“You’re anything but selfish.”
“I dunno.” Gwen drew her brows together in a frown. “I’m trying not to be but sometimes I just am, without realizing. I get upset about things and then that upsets Mum, and then I feel bad, but I never know it’s happening till after it’s happened, you know? Suddenly we’re having a huge fight and I don’t even know how. And then I can’t talk to her properly because we’re literally never alone. Ever. We used to get ten milliseconds in the car on the way to pottery, but now James comes with, and they go to the gym together during my lesson. The gym. I mean, Mum in the gym is so beyond ridiculous, it’s so try-hard, it’s only because James is obsessed with it. She doesn’t even have leggings; she goes in, like, linen trousers. So we literally have to whisper in the bathroom or whatever, and I get upset and then she gets sad and worried and feels torn, and then I get upset she’s upset. I’m not joking, I have to physically kidnap her to talk to her anymore.” She had begun to look brooding. Philip saw his son’s defiant dark eyes flash in his granddaughter’s face.
“It sounds like you miss her. Have you talked about it?”
“Maybe a squillion times and she just says it’s an ‘adjustment period.’ If I need to say something private, I message her now, but she’s so rubbish-texting it’s painful, I can see her across the room and she’ll be spending five hours typing three words so it’s actual parental abuse to make her do it. You text superquickly. You’re amazing.” She said this with some pride.
“I use voice recognition. It’s why my punctuation is sometimes a bit strange.”
“Punctuation’s so not important, Grandpa,” said Gwen loyally, and Philip, who wished to differ, held his tongue. Instead he asked, “And the rest of last weekend, apart from what must have been the very hard parts? How did you find Boston? Your mother says you get on well with James’s daughter.”
“Saskia’s awesome, she’s coming for Christmas I think, because her mother, you know Pamela? She’s coming over, too, to visit her sister. She is a total and complete psycho. It literally scares me how mental she is. No wonder James is a total wet blanket, I think she ate his brain when they got married. She’s like, terrifying.”
Philip laughed and began to reach forward, painstakingly, for the lemon biscuits Gwen had made him, and she sprang forward and handed him the plate. “Terrifying in what sense?”
“She just throws herself around all the time, it’s gross. Nathan is convinced it’s because she’s still in love with wimpy James, but I mean, good luck with that when he’s clearly obsessed with Mum, which I said and he was like, I know, I know, for now.”
“So you and Nathan are friends now? That sounds like progress.”
Gwen opened her mouth to speak and then clamped it shut with such sudden contraction that he heard the hollow thock of teeth closing together. “Not friends, he’s lame. But we’re stuck with each other, so everyone keeps saying.”
10.
They had been to collect Gwen from a visit to her grandfather’s, and when Philip had appeared at the threshold to wave good-bye, Julia was moved by the warmth with which he’d greeted James.
The two men had met at a conference on neonatal health. Their rooms had been side by side in an isolated block at the far end of campus, and each morning, Philip had reported, the blond American next door had knocked and invited him to walk to breakfast. Together they had crossed the neat triangular slices of lawn that lay between redbrick faculty clusters, and in the refectory Philip would find them seats while James had lined up for their oily, lukewarm fried eggs. When the conference ended James had offered Philip a lift back to London, and over coffee in an M4 service station had mentioned that he was considering music lessons. There had been no music in his house growing up, he’d confided, only the low susurrations of financial anxiety and the dissonance of raised voices. Was it a foolish aspiration, in his fifties? Philip had carefully lowered his cup and felt in his breast pocket for a pen. A surgeon should take care of his fingers, he had counseled. James absolutely must learn to play the piano. He had pushed Julia’s e-mail address into James’s hands.
James was a terrible, determined pianist, combining exuberance with Julia’s first true experience of a tin ear. He strode in tired from the hospital but in lessons seemed inexhaustible. He claimed to practice relentlessly, yet made no progress. He grinned, and swore, and hunched over to redouble his efforts. When a phrase defeated him he played it louder. He charmed her, but she knew he did not see her.
And then for his fourth or fifth lesson he’d arrived to find her stapling programs for her students’ winter concert. The youngest, only five, would open with “When the Saints Go Marching In”; Susannah Gowers, who at twelve was the eldest, was rounding off the night with Mozart’s Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332. James had picked up a stiff white card.
“A recital.”
“Yes.”
“How many students playing?”
“All of them. Sixteen, in total.”
He’d run his finger down the list, frowning. Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Bach again. “When am I?”
She willed away the bubble of laughter rising in her throat. It was a four p.m. children’s concert in a school hall, on a sticky Pearl River upright. There would be orange soda and pink wafers. There would be proud parents filming, most of whom themselves were younger than James Fuller.
“Don’t worry at all, and definitely don’t waste paper printing them again; you can just pencil it in. Perhaps I should perform the Schubert we’ve been working on? Or something new? I think you should decide what would work best for me. What about ‘Für Elise’?” He was grave, respectful. He regarded her unblinking.
“I”—she was defeated into acquiescence by her own bitter disappointment; she had liked him, and he was deranged—“if you like,” she said, weakly.
“Great.” He sat down at the piano and began to murder the first few bars of the Fantasie. “And I’ve been thinking,” he called over his shoulder, jaunty, like a music hall entertainer, “I’m going to sit for my grade three. I think I’m almost ready, what do you think?”
Julia had made a strangled noise, and it was then that James had laid his forehead against the music stand and begun to shake with silent laughter. He gasped out, “‘Für Elise!’” and she caught up. He was not deranged. He was wonderful and foolish, and he had spectacular muscled shoulders, and she was smitten. Later that day he had called, between patients, and suggested coffee. She did not know whether the life-altering generosity of Philip’s introduction had been deliberate, and she could never ask. The belief shimmered in and out of certainty. She wondered whether she would ever be able to sense if Philip found it painful or distasteful to see them together.