“Being ginger’s awful,” she said, crossly.
“Red was her name, I mean. Red hair’s pretty.” He moved the small table he was sitting on until it was immediately next to hers and reached out to lift a strand from her shoulder. Gwen thrust her hands deeper into her pockets. His face was very close to hers, inspecting a curl beneath the dull yellow light.
“Not bad,” he said, and she felt his gaze, slightly unfocused, shift away from the lock of hair that lay in his gloved hand.
There followed a fraction of a second in which Gwen felt he might kiss her. And a fraction of a second later, she realized that she had misunderstood, but that this had been—just for one, painful instant—what she wanted. She felt herself flush. Nathan’s face remained inches away from hers but he was still, with a show of great interest, studying the color of her hair. Then he looked up at her, but did not sit back.
“I like red,” he said, quietly, so close that his breath tickled her lips. He was twirling the strand around his finger.
She looked back at him and thought—I’m drunk. I am humiliatingly drunk, on two-thirds of a paper cup of lukewarm apple juice and whiskey. He is almost my stepbrother. And what if it’s illegal? At that moment he lifted his hand to her cheek and drew her face toward him, and their lips met.
A border crossed. A new territory and uncharted anxieties. His tongue, unexpectedly firm, was in her mouth where it remained, probing her own. She did not know whether it was permissible to close her lips, briefly, now that they were parted, and wondered, too, when she might be able to pause for a moment in order to swallow. But if they paused, they would have to speak to one another and that, when it came, would be excruciating. Their heads were tilted to the right—was there a prearranged moment at which one was expected to rotate ninety degrees and incline the other way, left to left? Nathan did not seem to want to stop, nor appear to suffer any salivary concerns.
So this was it. And it had not happened in the dark, buttered-popcorn recesses of a cinema, or years before, beneath the rolling swell of disco lights on the dance floor of a bar mitzvah, to a soundtrack of a power ballad and the envious whoops and giggles of spectating friends. It had happened in America on an icy hotel rooftop, with a boy much more experienced than she, a little older, very much cooler, who might or might not have a girlfriend and to whom she might or might not be related. It was possible she had been, until tonight, the only sixteen-year-old in London who had not yet kissed a boy, but she already knew that this tale, when she recounted it to an envious Katy, would be worth the wait.
Nathan’s hand was at the back of her neck, pulling her toward him with a new and surprising insistence. In a moment of tentative confidence she pulled away, swallowed furtively, and performed her revolution, right to left, her neck relieved of its increasing tension in the chill. After the successful execution of this move she started to relax. The racing of her mind began to slow, and she found herself thinking, with a flash of new triumph, that her mother, James, Katy, and Valentina would all be horrified, for different, precious, valid reasons.
9.
Philip had lost his Andrew-and-Fergie commemorative mug, one of the treasured possessions of his recent years. Gwen had accepted his attachment to this object without judgment. Julia was bemused, while Iris found it risible, and an embarrassment. Philip didn’t mind. If they wished to believe he had lately become an ardent collector of royalist memorabilia, so be it. Iris need not have the family monopoly on caprice, and it was considerably less humiliating than the truth: that he was a man whose surgeon’s hands had been seized by arthritis and who hoped—correctly, it turned out—that a two-handled mug would mean he could once again drink tea first thing in the morning. He had happened to mention that it was missing, and Gwen had raced over to help him hunt.
“Well, where did you last have it?” Gwen demanded, her hands planted on her hips. She had painted a butterfly on the back of her left hand and every now and then glanced down at her own handiwork with admiration. She spun on her heels in place, scanning the room, and her hair, in two fat braids, thumped against her back and chest as she turned. It was a pleasing sensation and she did this several times back and forth. “Can’t we put some more light on?”
“It is on. It really doesn’t matter, darling,” Philip said, gesturing for her to sit down again. She peered around once more without moving and then flopped back on the sofa, pulling her phone out of the marsupial pouch of her sweater. “Let’s find another one on eBay, I’ll bid on a few to make sure. Oh! Maybe they’ve got Charles and Diana?”
“Later, later. It must be somewhere. Tell me how you are, first. How have you been?”
“I’m okay.” Gwen shrugged, tucking her phone away again. “School’s boring. You know.”
“Your blog was very moving,” Philip told her. “The portraits were beautiful. I don’t know how you think of these things. Beautiful. You made your grandmother cry.”
“Really?” Gwen brightened. “Is that possible?”
“It’s possible. Not frequent, but it happens. You moved us both.”
Gwen had depicted herself and Julia hand in hand in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, beneath a gallery of portraits of Mole, tiny, recognizable Old Masters in which an elderly black Labrador had replaced those old familiar faces. Mole, peacock-blue-and-gold robed in His Studio; an uncertain, white-turbaned Berber King Mole; Mole in the brass-buttoned, double-breasted uniform of the Arles postman.
The dog’s final, rattling breath had slayed Philip, though he had remained calm and professional with the pretty, sorrowful young vet while she had wielded her terrible needle. He did not tell Gwen that when he had seen her portraits he had wept until fat tears had fallen onto his keyboard. When he had collected himself he had called Iris and they had agreed that their granddaughter was a genius. “Memento mori,” Iris had said, thoughtfully, and he had agreed, though these days he needed no such prompt.
Gwen was looking at him, her expression solemn. “I wanted to say—thank you so much for taking care of him. I’m glad he was with you. You’re the only person—you are very soothing, you know, Grandpa. I’m sure Mole loved you.”
“And I him. Thank you, maidele. I do promise you, I made the decision that felt moral.”
“Oh, I know,” Gwen said, with a decisive nod. “I’d have felt awful if you’d kept him suffering for me. It would have been so selfish. You’re a dog person, I totally trust you. And a doctor.”