared. She stopped short in the doorway, looking startled.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Valentina cooed, with an exaggerated expression of regret.

  Gwen appeared to struggle with a series of conflicting emotions but then said, rather stiffly, “I haven’t lost anything.”

  “She means Mole,” Nathan explained, looking embarrassed.

  Gwen appeared not to hear him. “I haven’t lost anything I actually wanted.”

  While this indecipherable exchange was taking place, Julia edged forward and tried to conceal the horrible, unsolicited little spelling test by standing in front of it. This drew everyone’s attention.

  Only Julia had a vantage place from which to see Gwen’s expression of bewilderment collapse into raw new shame. Gwen opened the fridge, extracted an apple, then left, slamming the door only marginally harder than necessary. Her footfalls up the stairs receded. To follow would compound the humiliation, Julia felt, though she longed with a magnetic pull to go to her daughter. James glanced at her and then turned and ambled out again. “I’m going to do a little work,” he said, as he left, “I’ll see you guys.”

  Julia noticed, unmoved, that Nathan was glaring at Valentina. “It’s late,” she said, finally. “I’m going to start dinner. Do you two mind shifting to the living room?”

  “Val’s not staying for supper,” said Nathan, smearing his hand over the scattered playing cards and pulling them toward him on the table with the satisfaction of a Vegas dealer. “Anyway, she’s given up eating till next year. Nil by mouth till she’s the size of the square root of minus one. Imaginary.” He sounded blithe but looked guilty, Julia noted. In truth, she thought, it wasn’t on to let him make fun of Valentina, either, and James would have pulled him up on it, but Julia did not feel inclined to defend her daughter’s assailant. Policing all these delinquent and unrelated teenagers was tedious. She took two eggplants from the newly denuded refrigerator and began to chop them. Behind her she heard Valentina saying, “Forgive me for thinking we had major things to talk about,” and then in a lower voice, “What? She won’t actually care. They don’t believe in stuff like spelling at her school, anyway, do they? It’s too rigorous and constraining. Who needs to be able to spell when you can draw such a jolly, friendly little fish finger?”

  Julia pulled open a lower drawer and clanged several saucepans on her hunt for the colander. If Nathan replied, she couldn’t make it out, and the next she heard was Valentina adding, petulantly, “E ho già detto che, don’t call me Val.”

  • • •

  SO THAT, GWEN THOUGHT, was that. Shame twisted within her. Valentina might be odious but she, Gwen, was something far worse, for she was stupid. Whatever peculiar Bostonian wormhole had yawned open and deluded Nathan into finding her attractive had resealed, and the natural order of the universe had been restored.

  All week she had been summoning the courage to message him at school to ask about Valentina—silent rehearsals of phrasing and rephrasing in which she tried to balance the desire to know with her more pressing wish not to seem invested in his answer. It had been a waste of energy. They were obviously back together, if indeed they had ever broken up.

  But then why, why all the kissing? Alone in her room she flushed, reliving it. He’d been home from school for the weekend and since then they had kissed for nearly two cumulative hours, she had calculated, and all of it initiated by Nathan.

  It was true that he had never attempted to approach her in the house, but this had surely been appropriate caution under highly unusual circumstances. If they were going to be boyfriend and girlfriend—and this had been her sustaining and most cherished fantasy from that first fraction of a second, on the roof in Boston—if they were going to be in a serious relationship, then a certain degree of tact would be required of both of them. She had planned it all out.

  On Friday he’d already been kicking about in Belsize Park when she’d got off the bus from school, when he usually spent Friday nights at Westminster. They had walked home together through the nature reserve where he had turned and pulled her to him almost in the middle of a sentence, stumbling with her off the path and pressing her up against the broad, rough trunk of an old oak, and on the way out had even held her hand, their fingers interlaced until they’d emerged into the familiarity and exposure of Lawn Road.

  And there had been other developments. When it first happened, the night of their return to London, she had fended off his hands as they’d snaked their way beneath her sweater. On Friday in Belsize Wood, she had waited a third and then a fourth beat before pushing him away. The cold of his fingertips had shocked her but there had been something else, too, and though it had begun to rain and the wintry, late-afternoon darkness had long fallen, she had felt a clenching low in her belly, a knot of sudden hunger, and had wanted to let him continue. Even to contemplate it was impossible—it thrilled her that a boy like Nathan would make these attempts but it was impossible to succumb to them. Her first kiss had been only a week ago; it was far too soon for anything further. In any case, she had privately resolved, his hands would go nowhere until he had clarified his position with Valentina. She would have told him of this stipulation had he asked.

