“It must be in her name.”
“But whoever’s name it’s in, doesn’t common courtesy require you to at least ask your former husband about selling the family home? Your best friend, supposedly? She’s been there”—she began to estimate—“Giles lived there with her for a few years after he sold his flat, I think, before he moved to France.” She allowed herself a small smile here, at the phrase, but did not pause to explain and, in any case, in this instance she was referring to his actual move to France. “And before then all those years with Philip. Daniel was born in that house. What an awful thing to announce just like that. It’s classic Iris. You know that for ages we didn’t even know if they ever actually got divorced? They made it impossible to ask. And then in the end it turned out that the divorce came through exactly around the time she and Giles were breaking up anyway. It was all part of their act, you know, how unusually civil it all was. Oops! We almost forgot to divorce.”
“It’s not very civil to make unilateral decisions.”
“No.”
At that moment the phone rang. “It’s Granny,” Gwen shouted, from upstairs. “She wants you, Mum.”
Julia picked up the kitchen phone.
“You needn’t have looked at me like I’d grown a second head this evening,” Iris snapped, without preliminaries.
“I’m sorry, I was just a bit surprised.”
“Well, lots of things are surprising. I was surprised to discover that my sixteen-year-old granddaughter thinks it’s reasonable to have a baby, but I’ve adapted,” said Iris, shortly. “Now I’m equipped for bribery and corruption—art college, a gap year, whatever her little heart desires if only she abandons this insanity. And if she does have the bloody thing, it won’t have to be dragged up by its bootstraps, not that I will tell her that at present.”
“Oh, Iris, surely that’s not—”
“I have several reasons, none of which I owe it to you to explain. It’s my house, to do with as I wish.”
“Of course, I know that. But I really hope it won’t be necessary—”
“So you say, and yet the days pass and nothing changes. I dearly hope I’m wrong. Thank you for coming this evening,” Iris finished, stiffly. This formality was intended to be wounding. “Tell Gwendolen I’ll call her over the weekend. I sincerely hope this family therapist person knows her onions.” She rang off and Julia shrugged, in response to James’s look of inquiry. Her mother-in-law’s self-righteousness, her generosity, her ominous prophesies—Julia could not face discussing any of them.
31.
The gabled redbrick mansions of Fitzjohn’s Avenue were built in the late nineteenth century for the great and the good of Hampstead—spreading gothic piles with grand staircases at their hearts, down which the bustled daughters of shipowners and silk magnates and wine merchants could sweep toward waiting carriages. Now, the great and the good of Hampstead trudge up these stairs to try to understand their own unhappiness, for these palaces have been carved into a warren of magnolia consulting rooms for Freudians and Jungians and Kleinians and, in the case of number 88, for three Independents, two marriage guidance counselors, and one Dr. Rhoda Frankel, clinical psychologist, family therapist, Wesleyan graduate, and grandmother, she’d said on the phone, of seven. Her voice was warm, her accent broad Long Island, and upon learning that Julia’s sixteen-year-old daughter had recently been impregnated by a newly acquired de facto stepson, Dr. Frankel had not offered a noncommittal, therapeutic “mmm” but instead whistled through her teeth and said, “Well, that’s not easy.” Her photograph on the Internet was of a bright-eyed woman in her middle sixties, broad chested, with a sharply cut bob of caramel hair that fell neatly either side of a pair of cherry-red plastic-framed glasses. She was all in navy, except for a long chain of complicated, interlocking Lucite squares of neon green slung round her neck. Julia had looked into the eyes of this facsimile while on the phone to the original and, speaking as calmly as she could manage, yearned to collapse and weep like a baby in Dr. Frankel’s comfortably substantial arms.
Julia sat beside Gwen in the waiting room on a low, sagging buttercup-yellow sofa before a glass coffee table tattooed with fingerprints, its stacks of curling National Geographics long neglected now that passing patients instead hid their faces in their phones, busily online, resolutely pretending to be elsewhere. A spider plant cascaded dustily from a hanging basket in the window, above a vibrant aspidistra that was, on closer inspection, plastic. Gwen sat with her hands retracted into her sleeves and clamped between denim thighs. Her brows were knitted into a frown, her lips pushed out, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere in her lap. Her posture, her expression, her every movement conveyed, megaphone loud, that she had come on sufferance. You are detestable, Julia thought, and you have ruined and continue to ruin my life; I should have had cats instead. She noted with an anxious pang that Gwen looked woefully drawn and pallid—almost gray.
Julia found she was unable to break from the constant repetitions of her own case. The prosecution, or was she the defense? In planning this session she had appointed Dr. Frankel as their savior but was gripped by a new fear that the kindly American woman was to be her judge; that they were to receive not arbitration but a verdict, and sentence. Gwen had gone back into their shared and precious past and had set fire to every room. She’s too young, she rehearsed, she has her whole life ahead of her. And, without knowing for what she pleaded she returned to it over and over. I fought with every breath to be two parents for you. Why are you so angry? And—Please. Please. Please.
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