“We’re all going out,” James said, shortly. “Julia and I have discussed it. We’re going to the pub and we’re going to sit and talk like adults. Right now.” He gave Julia a small smile of solidarity before returning to face the children looking thunderous. Beside him she dug her thumbnails into the pads of her ring fingers. Just breathe, James had said. I’ll talk to them. Nathan would soon be back at boarding school Monday to Saturday. Obviously he must stay away at weekends, too, she thought, and in the holidays they could take him directly from Westminster to Heathrow. The children would not sleep another night under the same roof.
Gwen would merely have to be dispatched to a convent in the Hebrides. There were ways, she thought, to—what had James said just now?—curb the insurrection. He had offered castration, a chastity belt, sedation, bromide in the tea, digging a basement and locking them in it for eternity together to get on with it. Or we could leave? Two weeks in the Caribbean? I bet Pamela would take ’em. A few days of a legume-only diet would kill the mood pretty quickly, I promise you. He’d worked hard to calm her. Should James and Nathan move out for a month? Probably that was the best solution but—the idea of him leaving made her frantic. She had waited her whole life for him, she thought, fiercely, and if he left, he might never return. To wake up alone another morning was unthinkable—if Gwen chased him from the house, Julia could not imagine forgiving her easily. Never before had she felt so assaulted by her daughter. And never had she come so close to slipping, and telling James what she thought about his son.
Nathan had taken out his phone. “Why do we—”
“I’m not interested in one syllable from either of you until we are sitting around a table like adults, in a neutral space.”
“But—”
“And I have a beer in my hand. Seriously. Just zip it, Nathan. We’ve been in this house all day and I need air.”
“But—”
“Be quiet. You’ll both do as you’re told, for once. And you will leave your damn devices here and talk like civilized humans.”
Nathan fell silent and Julia rose from the table, fortified. She was too angry to look at Gwen, too angry to speak to Gwen, but James had taken charge and she sagged with inward relief, leaning heavily against the strength of his resolve. He would speak for them both, until she felt able. He could be calm, where she would have raved. He was a good father. He would stop this madness in its tracks.
Nathan and Gwen relinquished their phones sulkily, but without protest. James hesitated, about to set them on the coffee table and then seemed to change his mind and slipped them into his own pocket. Coats were gathered in silence, and they all waited by the front gate while James switched on the alarm and double locked the front door.
They set off down the road in single file—Nathan toggled tight into his hoodie, followed by Gwen, then Julia and James. The pavement was deserted, but light glowed behind curtains and shutters. They walked down the terraced street, rich sand and ocher London stock beneath gnarled and naked winter-stripped wisteria. Functional, nuclear families inside home after home, Julia imagined, obedient, rosy-cheeked children bringing pride to their misty parents at the foot of sap-heavy Douglas firs. Gospel Oak, by Norman Rockwell. I can’t believe them, Julia had said to James, moments earlier. He’d shrugged, his thumb moving gently across her knuckles and said, Remember their ultimate aim in life is to piss us off. We don’t capitulate to terrorists. And she had found herself laughing—with disbelief at her undented happiness, at the power of James’s voice to lift her heart, with gratitude that the sight of his face turned toward hers still made her throat catch, that his eyes upon her could make all the rest mute and fade into insignificance. Her daughter had launched a missile at her life and yet here was James, and so everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.
The pub was closed. It was Christmas Day; their beloved, unrenovated local had bowed out of the race. Better to stay at home, its dark, etched windows advised; it would not compete with marked-down supermarket beer and glutted lassitude, and the rising screech of seasonal family tension. MERRY XMAS, read a small sign on the door in red felt tip, and then on a sloping second line the assurance, REOPEN BOXING DAY.
James swore. He caught Julia’s eye, and she wondered if he was about to laugh, but when he faced the children he looked stern once again. He shooed them away, homeward.
“Back. Now.”
“That was what I was trying to say,” Nathan muttered, as they began to trudge back the way they’d come. “Nothing’d be open.”
They had been out of the house for approximately three and a half minutes. As they turned onto their own street sloppy raindrops began to fall, landing splashily in shallow puddles from an earlier downfall. London seemed under water; it felt like the middle of the night. Back inside they moved by unspoken consensus into the kitchen. Julia put on the kettle, as if they’d been adventuring in the cold for hours. James went to the cupboard and took out two tins of baked beans. Julia went to the bread bin. Gwen opened her mouth to request a bagel, thought better of it, and closed it again. Nathan and Gwen sat side by side at the kitchen table, waiting and watching while their parents began to orchestrate supper. Gwen had begun to find the silence unbearable, which she suspected was the intention.
“What can I do?” she asked, brightly. A new approach. Sunny and amenable.
“You’ve done enough,” said James. He sounded almost cheerful.
Nathan said, “I think we should be allowed to put a case.” Beneath the table his knee pressed reassuringly against Gwen’s. “You can’t sentence us without hearing the case for the defense.”
James began to spoon warmed baked beans onto the plates Julia had lined up beside him. “This is a kangaroo court. I can do whatever I damn well please.”
“Can I have mine—” Gwen began, wanting to ask for her beans on the side, not actually touching her toast.
“Nope.” James was giving every indication of enjoying himself, but then said, in a different tone, “You’ve betrayed our trust. I am deeply disappointed in you both.”
“But—thanks—we haven’t,” Nathan explained, accepting the two plates that Julia had brought to the table and setting one down in front of Gwen. Julia turned back for the others. “It’s only been a few weeks, it didn’t make sense to get everyone all upset if it was nothing.”
“It is nothing,” James told him, taking his place at the table, opposite his son. He cut into his toast with relish and said, with his mouth full, “It’s nothing whatsoever. Whatever it is or was, it’s done. Finito.”
Gwen, who had been elongating and then releasing a single coil of hair, raised her head, her eyes flashing with rekindled fury. “It isn’t nothing! You can’t just say that—you don’t know anything. You can’t tell us what to do!”