Gwen sagged into a kitchen chair. “It’s so hot,” she said, which was true for no one except herself. “I’m roasting.” She pulled her sweater over her head and fanned herself. Julia averted her eyes in irritation. On the phone earlier Iris had made an unforgivable joke about giving Gwen the heaviest trunks to lift.
Iris nodded. “Very well. Why don’t you label boxes for us; that’s a good, nonstrenuous task. But you’ll need to ask me as you go along, because the most important thing is to mark clearly the name of the room it’s headed for, or it will all end up in the hallway there and be nightmarish. The rest of us can start in the bedroom, I’ve prepared piles. I’m rather pleased with my winnowing; there’s a vast heap of objets to go to Norwood.”
“Shouldn’t the writing be Philip’s job? Maybe Gwen can fold things. He’s been terribly elusive, by the way, is he alright? He’s not answering my calls.”
“I’m sure he’s right as rain. I didn’t want to trouble him with all this; he’s not coming. He can’t lift anything anyway; he’d have been less than useless and got under our feet. And he hates me throwing anything away. We’d only have rowed.”
Julia started to say that she was sure Philip would nonetheless want to be included, but something in her mother-in-law’s expression cautioned her, and she stopped.
“I don’t see that it should take all that long if we’re efficient. If you’ll all come up with me, perhaps someone could dismantle the computer, and then we’ll start at the top.”
“I can do the computer, Granny.”
Gwen set off, and in the hall could be heard to inform Nathan that they were all to begin at the top of the house. Julia began to tidy the kitchen, which was strewn on all surfaces with piles of bills and letters beneath yellow sticky notes. On the kitchen table was a stack of hardbacks in various conditions, Lucky Jim, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Anna Karenina, Les Fleurs du Mal. Julia ran her fingers over their spines.
“Giles’s. They’re all first or early editions. I thought I’d give them to Camilla.” Camilla was Giles’s daughter, a journalist who lived in Brighton and kept urban chickens in an egg-shaped fiberglass hutch in her tiny backyard.
“That’s thoughtful.”
“She’s got most of his others, they ought all to be together. He left his collection here, moldering in my office when he moved to France—oh, don’t be so childish, when he actually moved to France. I kept saying he ought to take them; after all, why own them if you don’t look at them? But he insisted I be custodian, and then he filled that house with cheap paperbacks instead. Typical Giles,” she finished, fondly.
“Shall we post these or is she coming up soon?”
“Just pop them aside, I don’t think we ought to trust them to Royal Mail, not that I wouldn’t willingly see Lawrence dispatched into oblivion. We’ll carry them loose.” These last were the ominous words Iris had spoken about a great many possessions. Julia imagined a column of hundreds of people moving like a line of toiling ants from Parliament Hill to the new flat, each ferrying one teaspoon or a single mug.
“How much is actually packed?”
“Oh, there’s barely anything left, I’ve worked and worked. Look, I’ll show you.” Iris tripped lightly across the kitchen and flung open the pantry door to reveal a tower of neatly taped brown boxes. Julia felt a wave of relief.
“Shall I start taking these out? James found a parking space right outside. It might be good to get things out of the house.”
“That would be lovely, darling, and now I must go and supervise; God knows what the children are doing with my belongings. I’ll send Thing to help you with your labors.” Iris then swept out, and Julia surveyed the contents of the pantry. P.A.’S BOOKS, was scrawled across the top of one box. P.A.’S CLOTHES. P.A.’S MED. TEXTBKS. P.A.’S TENNIS R. AND SPORTSWR. P.A.’S PAPERS. And on the side of each the words, SECOND BEDROOM. SECOND BEDROOM. SECOND BEDROOM.
35.
A brief moment of respite. James at work, the delinquent, enervating, relentless children at school, and Julia alone in the house, alone with her own thoughts and alone, finally, with her piano. No students until four p.m. A few days ago James had come home with some Nigel Hess sheet music for her, a piece he adored, but she had not yet taken it from its bag. Of late, her free hours had been spent envisaging various calamitous paths Gwen’s life might take as a teenage mother, and plotting every possible contingency. Now, turning the pages in silence, she felt her blood slow. Time contracted and folded in upon itself; in this stillness worry lifted, fractionally. This was the reason for James’s gift—to coax her back to a pleasure she had been too guilty and frantic to permit herself. It would last, she knew, only as long as the concerto. But here on this bright, silent afternoon, here was meditation and repair.
By the end of the year she would be a grandmother. A grandmother! Only in the last days had she forced herself to envisage it, as it felt right and necessary to confront what lay ahead. Gwen had made her decision and from now on, Julia resolved, would have no cause to doubt her support. She would bury her fear, and her anxiety. She no longer discussed alternatives. She and James had made a conscious decision to alter their language, and to help one another come to terms with what lay ahead. They would try not to call it “a disaster,” “a nightmare,” “an accident” (at least not too often) but to say, instead, “a baby.” For that was what the nightmare would become. Another person in their family by Christmas.
There had been years in which the longing for another child had consumed her. She had tormented Daniel with it until eventually he’d decreed that for their marriage they must draw a line, must formalize their contentment with their funny, mischievous little Gwen, and Julia had wept silently and had assented, continuing, in secret, to chart her ovulation, to take her temperature, to hope against hope. All that spilled and needless grief for an imagined, unknown soul, and all the while wasting precious, jeweled seconds with the real little girl around whom her whole world turned. Wailing for a paper cut on her fingertip while a fat, vermillion clot slid closer and closer to her heart.
And then James, and happiness, so many years later. Loneliness ended. She had surfaced from the submersion of parenthood and filled her lungs. Who could bear to begin all that again? She had found passion and peace and a future with a man she loved, this time not for the children he would give her but deeply and purely for his own soul. James was all she wanted, and more than she’d ever dreamed.