  It had become clear that Nathan was a two-timing weasel and a liar. Home was now officially and comprehensively unbearable—there would be nowhere to which Gwen could escape except her own room, and even that would be no liberation if Valentina started staying over again. It was not only in the movies, she’d discovered, that headboards banged against walls with rhythmic and unequivocal insistence. Valentina had read Dante in Italian, she was not dyslexic, and she would definitely be accepted to read English at Merton, which was—Gwen had heard it discussed as a fait accompli so often she might scream—what she planned to do after graduating from Westminster. Not hoped. Planned. Gwen did not know who or what Dante was, though she knew it to be the name of a character on an American television drama. Alone in her room, her cheeks flamed. She wanted to open her new polymer modeling clay, a deep indigo that she’d hoped would be perfect for rendering denim, but Valentina’s mere presence made her art feel foolish and for that she hated her more than anything. It was the anchor of her identity without which she was undifferentiated and unremarkable, and it was childish and pointless.

  There was a cheery rap, and James’s head appeared round the door.

  “Your mom sent me psychic vibes that she wanted me to come and check you were okay. She’d have come herself but she’s busy lacing arsenic into the dinner.”

  “Good. Tell her to make it a double dose for me.”

  “Not for you. But I think she’s ready to dispatch our little visitor.” James advanced a little into the room and opened the door wider behind him. He always did this when they were alone together, Gwen had noticed with exasperation, shuffling away on sofas and adopting modes of ostentatiously monkish propriety that he had no doubt learned from a book of pop psychology. How Not to Make Your Stepdaughter Think You’re a Perv, Volume I. This was the first time he had ventured alone into her bedroom and so he must have been on high alert. He needn’t have bothered. James did not have it in him to be anything so interesting as a pervert. Of all her objections that, thankfully, was not a concern. His self-conscious behavior merely drew attention to the idea that
he could have been an incestuous pedophile, but wasn’t. Still, if he was willing to insult Valentina, he could stay.

  “Your son,” Gwen said, with slightly wobbly scorn, “is a total douche.”

  “He has it in him,” James conceded. “But I think that particular little nastiness was someone else’s handiwork. I saw his face, I really think he hadn’t seen. Do you want to come back down and show them that you’re a bigger person?”

  “Is that some kind of joke?” Gwen demanded, ever attuned to anything that could be construed a reference to her height. “You think I should like, stand on her, or something?”

  James looked bewildered and then horrified, briefly. “No! I wouldn’t make personal— No, no. Retake. Do you want to come back down and show them you are a more mature person than she?”

  “I’m not. I’m a retard who can’t spell.” Gwen promptly burst into tears. James would never attempt to hug her unchaperoned, and she felt fleeting gratitude for this consideration before sinking back into the partial relief of misery and self-pity. And her mother hadn’t even come up. She’d sent her new proxy, as if she and James were interchangeable. Gwen’s companionship no longer necessary, her requirements no longer paramount. Gwen had no one. James sat down in the open doorway and pulled his knees up, awkwardly.

  “You know, nowadays we have spellcheck,” he mused. “I’d say on balance I’d rather be you.”

  Gwen shook her head, mute with unhappiness, but just then a message arrived.

  Sorry about V. She’s mad because it’s totally over, that was last talk. You’re my girl? xxx

  Gwen gave James an unsteady smile that broadened as she reread. She said he could go, thanks. She would be okay.

  11.

  Christmas had always been presumed a point of tension between Julia and Daniel but had been, in reality, quite the opposite. Before they’d married they had felt obligated to visit Julia’s mother every year on the grounds, put forward by Julia’s mother herself, that Daniel’s parents were Jews and it was not “their day.” “They can’t have everything,” she had said, dark and obscure. Julia had sat in shame and misery while her mother scorched a crown of turkey, refused Daniel’s help with anything but taking the bins out, and instead sat, slashing deep scores into the bottoms of tough sprouts and alternately ignoring or interrogating him on the subject of his religious beliefs. Unearthing his agnosticism, layered on top of the already unacceptable Judaism, had been the final insult. They had gone one final time when Gwen was tiny, teething, battling an unfortunate coincidence of pinkeye and impetigo, not a celestial Christmas cherub but a blotched and irritable tyrant. Julia’s mother had refused to hold the baby but instead had sat back, arms crossed defensively across her chest, and offered the bewildering adage that “a redhead aboard a ship brings bad luck,” implying that both Gwen and Daniel might have had the same ill effect upon National Rail, opined that it had been wicked to take the child on a crowded train spreading all those germs, and had then gone on to suggest that they had done so only because Daniel (and wasn’t it always the case with his sort?) was too tight-fisted to pay for the petrol. Julia had not repeated the mistake, preferring to visit alone, and at less charged points on the calendar. Christmas had offered too much tantalizing material, too many baubles of obvious conflict and star-points of attack.