The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  But Gwen shook her head and drew the hood of her sweatshirt down low over her forehead, pulling tight the toggles to cover her ears, and to shield her eyes from the lights, which this morning seemed offensively dazzling. The sweet indolence of the summer lay ahead, Nathan would no longer be away on weeknights, and they could be together every day. She had succumbed briefly to his results-obsessed propaganda and had expended needless energy tearing after the bloodless electric hare of senior school success, but in truth academic qualifications did not matter. They were all deluded. She could not summon the energy to tell them of their misconception, however.

  23.

  All afternoon Gwen followed her mother around as she packed, wearing the mournful expression of an abandoned puppy dog but, quite unlike a puppy, making no attempt to be appealing. In response to Julia’s inquiries she would only offer such valuable contributions as, “Who cares what you wear with a bunch of musicians?” Her sullen unpleasantness had been increasing since breakfast, when she had told James his aftershave made her want to vomit, and had even snapped at Nathan, complaining the eggs he had scrambled with much fanfare were slimy, undercooked, and generally offensive. She was standing in the hallway while Julia dithered over whether or not to bring a coat for the festival. Julia was indecently excited about this small, solo trip.

  “If you change your mind, I’m sure James will pop you round to Katy’s party later. What have you planned for the rest of the weekend?”

  “Weekends don’t matter now it’s Easter,” said Gwen, who had taken deep offense at her mother’s evident eagerness to go, and would not give an inch before this treacherous departure. “All days are the same. I’m tired, I don’t want to see a bunch of randoms.”

  “Have you and Nathan got anything planned?”

  “Why are you interviewing me?” Gwen whined, sitting down heavily on the stairs and slumping over her knees. “You don’t need to plan playdates for me while you’re away, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

  If she hadn’t had one foot out of the door—or had James overheard—Julia might have felt fortified to check this latest discourtesy, but instead she raised her hands in surrender. Gwen laid her head on her crossed arms, the embodiment of bleak despair. Moved despite herself, Julia stroked back her daughter’s tangled hair. “No third degree, I just thought you might be doing something.”

  “What, like a superfun classical music festival?” Gwen mumbled into her knees, “Woohoo, par-tay.”

  Surely this mood couldn’t be attributed to her own, brief departure, Julia thought, perplexed, and then with a thrill of disloyalty, reflected that in about half an hour this state of affairs would all become Nathan’s problem. He wanted to be with her daughter? He could take her as he found her. The festival in Verbier had begun to take on the honeyed glow of a recuperative spa weekend. She was even looking forward to the drive to Heathrow.

  “Mummy,” Gwen looked up, suddenly plaintive. “Mummy, I don’t feel very well.”

  Julia laid the back of her hand on her daughter’s cheek. It was cool, and dry. “What’s wrong, Dolly?” she asked, softly. “I’ll be back before you know it. What’s going on?”

  Gwen shook her head, hopeless. “I don’t know.” She began to cry. “I feel dizzy.”

  Julia bent to kiss Gwen’s forehead. She looked down at the mass of loose, fox-red curls escaping and unraveling into a halo of fine frizz, the bursts of psychedelic swirls and flowering creepers that Gwen had drawn in blue and red Biro across one forearm and then, above the loose cotton neck of an ancient shirt of Daniel’s, she saw the blue-veined marbling of her daughter’s swollen breasts. She bent down suddenly and gripped Gwen’s shoulders.

  “Gwendolen.” Her voice was steady, as steady as an ambulance dispatcher’s, as steady as due north. “Gwendolen.” Behind her she heard a key scrape in the front door but she did not turn. “Gwen. Look at me. Right now. Are you pregnant?”

  Gwen looked up, her pale face striped with glossy tearstains. She shrugged.

