The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  “And that’s fine, but what about raising children to be kind, or to be thoughtful, or to take responsibility for their actions, or to trust their own intuition? I don’t understand—he puts such value on generosity in his own behavior and with his kids he has this blind spot; the most important thing above everything is pedaling away on this hamster wheel. He can’t think that’s what matters most in life, and yet he does. It’s just so, so narrow. A degree doesn’t make you happy.”

  “Hamsters don’t pedal. I agree that one can be equally miserable with an Oxford degree as without, but you do see why he’s disappointed when it was such a close thing. And I do think the ex-wife has some fairly substantial expectations for the boy, too.”

  Julia was glaring into a chiller cabinet at an array of Cheddars and Wensleydales and Red Leicesters. Did they need cheese? She couldn’t remember. She threw several blocks into the cart, then replaced one. When she reached the end of the aisle she hesitated and returned for it, dragging her cart backward. “I couldn’t care less what loony Pamela thinks. I can’t see how the pregnant women of Boston have coped today when she’s spent every waking hour phoning either Nathan or James. Or me, to ask for Nathan or James. And meanwhile James is finally having to confront the reality that Nathan—shock horror—isn’t necessarily a genius. What’s to say he would have got anything different anyway; maybe he didn’t mess up and these are the marks he deserves? Till yesterday James was genuinely resolute that the last months wouldn’t have to cost Nathan anything, as long as we all worked hard enough, as if we could manage it away so beautifully that no one would even have to break their stride, but now he needs to give his son a kick up the backside and get him to stop behaving like such a bloody child, and to come home, stop drinking, get a bit of perspective. None of this will matter remotely in the long run—Oxford, not-Oxford, who cares? He’s in a ludicrously privileged position. And he can’t just leave Gwen in this awful limbo that she won’t even admit she’s in; he has to tell her if it’s over. Enough’s enough. I’d like to see them all prioritize some values, not just marks.”

  “Have you and Thing talked this morning?”

  “About what? What is there to say? I feel as if we’re speaking different languages. But I do know his son can’t behave like this and live under my roof.”

  “It isn’t just your roof.”

  “Exactly,” said Julia, ignoring what she suspected had been Iris’s point. “It’s Gwen’s childhood home. She has a right to feel safe, and looked after, and secure. If they break up—”

  “Listen, darling.” Ice clinked in a glass and Julia felt a stab of envy, picturing pale Provençal sunshine, chilled rosé under a sheen of condensation, Bleu de Bresse weeping on a board of olive wood, magret de canard, the air heavy with ripe figs and citronella smoke, a hot and honeyed escape from muddy reality. Iris had been made unhappy by a change of circumstances and had thrown back her shoulders and booked a ticket to France. She would give no straight or definitive answer about her return. She had wanted to sell her house, so she’d sold her house. She had wanted to go to France, and a few weeks later had taken up residence in Bargemon. She made apparently effortless fresh starts. Julia flung several cartons of fat-free yogurt into her cart with unnecessary force. “I’m so glad you phoned me,” Iris went on, “you need to get this off your chest, and I must say it’s rather a relief not to hear you Pollyanna-ing around the place, but now you’re going to hear me say the opposite of what I usually tell you. It’s all very well to be expressive and let things out in a relationship and everything else, but this time you simply can’t do it. You must call me or at a push Philip Alden, if he can find the time between filling Viagra prescriptions and manicuring poodles to answer the telephone, but for God’s sake don’t say any of this at home. He’ll never forgive you. You feel aggrieved by his child and he feels aggrieved by yours, so please stop talking about them. I agree that you are very different sorts of parents but the beauty of your position is that you don’t have to bother finding common ground because you don’t have to parent together, so none of it matters in the slightest. Just leave one another to get on with it. Your efforts now need to be directed back toward your own business.”

  Julia wheeled slowly through the biscuit aisle, then reversed to snatch a treacherous roll of Marie biscuits. Philip was bringing Joan for tea. “We’re supposed to be going out for dinner tomorrow night. James insisted.”

  “Don’t you go out for dinner all the time?”

