The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  Julia was cringing, waiting for some unforgivable rudeness, and felt a rush of anger when Gwen raised her head and she saw a tear slip down her face. But Gwen was looking at Joan intently. She said, “We had Mole, and he saved me, too.”

  “They just know, don’t they, dogs,” Joan agreed, and she and Gwen smiled at each other.

  45.

  A, a, b, c, c. Oxford would not take him. Imperial would not take him. It was University College London, another world-class institution, and it was unimaginable, the end of the world. Controlled while on the line to Nathan’s housemaster, James had put down the phone, paused, and then slammed his palm into the doorframe, leaving a fine spiderweb of cracks beneath the heel of his hand. The next minutes were a blur, from which Julia could only recall the gist of her own soothing, reasonable words—she had talked about perspective, about difficult circumstances, about a sense of achievement, personal fulfillment, and who you actually were as a human being mattering more than historic names—but only moments later found herself screaming that he should think himself bloody lucky his child was being educated at all when her own child’s life had come close to ruin; somehow James was roaring that she wanted Nathan to fail just because Gwen made destructive choices; her outraged denial of this indefensible accusation had been loud, but had not been convincing to either of them.

  She hadn’t wanted Nathan to fail. But Gwen had suffered, and Nathan’s impermeable cheer, his impending success, the new stage he was impatient to begin had all filled her with envy. He seemed shatterproof, and she could not quite let go of its unfairness. It was Gwen’s strength and affliction to feel to the quick even a glancing blow, while Nathan had been so effectively in denial about its existence that the loss of his child made no lasting impression. And now to grieve for something so petty—how could James truly think a university so important? It was ludicrous. What message did James’s own disappointment convey to his child about what mattered in life? She would have liked a little less emphasis placed on the boy’s curriculum vitae, a little more placed on his character. No. Julia could not pity Nathan. She could not even like him, even in these last weeks when his devotion to Gwen had apparently returned, and redoubled.

  James and Julia went to bed in a frosty silence, unaccustomed and distressing to both of them. They had never before raised their voices in anger and it was only now, after the smashing of that precious, celebrated myth (we are a couple who always speak with gentleness, we are a couple who sleep each night face to face, we are a couple unlike other couples) that each had realized the wonder of it. After all, they had weathered more treacherous storms. As parents they made very different choices, true, but James had proven himself wise and generous to his marrow, a better man even than she’d known. And Julia’s gratitude, above all else, had never left her. She had expected to live the rest of her life without love and had found James, and had never before lost sight of that revelation. But tonight she had abandoned her gratitude when James had seemed to forget his own. He made it clear he blamed Gwen. An act of sabotage. Had he really said that? Not quite, but almost.

  • • •

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, she woke to find that they had moved together in sleep and were entwined, arms and legs wrapped tightly around one another, the sheets kicked off and entangled at their feet. James was sleepily kissing her face, her eyelids, her mouth, and she had begun to cry and to whisper frantic words of love and of apology before it began to dawn that what had roused them both was furious shouting, somewhere in the house. They froze, pressed tightly chest to chest, breath held as if sharing a narrow hiding place. Against her cheek Julia felt James furrow his brow as he listened. He dropped his forehead against her collarbone, and rolled over with an exhausted groan. Julia fumbled on the floor for her dressing gown and followed James downstairs. As she passed her practice room the door opened and Saskia emerged, sleep-tousled and squinting, mumbling something indistinct.

  “It’s fine, go back to sleep,” Julia whispered, and Saskia nodded wordlessly and closed her eyes and the door again.

  It was three o’clock in the morning and on the ground floor of the house both of their children were screaming, voluble and operatic. Over James’s shoulder Julia looked down and saw Gwen at the foot of the stairs, dressed in tartan brushed cotton pajama shorts and a faded Rainbow Brite T-shirt. She had worn this at seven or eight years old and called it back into service as an ironic retro item, though it seemed to Julia that she had been seven or eight only yesterday and there was nothing ironic about a child in child’s clothing, however much midriff it now exposed. Gwen’s hair was electric, huge and wild around her pale face and she was pacing back and forth in the narrow hall as if barring the front door, a scrawny and gesticulating Cerberus.

