Gwen, bewildered, stood and padded forward to listen more closely. Her mother coughed, and she heard Pamela barreling onward, “Oh no, don’t blush, I am sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but it would be just so invigorating to have a new little one in the family, don’t you think? And it’s not yet quite too late if you were really determined. No. Are you? No. I could have sworn you were just a scrap of a thing! Are you really? What a complexion. Right, on that note—on that note, lovely lady, I’ll be off. Maybe I’ll scoop up Saskia to come and spend a girls’ night with me at the hotel, then you can reclaim your peaceful music room.”
The footsteps descended once again. Gwen remained still, her heart pounding. She remembered a long-ago supper table and herself at six, nibbling at the tail of her dinosaur-shaped cheese on toast, on the single occasion she had asked her parents about siblings. Then, too, it had been at someone else’s prompting—another child at school with a brand-new baby brother had warned Gwen that the same fate could just as easily befall her own slim and attentive mother. “We are perfect just us, don’t you think?” Daniel had said, and Gwen had nodded, chewing steadily, and the three of them had held hands around the table. In childhood when friends had stayed over and Julia had kissed them each good night, first Gwen, and then the little girl beside her, Gwen would lie awake until long after her guest was breathing steadily, unable to sleep until she could pad downstairs alone to find and reclaim her mother. To see her kiss another child good night was a torment. Julia would look up, surprised, and explain that she had only wanted Katy to feel welcome. She would open her arms to her hot, distressed little daughter and Gwen would bury herself there, breathing away the horror of their last parting, and the memory of Julia’s infidelity. She had only one mother; her mother had only her. Their devotion was balanced, and equal. Never, not once in all these last distressing, enraging, unprecedented months had she ever considered that her mother and James might have a baby. But anything was possible. Weren’t there women in India having triplets at seventy-five, or whatever? She’d thought her mother too old for a boyfriend, and yet here was James. She remained by the door, winded.
Gwen picked up her laptop and sent Nathan a message. He was in the kitchen, too far away for her to hear his phone beep, but a minute later the door opened and he slipped in, closing it behind him and grinning.
“You are daring today,” he said, coming toward her and putting his arms around her bony shoulders. “I thought we weren’t taking undue risks.”
“I’m feeling daring.” And then emboldened she added, “So what are you waiting for?”
Nathan needed no further encouragement. His mother and sister had gone; he had seen his father and Julia side by side in companionable industry, emptying the dishwasher. Encouraged by this new, indoor comfort and Gwen’s uncharacteristic brazenness, he pushed her backward, gently, onto the bed. She would not let him lie on top of her exactly, but he pressed beside her, one leg slung over hers, his crotch pleasingly close to her firm upper thigh. Every now and again he moved as if to readjust, and inched their bodies a little closer into alignment. And it was in this position, with one of his hands lost beneath the printed logo of her T-shirt, that Julia came in and found them.
14.
“Fuck!” Julia shouted, startling all three of them. Gwen had never before heard her mother use the word and it sounded comical, and disconcerting. Julia clapped her hands across her mouth and looked, for a moment, as if she was about to vomit. “What the fuck is going on in here?” But she did not stay for the answer and instead backed out, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you,” she kept repeating. “I can’t believe you. I don’t believe this.” She turned on her heel and left. A moment later, while Gwen and Nathan were still straightening their clothing, the front door slammed.
“Nathan?”
“Here.”
James came in, surprised to see the children standing up in the middle of Gwen’s bedroom, looking at one another in awkward, complicit silence. “Hey, guys. Was that the door? What’s up?”
“We’ve got something to tell you.” Gwen threw her shoulders back and went on, in a voice that managed to be both imperious and confiding, “We were going to wait a bit longer but—Nathan and I are together.”
James frowned. “What?”
Gwen bit her lip and looked to Nathan for reassurance but he was staring out of the window with his hands crossed behind his head, like a man before a firing squad.
“Together. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Dating.”
James was staring around the room somewhat fixedly, his gaze moving from Nathan to the bookshelves of magazines and trinkets and assorted dolls’ furniture, the mobile of Polaroid photographs suspended with rainbow ribbons from two reshaped coat hangers, to the homemade beaded necklaces slung over the bedpost, to the colony of clay figurines in various stages of completion, guarding the expanse of her desk like a mismatched terra-cotta army. “No. I don’t even— I can’t— I don’t even know where to begin. This seems like a recipe for—what? You’re not serious.”
Gwen, unable to help herself, began to giggle. It was gratifying, after diverse and concerted efforts, finally to see James unsettled.
“How long has this been going on? Nathan, will you turn around, please? Does Julia know? Is this why she just left, is she okay? Was she . . . Hang on—” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I expect to see the two of you downstairs, at the kitchen table, in five minutes. Do not—I repeat DO NOT CLOSE THE DOOR OF THIS BEDROOM. Five minutes. Downstairs.”
? ? ?
WHEN THE CHILDREN DESCENDED they were hand in hand, a brief chain gang of penitents. This solidarity seemed staged. Gwen looked mutinous and defiant with lifted chin and narrowed eyes, and appeared to be gripping Nathan as if leading an uncooperative child around a supermarket. Nathan was gazing at the tiled floor. A blush crept up his neck and cheeks. They were very sorry, he said, with an unmistakable smirk in his voice. Still, he did not move to free himself from Gwen.