The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  37.

  Gwen’s exam weeks passed without incident, which was in itself remarkable, under the circumstances. If pressed, she would reply that the day’s module had gone “okay,” or “fine,” or in the case of an art history paper, “alright, I think,” and no more would be forthcoming. Each evening she sat down ravenous to supper, did an extremely brief spell of French vocabulary on the sofa, and then retired to the bath where she would lie for an hour, occasionally memorizing history dates but more often listening to a meditation track that she had recently downloaded from the Internet. Julia would walk past the bathroom and hear snatches of, “allow your mind to empty like the waves receding,” or more oddly, “you can know anything you wish, if you simply wait in stillness for wisdom to enter.” Keeping up the Easter revision intensity for these final few days seemed a more sensible approach than waiting in stillness for wisdom to enter the cooling silted waters of a bathtub, but Julia recalled the tears and nightly hysteria of the GCSEs the year before and passed no comment. Gwen’s morning sickness had been violent but unexpectedly brief and had passed entirely, as had her fatigue. She no longer had any symptoms at all and, she would boast to anyone who’d listen, she felt entirely herself again and could forget about it for days at a time. Nonetheless she took herself to bed each night at nine p.m. “to be responsible,” and James and Julia had a series of improbably lovely evenings alone, curled together on the sofa, as it had never before been. And might never be again, Julia thought, with an ache in her throat. Gwen might be able to set aside her pregnancy while she finished off the year, but it could not be ignored much longer. She was ten weeks pregnant—in some ways very early; in others, late.

  • • •

  WHILE GWEN apparently grew calmer, Nathan grew increasingly desperate. His own exams would not begin until the day hers ended and, for him, everything was still to play for. Oxford had asked for two As and two Bs. He told Gwen that he did not have time to call her from school and she did not protest; she, too, was under pressure. Without the sound of her voice, it became surprisingly easy to pretend that nothing at home had changed. He was working every waking hour, and for efficiency’s sake had increased these waking hours first to eighteen, then nineteen, then, finally, to twenty a day. When his eyes closed over his books he drank coffee or took caffeine tablets, and then stayed longer at his desk to make effective use of the jittering insomnia. Charlie gave him eye drops, and these helped with the burning and dryness. He would have all summer to recover.

  There was nothing he had ever wanted as much as he wanted straight As, now. He would forgo all sleep, all pleasure; he would work until his hands seized and his brain bled. When term began it had been a relief to go back to the easy, studious camaraderie of his boardinghouse but it wouldn’t have mattered. He could revise polynomials at the back of the 24 bus. He would have walked the streets reading about gene expression. He could have memorized the properties of transition metals at the foot of Eros at the heart of Piccadilly Circus while around him the pubs emptied, and the crowds flooded out of the theaters on the last Friday night before Christmas. He feared life closing down around him but he would fight his way free and Oxford would harbor him, offer safety, redemption. He was the embodiment of single-mindedness. He was indefatigable. He would succeed. He would fly.

  38.

  Nathan’s exams had finally begun that morning and since then James had carried his phone around the house, mooning and checking his watch and sighing with impatience like a love-struck teenager. He was anxious to hear about this afternoon’s Mechanics. Physics had gone very well, he told her without looking up, frowning as he typed his reply; the question they’d expected about Friction had come up and Nathan had aced it. It was his apparent confidence in the morning’s module that had prompted this unwelcome discussion about next year. Julia continued to zest a lemon in silence, the sharp scent rising in her nostrils. She did not feel charmed, or generous, or celebratory, though she was in the midst of making a cake that she hoped would substitute for all those feelings. Gwen’s own exams finished that afternoon.

