“I’m so sorry, maidele,” Philip said, when Julia answered. She stood in the cold, numbed. “It wasn’t right. We couldn’t let him suffer.”
A hope extinguished. Each change had come like this. Gwen’s first day at secondary school. The rapid and murderous blight that afflicted the blowsy, salmon-pink roses that had always climbed their garden wall, flourishing over the years despite total ignorance and neglect. The transformation of their family’s beloved local curry house into a fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored nail bar. Each wave swept Daniel further from his little girl, a stronger tide even than the accumulated minutes since she had last seen his face. And Julia could do nothing but stand on the shore and watch, hopelessly, as he receded, alone with the wounded little girl he left behind. Gwen’s longing for her father was why Julia would not get a new car, nor replace—of all the things about which to be sentimental—the unreliable microwave. Gwen had asked her not to. Through the glass she watched Gwen talking, gesticulating, eating the ice cream James had given her, opening up to him, possibly for the first time. And now she would have to be told and would suffer. It was on this duty that Julia fixed as she turned her face away from her family and into the biting wind, permitting herself only a short, silent weep before she returned to the café.
7.
James was an optimist. He was determined that eventually Gwen would love him and, though at present it was challenging to imagine, that one day he would also love Gwen. There was no question that Gwendolen could be extremely trying and that Julia’s guilty permissiveness had not helped. She would be a less demanding child and, more important, would show greater fortitude, he thought, had she not been raised in such a spirit of compensatory contrition and apology. But they were family now and the only way to proceed was with positivity. Falling for her mother did not entitle him to a role in Gwen’s upbringing, and he would keep his opinions to himself. Primum non nocere. And one did not need to be her parent to see that she was absolutely devastated about the dog. Julia had led her gently to the bathroom for privacy. They had been gone some time.
When they returned Gwen was even more hunched than usual, folded in upon herself as if she carried something fragile clutched to her chest. Her eyes were red-rimmed but she was composed, and she pulled her jacket tighter and huddled into the cocooning woolen mask of her scarf. Julia put her arm around her daughter and kissed her forehead, stroking back her red hair. At the last minute James decided to offer no eulogy, wagering—correctly—that Gwen would not like him to besmirch Mole’s memory. Instead he squeezed her shoulder and she’d given him a brief, wan smile. They gathered up their belongings to go.
As they were pushing back their chairs Nathan loped up, drinking from a stainless steel travel mug that James immediately identified as Pamela’s. The ghosts of a dozen arguments rose from that mug like unwelcome genies—disputes about paper coffee cups “choking our landfills,” about disposable nappies and the reuse of plastic bags, and a particularly hysterical exchange about the “poisonous and inhumane” chicken nuggets James had bought for Saskia on a visit to Sea World that had really been, he was convinced, about the fact that at that stage they had not had sex for almost three months. All their disagreements echoed in that mug; the petty, ludicrous, deathly serious battlegrounds of discordant—and subsequently divorced—parenting. He considered they were mature and cordial, and yet he knew she would be working hard to undermine many of his choices this weekend. He couldn’t blame her—he would begin his own exorcism at the airport by treating everyone to McDonald’s.
“Well, hello to all of you,” said Nathan, looking between them, perplexed. “What an overwhelmingly enthusiastic welcome.”
“We’re a bit sad, that’s all,” said Julia, squeezing Gwen’s arm. “Gwen’s grandpa phoned this morning and we heard the news that Mole died.”
Nathan exhaled through his teeth. “Christ, you scared me, I thought something awful had happened. Well, look on the bright side”—he grinned and raised his coffee to Gwen in a partial toast—“at least you won’t have to clear up shit in the kitchen anymore.”
James had sensed this comment long before Nathan’s arrival, he realized, had felt it in the air like coming rainfall, yet nonetheless he was momentarily floored by his son’s misjudgment. He turned, but before he could address Gwen she was already outside and crossing back through the speeding traffic of Massachusetts Avenue. The lights were not with her and for one heart-stopping moment she had looked—he hoped Julia hadn’t seen—the wrong way to check for oncoming cars. Julia stood and went after her daughter. With a hand on the doorframe she paused and looked back, addressing Nathan. “That was utterly uncalled for. That was crass and unkind.” She then departed, breaking into a run.
And now Gwen would need to be pieced back together all over again, James thought, frustrated. Why couldn’t Nathan keep his mouth shut? Why was Gwen so maddeningly thin-skinned?
Nathan began to stir Julia’s tub of melting frozen yogurt, looking sullen. “She’s so hypersensitive.”
“Well, there’s no concerns about sensitivity with you.”
“I was only joking, she’s like a three-year-old, running off all the time and throwing tantrums.”
James had been about to protest this accusation, but then conceded: “I know, she does. But can I explain something? I don’t entirely blame you because I know you were trying to be funny and probably wanted to make everyone feel better. But we’ve come into a family that’s very different from ours—”
“—too right.”
“Right,” insisted James, earnestly, refusing to be drawn at this moment by the temptation of disparaging collusion, “but you’ve also got to understand that this is about her father. I don’t want to ask you to imagine but can you just for a moment, imagine what that must be like to lose your dad? She misses him all the time. And it’s been just the two of them for all those years, and it absolutely does not excuse her behavior in other circumstances, I agree, and Gwen can be difficult, but that dog was her father’s. He bought that dog and trained that dog, and probably spent a lot of time with Gwen and the dog, and she’s probably thinking about her father today and feeling like she’s lost a connection to him. She’s really hurting. You have to think of things in context.”