  “I can’t even think . . . We’ve not been out the two of us since before everything happened. Months ago. We’re actually meant to be going to Milan for the weekend in a few weeks—James has those Rossini tickets—but I can’t even think about that just yet.”

  “Listen to yourself, anyone would think you had survived a nuclear holocaust. Everything happened, as you so coyly put it, and it was horrid, but we need a firm return to real life now, please. I’m desperately relieved to hear you’re getting a weekend away soon. Listen to me. Put on something attractive, get your hair done, go out tomorrow, for the love of God. All this micromanaging of the almost-adult is unhealthy for absolutely everyone. Why don’t you book a hotel for the night?”

  “We can’t.”

  “I don’t see why not, but then what do I know. Listen, enjoy tomorrow evening. I must go, I’ve decided to lunch every day in the square, I can’t lurk in this house just because—I can’t just sit here. Come and visit.”

  She was gone, and Julia, too, was alone again, wheeling her cart toward the tills and unpacking onto the conveyer belt her various acquisitions, having forgotten almost everything for which she’d come.

  47.

  Gwen slept intermittently all afternoon, stirring only briefly when her mother came in from shopping and sat beside her silently for a time, stroking her hair. When she next woke she was alone and it was cooler—the sky through the window, a bank of dense bruise-dark cloud. There were voices downstairs and she knew without hesitation that Nathan was in the house.

  The ground had shifted. When they had eventually gone to bed last night he’d seemed full of a determined, unfocused, angry passion, had pulled her to him urgently but it had been without affection or even much awareness of her. Afterward he had turned his back to her in brooding silence, and later must have crept out while she lay sleeping for she’d woken alone, and a new, sick sense of foreboding had kept her cocooned beneath the muffling safety of the covers. His absence filled the room that morning. It squatted lead-heavy on her chest, and she had the sudden understanding that they could have weathered his physical removal to Oxford, and that if he had won the place she’d so feared, she would have cost him nothing, and might still have been his girlfriend. Now he was going nowhere, but in his bitter disappointment he was moving beyond her reach.

  She had planned to change. She had wanted to brush her hair. She had wanted to paint her nails, and find her push-up bra, and paint black kohl over the red rims of her bloodshot eyes. Instead she padded downstairs where she knew he’d be, herself unaltered.

  Gwen entered the living room to find Saskia’s friend Rowan sitting neatly on top of Saskia’s closed suitcase, cross-legged, like a pixie. She wore a white vest and black denim dungarees, small, very round mirrored sunglasses, and burgundy lipstick on a very white face.

  “It’s a travesty,” Rowan was saying. “Hi, Gwen, cute bracelet. A week is a travesty. I’m going to climb into this suitcase and come with you. I’m going to slip into your pocket.”

  “Come with me!” Saskia said, and Rowan sprang to her feet so the two could embrace, rocking from side to side in one another’s arms savoring their maudlin, pantomime sadness. Nathan was lounging in an armchair and as Gwen entered he did not look up, but instead smiled toward his sister with her friend, indulgent, paternal. Behind her James came in with the car keys.

  “I’m so sorry, guys, but I have to take Miss Saskia. The time has come.”r />
  Rowan stuck out her lower lip in protest. “Boo,” she said, “boo, boo. Let her stay! We say let her stay forever.”

  “Believe me, if I could, I would. Take it up with the college; they claim they need her back.”

  “Transfer to Magdalen,” Rowan said, finally removing the mirrored sunglasses and letting them fall. They were, Gwen now saw, on a long chain of black-and-gold links that hung around her neck. “Come back with me; you know it’s the only sensible thing to do.”

  “Magdalen? Only losers go to Oxford; all the cool kids are going to UCL.” Nathan swept back his hair. To hear him, Gwen thought, you would never know that he had cried for most of last night.

  James picked up the suitcase. “I’m taking this and we’re going in five minutes. Four minutes. Who’s coming with me?”

  Nathan raised his hand. “I’m coming. Rowan? You in?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it. I’d love to but I don’t have a means of getting home again.”

