“It’s just about attention, it’s nothing to do with you,” James continued, battering the heel of the loaf into the narrow slot of the toaster with unnecessary force, “and we’ll figure it out.” Nathan took this statement at face value, and as all the explanation required. He had no wish to think deeper, or further. He had taken up the reassuring, containing phrase “nightmare episode” as an accurate description of the terrible five minutes during which his girlfriend had been wailing beside the refrigerator. That had been intense, but now he wished to burrow into his hood and sleep. It was a further unpleasant jolt to learn that before he slept he would have to help his father carry a divan and a mattress back to his own bedroom—the temporary theft of his single bed had been if anything a greater shock, and with it an attempt upon his autonomy and very manhood, he’d felt—but Gwen was obviously in distress, and would need careful handling until the nightmare episode was over. After the sheets had been restored he muttered, “Keats!” rather sorrowfully to his father, and then fell into a dreamless slumber, without pausing to remove jeans, or sweatshirt. James kissed his brow, reiterated softly that he loved him, and departed.
Nathan had surprised himself with his devotion to Gwen, for he had believed himself sincerely in love with Valentina and had since learned something deeper. With Gwen he was able to be himself, or at least, whichever version of himself felt truest at the time. She loved him without limits or conditions, and without apparent judgment. As he was, so she took him. Schooled by his friends to be quick and judgmental and to seize gleefully upon the slips of others, he was humbled by Gwen’s simple, earnest loyalty. In their private spaces, she had made it safe for him to be sometimes wrong, or undecided. With Gwen it became less frightening to be fallible, because she resolutely refused to believe him so. If he were in trouble, he would not doubt her steadfastness. This weekend she was not rational, but his father assured him it was an episode, so he would stick by her until she had recovered. It was about attention, James had said, and once she’s well and had truly traumatized Julia, there was no damn way she’d go through with any baby. Well, Nathan remembered what it felt like to be sidelined in a parental drama and was anxious to believe this explanation. No one his age could be pregnant. He was not such a statistic—he went to private school, for God’s sake.
? ? ?
NATHAN AWOKE IN THE AFTERNOON to the return of the women, and of fear. By dinnertime Gwen was vomiting copiously and pitiably, as if the revelation of her condition had unleashed her symptoms like hounds uncaged. She did not have anything resembling a glow about her but instead after only a few hours had begun to look haggard and almost feral, like something, he thought, swept in off the moors. Claire’s celebrated pragmatism had had no discernible effect. During the brief moments she was not on her knees in the bathroom Gwen lurched from a soft-voiced, reasonable calm, stating her position with the deliberate, even tones of a well-trained customer service agent, and a moment later would be unhinged by an imperceptible provocation, wild-eyed and snarling at James and her mother like Bertha Rochester. For Nathan she had only words of love, and of contrition, but through all of Saturday evening and most of Sunday they were alone for only fleeting snatches.
In the end it was decided that when term began the next morning he would go to back to boarding, as planned. Regret could be stoked and fostered into a full-time activity but it was not a very constructive one and, as the stalemate continued, it became clear that there wasn’t much Nathan could actually do. The baby about whom they all raved and ranted would be—an unimaginable hypothetical—his baby. And yet when mother and daughter clashed, eyes flashing, hands on hips, or more bewilderingly, crying softly in one another’s arms, no oxygen remained. The tears and slammed doors, the ragged apologies and immediate retractions: Nathan had no place in these scenes. Neither Gwen nor Julia thought to ask him what he wanted. Instead he retreated behind his father. It became harder and harder to believe that it would all, as James continued to promise with grim determination, be okay. Gwen had lost her mind and so far showed no signs of recovering it. He missed his mother, and longed to be at home.
26.
“Well obviously she’ll have to get rid of it,” said Iris equably, just as Julia had known she would. She waited for the rest of the address while her mother-in-law clicked sweetener tablets into her teacup. Julia felt almost giddy with relief to be in Iris’s living room, awaiting judgment and a brisk shot of fortitude. In her mother-in-law’s presence there was nothing that did not seem obvious or manageable. It was healing to be spoken to in the imperative.
Philip had been the one to tell Iris the news, and had therefore taken the unrestrained brunt of her wrath and disappointment. It was with Philip that Iris had also wept, once, briefly and in silence. Nonetheless, Iris did not understand the extended lamentations. She saw merely an unpleasant, regrettable expedient they would all hasten to forget once it was over. A young woman’s future hung in the balance. On one side an education, choice, independence. On the other Iris saw the scale loaded with all the heavy, dark weight of the past. Biology as destiny: it no longer had to be. If that maddening child had any grasp of her generation’s privilege, she might have been more respectful of the sovereign miracle of contraception. She ought, Iris thought furiously, to have cherished it. Worshipped it. The Pill was golden liberty, deliverance from both the baby and the scalpel, and this needless mess was due entirely to Gwendolen’s own stupidity and ingratitude. Never mind. It was not too late.
“She’s got herself into a horribly foolish situation but all that matters now is that she be forbidden from doing something far stupider. If you don’t like the place that Thing’s pal found, then that ex-wife of his will know the right women’s clinic, surely. God’s teeth, what I wouldn’t give for a cigarette right now.” Iris took a prim sip of tea. “If that girl undoes my Allen Carr, she’ll really learn what trouble looks like.”
Julia had not moved to speak, and so Iris continued, “Look. Mistakes happen. This is truly one of Gwendolen’s more spectacular balls-ups, I will give you that, but it can’t possibly be allowed to dictate the rest of her life. You are her mother—no more fluffy Fabian philosophies and all that utter guff you thought would be so healing. Trust the child. I’ve always known it was a nonsense but I now see in serious circumstances it’s positively dangerous. We’ve watched and we’ve said nothing till now, but really, Julia, there must be limits. Teenagers have no impulse control, it’s a neurological fact. What on earth does she know about anything? It’s not at all the same as letting her choose her own bedtime or have marshmallows for dinner. You must save her from herself now, and you simply cannot allow this madness to proceed.” Iris gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Julia? God help us, you’re not suffering a sudden bout of Catholicism?”
Julia came to life. “No! How can you even— No, of course not, you know I don’t think there’s any other sensible course, it’s— She’s just being so, so intransigent. Every time we talk she ends up screaming. She is absolutely deaf to sense.”