“No, what? No, you haven’t seen a doctor? No, you don’t know? I don’t understand how you could have allowed— We trusted you. You asked me to trust you. You promised me I could trust you, and you’ve let me down. You’ve let”—Gwen had a sudden instinct to cover her ears against the next words—“you’ve let your father down.”
Gwen felt her last hope collapse within her. She would be abandoned for this, and would never be forgiven. Now, when she needed more than ever to be restored to the full beam of her mother’s love, to that deep, old intensity, they felt further apart than ever. She fell to her knees like a penitent, laid her head against the cold edge of the bath, and began to sob. “Don’t talk about Daddy!” she begged, gasping for breath. Her shoulders heaved, and she waited for warm arms to enfold her. She longed to lay her head in her mother’s lap and sob, You used to love me—love me now. But though she cried harder and harder nothing happened, and when she looked up Julia was shaking her head in disbelief, and there was something new in her eyes that frightened Gwen. Hatred, maybe. What happened now hardly mattered.
24.
Julia stayed up very late with James, talking. Just before midnight the evening’s silence had been briefly broken by shouts and scuffles as the pub around the corner disgorged its Friday-night punters and by intermittent caterwauling as these liberated drinkers carried their singing from the bar into the streets. Tonight, though this was not always the case, it sounded spirited but good-natured, out of sight behind the sturdy Victorian terraces. Julia and James stood at the window, intertwined and unmoving, frozen in their bubble of shock. The solidity of James’s arm around her waist was, quite possibly, the only thing that kept her standing. Disbelief came crashing back over her in waves, and each time it receded left a shoreline sullied with debris. Strands of anger and guilt. Empty shells of self-reproach. She felt a hundred years old.
“Maybe that’s what we should have done this evening,” Julia said. “Maybe we just should have walked out and gone to the Lord Southampton and drunk ourselves into oblivion.”
“What, take up binge-drinking? Sing our troubles away on a karaoke machine somewhere?”
“Yes, exactly. It would have been cathartic. Or numbing. Oh”—she turned and laid her head against the broad solidity of his chest—“let’s run away. Let’s just go. I’ve got a hotel room in Verbier ready and waiting, right now, that I’m meant to be in. We could conceal ourselves among the violinists.”
“We could pay our way across Europe giving recitals. You can play and I’ll . . . dance. South of France? Tuscany?”
“We could start a vineyard.”
“Let’s make buffalo mozzarella.”
“I think you might need buffalo to make buffalo mozzarella.”
James considered. “So you’ll look after the buffalo. I’ll make the wine. I really think we’re onto something, it will be more economical to make our own if we’re going to become full-time alcoholics.”
“Not alcoholics,” Julia amended. “Binge-drinkers.”
“Right. Tuscan binge-drinkers.” James sat down on the bed and pulled her hand, gently, until she was sitting beside him. “It’s a real shame about your master class, as well as everything else. I know it’s not . . . This does happen, you know. I see a lot of kids at work—”
“Everyone you see at work is pregnant, it’s not representative.”
“True. But what I mean is . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m in shock, I think. I’m sorry, I won’t quote statistics at you.”
“We should have stopped all of this, the whole thing. The sex. The unprotected sex. The utter stupidity of the relationship itself. How could they be so bloody stupid? How did this actually happen?”
James could not reply to this question for in truth he blamed Gwen, and was so angry that he did not think he could ever again be civil to her. Pamela had waged a relentless sexual health campaign with their own children since long before it had been relevant or even appropriate, and despite these assurances, James himself had given Nathan stern reminders about the importance of condoms ever since Valentina’s first appearance. Each of these unsatisfactory discussions had ended with a withering dismissal of, “It’s all taken care of, Father,” or more tastelessly, “Dad, this ain’t my first rodeo.” But it had been established that they had not been using condoms, and that this current debacle was therefore entirely due to Gwen’s laissez-faire attitude to taking the Pill. Nathan, James judged, had done his medic parents proud. He had taken himself off to the Royal Free for a full sexual health screening before trusting to the hormonal contraception alone, which was mature and considerate, especially given his rather limited sexual history. Nathan had been gentlemanly, principled, irreproachable. Gwen, by contrast, was a spoiled, selfish, and irresponsible little airhead. Despite tonight’s earlier display, in which she had been the embodiment of abject misery and contrition and bewilderment, James thought it more than possible that she had done it on purpose. To share her mother’s attention made her frantic, and with a single move she had commandeered it all, trapping Nathan in the process. Regardless of her insecurity, Gwen was a girl accustomed to her own way and now she had created such a tornado of dramatic tension around herself that it was possible she would once again get it. She had behaved indefensibly toward his beloved son. His beloved son who was staying over at Charlie’s house after a gig, whose phone was still off, and who had absolutely no idea of the bedlam that awaited him at home.
He had stood outside the bathroom while the stupid girl had peed on a stick that would reaffirm what, with a little hindsight, ought to have been perfectly obvious, and by the time the three minutes of waiting had elapsed he had regained outward mastery of himself. Nathan would need his father to be calm. In any case, amid the howling and shrieking, someone had to remain clear-headed.
He saw that he had been too cautious about discipline, too careful not to undermine or challenge Julia’s rule, and far too deferential to the other, absent man of the house. Once they had all recovered from this unpleasantness he would assert himself, by Julia’s side, at the helm of this family. He would dispatch Gwen to a grief counselor. He would insist that they all see a family therapist. He would fix what was broken around here.
“I promised Daniel,” Julia was saying, and he summoned his mind back to the present, back to her serious, pale face, “I promised I’d take care of her. I promised I’d be two parents.”