  • • •

  “I’M HOME!” called James from the doorway. He held many straining plastic shopping bags and had slung several others around each wrist, so that beneath their weight his hands had turned first white and then puce with temporarily arrested circulation. He edged the door open with his knee. He had determined to consider the weekend with Julia’s daughter an opportunity, rather than a nuisance. Certainly he had made sure to tell Julia this was how he saw it, and he wished to make it true.

  “Now,” he said, slamming the door shut behind him with a violent jolt of the hip and dumping the groceries at his feet before remembering the eggs, too late, “I have big news, kiddo. And the news is this: we’re making veggie pizza. Your mom’s away so you get to be the queen around here.”

  He crouched down to investigate. To his relief, the eggs were all unbroken. Now he looked up, one hand still buried in a Waitrose carrier bag. Two stricken faces met him in silence.

  “What’s happened? Where’s my boy? Where’s Nathan?”

  • • •

  THIS WAS NOT THE RIGHT WAY. She should have taken a test alone, to prove that she was responsible. She should have presented the facts in a calm and considered manner, so that Julia would admire her solemn maturity and initiative. These things happen, Gwen imagined her mother saying, stroking her hair. I can’t believe how grown up you’ve been, my brave girl. She should have gone online and found herself a doctor; should have made her own appointment to take care of it, and the magnitude of the decision and the stoic dignity with which she’d taken it would have filled both Julia and Nathan with awe. These things happen. She did not want to be pregnant. It was inconceivable that she could be a mother. But she knew she had not been foolish—in her head she had been courageous and responsible. She just hadn’t had time to prove herself. How could you test for a pregnancy in which you didn’t quite believe? Now it had all gone wrong, for her mother looked as if she hated her. They were together in the bathroom while James paced the hallway, outside.

  “I don’t understand,” Julia kept saying. “I don’t understand how this happened.” She had not yet raised her eyes from the plastic window of the newly purchased pregnancy test that lay on the side of the sink, its message unequivocal. Her knuckles had whitened from her grip on the basin. And then the worst words, “How could you be so stupid?”

  Gwen shrugged, hopelessly. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, but she could not yet speak. She felt flushed and dizzy and slightly sick, from fear or pregnancy or possibly both. No fate, in that moment, could have felt worse than her mother’s disappointment. She yearned for sympathy, for gentleness. She longed to be small, and to be taken care of.

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” she whispered.

  This had been the wrong thing to say.

  “On purpose? On purpose? I never for one moment imagined it was anything other than, than damn foolishness. How long have you suspected? How many weeks—oh, God. This is a nightmare.” More softly, to herself, “This is a living nightmare.”

  “I was going to deal with it. I was going to fix it so you didn’t worry and then tell you . . .”

  “But have you seen a doctor? Do you know if you even have time to fix it? Does Nathan know?” This last was shouted, in a crescendo of rage.

  “No.”

  “No, what? No, you haven’t seen a doctor? No, you don’t know? I don’t understand how you could have allowed— We trusted you. You asked me to trust you. You promised me I could trust you, and you’ve let me down. You’ve let”—Gwen had a sudden instinct to cover her ears against the next words—“you’ve let your father down.”

  Gwen felt her last hope collapse within her. She would be abandoned for this, and would never be forgiven. Now, when she needed more than ever to be restored to the full beam of her mother’s love, to that deep, old intensity, they felt further apart than ever. She fell
to her knees like a penitent, laid her head against the cold edge of the bath, and began to sob. “Don’t talk about Daddy!” she begged, gasping for breath. Her shoulders heaved, and she waited for warm arms to enfold her. She longed to lay her head in her mother’s lap and sob, You used to love me—love me now. But though she cried harder and harder nothing happened, and when she looked up Julia was shaking her head in disbelief, and there was something new in her eyes that frightened Gwen. Hatred, maybe. What happened now hardly mattered.

  24.