  They had made it through her AS fortnight with preternatural calm and harmony, but her daughter still had a year of school before she could be in Nathan’s privileged position, considering universities, making plans, and what the hell did her future hold in any case, and how would she manage any of it if Nathan didn’t stay in London? Julia would do whatever it took to prevent Gwen’s own dreams from evaporating, but she did not intend to be left holding the baby while Nathan swanned off to Oxford, scot-free. It seemed obvious that he must live at home next year to help with his child, so obvious, in fact, that she had barely thought it needed discussion. He would still have the choice of many medical schools, several of which ranked among the best in the country.

  The night before returning to Westminster, Nathan had announced over dinner with a faint but discernible touch of sorrow that he would no longer be applying to faraway Harvard, as if they would all be surprised and moved, and full of praise for a grand and unexpected sacrifice. Julia had only managed to say, “I see,” and had asked to be handed the asparagus. Harvard? After Christmas her daughter would barely be able to go to the corner shops. For Julia and James, too, the future to which they’d looked forward had become hazy with uncertainty—music festivals interrupted for feeds and tantrums; the new piano in a Lewes cottage vying for space with a shattered rainbow of plastic tat. Yet for Nathan, Oxford remained the plan, and there had arisen this slim, prickling weal of irritation on the previously unspoiled surface of Julia and James’s intimacy. They had approached it, circled and retreated without resolution. “He might not get the grades,” James would offer, which really meant, Peace, please, I love you, we’ve made it this far, we are united, please let’s not fight. And he might not get the grades, Julia knew, but the truth was that he almost certainly would. It was conditional on his earning two As and two Bs, and his teachers had long predicted five As. And then what would happen? Whatever James might insist, it was too far to commute. He would have to turn it down. Julia found herself praying that he would miss his marks and so would not have to make a sacrifice for which he would almost certainly punish Gwen.

  She considered Oxford. Its Brideshead splendor and indolence, the low click-thock of croquet mallet, the self-conscious delight of sub fusc and black tie and tail coats, emerald lawns and muddy riverbanks, of simply messing around in punts; of cobbled streets and echoing cloisters, wide open quadrangles and covered markets, of squeaking bicycles, of dusty, leather-scented library corners where light streamed in through high windows onto the bowed and privileged heads below. Nathan would soon be handed the key on a velvet ribbon, and in autumn would disappear into that enclosed and enchanted garden. And for Gwen, a life of schoolgirl motherhood. Oxford would never have been Gwen’s world, she knew, but still, she had her own dreams. They’d walked around the animation department of the Leeds College of Art one half term and Julia had not been able to tear her gaze from Gwen’s face. Her hungry eyes had taken in the banks of drafting tables, the modeling studio, the long rows of huge-screened iMacs. She’d turned to her mother with an expression of joyful disbelief and Julia had felt an unexpected pain at her daughter’s impatience. Don’t grow up so fast, she’d thought, not yet. Gwen had shown her around instinctively—here is where they do traditional frame-by-frame work, these puppets are for stop-frame animation, this must be the recording studio for voices, here’s for 3-D, computer-generated work. Her little girl wanted to join this band of serious young people with their dyed hair, their septum piercings and eyebrow rings, their checked flannel shirts and army boots, their intense frowns over joystick and mouse and pencil and clay. And Julia had felt stricken, understanding for the first time that her daughter longed to leave her, and that it would happen soon, and Julia’s world, without its center, would quietly and catastrophically collapse. Gwen would take with her everything of meaning. It had been shortly after that visit to Leeds that sh
e had agreed to a date with James.

  No. There was no question that Nathan must live at home. He would have responsibilities, unimaginable though it was, and his second choice was not exactly a tragedy. Medicine at Imperial was not to be sneezed at. As Iris would say, you don’t exactly sit shiva for Medicine at Imperial. He didn’t get to have the sex, the girlfriend, the intellect, the freedom and then, the crowning triumph, the Houdini act that spirited him away into a limestone paradise of books and beauty in that sweet city, with its gleaming infant-free spires. He couldn’t have everything.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I want you to talk to me. I want to understand why you’re so against it. I want us to make plans—”

  “But your plans involve your son sixty miles away from my daughter. And from his son or daughter, more to the point. For five years.”

