“Good, I think. The girls get on so well.” This was her own favorite reassurance. She sat down again, gingerly, on the waterbed. “I should probably go back, I’m lurking in a spare room with all her medical equipment.” She peered into a bag that lay open by her feet and saw a package of empty syringes and pink-tipped needles in sachets; glass bottles; and tubes. She picked up a tiny vial that contained a coarse white powder and shook it, speculatively, and then returned it. “I’d much rather hide in here talking to you, it’s so lovely to hear your voice. Are you really not worried? Should I say something to Gwen? She’d be devastated if something happened to him.”
There was a long pause. “He is twelve, you know.” Philip said this very gently. “But don’t think about it now. Iris and I will go and see old Mole in the morning.”
Julia waited a moment before descending. Gwen had been very little when Daniel had come home with a puppy, and his decision had taken Julia by surprise as in those days they had still been trying for another baby. Perhaps he’d guessed it might take longer than they’d hoped; at that stage he could not have imagined that it would never happen. With hindsight, she thought, tiredly, he had probably been trying to force to a close that fraught and unlovely chapter of their marriage. In the early years Gwen had fawned over Mole, dressing him in hats and outfits and trying to draw him into her games, with mixed success. Later her enthusiasm had waned; for years he had seemed part of the furniture and had been, in truth, Daniel’s dog, for it had been Daniel who’d walked and fed him, groomed him and planned their weekends for his amusement, choosing pubs that were dog-friendly and walks that Mole might favor. He took after his father (Philip had almost become a vet, before choosing medical school). But after Daniel had died, Gwen had turned back to Mole. They both had, Julia realized, and had each focused deliberate love and energy upon him as a proxy for Daniel himself. The warmth of the dog’s rough fur had soothed her; at night when he lay next to her on the sofa Julia sought out the quick, steady gallop of his heart beneath her hand. She and Gwen had often agreed about Mole’s wisdom, an impression that had deepened since the coarse fur around his eyes had turned from black to ashy gray. Mole’s mortality, like Philip’s, like Iris’s, like her own, in fact, was just one more item on an extensive list of impossible, uncontrollable anxieties. They would all have to go on living because they simply had to, for Gwen.
She knew that Iris and Philip thought she’d coddled Gwen, that Julia failed to admonish small rudenesses, that she reflexively lifted responsibilities off Gwen’s shoulders. But why deny any wish so easy to grant? Julia had never minded what they had for supper; so easy to let the little girl decide. Why care about report cards, or place emphasis on schoolwork that frustrated or upset her when to build her own miniature refuge in clay brought a smile to her face, and connected her to an online world when she had been so lonely in the real one? All adult life lay ahead in which to do laundry and pick up crumpled jeans, to learn—as Julia’s own mother had never allowed her to forget—about the Sisyphean battle against entropy and chaos that was maintaining a household. What innocent liberty it was, to believe that a water glass left empty on a bedside table would appear, clean, back in the kitchen cupboard. So little magic remained for her. And so Mole could not be ill because Gwen would be unhappy, and Julia could not bear for her daughter to be unhappy again. Committed pessimism was supposed to offer this single, ultimate benefit—that one could never be sideswiped by sadness. It was only now that she realized her vigilance had slipped. She had stopped—so foolish!—she had entirely ceased worrying about the dog. And now look.
5.
Nathan was staying with Saskia and their mother; back at the hotel Gwen announced with greedy satisfaction that she was going to watch sitcoms and eat candy in the bath. James took Julia toward the river. It was still very cold but the sky was clear and he needed, more than anything, for Julia to see and understand the beauty in this fine, proud city. He had grown up in a spare, rented apartment on the top floor of a Dorchester triple-decker. Later a scholarship spirited him across the river, and he spent four years at Harvard as an undergraduate, followed by many more at the Medical School and then a residency and fellowship at Beth Israel. The deep, turgid black of the Charles River stirred his soul; in the words of the anthem bawled in the happy heat of Fenway Park, he loved that dirty water. He would play her the song, he thought, when they got back to the hotel. Holding her hand, he felt like a boy, making a gift to her of every place he’d been happy. He wanted each site blessed by her gaze. He wanted her to see that he would always give her all he had.
“I understand why Pamela wanted to come back,” Julia said, leaning on the railings. They had walked to Harvard Bridge and stood looking down into blackness, halfway between the boathouses and jewel-bright polished cupolas of Cambridge and, on their other side, solid, honest Boston. There was a sharp wind coming in off the water and Julia pulled her collar up higher until only her eyes were visible. She had been quiet for some time and he had been waiting, patiently, to discover what it was she had on her mind. After a moment she added, “You didn’t want to move back when she did?”
He pulled her to him. In his arms she felt slight, even beneath the insulating layers of her winter coat. They had had similar conversations before, but it felt different in Boston. Here he heard the unspoken questions and understood her earlier silence. Will you leave London? Will you leave me?
“You look cold,” he said, gently. “Are you?”
“A bit.”
He began to lead her back toward Storrow Drive. “Here, take my scarf. Let’s go and have Manhattans in the lobby. Or something warm, maybe Irish coffee. You know, I do really love this town. But I love London also, and now London has you, which makes it the only place I’d ever want to be. I’m not going anywhere. You’re my home,” he added, and smiled to himself at his unconscious appropriation of another lyric from Boston’s defiant punk theme song. But he meant it.
“Thank you. I know, I think. Sorry. I suddenly saw just a glimpse into your life here, before we met, and I got jealous. Of a city. You had a whole life before I knew you, and I missed it.” Their gloved fingers were interlaced and she squeezed his hand.
“Truly, the only life I want is what’s ahead, with you. It was all practice, before.” After a moment he added, “Pamela is . . . an experience.” He felt that Julia had been graceful in the face of Pamela’s assault. Once that theatricality and confidence had captivated him but this weekend, seeing the two women side by side, he had found his ex-wife more than usually enervating.