  Julia stayed up very late with James, talking. Just before midnight the evening’s silence had been briefly broken by shouts and scuffles as the pub around the corner disgorged its Friday-night punters and by intermittent caterwauling as these liberated drinkers carried their singing from the bar into the streets. Tonight, though this was not always the case, it sounded spirited but good-natured, out of sight behind the sturdy Victorian terraces. Julia and James stood at the window, intertwined and unmoving, frozen in their bubble of shock. The solidity of James’s arm around her waist was, quite possibly, the only thing that kept her standing. Disbelief came crashing back over her in waves, and each time it receded left a shoreline sullied with debris. Strands of anger and guilt. Empty shells of self-reproach. She felt a hundred years old.

  “Maybe that’s what we should have done this evening,” Julia said. “Maybe we just should have walked out and gone to the Lord Southampton and drunk ourselves into oblivion.”

  “What, take up binge-drinking? Sing our troubles away on a karaoke machine somewhere?”

  “Yes, exactly. It would have been cathartic. Or numbing. Oh”—she turned and laid her head against the broad solidity of his chest—“let’s run away. Let’s just go. I’ve got a hotel room in Verbier ready and waiting, right now, that I’m meant to be in. We could conceal ourselves among the violinists.”

  “We could pay our way across Europe giving recitals. You can play and I’ll . . . dance. South of France? Tuscany?”

  “We could start a vineyard.”

  “Let’s make buffalo mozzarella.”

  “I think you might need buffalo to make buffalo mozzarella.”

  James considered. “So you’ll look after the buffalo. I’ll make the wine. I really think we’re onto something, it will be more economical to make our own if we’re going to become full-time alcoholics.”

  “Not alcoholics,” Julia amended. “Binge-drinkers.”

  “Right. Tuscan binge-drinkers.” James sat down on the bed and pulled her hand, gently, until she was sitting beside him. “It’s a real shame about your master class, as well as everything else. I know it’s not . . . This does happen, you know. I see a lot of kids at work—”

  “Everyone you see at work is pregnant, it’s not representative.”

  “True. But what I mean is . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m in shock, I think. I’m sorry, I won’t quote statistics at you.”

  “We should have stopped all of this, the whole thing. The sex. The unprotected sex. The utter stupidity of the relationship itself. How could they be so bloody stupid? How did this actually happen?”

  James could not reply to this question for in truth he blamed Gwen, and was so angry that he did not think he could ever again be civil to her. Pamela had waged a relentless sexual health campaign with their own children since long before it had been relevant or even appropriate, and despite these assurances, James himself had given Nathan stern reminders about the importance of condoms ever since Valentina’s first appearance. Each of these unsatisfactory discussions had ended with a withering dismissal of, “It’s all taken care of, Father,” or more tastelessly, “Dad, this ain’t my first rodeo.” But it had been established that they had not been using condoms, and that this current debacle was therefore entirely due to Gwen’s laissez-faire attitude to taking the Pill. Nathan, James judged, had done his medic parents proud. He had taken himself off to the Royal Free for a full sexual health screening before trusting to the hormonal contraception alone, which was mature and considerate, especially given his rather limited sexual history. Nathan had been gentlemanly, principled, irreproachable. Gwen, by contrast, was a spoiled, selfish, and irresponsible little airhead. Despite tonight’s earlier display, in which she had been the embodiment of abject misery and contrition and bewilderment, James thought it more than possible that she had done it on purpose. To share her mother’s attention made her frantic, and with a single move she had commandeered it all, trapping Nathan in the process. Regardless of her insecurity, Gwen was a girl accustomed to her own way and now she had created such a tornado of dramatic tension around herself that it was possible she would once again get it. She had behaved indefensibly toward his beloved son. His beloved son who was staying over at Charlie’s house after a gig, whose phone was still off, and who had absolutely no idea of the bedlam that awaited him at home.

  He had stood outside the bathroom while the stupid girl had peed on a stick that would reaffirm what, with a little hindsight, ought to have been perfectly obvious, and by the time the three minutes of waiting had elapsed he had regained outward mastery of himself. Nathan would need his father to be calm. In any case, amid the howling and shrieking, someone had to remain clear-headed.

