The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  “Red,” Philip said. “Thank you.”

  Philip did know where Giles had kept the corkscrew, as well as the several other places between which it migrated in the time since Iris had reclaimed sole stewardship of this house, none of which were where he himself had filed it when he’d lived here, on the shelf beside the bottles. Giles and Iris had shared a distain for his regime and though it had been many years since Giles had moved to Provence, much of the disarray he’d introduced still remained.

  Giles had died shortly after moving to France full time, and the two states—being dead and residing in a French farmhouse—had fused in the family lexicon so that between Philip, Daniel, and Julia, one had become a euphemism for the other. It was not kind. Philip had in fact been friends with Giles, and Daniel had also been on cordial terms with him, but the phrase had nonetheless evolved, and stuck. Philip could only hope that, as a man who’d loved the reassuring intimacy of a private joke, Giles would have been forgiving. Daniel had spoken of moving to France himself in the last months of his illness, and had studied his father’s countenance, insisting, with his eyes, upon a small returned smile. Cool, insouciant, hiding his fear to spare them. His brave boy. It’s an obscenity that he is gone and I’m still here. With effort, Philip recalled himself to the kitchen, and to James.

  Philip liked James. James was likeable. He put Julia at ease and made her laugh. This year she had become beautiful again, recalling the fragile, striking girl she had been when he’d first known her, where for years she had begun to look—it was Iris’s uncharitable word, though he had had to admit a truth to it—slightly haggard. Now she looked young again, and luminous. James exuded a sort of Viking strength and vigor and, searching for a description, Philip found his first true use for the term “in rude health.” He understood, choosing to steer his thoughts firmly away from his own son’s swift waning and diminishing, why Julia would be drawn to such a man. Now, under extraordinary circumstances, James was proving himself over and over, tested in his kindness, his generosity, his understanding. He had found a clinic, he’d spoken to the psychologist in his department, he’d been the one to source online videos for Gwen to watch, to help her understand the realities of teenage motherhood. Not once, Julia said, had he raised his voice. He was kind to Gwen, and liked her. He understood that gentle steadiness was their only hope for persuasion. He was taking care of all of them. Still. Daniel.

  “Pamela told me that she dispatched her travel agent to hunt you down. I’m sorry about that, she’s not very good at taking no for an answer. I don’t think the assembly will be for you, if that’s okay to say. It’s not for me, anyhow.”

  “Yes, she sent along a great deal of unusual literature. I’m afraid Joan, the woman she sent, was rather misled to believe that I was simply a nervous traveler in need of a little coaxing so she was terribly embarrassed once she realized. I tried to reassure her that I was interested to hear the details nonetheless. Apparently”—he began to laugh—“Joan’s had terrible trouble finding a source of dairy-free croissants for the breakfasts. It’s made the hotel manager very cross.”

  “I think hearing about any of it would make me mad, too. Julia’s just upstairs, by the way, fixing some sort of formatting issue on Iris’s laptop.” James set a glass down before Philip, but at that moment everyone came in together, Iris shooing Julia and Gwen before her and demanding, “Can we sit down now?” as if it had been someone else occupied upstairs for the last half an hour.

