“Dolly.”
“I don’t even get it, it’s so pathetic. You’re obsessed with us not being left alone together even for five minutes and then suddenly today I find out you’ve got summer plans to go to Italy for a whole weekend. So it’s totally fine for us to stay here by ourselves if you get to go to the opera and Verbier, or whatever. It’s like, insane double standards. So we are allowed, now.”
“I’m afraid,” boomed a disembodied voice from behind a newspaper, “that I’ll be here when your mother is in Verbier, and for Milan we’ll find a suitably obtrusive chaperone. The arrangements predate the current regime. Don’t get too excited, kiddo.”
“Maybe you could go with Nathan,” Julia suggested, and felt cheapened even as she said it. To her astonishment Gwen simply gave a melancholy shrug. Then she said, softly, “Mummy, I don’t want to go with Nathan. The whole point was to go together,” and Julia’s heart fractured, yet again.
20.
Swiss Cottage Library did not become more romantic in miniature, but Gwen could think of no other way to represent the day’s events. Certainly she had no desire to record the morning’s argument, in which her mother had made it clear, once and for all, where her traitorous priorities lay. Maybe you could go with Nathan, she had suggested, not simply missing the point but readily giving up custody or care of her daughter and forgetting, erasing, a precious long-ago memory. Gwen did not usually like old people’s music but when she was eleven they had gone to hear Simon and Garfunkel, and it had been a magical evening in a dark, hard year. The concert, held outdoors in Hyde Park, had been hot and dry and perfect, and the first glimpse of a possible future in which they might once again, one day, be happy. Gwen had shut her eyes tightly and tried to feel the passion her mother felt for this strange, folksy music, had tried to let the simple melodies, the unexpected rhythms of the language, move in her blood. At eleven she was already the same height as Julia but she had hunched over and drawn closer under Julia’s arm and had felt safe, and hopeful. Couples stood around them interlocked, swaying, and her father wasn’t there to sway and sing alongside her mother but she was there, she told herself, and after a while she had straightened her spine and stood up to her full height and put her arm, instead, around her mother. In the days that followed, Gwen taught herself the words to every song they’d heard, and learned to love them. They would be okay. They would be a family again, just the two of them. But Julia had made it clear that James was her only priority.
Her mother had needed a vessel for her love and energies, and now no longer needed to be needed. But it wasn’t fair—she had lulled Gwen into believing that she would always be there. Gwen had offered up her life, her sorrows and pleasures, her preoccupations and requirements, had worked busily to keep her mother fulfilled and contented, and her being had formed around this belief, molded like ivy around a solid trunk. Now, Julia had withdrawn. Without her mother at her center she wavered. If she had seemed sturdy, it had been Julia firm beneath her.
She already had several sets of small bookshelves usually used for scenes in her mother’s music room, and these just needed populating with cardboard concertinas, decorated with some fine cross-hatching to imply the microscopic titles on the folded projections of tiny spines. She set up a shoebox to be the reading room and assembled all the paraphernalia to scatter on her tiny desk and on Nathan’s—mobile phones, some pens and pencils and even a lined and ring-bound notepad she had painstakingly constructed long ago for use in an imagined, flashback scene showing her grandmother at work as a journalist. All that remained to make were some textbooks to indicate homework, and the subtle nod to the real incident—the tiny paper airplane on which she had written her explosive missive and, heart pounding, sent it sailing over the wall between their carrels like a kamikaze. It was time, she’d decided, to grow up.
She wanted the blog to capture the formative events in her life, good or bad, while as much as possible sparing the humdrum, or repetitious. This was not the way her friends depicted themselves on the Internet but she had no interest in varnishing her life as they did, glamorous moments threaded one after another like an endless string of glossy and identical fake pearls. That, after all, was not brave, and was also definitely not Art. She wanted wit, or poignancy, or meaning. This was her coming-of-age story, after all, and one day when the story was over and life had acquired stability—perhaps when she was twenty-five, or twenty-six—its coherence and powerful narrative thrust would be united into a book, or possibly an animated television program, her own history reenacted by tiny clay figures in shoebox worlds. It would be an album of memories. It would be proof that she had been, and felt, and lived.
But tonight something had happened and though it was momentous, she was at a loss as to how to honor it. Her grandfather read her blog. Her traitorous mother read her blog, and in any case thought this landmark long behind her. Meanwhile, she had a more pressing and practical problem for it was very late, and she did not know what to do about the bedsheets.
? ? ?
ALREADY THE NIGHT’S EVENTS seemed distant. She examined her own feelings and found only deflation, and a sense of anticlimax. If she thought too long, she could summon a quiet, mawkish grief for her own innocence.