Alone, they remained apart, looking at one another.
“We need to behave,” said Julia softly, with regret.
“I don’t want to behave.” James took her hand in his. “Let’s go home.”
From the living room they heard the sound of a countdown. Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! This would be the year. She would learn to be assertive with her daughter, she would fight for time and space with this man whom she loved so fiercely; at half term they would send Nathan to America and leave Gwen with Iris and they would book a holiday just the two of them. Six! Five! Four! A fresh start. No more guilt. She would remember that she was allowed to be happy. Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!
? ? ?
ACROSS LONDON, Gwen was waiting for a night bus. She had spent the early part of the evening with Katy and two other school friends at a pizza restaurant on Haverstock Hill. At ten thirty, Katy’s mother had arrived to take them all back for a sleepover and to see in twelve o’clock armed with ice cream and Maltesers, and cans of sparkling apple juice that Katy’s father would later decant into champagne flutes for them, thereby mortifying Katy. Gwen, as arranged, had hidden inside the restaurant.
After the car had pulled away Gwen had tugged her hood over her face and walked down the hill to Belsize Park tube station, where she’d got the train to Waterloo, an unexpectedly exhilarating adventure. She had never before been allowed to go out on New Year’s Eve. Her mother would argue she was not yet old enough now, but in the last days Julia had proven that she knew nothing about her daughter, her needs or principles, and no longer cared to pay attention. She was too busy with her own repulsive romance. And it turned out that there was a camaraderie in London on New Year’s Eve, a carnival air on the Tube encouraged by the jovial announcements of the driver, and the makeup and glad rags and mounting anticipation of the passengers. Gwen could not know this would later sour into a less benign atmosphere, a bright-lit, bristling tension charged with disappointed hopes, too much alcohol, furious energy as yet unspent. In this same train there would be fights, and sobs and jeers, and possibly vomiting. But for now, while the night still held promise, all was celebratory. The mayor’s drinking ban was openly flouted. A man in a rhinestone-studded denim jacket and gold sunglasses played music. In high spirits and higher hemlines, a group of girls at the other end of the carriage called out song requests and one, beneath a towering, backcombed beehive, stood up and began to gyrate around the central pole. Gwen smiled to herself, and was rewarded with a fleeting grin from a woman who sat opposite, in the midst of applying her mascara. The plan was going easily, and well. Julia, who had dropped her off and had chatted to Katy through the car window before disappearing to her own, private, exclusive and excluding plans, would never learn that Gwen was spending the evening with Nathan. Last year Gwen and Julia had shared pizzas from the same restaurant and watched Calamity Jane till midnight. It was amazing how much her mother, who had once known everything, did not know.
Since the discovery on Christmas Day, the household had moved together through various phases. Acceptance would follow, Nathan had asserted, since they’d dwelt so exhaustively in rage and denial. He was waiting out his father’s disappointment as if it was a rainstorm and he happily settled in the window of a café with a newspaper and a hot chocolate, nowhere special to be. The squall would pass and he would venture back into the pale, clean-washed sunshine. He would be forgiven—had probably been forgiven already. Gwen felt less secure. Julia’s immediate fury, though it had been startling and uncharacteristic, had turned out to be the easiest to navigate. Gwen was accustomed to her mother’s fierce devotion and so her mother in a fit of violent feeling was, at least, feeling violent feelings about her. In the quiet isolation of late December, that pocket of slow, padded time between Christmas and New Year when families turn in on themselves, hibernating, or festering, Julia and Gwen had been forced by sheer exposure to return to a superficial approximation of normality. Julia’s temper cooled to chill disappointment. The household had grown steadily calmer, but the unaccustomed rift between mother and daughter remained in place. Gwen had no choice but to cleave tighter to Nathan, and to stand resolutely by her choice.
The bus came, bright and busy, and from it poured a steady stream of revelers. Out came the tourists in plastic rain ponchos heading for set meals at chain restaurants booked months ago, online; she pushed her way on, her height for once an advantage, and a text from Nathan pinged through. Where RU? Don’t like you wandering the streets. Can I come get you somewhere? RU safe? She began to feel the rends in her cocoon slowly knitting back together. Wasn’t this growing up? Moving on, forging new bonds, and graduating into independence? If so, perhaps this desperate sadness and longing for her mother that she felt was usual, too, and would pass, in time.
On the bus, she wrote back.
Instantly he replied, Party’s long. I’ll meet you. Let’s go just us to the river, baby, can go later to Charlie’s. Bisous.
The parents did not expect them home (nor care, Gwen told herself, the taste of new, bitter cynicism on her tongue). She had said she’d stay with Katy; in her bag a pair of clean underwear, a toothbrush, sneakers for tomorrow morning, the contact lens case she’d painted with nail varnish rainbows. Nathan had told the truth: he was sleeping at Charlie’s with a mixed group of fifteen other school friends, only omitting the additional information that Gwen would join him. The night would offer little privacy other than that afforded by darkness and a sleeping bag but this, already, was an improvement upon the late-night tiptoeing and furtive anxiety of home. Around them would be other teenagers with sympathy, and romantic concerns of their own.
K, she wrote back, and then almost as an afterthought, for though she’d never told him, she knew he already knew, Love U.
18.
This time, Philip prepared by standing quietly to recall the name of James’s son in advance, as well as the name of the play that he and Iris had seen together when the subject had arisen, and the name of the current book he was reading, just in case. It was not possible to consider all contingencies, but with this cache he felt able to ring Iris and inform her, “I believe it’s true that a romance has begun between Gwen and Nathan,” with the easy, conversational flow of a late-night radio host. His memory was not getting worse, thank God. But, despite online Sudoku, it was not getting any better.
“Well I suppose it’s not incest.”
“Don’t be ludicrous, of course it isn’t.”