  They sat, and raced through a perfunctory Haggadah reading led by Philip, prompted intermittently by Julia. Iris had forgotten the horseradish and they were forced to settle for the closest thing in the refrigerator, a squeezy bottle of yellow American mustard. It was then discovered that she did not have a shank bone either, but after scrabbling in the cupboard Iris presented Philip with an organic lamb-flavored stock cube, wrapped in shiny purple foil. She had not cooked, but instead had bought lime-marinated chicken wings and red quinoa studded with tart currants, premade, in the Selfridges Food Hall. Philip had two helpings of salad, which he did not prepare for himself at home, so felt duty bound to consume for its phytonutrients when it was served to him elsewhere (and for the same reason, he had taken a punishingly large piece of parsley during the Karpas). Work had seemed a neutral topic and he enjoyed a quiet discussion with James about a VBAC uterine rupture earlier in the day, called to a halt when Gwen, overhearing, said it was gross and could they stop, please, and he had then realized his own insensitivity. More than once he noticed James and Julia holding hands, beneath the table. By contrast, Julia and Gwen did not speak to one another directly, except for a brief, bitter exchange overheard as they were ladling out soup together. He sensed Iris’s mounting incredulity that Julia, while clearly seething, would not allow anyone to acknowledge the pregnant teenage elephant dominating the room. The evening had a hallucinatory edge—conversation was polite, brittle, utterly empty. Between Julia and Gwen hummed invisible electric wires of resentment, studiously ignored by everyone else. It was painfully, ludicrously English, and he wondered how James could stand it. James’s praise for everything on the table irritated Iris, he noticed, though she demanded this same excessive flattery from her own family. Later James helped to clear the plates, and Philip observed Iris’s disapproval of this, too, watching her dismiss it as both unseemly and overfamiliar. His son had compromised her granddaughter—he was implicated, and culpable, and entirely unwelcome at her dinner table. Philip wished sometimes to be liberated from his understanding of Iris—when they were in company together her feelings sometimes crowded his out; spoken in her rich and strident voice, they were frequently louder inside his head than his own mild thoughts and observations. He was tired.

  30.

  The announcement, later in the evening, came as a surprise.

  “We are all family here, after all,” said Iris, looking with undisguised irony from Julia to James, who paused, arrested in the act of reaching for another macaroon. Her eyes slid over Gwen, who was sitting primly, hands folded in her lap, and came to rest finally on Julia again, who was refilling Philip’s water glass.

  “As everyone’s assembled I would like to say something important. I’ve decided I’m selling the house.”

  “You always say that, Granny.”

  “There’s no need for you to move just yet, is there?” Julia asked.

  “It’s not a question of need. I’m moving. I’ve got a good buyer, a developer. She’s the right person.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve found someone already? When?”

  “As it happens we exchanged this morning. She’s happy not to dawdle, which was exactly what I asked for. There’s really very little to do, if I’d known how easy it would be, I would have done it years ago. I want options, and I want to be in a position to—who knows what the future holds.”

  Nobody spoke. Philip, Julia saw, looked stricken. He said nothing, but was now gazing down at his hands, their joints stiff and swollen, though he would rarely admit they bothered him. She felt an urge to defend him but could think of nothing to say that would not diminish or shame him. He did not move or look up. Eventually Gwen said, “But, Granny, I really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to move; everyone loves your house, and you’re so close to us.” More quietly, “And it’s where Dad grew up. Don’t sell it. I think you should think more about it.”

  “Where will you go?” James asked.

  “I’ve found a flat in St. John’s Wood. Well, off the Finchley Road, in actual fact. Really, I don’t know why you are all gawping at me; you can’t have thought I’d stay in this enormous house forever and I’m not waiting until I’m wheeled out of it. I want to be able to walk to Regent’s Park. I want to be closer to town. I liked Giles’s flat in Bayswater before he gave it up; it was convenient, and I want to have a management committee to deal with the roof and the hallway carpets. I want the financial freedom to be able to— I don’t int
end to spend my seventies enslaved to the running of a house, I have far better things to do.”

  “But it’s your seventies, Iris, not your nineties.”

  “Regardless,” said Iris, primly.

  Beside her Philip still had not spoken. It seemed he’d known as little as anyone else. Surely this house was his, too? How could Iris just sell it without his consent? And why? Strolling through Regent’s Park was not a convincing argument when she currently lived on Hampstead Heath. Gwen had not understood what it meant to exchange contracts, Julia saw with exasperation, and it would have to be broken to her that her grandmother’s house was all but gone, and further discussion pointless. Gwen needed support and stability to face the choices ahead, not further upheaval and insecurity. At that moment, Gwen scraped her chair back.

  “I’m desperate for the loo,” she announced unnecessarily, and then trotted out into the hall, one hand cupped against an invisible bump.