  “I can be your means,” said James, pausing to set down the suitcase he held. “I’ll drop you home. But if you’re coming, we’re all leaving now, now. Gwen?” he asked, squeezing her shoulder. Gwen shook her head. The presence of the others dropped a cloak of public silence and propriety over her; Nathan’s inaccessibility beyond it was insupportable. He still had not looked at her. When they were next alone, he would say things she did not want to hear.

  Outside James began to toot the car horn and Nathan jogged out after the others. After a moment Saskia returned. Gwen swallowed, thickly. Saskia’s loss severed yet another fine wire of connection with Nathan and left her perilous.

  Saskia took Gwen’s face between her hands, squeezing her cheeks, shaking Gwen gently from side to side. “Please don’t let my brother be a dick.”

  “I don’t know how I can stop him.” A tear slipped down each cheek.

  “Oh no, don’t be sad, I’m sorry. You’re still my sister; please don’t cry. You are, I mean it, that’s the amazing thing. You’ll always be my sister whatever happens. Always.”

  Gwen nodded, tightly. It was not true, of course. Saskia was Nathan’s sister. Gwen had nobody.

  • • •

  “I THOUGHT I’D BE ABLE to talk to him on the way home this evening but then Rowan came to Heathrow with us, so I had to drop her back. I had to listen to him pretend to be fine instead.”

  “Well, where is he now?” asked Pamela. She sounded faintly accusing, as though James might have mislaid their son like a dry cleaning ticket or a bunch of keys.

  “Asleep, it’s two a.m.”

  “Are you at work? Why are you awake?”

  “Yes,” James lied, closing the kitchen door behind him and lowering his voice. “On call, my house officer rang. Shoulder dystocia and postpartum hemorrhage and— I can’t talk about it twice,” said James, who had not, in fact, even talked about it once, and was a poor liar. He was not on call, and the prolonged dystocia had been first thing this morning, an unpleasant enough birth that he felt guilty using it now as an excuse. The mother had been morbidly obese and suffering gestational diabetes and he ought to have insisted on a section, but she had cried and pleaded and James, overtired after yesterday’s emotional scenes, had not had the energy to resist her. She had tried to push, and the newborn had suffered brachial plexus damage. James did not, now, feel good about this decision.

  The truth was that he couldn’t sleep, had longed for someone to talk to, and had no wish to wake Julia as he did not trust himself to remain civil. She had accused him of having no sense of perspective, of snobbery, of inhabiting an elite and rarefied plane while discarding “what really matters.” Hadn’t she heard anything he’d confided about his background? About his own childhood? Did she really think that names and labels were what mattered to him? To accuse him of snobbery was risible—and the hypocrisy had taken his breath away. All he had ever taught his son was the value of hard work, of discipline, of aspiration. It was far more indulgent to raise a child to think that academic education was an irrelevance as long as their self-esteem was thriving, or whatever the hell it was she believed. What really matters? What horseshit. Meanwhile, along the way, Julia had lobbed a series of adjectives at his son for which, twenty-four hours later, he was still struggling to forgive her. Selfish. Immature. Self-absorbed. Inconsiderate. All these on a day when Nathan had needed not condemnation but comfort, a day when the memory of Gwen’s monumental selfishness was heightened, its consequences livid and raw. Julia accused Nathan of disrespect, of behaving badly toward Gwen. Well, Nathan had his whole life ahead and it was understandable if he did not want to remain in a joyless and precociously serious minimarriage with an infantile, spoiled little girl who whined with hectoring neediness. James found himself grieving the Oxford loss afresh. As well as everything else it would have granted Nathan total liberty from Gwen.

  He’d walked away expecting any minute that Julia would calm down, follow him upstairs and apologize, and when she hadn’t he had grown angrier and more resentful. Pamela, who loved Nathan as he did, would understand.

  “Was the baby okay?”

  “What baby?”

  “Shoulder dystocia? Never mind, never mind. Nathan sounds terrible. Should I come, do you think?”

  “No,” said James, reflexively, but then thought for a moment. “Maybe, actually. I think we should sit down with him. I still can’t believe it. Mr. Markham is shocked; we’ve talked twice today. When did you speak to Nathan?”

