Julia set down her fork with a clatter. “Don’t you dare shout at James like that. This is absolutely inappropriate, Gwendolen, and I forbid it.”
“Why do you even care what I do? You’re such a hypocrite, you don’t tell me anything about your life, you barely even talk to me anymore except to tell me to, ‘be nice, be nice, be nice,’ and ‘Oh, by the way, a family of total strangers are moving in, kay, thanks, and I’m going to need you to be a totally different person now,’ and we’re all meant to be best friends and you don’t even notice or care that everybody’s miserable except you two obsessed with each other, and now something nice has actually happened for literally the first time in my life and you only care what it means for you.” She was out of breath and paused. “Well, sorry if it’s not convenient. Nathan’s my boyfriend. You didn’t tell me when you first got together and you don’t tell me anything about your plans for this family and I would have thought you’d be pleased to know I have someone who cares about me while you’re busy replacing me in your new fabulous life. I’m a—a superfluous person.” She dropped her head and began to sob, her face now entirely concealed behind a mass of russet hair that had fallen forward, perilously close to her plate. Julia opened her mouth to reply, but closed it in stricken silence. That Gwen should feel safe, that Gwen should feel cherished: these objectives had been her life’s work. Her anger began to drain from her like water from a pool.
“Can everyone please lower their voices.” James was speaking in a singsong half-whisper, in the tone of one addressing much smaller children, at nap time. He picked up his remaining crust and began to mop up tomato sauce. “One at a time, please tell us what’s been happening. Calmly. Nathan?”
Nathan looked to Gwen and then back to his father. “Can we please scratch everything that happened today, and can you listen as though we’d brought this to you ourselves?”
“No. Next question.”
“Okay, fine. Look, we like each other, okay? And I know it’s a little weird that you guys are dating and now we’re dating and we all live in the same house, but we both understood the ramifications of it all beforehand and considered it worth the risk.”
“You did, did you. How very mature. Well, we all live in the same house, as you so charmingly put it, because you are our offspring and we are your parents. This isn’t a Noel Coward play; it’s not just some unfortunate coincidence in a boardinghouse. I do not allow it, and that’s the end of the story.”
“We’re not related, we never could be even if you guys— We were adults before you even met.”
Both Julia and James began to laugh, which was enraging, and after a moment James set both his palms on the table and stood up, scraping his chair back loudly. “Enough. I’ve had enough hilarity for one night. Nathan, I am phoning your mother, with whom you will now stay this evening, and in the meantime, Gwen, please go upstairs. Take whatever sustenance you need for a good twelve hours, I don’t want to catch sight of you again until tomorrow.”
Gwen, whose usual trick of storming to her bedroom had been whisked unexpectedly from her arsenal, looked wrong-footed and gave James a scathing glance. “You’re sending me to my room. Like someone from the olden days. Fine, I’m going. But newsflash, you’re not my father. And you can’t stop us seeing each other; we both live here.” She, too, stood, clutching her plate in both hands as if in line at a soup kitchen. “You can’t lock me in my room forever.”
James already had his phone to his ear. “I will look seriously into the legality of it. Pamela? Yup. Yup. Minor change of plan. Can I deliver your son in half an hour?”
15.
“Did you have to tell her? Couldn’t you just have said he was coming to visit?”
Taking off his coat, James paused, looking surprised. “She is his mother.”
“Yes, but . . .” Julia could think of no good reason other than her own, visceral objection. Pamela’s involvement was perhaps the only way to make the circumstances feel more calamitous. She could not get past the suspicion that this latest, repugnant development was due to Pamela’s own unwelcome pheromones and sexually permissive influence wafting through the house. She felt an urge to burn sage leaves, or perform some other sort of occult, neopagan cleansing ritual, and then, thinking that this was perhaps precisely what Pamela herself might do, wondered if she was actually losing her grip. She thought, but did not say, I don’t like Pamela.
“Nathan would have told her himself anyway,” said James, reasonably, dropping the car keys onto the coffee table and collapsing into an armchair. “But also we have to be honest with one another. I’d be mad if something happened on her watch that she didn’t share with me.”
“It wasn’t ‘on our watch,’ we could hardly have known—”
“I’m not saying we could have stopped them, you know what I mean.”
“This is nauseating,” said Julia, laying her forehead on the arm of the sofa. She rejected the memory of Nathan’s hand lost beneath her daughter’s T-shirt, the pert denim globe of his backside aloft as he lay almost on top of her child. “I quite literally cannot believe this is happening. It cannot happen. They’ve chosen the one thing that will make our family life impossible. It’s genius really, when you think about it. It’s the perfect sabotage.”
James moved to sit beside her and laid his hands on her back. The warmth of his palms seeped through her sweater to her skin. “I think it’s also teenagers doing what teenagers do.” She lifted her head slightly but before she could protest he continued, “But let’s say you’re right and there’s a part of them trying to rebel and make things difficult or, what I think is more likely, looking for attention they might feel they’ve lost recently. It’s still pretty new for them, seeing us together. That’s twice the reason to show them what we’re made of and to handle it like a team. We’ve done a lot of family stuff recently, so maybe it’s time to go back to the beginning, making sure you get time alone with Gwen every weekend and I get time alone with Nathan. They’re good kids.”
“But that’s the point, they’re kids. They have no idea what a mess this could be; I don’t think they even really get why it’s so totally and utterly wrong, and revolting. And all those things she said—I’ve been selfish and I’ve hurt her and—”
“Stop. For right now Pamela’s happy to have him and that will give them time to cool off, or pretend it never happened or whatever. They’re apart during the week when he’s at school, so it’s only weekends we have to just say, no, obviously this is unacceptable. We’ll put a stop to it and that’s that. We’ll figure it out, but you have not been selfish. You do nothing but think of her. There’s still some mulled wine, if you want?”
Julia shook her head. “It wasn’t very nice, I don’t know what they put in it.”
“Maybe they weren’t concentrating.”