  Iris tutted. “What a mercy she reminded us all she’s pregnant, we’ve been talking about something else for all of twelve seconds. How remiss of us.”

  Julia caught James’s eye and began, despite herself, to laugh. James shook his head; he, too, was fighting a smile. Just as Julia felt that giggles might overwhelm her Gwen returned and James straightened his face and stood up, abruptly. “It’s been a great night, thank you. Le shana haba’ah be Finchley Road. And it’s getting late. Philip, shall I give you a ride back?”

  Julia and Iris looked up at him in surprise. Gwen stood in the doorway yawning, widely.

  “That would be lovely, thank you,” said Philip. He had not joined in the laughter. He leaned heavily on the table and rose, slowly, to his feet.

  • • •

  WHEN THEY WERE ALONE, back in their own kitchen, James asked Julia, “Did you know she was doing that? Philip seemed stunned, in the car.”

  “I don’t understand; surely it’s half his. She can’t just sell without asking him. He bought it before they even married, I think.”

  “It must be in her name.”

  “But whoever’s name it’s in, doesn’t common courtesy require you to at least ask your former husband about selling the family home? Your best friend, supposedly? She’s been there”—she began to estimate—“Giles lived there with her for a few years after he sold his flat, I think, before he moved to France.” She allowed herself a small smile here, at the phrase, but did not pause to explain and, in any case, in this instance she was referring to his actual move to France. “And before then all those years with Philip. Daniel was born in that house. What an awful thing to announce just like that. It’s classic Iris. You know that for ages we didn’t even know if they ever actually got divorced? They made it impossible to ask. And then in the end it turned out that the divorce came through exactly around the time she and Giles were breaking up anyway. It was all part of their act, you know, how unusually civil it all was. Oops! We almost forgot to divorce.”

  “It’s not very civil to make unilateral decisions.”

  “No.”

  At that moment the phone rang. “It’s Granny,” Gwen shouted, from upstairs. “She wants you, Mum.”

  Julia picked up the kitchen phone.

  “You needn’t have looked at me like I’d grown a second head this evening,” Iris snapped, without preliminaries.

  “I’m sorry, I was just a bit surprised.”

  “Well, lots of things are surprising. I was surprised to discover that my sixteen-year-old granddaughter thinks it’s reasonable to have a baby, but I’ve adapted,” said Iris, shortly. “Now I’m equipped for bribery and corruption—art college, a gap year, whatever her little heart desires if only she abandons this insanity. And if she does have the bloody thing, it won’t have to be dragged up by its bootstraps, not that I will tell her that at present.”

  “Oh, Iris, surely that’s not—”

  “I have several reasons, none of which I owe it to you to explain. It’s my house, to do with as I wish.”

  “Of course, I know that. But I really hope it won’t be necessary—”

  “So you say, and yet the days pass and nothing changes. I dearly hope I’m wrong. Thank you for coming this evening,” Iris finished, stiffly. This formality was intended to be wounding. “Tell Gwendolen I’ll call her over the weekend. I sincerely hope this family therapist person knows her onions.” She rang off and Julia shrugged, in response to James’s look of inquiry. Her mother-in-law’s self-righteousness, her generosity, her ominous prophesies—Julia could not face discussing any of them.

  31.

  The gabled redbrick mansions of Fitzjohn’s Avenue were built in the late nineteenth century for the great and the good of Hampstead—spreading gothic piles with grand staircases at their hearts, down which the bustled daughters of shipowners and silk magnates and wine merchants could sweep toward waiting carriages. Now, the great and the good of Hampstead trudge up these stairs to try to understand their own unhappiness, for these palaces have been carved into a warren of magnolia consulting rooms for Freudians and Jungians and Kleinians and, in the case of number 88, for three Independents, two marriage guidance counselors, and one Dr. Rhoda Frankel, clinical psychologist, family therapist, Wesleyan graduate, and grandmother, she’d said on the phone, of seven. Her voice was warm, her accent broad Long Island, and upon learning that Julia’s sixteen-year-old daughter had recently been impregnated by a newly acquired de facto stepson, Dr. Frankel had not offered a noncommittal, therapeutic “mmm” but instead whistled through her teeth and said, “Well, that’s not easy.” Her photograph on the Internet was of a bright-eyed woman in her middle sixties, broad chested, with a sharply cut bob of caramel hair that fell neatly either side of a pair of cherry-red plastic-framed glasses. She was all in navy, except for a long chain of complicated, interlocking Lucite squares of neon green slung round her neck. Julia had looked into the eyes of this facsimile while on the phone to the original and, speaking as calmly as she could manage, yearned to collapse and weep like a baby in Dr. Frankel’s comfortably substantial arms.