  “Darling, I’ve spoken to him twenty-five times today; it’s precisely why I’m worried. He barely called all summer and now it’s like the Batphone. I popped to one of Beth’s deliveries this morning and when I switched my phone on I had eleven missed calls. I think I should come. It’s only three weeks till the Paris conference in any case; I could come and just stay through. Are you okay? You sound very cross.”

  “You make it sound as if I haven’t been taking care of him.”

  “Jamesy, I don’t know what’s afoot with you, but I said absolutely no such thing. I said the boy phones his mother.”

  “Julia called him vindictive for blaming Gwen. I don’t see who else we should blame.”

  “Julia’s delusional,” said Pamela, shortly.

  “We had a crazy fight yesterday,” James admitted.

  “I’m amazed you have the energy to fight with everything else going on. You know, I feel I ought to do something nice for Gwen. She’s one of the most spoiled little girls I’ve ever met and I am absolutely consumed with loathing. For my own sanity I need karmic balance. I should give her a gift.”

  James, long familiar with Pamela’s complex and contradictory theology of giving, said nothing. He had many times been on the receiving end of these presents of karmic redress, and they were usually tied in a stinging ribbon of acid.

  “Listen, for God’s sake, if you really think it’s over between them, don’t let him have break-up sex with her; she’ll get pregnant again, I promise you. Don’t laugh, I’m absolutely serious, she will. She’s a conniving little so-and-so who will have to readjust to the idea that she’s not the center of the universe,” Pamela concluded, apparently abandoning all thoughts of good karma. “Enough flinging herself around like Ophelia and then pulling that bloody exam rabbit out of the hat. Her life’s on track. She made her bed.”

  “Yes. But look what it cost Nathan to lie in it. What I don’t understand,” James went on, feeling a guilty rush of disloyalty and relief, “is how it can be possible to put such a premium on children’s happiness and self-fulfillment or whatever, with no understanding that encouraging academic success teaches precisely the delayed gratification that is essential to later happiness in the real, adult world. Happiness isn’t having your needs met instantly, like an infant. Fulfillment in later life is effort rewarded. In work, in relationships, in marriages . . .” Here he trailed off, thinking it unwise
to pursue a discussion of marital fulfillment with his ex-wife.

  “You can’t eat happiness,” said Pamela, shortly. Her pragmatism had always been robust, if incongruous. “A joyous adolescence playing with Play-Doh won’t pay the gas bills later on. And more to the point, someone somewhere will say no to the girl, and then what will happen? She’ll fall apart.”

  “Julia thinks I’m pushy. She called me a snob.”

  “Take it as a compliment. Has Nathan said anything to you about America?”

  James opened the fridge and stared blankly into its depths. “He’s missed the applications, no? I thought we’d agreed not.”

  “That was mid-debacle, if you recall, when the shackles of imminent teenage parenthood awaited him in London. He could start spring semester; it wouldn’t take much, quick SATs, personal statement. Wentworth will write him a reference, and with that he’d be a shoo-in everywhere. What are you chewing? It’s loud. Even Harvard’s still not out of the question.”

  “Chicken from yesterday, I’m starving. My God, that would be incredible. It would have blown my mother’s mind, two grandkids at college. A son and a grandson at Harvard! That’s what she busted her ass for, to get me out of Dorchester, to teach me—”

  “Take a little credit, you got yourself out. You won the scholarships. And,” she conceded, seizing an opportunity to criticize Julia obliquely, “your mother taught you the value of hard work. We can sort it out, you know; there are enough Ivy League schools. I’ll come to London, and we’ll powwow.”

  Someone else was awake in the house. James heard footsteps and the floorboards above his head creaked as one of the children padded across the landing to the bathroom.

  “I’d better go.”

  “Good luck. I’m really not sure I’d eat yesterday’s chicken at the Free, you know,” said Pamela, confusing James until he remembered he’d said he was at work. “It’s bad enough on day one. Consider a few days a week of veganism. Or even just Meatless Mondays. You’ll feel better, I promise. I’ll e-mail when I’ve booked flights. Kiss, kiss. Ciao, ciao.”