  “Oxford terms are only eight weeks long and he’ll come back every weekend, Gwen’s high school terms will be way longer than that.”

  “If we can get her back to school.”

  “She has to; it shouldn’t be a negotiation. And she’ll have a huge amount of support during the week; she’s never going to be alone. I’ve told you I’m going to be there for this baby. I’m going to do whatever I can to free them, no one’s life should be derailed, you and I are here, and we can do it. And the other day Pamela was saying she could maybe also arrange to come over for two weeks of each term, if it helped—”

  “What do you mean? Our life will be derailed! Our life is going to be totally derailed—I don’t even recognize what’s ahead of us . . . I’m almost fifty, James; it’s too much to even think about starting all over again with an infant in the house. I don’t know how it was for you and Pamela, maybe you had babies who slept through the night and never cried and sterilized their own bottles, but I certainly didn’t; I remember being so tired I felt jet-lagged, all the time, and I never imagined— Of course we’ll be there but you can’t just decide you’ll do it for him, and it’s not as if we’re talking about success or failure here; medical school is medical school and he should be grateful—” Julia halted quickly, though not before noticing that James had raised his eyebrows. She tried again. “He should still be happy and excited about next year wherever he goes. I’m just saying, to get a medical degree from a great university is a triumph under any circumstances. He can go to UCL or Imperial, and most kids don’t have that much choice even when they don’t have a young baby. There’s no reason to go so far away.” The idea of Pamela descending upon them was too alarming, so this she ignored entirely.

  “So far away? Julia, it’s sixty-two miles, it’s barely up the road.” James pointed behind him, toward the front door, toward Golders Green, toward junction eight of the M40, toward the rosy gold horizon over which his golden son was to set sail. She knew what he valued—he had been to Harvard for both his degrees, and before Harvard Medical School, nauseating Pamela had read Natural Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge. They were speaking more often these days and she could imagine their discussions—why ought their son to turn down a world-class institution when they could manage his temporary absence? Even for a good London college, it would be symbolic self-sacrifice. James could keep the baby cared for, the household mollified and managed, and would of course do it with better grace, better humor, and a great deal more competence than his teenage son. She understood it, in principle. It was atavistic. To launch your child into the world toward success and freedom, wasn’t it this for which every parent strove, lifelong? If an impediment lay in Nathan’s path, James would raze it to the ground like a bulldozer, but in this case the impediment was her own child and she would not allow Gwen to be flattened for an indulged, overprivileged little so-and-so. She took a deep breath and began her explanation again, from the beginning, and saw him grit his teeth with unaccustomed irritation. But then her phone rang and she sprang for it. It would be Gwen, reporting on the final exam. Those, at least, seemed to have gone without incident. James checked his own phone.

  “Hi, my darling, how was it?”

  “Mummy,” the voice on the other end was muffled and warped by digital interference. It sounded as if Gwen was underground, or perhaps under water. “Mummy, can you come?”

  “I can’t hear you very well, my darling, where are you? What happened? It’s only one module, my love, I’m sure it will be okay.”

  “I’m in the loos. Mummy, please come.” Julia heard a shuddering sob. “I’m bleeding.”

  39.

  When Nathan tiptoed in, Gwen was in her pajamas on the sofa, her hair in two thick braids, her knees drawn up, a hot water bottle cradled in her arms. Behind her glasses her face was very white, her eyes fixed on the flickering television. She had the cuticle of her right thumb between her teeth, and did not appear to hear or sense him entering. The room was stuffy, the only light in the room the screen and a reading lamp casting a yellow glow on the far wall.

  Nathan hovered in the doorway, uncertain. He spoke her name softly, as though waking her from sleep, and she looked up and gave him a wan smile.

  “You didn’t have to come back.”

