“No. Oh—fine. But I’d like to be clear that this does not constitute endorsement. Katy, I have not yet heard your opinion on the matter but I shall tell you for the record that I believe continuing with this pregnancy to be an act of self-sabotaging imbecility on my granddaughter’s behalf, as she well knows. You may keep them if you insist. Lord knows what’s in there. Your father’s baby clothes, a baby blanket, and if I recall, an elaborately hideous collection of rather itchy cardigans knitted by Philip Alden’s mother, who had, as you will soon see, a great deal too much time on her hands.” She turned to go. “I sincerely hope if they do anything, they drive home a little reality. Those are clothes for a human, not a plaything. I am displeased.”
It was Katy who a moment later was wiping away tears and this decided Gwen’s own course of emotional action, till then uncertain. She had many precious artifacts, but it had been so long since she’d unearthed something new of her father’s. A lump had risen in her own throat, but when she saw Katy crying she said firmly, “Don’t be silly.” Her father as an infant had not yet been her father; these were adorable but did not represent a person she could reasonably miss. She put her arm around her friend and realized, with a pounding heart, that it was possibly her first spontaneously maternal gesture.
Katy nodded and sniffed, wiping invisible mascara smears from beneath each eye with her ring fingers. “I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s so nice. You might have pictures of your Dad in some of these little outfits, and I just thought that when your baby comes you can take the same pictures, and—and that’s really special. Oh, no, Gwen, please don’t cry, I’m so sorry, please don’t cry. They’re beautiful. They’re happy, as you said.”
They sat for a moment with their arms around each other. Gwen reached out reverentially to stroke a tiny playsuit in smocked white cotton, uneven mother-of-pearl buttons down its front. It was utterly unthinkable that a human was at that moment gestating within her, and would one day grow to fit these garments. Her throat constricted. She did not want to picture plump limbs within these tiny sleeves, nor the hot monkey cling of a tiny body. She wiped her nose inelegantly on her sleeve and said, “I have to tell my mum, like, now, she’ll be so shocked that there’s stuff she hasn’t seen, she’s going to freak. And look at these, they’re so gorgeous. I hope she’s okay, she gets upset about my dad, you know. If she comes straight over when I text her and she’s supersad, do you mind hanging out with my granny just for a bit? Just for like, ten minutes?”
Katy said that of course she wouldn’t mind, Gwen’s granny was fantastic, but that she would soon have to go in any case. Actually now, in fact. This had become urgently, pressingly true ever since Katy had seen those tiny, yellowing clothes, museum faded, inert, as lifeless as the man who’d once worn them. She was desperate to get on the Tube back to Totteridge where her own father, full-bellied and balding and a hale and hearty forty-five, would be there to give her a hug and to promise her, Scouts’ honor, that he wouldn’t die. Gwen’s suitcase of Gothic, desiccating sleep suits, like the dead husks of abandoned snakeskins, was intensely distressing.
“It’s a sign,” Katy said firmly, retrieving her own sweater from beneath a pile of pillows. “Even if your granny didn’t want you to, your dad meant you to find them; even though he passed away he’s looking over you and the baby.”
Gwen said, “Mmm,” not very convincingly. She loathed such specific and improbable states as “looking over,” which evoked a nosy neighbor peering over a picket fence. She also disliked “a sign,” and particularly “passed away,” the latter because she felt it sounded somehow passive and a little foolish, as if her father had accidentally missed an exit on the motorway when, if anything, to die was to take the ultimate definitive action. And she did not like to have the pregnancy connected to her father. She had tried to tell herself he would be proud of her for choosing a hard, brave path but still, it seemed unlikely he’d go so far as to send gift baskets from on high. The only person who understood the delicate vocabulary of her bereavement was her mother. Gwen needed urgently to speak to Julia. The girls parted, with equal relief. As soon as she could hear Katy downstairs taking polite leave of Iris, Gwen picked up her phone.
It rang, and rang. Gwen hung up and immediately called back. Where was her mother? And why couldn’t she sense, as of old, that she was needed? Gwen threw her phone onto the bed. The endless steady nausea was insupportable. Without Katy she no longer had the motivation to continue, and she felt hot, and teary, and possibly in need of a nap. She would take her treasures home, and she would wash them and iron them herself, and keep them in her room and she wouldn’t allow her treacherous mother even to look at them. They were precious, and she could not let them frighten her with intimations of a flesh-and-blood reality to come. Julia did not deserve such relics. She was building a new life, and Gwen must do the same.
33.
“This is no good, you know. By the time we reach the front it will have started,” Iris complained, shifting irritably from one foot to the other and peering around the group in front of them, searching for the source of the delay. She was with Philip at the O2 Centre cinema on Finchley Road, waiting in line to buy their tickets for a documentary he was keen to see, about whales. “Wales?” Iris had asked, puzzled, and Philip had clarified. On the assumption that an independently made wildlife documentary was unlikely to cause a box office stampede they had not booked in advance, but when they arrived the line snaked disconsolately around a Pac-Man configuration of security barriers. Iris glanced again at her watch.
“I don’t think it matters a great deal if we miss five minutes. We know the gist.”
“You know the gist. Until five minutes ago I thought it was about scaling Snowdon.”
“If you prefer, we could go downstairs to one of the places for some supper?”
Iris wrinkled her nose in distaste, as if he had suggested they forage for their dinner in the shopping center dustbins. “Can’t we go somewhere civilized every now and again? Coming to the pictures here is one thing but it’s not exactly a culinary destination. In any case, I’ve utterly lost my appetite. This morning has quite literally sickened me. I feel ill.”
“Gwen seems—”
“Gwen is behaving like the stubborn infant that she is, and the most heartbreaking part is that she’s so pleased with herself, and all the while she’s careening toward a cliff; you should have seen her cooing over those baby clothes. She’s overjoyed to be the center of attention and what she doesn’t realize is that she’s simply ensuring in about seven months she will never be the center of attention again. And that friend of hers is sweet enough but utterly air-headed and childish.”
“Well, they’re children, so if they’re a little childish, you’ll have to let them off.”
“I’d feel more comfortable if she had some contemporaries with a brain cell between them. Peer pressure ought to be what changes her mind. If she had some friends with a little ambition she would have made entirely different choices. If Julia had sent her to a decent school—”
“She’s got a wonderful mother. And a kind stepfather. And us.”