  Julia sat beside Gwen in the waiting room on a low, sagging buttercup-yellow sofa before a glass coffee table tattooed with fingerprints, its stacks of curling National Geographics long neglected now that passing patients instead hid their faces in their phones, busily online, resolutely pretending to be elsewhere. A spider plant cascaded dustily from a hanging basket in the window, above a vibrant aspidistra that was, on closer inspection, plastic. Gwen sat with her hands retracted into her sleeves and clamped between denim thighs. Her brows were knitted into a frown, her lips pushed out, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere in her lap. Her posture, her expression, her every movement conveyed, megaphone loud, that she had come on sufferance. You are detestable, Julia thought, and you have ruined and continue to ruin my life; I should have had cats instead. She noted with an anxious pang that Gwen looked woefully drawn and pallid—almost gray.

  Julia found she was unable to break from the constant repetitions of her own case. The prosecution, or was she the defense? In planning this session she had appointed Dr. Frankel as their savior but was gripped by a new fear that the kindly American woman was to be her judge; that they were to receive not arbitration but a verdict, and sentence. Gwen had gone back into their shared and precious past and had set fire to every room. She’s too young, she rehearsed, she has her whole life ahead of her. And, without knowing for what she pleaded she returned to it over and over. I fought with every breath to be two parents for you. Why are you so angry? And—Please. Please. Please.

  • • •

  AS SHE HAD BEEN in her photograph online, Dr. Frankel was all in navy blue, stouter than her image, her hair the same resolutely expensive caramel, her crimson glasses replaced with frameless ovals resting on the very end of her nose. She greeted them warmly by name, “Gwen, Julia, do come in,” and gestured to a pair of narrow biscuit-colored armchairs. She hers
elf squeezed into an upright wooden chair opposite them, a ring-bound notebook on her crossed legs, an expectant smile for them as they settled. Gwen surprised Julia by arranging herself bolt upright, her hands neatly on her knees, an expression of anticipation on her face. Her head was cocked slightly to one side, as if listening for instructions. Dr. Frankel turned to her.

  “I’m sure you know, Gwen, that Mom and I had a brief chat on the phone when we set up this meeting, and so she’s had a chance to tell me a little bit about what she feels has been happening, but I’m really interested to hear from you. I take it for granted that each of us has a different perspective, right?” Julia thought she saw Gwen offer the ghost of a nod. “And I’m here to listen, and maybe to help everyone else find a way to listen, too, in a way that might feel easier than when you’re at home together. I’d like to hear why you’re here, and what you hope to achieve. How did you make the decision to come today?”

  “My mum wanted me to come.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a long silence. Julia’s hope wavered.

  “I understand. So it wasn’t your plan to be here.”

  Gwen shook her head.

  “So then I’m thinking”—Dr. Frankel leaned back and considered a point above their heads for a moment—“I’m thinking then that it was quite a decision you made to show up, in that case.” Her gaze returned to Gwen. “After all, you’re here now. Our moms ask us to do a lot of things, and would you agree it’s fair to say, as teenagers, we don’t always do them?”

  “I came today because you asked me to.” Gwen then turned to address Dr. Frankel. “I came because she asked me to because it would show that I don’t just not do stuff . . .” She blinked several times and cleared her throat but lapsed once again into silence.