“Then you must be louder,” said Iris, stoutly. “Time is ticking.”
“Believe me, I’m well aware. I spent half the night writing her a letter, and I left it on her pillow yesterday and she came down looking sort of grave and pious and told me very calmly that she knew I only wanted the best for her but that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Nathan was in tears this morning, he’s frantic, Saskia apparently e-mailed her and even Pamela’s spoken to her, not that she has any influence, but she’s at least full of fire and statistics, and Gwen put the phone down on her. I don’t know what to do, I can’t reach her. I don’t know how to make her see what she’s doing to her future. And to my future, not that she seems particularly concerned about that. I can’t actually force her, can I? Can I? You can’t force someone. What if she really did regret it for the rest of her life? It would be unimaginable. But this—this is unimaginable. It’s all unimaginable. I’d give anything to rewind, I’m longing to make it all just go away.”
Iris set her teacup and saucer down on a large, hardcover copy of Le Corbusier’s The Modulor, which sat at the top of a stack on a gold silk ottoman beside her. She began to speak more slowly, as if to a person of limited understanding. “The ‘someone’ in question is a child, and not a particularly mature or clear-headed one. Your language is problematic. Of course one can’t force someone but one ought to direct one’s minor children and take responsibility for their lives, it’s a mother’s job. If you want to discuss lifelong regret, I suggest you try imagining this: all her little girlfriends lining up in mortar boards to collect their degrees, or shouldering backpacks to binge-drink on Vietnamese beaches, or throwing their first dinner parties after a day in some jolly little graduate scheme, and I urge you to picture alongside it our young Gwendolen alone, for you and I both know she will be alone—these boys don’t stick around for five minutes—alone with a screaming toddler at her knee, hanging up laundry.”
Julia nodded and said nothing, and Iris began to look mutinous. She had begun with her usual affectation of serenity but Julia was vexing her. “Well?”
“I know,” said Julia, quietly. “It would be a tragedy.”
“Well then for God’s sake, stave it off! If you’re all so worried about lifelong regret for this hypothetical infant then no wonder she feels she ought to keep it, you might as well start putting it down for schools. Not that it will be going to private school, of course, having grown up in ignorance and penury.”
“I can’t actually drag her there by the hair! What am I meant to do? I’ve made the appointment and I’ll try to find a way to get her there. There’s only a few weeks left before it’s too late. Oh, God. I should never have let this happen in the first place and then we wouldn’t be here. I feel culpable. I’ve made an appointment to talk to a family therapist next week. I know we should have separated them, but the idea of James moving out again—”
“No self-flagellation please, thank you very much; this is entirely Gwendolen’s fault. But you can fix it.”
“And Nathan’s,” said Julia, ignoring the second assertion. In the last days she had longed more than ever to dispatch James’s monstrous, con artist, sex offender of a son to a life of hard labor in the colonies, or even to the lesser sentence of a life burying eggshells and peeing on compost heaps under his mother’s permanent charge in Boston. She wished, with clear precision, to murder him. The vivid violence of her imagination shocked her. She saw house fires and gas leaks. She saw him jaunty and carefree, mown down into a cartoon two dimensions by a speeding bus. She was too angry with her daughter to allow herself safely to feel or even approach it; Nathan, therefore, received the full force of her fury. Fury was more bearable than sorrow.
“I will apportion him precisely twenty-three percent of the blame. Nathan wasn’t the one, after all, who ‘forgot’ to take the Pill.” Iris left her hands frozen where they had risen on either side of her face, fingers held in drooping peace signs around the stinging, crucial word.
“I can’t deal with accusations of deliberate idiocy right now. I do know what it looks like.”
“For the moment why it happened is irrelevant; now we find ourselves here. Listen to me. Do you know a single person in our milieu, a single girl of our acquaintance lucky enough to be from a privileged, educated north London family of means who has had a baby under these circumstances? Don’t be so arrogant as to assume we’re the only ones; it’s statistically impossible that no one we know has had a daughter run into a bit of trouble. But they don’t go leaving letters around like the tooth fairy, they deal with it, Julia. The parents deal with it. And the girls chalk it up to experience and go on to university and careers and marriages and there’s no harm done.”
Composed until this moment, Julia suddenly covered her face and began to sob. “I’ve lost her. I don’t know how to get her back.”