  He saw that he had been too cautious about discipline, too careful not to undermine or challenge Julia’s rule, and far too deferential to the other, absent man of the house. Once they had all recovered from this unpleasantness he would assert himself, by Julia’s side, at the helm of this family. He would dispatch Gwen to a grief counselor. He would insist that they all see a family therapist. He would fix what was broken around here.

  “I promised Daniel,” Julia was saying, and he summoned his mind back to the present, back to her serious, pale face, “I promised I’d take care of her. I promised I’d be two parents.”

  “Even kids with two parents can get pregnant.”

  “I know, but when we talked about her life, and the support she’d need to get through his loss—he felt so guilty about leaving her, you know, she was only ten and he knew how she would suffer. Can you imagine? She was just skinny arms and legs, and this huge bushel of mad red hair, and all sunshine and energy. He said it was like throwing a beautiful, porcelain plate high in the air—you can see it flawless and unbroken as it arcs upwards and descends, right until the moment you know is coming when it hits the ground and smashes. And he was going to be the one to hurt her like that. He was so angry he’d never see her grow up. And you know, we’d talk about what she’d be, who she’d become; we’d try and imagine it together, and I promised I’d do my best to protect her and give her a good life.”

  James did not, in this instance, think that a father’s death years ago offered sufficient excuse or explanation. He never usually acknowledged her daughter’s bad behavior, but with this silence, he now judged, he had also let Daniel down. He had pragmatic feelings about Daniel. He rarely chose to think of him at all, and when he did it was as a vague, benign presence, abstract as an ancestor, and with this unthreatening distance between them the two men could and ought to be brothers in arms. He imagined Daniel’s love for Julia as his own—epic and sweeping as the prairie, broad and generous as the pale sky above it. When he thought of Julia he always saw this same image—vast, open spaces; the pallor and splendor of soothing, infinite skies. He would take care of her. He would not let her be bullied by an unhinged, manipulative teenager. A teenager whose attack had wounded his son as collateral damage. He could give voice to none of this. Instead he said, “You have given her a good life. You are giving her a good life.”

  “Maybe, but seriously, I considered making it through secondary school without an illegitimate pregnancy as the bare minimum.”

  “No one, no one could love their daughter more than you love Gwen. And we will all get through this together and be fine. It’s horrible, it will be horrible for both our kids, and then it
will be over. We found out early, which makes everything vastly less complicated.”

  Julia tucked her legs up beneath her and began biting the nail of her little finger. “What exactly will they do?”

  “You never had one?”

  “No!” She looked scandalized. “Why, did you? I mean, did you ever get someone pregnant by accident?”

  “No,” James admitted. “My knowledge is purely professional. Pamela had one, just before we started dating, in fact. She was characteristically robust about it. I don’t think she was entirely sure who had helped her into her condition in the first place, which would make imagining an alternative outcome more abstract. Hard to picture a baby’s face if you’re not sure which dude it might resemble.”

  “That’s the bitchiest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” said Julia, briefly cheered.

  “Well, there you go. I’m allowed a slip every now and again where my ex-wife is concerned. I should call her but, Christ, I really can’t deal with her tonight. And I don’t want him to hear it first from her on the phone. Or she’ll tell Saskia, or arrive on our doorstep or— I just don’t want to handle it right now.”

  “So, what will they do?”

  “If she’s right about her last period then it’s very early, she won’t need a surgical abortion and can do it with mifepristone. It blocks progesterone, which then makes the uterine lining break down. Then she’ll go back for misoprostol, which causes contractions, bleeding, and everything hopefully passes out after that. It’s not a party, I will tell you, but it’s pretty quick, they’ll give her pain relief and antibiotics, and if all goes smoothly, that’s it, just a checkup and then back to normal. Codeine, hot water bottle, good TV, distraction.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, her fingernail still between her teeth. “Can you imagine, just for a moment, if our children actually had this baby together?”