  “You can’t! You can’t say that, you can’t, you can’t just rewrite everything.” Gwen’s thick glasses slipped to the end of her nose on a slick of tears and sweat, and she was forced to pause and push them back up with her forefinger. “It’s not fair!”

  “Hey. Keep your voices down. What’s wrong with you? Where’ve you been, Nathan? I’ve been calling you, come here, I’ve been worried. We needed to talk today.”

  Neither teenager gave any evidence they could hear James speaking. Nathan lurched into view from the kitchen and began to repeat that Gwen was insane, out of her mind, impossible to reason with. His voice was loud, slurred with alcohol and outrage, and he had the hood of his sweatshirt tightened low over his brow so that his face was in shadow and he looked as if he were about to commit a mugging, or an act of light vandalism. Gwen, who had begun to hyperventilate, was gulping back strangled hiccups of rage between each choked word of accusation.

  James rushed to pull his son into a tight bear hug as Julia went to embrace her daughter. Gwen did not succumb easily, her long limbs stiff and flailing, her narrow shoulders heaving with jagged, desperate breaths.

  “Shh. Breathe, Dolly. What is going on?” Julia pushed back the few damp curls that had stuck to Gwen’s sweating brow just as James, in less compassionate tones, turned and demanded, “What the hell is going on down here? Why are you shouting at him?” He had one arm thrown over Nathan’s shoulder, his hand upon his son’s chest, upon his notionally broken heart. Nathan’s eyes were pink-rimmed and bloodshot. Crying? Drugs, maybe? Julia did not feel particularly sympathetic to either cause. She glared at James.

  “Ask her,” Nathan said bitterly, pointing, “she’s having a psychotic break. She’s actually psychotic. I haven’t done anything wrong. My life is officially over now, thank you, thank you very much; you can’t actually keep me chained in this house anymore; I’m not a hostage, I’m allowed time off for good fucking behavior. And I’m allowed to say that the reason my life is over is—”

  “Your life is not over, you got amazing grades—”

  “Oh yeah, they’re really amazing. They’re amazing for a retard. Amazing for a school like yours where everyone does Goat Milking and General Studies and fucking Art, amazing for you with your accidental, ‘Oh, I only care about rainbows and glitter and oops! I get As.’”

  “Art is just as important as what you do!”

  Nathan turned unsteadily on his heel and set off toward the front door; Gwen shrieked with incoherent rage, shaking Julia off and chasing him. “Stop walking away from me! Come back! COME BACK!”

  “Enough,” hissed James, springing forward to bar Nathan’s exit. Gwen and Nathan paused and looked at him. “Nathan, I want to talk to you, properly. But this is not the way, and you are not walking out of this house again tonight, do you understand? You both sort your asses out like civilized adults.”

  Nathan, who had been looking slightly queasy and fleetingly contrite, raised his face in a sneer. “Oh, because we never heard you and Mom yelling, never. It was nothing but raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens in our house growing up. One endless picnic. Like the fucking Waltons.”

  James
looked thunderous. “Stop. Cursing. Both of you. You will behave like human beings in this house, and like the adults you claim to be. I don’t care if you are sixteen or sixty, this is unacceptable. We need to sit down and talk; I promise you, we just need to—”

  “What are you even talking about? Nothing’s going to be okay, and by the way, you can’t promise me shit because my life is over already, because she has chopped my balls off. Literally one by one, my balls have been chopped off, she’s torn them off with her teeth like a Rottweiler. ‘It is all rather unexpected and disappointing, Fuller,’” he quoted, shaking his head sorrowfully and stroking the air beneath his chin as if pulling on a beard, “‘so unexpected and disappointing but under the circumstances’ . . . I knew it was a mistake that you told Markham; now he’s all like, ‘Under the circumstances it’s lucky you’re not in a ditch.’ ‘Under the circumstances it’s lucky you’re not a crack addict eating from the trash under Waterloo Bridge.’ ‘Under the circumstances we’d have been happy if you’d dropped out of school and got a job licking the toilets clean at McDonald’s; we’d have been jolly proud of you under the circumstances.’”

