“Oh, darling.” Iris’s expression remained stern but her voice softened. She sighed. She felt less equipped to deal with Julia’s grief; it was moving beyond her remit. “Listen to me. You’re very happy, in case you’d lost sight of it amid all this mess. You’re happy for the first time since . . .” She abandoned this sentence, and began to readjust the gold watch that hung loosely on her left wrist, rotating it, checking and then rechecking the clasp. This was one of her forbidden paths of thought, leading only into snares and brambles. Back up, back out. Yet it was indisputable that Julia was in many ways better suited to this large, affable American than she had been to Iris’s beloved son, and she was stung with sudden furious envy for Daniel. Daniel had been fiery and impetuous and brilliant—her captivating, flame-haired boy. Julia was unchallenging, far too passive for him, and they had argued, and she had not stood up to him as he’d needed. Her wilting would further aggravate him and they would then limp on for days in unresolved, unignorable tension while little Gwen, attuned and vibrating with every mounting bar of pressure, would prance between them like a court jester, exhausting herself in her efforts to effect a reconciliation. Daniel should have married someone with a bit of spice. Instead he’d chosen this pale flower and she had gone about looking harried. Julia had softened and unfurled. Yes—Iris had talked herself free of danger—it was no insult to Daniel to concede that she and anodyne Thing were a better fit. She drew in a deep breath and looked down at her hands. On the left a grape-colored chip of ruby set in ornately engraved eight-carat plate that had once been Philip’s mother’s—the thin, scuffed gold of her wedding band now retired to her right ring finger, where Philip also wore his.
“My darling girl, I do know.” Here she paused, certain that Philip Alden would caution her not to sermonize. “You won’t lose her, the two of you are part of one another, which is precisely why this must hurt so much. And you and Thing have enough on your plates. In not very long you’ll be carefree together, and you’ll be starting an entirely different sort of life. You cannot allow Gwendolen to sabotage everything and destroy her own life in the process. Believe me, that would do your relationship with her no good either.”
Julia wiped her cheeks, and nodded.
Enough, thought Iris, suddenly overcome with irritation and unwilling to mourn a catastrophe while it could still be headed off at the pass. All this ululating and rending of collars was simply wasted energy. “Anyway. Your plans are your own business and are for you and Thing to discuss once the nest is actually empty. In the meantime”—she looked steadily at Julia—“before the children go forth, you must forbid them from multiplying. Deal with it.”
27.
“What about up here?” Nathan offered, pointing toward a patch of balding grass beneath a giant sycamore. It was less crowded than the larger clearing they had just passed, in which he’d spotted a group of local teenagers he half knew and urgently wished to avoid. A damp chill remained in the air, but an unexpected wash of pale April sunshine had drawn hopeful crowds to the Heath. Nathan’s parents had given him a series of coaching sessions prior to this outing, and he had set out determined to act upon them.
“Ugh. You’re so lucky you get to escape to school. I wish I could escape from Mum and— Julia and James. They’re probably desperate to get rid of me anyway. I’m so sick of crying and being yelled at and groveling and then crying again, it’s not exactly relaxing.”
“I don’t think the throwing up is majorly helpful. Maybe you should consider quitting that.”
“Okay, I’ll think about giving up, but it’s just been so much fun. I feel human again today, though.”
“I’m glad,” he said, with feeling. It had been dreadful to watch her heave, with the surreal guilt and awe that his own ejaculation could have such terrible power.
They sat down on the seam of shadow that fell across the grass, Nathan in the sun, Gwen in the full shade. She had showered and put in her contact lenses and looked pretty and fresh faced again, in a pair of heart-shaped cerise Lolita sunglasses and a denim jacket on which she’d long ago embroidered a seam of prancing, rainbow-tailed unicorns. She had been cheerful since they’d been alone together. Sucking intermittently on an orange lollipop, she looked the picture of youthful innocence. Here was someone he recognized.
“I’m sorry this has all got so crazy,” she said, after a while. The lolly clicked against her teeth as she removed it to speak. “I just get so frustrated that they don’t get it. And I know I’m superhormonal so it seems like I don’t know what I mean because I keep crying but I do, I just express myself badly. It’s like, insanely clear in my head. They’re both so rigid, it’s like they refuse to see that people can take different paths from them. From them? From theirs? Anyway. I think”—she paused to tuck the sweet back into one cheek—“I think sometimes it can be very hard for parents to see signs that their babies have become adults.”
Nathan saw the truth in this statement, and also its dishonesty. Their parents were not upset because their children were growing up but because they had done something infantile. He had never felt less like an adult. This was most acute when he spoke on the phone with his mother, longing for the stifling warmth and reassurance of her soft arms around him. Last night he’d dreamed he had been entrusted with a minute baby in a jam jar. The jar had smashed, and the baby lay gasping and suffocating at his feet like a tiny landed minnow.
Gwen turned to him to speak again and he took the lollipop from her hand, crunched it between his molars and then grinned at her, handing back the remaining shard on its paper stick. She liked these small, exclusive familiarities, he knew, liked sharing his spoon, or his toothbrush, enjoyed the ostentatious intimacy of licking a swelling drop of ice cream from his wrist, or passing chewing gum mouth to mouth. Or carrying his child, he thought, and found himself shaking his head involuntarily, as if the thought could be dislodged like water from his ears. He desperately needed her to listen.
“Tell me honestly what you want.” Gwen began to peel at the damp stick with a fingernail. “I go mental when they ask because they’re so judgmental and it’s none of their business, but it’s different just us. This is our decision.”
“Okay,” began Nathan, slowly. “Well, right now we’re talking about, like, a grain of rice.”
Spoken by James or Julia, this would have tripped Gwen into a spasm of white rage, but alone with Nathan, she did not feel defensive. Nathan was not a threat. To compare it to a grain of rice did not reduce it to the insignificance of a grain of rice. Her chin lifted a fraction.