“It’s late. What is it? I don’t really drink. And I only like Malibu.”
“That’s probably because it’s the only thing you’ve ever tried,” said Nathan, reasonably. “Whiskey’s medicinal. It’s why I picked it, it’s reviving. Saint Bernards delivered it in the Alps. Or maybe that was brandy. Anyway.” Would this canine reference be enticing, or insensitive? “Come up. Five minutes?”
She nodded her assent and elbowed the door closed, careful not to unclamp her arms from across her chest.
? ? ?
TEN MINUTES LATER they reunited on the roof beside a deep, square swimming pool. This had been drained for the winter, though the small round lights embedded into its walls still shone, filling the pool with overlapping rings of cold, turquoise light. A drift of tiny leaves had collected on the blue-tiled bottom.
The chaise longues were stacked and shackled beneath tarpaulins for the winter, so Gwen and Nathan sat on the concrete lip of the deep end, cold seeping through coats and jeans. It was impossible to remain there and they both stood up almost immediately, casting around for alternatives. Nathan noticed a panel of switches by the elevator and began pressing them in turn, and eventually a large heater came on above the door. Gwen found two small aluminum coffee tables, icy to the touch and beaded with moisture from the damp air, and dragged these into the doorway where they could sit shielded from the wind and warmed, fractionally, by the buzzing fan. That morning James had presented her and Saskia each with a pair of yellow, faux-fur earmuffs, and she clamped hers tighter over her ears.
Gwen’s few, tentative experiments with rum and pineapple juice had been uneventful. She had always mixed her own drinks at parties and, cautious about quantities, had used the tiny plastic screw cap of the lemonade bottle as her measure. She watched Nathan pouring long slugs of toffee-colored liquid into two white paper cups of hot apple juice. Far below, in the street, an ambulance wailed.
Her first sip made her cough. “It’s burning,” she said, recovering herself, but immediately tried again. “It’s so grim, how can people drink this?”
Nathan made a show of taking a swig straight from the hipflask. “It is rather smoky, it takes time to acquire a taste for it. I took it from a decanter in my mother’s house. The current man likes Scotch malts, apparently.”
“Is that Wentworth guy her boyfriend?” Gwen asked. Something in Nathan’s careful enunciation of “Scotch malts,” a spitting quality, caught her attention.
“Who knows. My mother is quite liberal with her favors.”
Gwen giggled, shocked.
“I speak only the truth. Boyfriend, who knows? But I mean,” Nathan continued, forcing an unsuccessful innuendo, “he keeps his whiskey at her house.”
“Won’t your mum notice you took it?”
“I didn’t take it. I used it for its proper purpose. I decanted it.”
Gwen’s earmuffs were itching and she took them off, shaking out her hair. Nathan smiled.
“Those look absolutely ridiculous.”
“Take it up with your dad; he bought them.”
“Well, no one ever claimed he was a sartorial genius.”
“What does ‘sartorial’ mean? Why do you speak like that?” she demanded, made bolder by the dark, and by this unexpectedly companionable transgression.
“You mean, with words? In sentences? It means ‘about or to do with clothes.’ It was the perfect word for the moment.”
“You could have just said, ‘No one ever claimed he knows about clothes.’”
“Orwell would admire your commitment to simplicity.”
“I’m not simple!”
“I never said you were any such thing. You are quite complex, in fact. Like all women,” he added, loftily.
She clamped the earmuffs back on, defiant.
“You look like a Fraggle with those things on your head.”
“I never watched it. Didn’t the main one have red hair?”
“Yes. How come you’re actually wearing a gift my execrated father bought you?”
“I’m not even going to ask you what that word means.” She shrugged, her hands in her pockets. “My ears were cold. And I’m trying to adjust, isn’t that what we’re meant to be doing? Adjusting to our new family. My mum wants me to be nice to him, so I’m trying to be nice to him.”
“I wouldn’t expend too much energy adjusting,” Nathan said. He was typing on his phone as he spoke, and did not look up. “It’ll last till it lasts, and then who knows.”
Gwen fell silent. She had never—not once—considered the possibility of the relationship “not lasting.” Adult relationships lasted forever or until someone died, which was precisely why James’s appearance had been so devastating. The idea that it could just end and life could return to normal was thrilling. She and her mother could slip back into old, easy ways, the soft comfort of favorite jeans after this stiff, unnatural costume.
“Why d’you think it won’t last?”
“I can think of a hundred reasons. First of all, I don’t believe in marriage.”
“They’re not married!” cried Gwen, horrified.
“You are terribly literal. I don’t believe in lifelong monogamous cohabitation, then.”
“I don’t think it matters if you believe in it, I think it matters if they believe in it.”
“Well my father obviously doesn’t either or he’d still be married to my mother.”
Gwen considered this—it made James sound rather threatening. “Who broke up with who?”
“Whom. Who broke up with whom. In any case,” Nathan said, easily, “it was never all that clear. I think it’s one of those absurdly passionate can’t-live-with, can’t-live-without things. When Mom lived in London Dad was always randomly staying over. She’d have chucked some boyfriend or other and then on Sunday morning Dad would be there, all jolly and making pancakes and wearing some weird old clothes that he hadn’t bothered packing when he moved out. It doesn’t bear thinking about. People over forty should be forced into celibacy. It’s so wrong.”
“So why aren’t they still married?”
“Oh, I’d not be surprised if they got back together properly at some point, when they’re living in the same country again.” And then, as if discussing his own children he added, with indulgent fondness, “I’ve given up second-guessing. Nothing with those two would surprise me. Don’t look so freaked, it’s not like he’d ever be unfaithful to your mother or anything. He’s utterly besotted right now. I just don’t believe anything lasts, that’s all.”
Gwen’s fantasy scenarios of getting rid of James involved her mother listening to reason and evicting him. She did not like to think of Julia being abandoned for a seductress who lured him back with pancakes and a restoration of his former family life. Then she remembered Mole, and to her dismay she felt a lump begin to form in her throat.
Nathan glanced at her. “That girl Fraggle was quite hot. Red.”