  Gwen gave a gasp, outrage mingled with disbelief. “You’re such a snob! And there aren’t any circumstances! Your circumstances are literally exactly how they were before; it’s made no difference whatsoever, your life never changed even one percent. We’ve all been walking on eggshells for you pretending that any of this actually matters, like your school exams were the most important thing in the world; do you even know how stupid that is? Do you know anything about the real world at all? Newsflash—no one cares at all about your A levels, literally no one. And you never let me talk about the fact that we lost our baby; you don’t care, you’ve just had everyone pretend that the whole thing never even happened, like our baby never even happened; it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, it’s the most selfish—and now you’re blaming me and—and you’re the most immature, disgusting—” She broke off, weeping extravagantly. Julia tried to put an arm around her again, to guide her back upstairs, and was once more abruptly pushed off.

  Nathan spread his hands and gestured around, gathering looks of sympathy from an imagined crowd of supporters, though only Gwen and Julia were facing in his direction, neither inclined to solicitude. Julia stepped forward. “Go to bed,” she ordered, attempting the same commanding air that James had achieved moments earlier. “Enough. We will talk as a family in the morning. I’m sorry you feel you’ve had a hard day, Nathan. I know you don’t want to hear it right now but I think in time you’ll come to be very proud of yourself. You’ve had a shock, but now it’s three o’clock in the morning. Go to bed. Now, please.”

  “I was under the impression this was a free country.” Nathan was not looking at her but instead continued his slurred address to the invisible audience in the galleries. “I was under the impression people could air their dirty laundry in the privacy of their own homes. This is my home, isn’t it? I was under the impression it was good to talk about our feelings. To express.”

  “Yeah, Julia,” said Gwen, which startled Julia and came as an unexpectedly painful betrayal, “it’s actually none of your business. It’s not like I tried to get involved when you guys were screaming at each other earlier.”

  “We weren’t screaming,” Julia protested, as Nathan began a rather hollow, mirthless laugh. “Pots and kettles all over the place. ’S’like living in a kitchen cupboard. We’re all mad here,” he added, smiling in a way that suggested that the spectators in the dress circle had appreciated this reference, “I’m mad, you’re mad. They’re Hare and Hatter, baby. Visit either you like, they’re both mad.”

  “They were screaming,” Gwen told him. “They were, while you were out. When they couldn’t get hold of you and they were worrying and then they phoned the school, they were screaming their heads off at each other for ages.”

  “Love’s young dream. The lesson in all of this, baby, is that there’s no such thing as perfect anything, it’s all just PR bullshit, ’s’what I’ve been saying to you all along if you recall, and you didn’t want to hear it. I get called cynical so often that people forget to call me right, which I also am, but cynical’s just sensible. There, that’s my bumper sticker contribution. Cynical’s sensible, and it’s all sunshine and roses until you start fighting and then next stage is, ‘It’s not you, it’s us, Mommy and Daddy still love you both very much.’ ’S’amazing how everyone reverts to cliché. Here’s a cliché: Life’s a bitch. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Everyone knows I’m right; we’re all dancing on the Titanic and no one will admit the Emperor’s got his cock out. Now please come here.” Nathan opened his arms and Julia was astonished to see Gwen move into them, grateful, and without hesitation. She had hunched over automatically, so that he might put his arms over her shoulders. Moments ago Gwen had been almost unhinged with righteous fury; now she had buried her face against his neck and was stroking his hair and murmuring, inaudibly.

  Julia thought she caught the words, “going to be . . .” and, “I hate . . .” but could not hear and so did not know what Gwen hated. Julia, with sharp clarity, hated Nathan. Still too inebriated to modulate his voice, Nathan began to whisper loudly and ardently into the fox-red cloud of Gwen’s hair that he loved her, that he was sorry about the baby, their poor baby, that he hadn’t meant it, that he had never been so unhappy. “I don’t understand,” he kept saying, “I don’t understand.” Julia watched his hands roaming up and down her daughter’s narrow, bent back, the sharp shoulder blades, the knobbed spine visible beneath faded cotton, his gestures both one of reassurance and perhaps preliminary sexual advance. Julia looked away in disgust. She heard footsteps on the stairs and saw James heading upstairs. He gave a grim little smile and gestured to Julia to give up, to join him; together they retired to their bedroom, feeling fragile and somehow brutalized.