  He sat down beside her, very gingerly. He did not know whether she was in pain, nor what to say if she was. What had been done to her, in the bright white sterility of the hospital? What had been taken?

  “I mean, it’s lovely that you did. But you’ve got two exams tomorrow.” Her voice was husky, as if her throat was very dry.

  “You’re more important,” he said, fiercely. His father had said the same on the phone: exams tomorrow. But how could they possibly think he’d care about exams today? How could he stay in his boardinghouse tonight? His father’s voice—filled with warmth and pity and a promise of his own reassuring solid presence, at that moment just out of reach, across London—had brought on such a violent lurch of homesickness that he could not have stayed in school another moment. As soon as he stepped out into Victoria Street, arm aloft, purposeful, he felt better. At first in the taxi he felt himself racing against the clock, in a panic to reach the heroine for the climactic scene in which he would be tested and would comfort her, and triumph. Nothing of these last, strange weeks had felt real—around him weird storms had raged, but when he kept his head down life remained unaltered, the threat too far ahead to fear, too abstract to comprehend. Now he felt electrified. Telling the driver “as fast as you can” was manly and exhilarating. This was reality. But then near-stasis in the red neon and clamor and spewing traffic of Edgware Road, and the film crew departed and left him alone, and he was no longer needed to perform. The adrenaline seeped away and left him shaking. No one was picking up the phone. He tried his mother, over and over, but it was midafternoon in Boston and she would be in clinic, inaccessible for hours. Then he had screwed shut his eyes and bitten the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger to try and punish himself into control; he had not been able to answer when the cab driver turned and asked him if he was alright. He did not understand the source of all this sorrow, only its magnitude, and that it had engulfed him.

  He had expected hysteria at home, he realized; he had feared blood, or a confrontation of female biology. This muted calm was disconcerting and made his role unclear. She already had a hot water bottle, and beside her on the coffee table lay a still life of sickroom requirements: a plate of biscuits, a cup of tea, a glass of water, a packet of chocolate buttons, a box of painkillers, a small packet of tissues, a weekly celebrity magazine. He had come home intending to nurse her, an evening of his own hard penance so he could go back to school having altered something. But her requirements had been met.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, foolishly. He leaned over to kiss her and she inclined her head toward him so he ended up catching her paternally on her hairline.

  “I’m okay. Your dad got me an appointment with his friend tomorrow morning. Not that Claire person, someone else. It’s nice of him, usu
ally I’d have to wait longer. It’ll be more comfortable after that, apparently.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  She shook her head. “They said I could take Paracetamol, but then when we got back your dad gave me— He said I didn’t have to be hurting when he had something stronger that’s okay to take. So he gave me something . . . American,” she finished. This speech had taken effort; she sank back onto the sofa, wearied by it.

  “Lucky, Dad never gives me his good drugs. But I mean, you’re okay. You’re safe?”

  “Yes. S’just one of those things. Wasn’t meant to be, or whatever.”

  “But how can it just be—” His voice broke and he took Gwen’s white hand and raised it to his lips. He could not quite find her in the dark hollows of her eyes. It had begun to dawn on him what had not seemed real or possible before this loss—that he had almost had a child. A son, maybe. A moment later he found himself weeping. Gwen shifted to her knees and held his head tightly against her breast. “How can it just be gone, just like that? That was our baby.”

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, “everything’s okay.” Her hand stroked his hair, but the more she soothed, the harder he wept. He did not want to stop. Nothing was okay. He had lost something in which he had never believed.

  • • •

  UPSTAIRS, GWEN SANK INTO BED. She had ordered Nathan back to school, back to his necessary responsibilities and the unaltered reality of exams. It had been a relief when his father drove him away and the house was silent again. When James returned she could vaguely hear his voice and her mother’s mingled, soft and low in the kitchen, and for once she did not feel an angry impulse to eavesdrop, did not fear secrets or treachery. She knew they were speaking of her, and speaking tenderly. She did not deserve it.