  In the living room, Gwen and Nathan were still crying and kissing, kissing and crying, cupping each other’s faces in desperation, drawing each other in as if they were reuniting or perhaps parting before an uncertain future on the chill, gray platform of a wartime train station.

  46.

  “Not good,” said Julia, in response to her mother-in-law’s inquiry. An exhalation could be heard through the phone. Without warning Iris had taken herself to France; her displeasure came through with a Gallic-hinted shrug, the imagined aroma of lavender, and pastis. Julia stepped out of the elevator from the underground car park and battled to release the chain of a tethered supermarket cart, one-handed. “You can’t even begin to imagine how horrible it was yesterday. It was as if everyone finally lost their minds, once and for all. I said such awful things and James looked so hurt and I still couldn’t stop myself. The only thing I’m longing to say and can’t is that I hate his son, and I want him out of my house. And Gwen’s absolutely insistent that everything will be fine once Nathan gets over yesterday, and it won’t be; I saw his face. He’ll never forgive her—not for Oxford, not for getting pregnant. And not for her results. Which by the way, I am bloody proud of.” Julia bit her lip and stared glassily into her empty cart. “Though not as proud as I am of how courageous she’s been recently. Unlike James, I have not raised my daughter to believe that grades reflect the value of a person.”

  She had come to lean on James so completely that thinking of it gave her vertigo, yet now it was James’s son about whom she needed counsel and, almost without realizing, she had begun to withdraw from the safety of their private, holy confessional. She took her fears to Iris, leaving with James the banalities, the palliatives, the careful and protective white lies so essential to a new family. We are all fine. It’s fine. Your son is a fine, upstanding citizen who I’m so fond of. Of course he needs to blow off steam. A small, unnerving gulf had opened, a crack in the earth between them two inches wide, a mile deep. She had come to the supermarket for fruit and eggs, and tuna steaks for this evening’s dinner, and to rant in
guaranteed, luxurious privacy. She did not care about fruit or eggs or tuna. She was wandering up and down the aisles of Waitrose looking blankly at product after product, and off-loading her anxiety onto Iris. Iris, whom she longed to visit in Parliament Hill, whose face she longed to see. Iris, who no longer lived in Parliament Hill, who made fresh starts with such dignity, who had taken the sorrow she refused to acknowledge to the far side of the Channel.

  It had been many years since Julia had been to Giles’s house in Bargemon. Gwen had been eight, engrossed by her crochet kit, utterly uninterested in Giles’s attempts to teach her tennis or Julia’s to take her down to the ponds to visit the squat, fat, interesting toads. Gwen had sat cross-legged by the swimming pool making pink-and-purple coasters shaped like four-petaled flowers, her tongue clamped between her teeth with stern concentration. She would do nothing else. It had been uncomfortably like having their own little sweatshop, Daniel had observed, staffed with one extremely diligent child laborer. When she’d run out of fuchsia they’d expected the coaster craze to fizzle but instead she had begged and pleaded, hopping from foot to foot, and Julia had driven her the hour and half back into Nice to find a haberdashery.

  The house, Iris had assured her, had barely changed since that summer. It was rather quiet, perhaps, but several people in the village remembered her. Julia pictured her mother-in-law outside on the highest of the terraces, sitting at a terra-cotta–tiled table beneath the shade of an ancient fig tree. Iris herself was a blank in this image. It was high summer, and possibly 40 degrees, but surely she wasn’t in anything as undignified as a bathing suit? Loose white linen, possibly, and a broad straw hat. Would she always be chic, even in complete, unbroken solitude? Then Iris brought her back into the fluorescent chill of Waitrose by saying, “Well, you do have rather different child-rearing approaches, put it that way. It’s tricky to bring two sets of values together so late in the day, but I must say I don’t think Thing has it entirely wrong—”