Joan Perelman was a scorpio, a part-time travel agent and full-time widow who lived, worked, and bred miniature Schnauzers in a semidetached pebbledashed house in Stanmore, airy and spotless (despite the proliferating puppies), the mortgage of which she had recently and triumphantly finished paying off. She was sixty-six, had been only fifty when her Steve had died, and had been alone and lonely since then though she would never have admitted it, not even to the girls in her Thursday book club, perhaps not even to herself. Her two sons (journalist and doctor, Aquarius and Pisces), matching pair of fire-sign daughter-in-laws, and five grandchildren all lived in Israel, and while she was glad they were settled, and happy for them that they were all together, it did make life in London very quiet.
She had been e-mailing Mr. Philip Alden, MRCP, MD, FRCOS, FRCOG, intermittently for several months. He was supposed to be a speaker at an assembly for trainee holistic midwives in Paris organized by a British woman named Pamela Fuller who lived in Boston and who, though demanding, had given her a great deal of business over the years. Joan had made the travel arrangements for the last three of these retreats and so when Pamela had asked her to pin down an elusive participant, she’d hopped in the car armed with some encouraging soft-lit beauty shots of the Left Bank and a spa menu, as well as the material for the conference itself. She would coax him to commit, if Pamela so wished it.
It had been, as Joan had confided in her friend Cathy in the changing rooms after Hip Hop Hips, a whirlwind. Of course he was quite a bit older, but he had such a beautiful face, and clear, sad eyes that shone with humor and wisdom, and after setting her straight about the conference, which he had done almost immediately, he nonetheless offered her a coffee. This he made on the stove and then carried through on a precariously clattering tray. He had poured her coffee, offered her UHT milk, the sight of which had touched and saddened her, and had asked, with ever such a naughty twinkle in his eye, for her to tell him all about what he’d be missing. “Tell me about the”—he’d reached for the top two brochures—“tell me about the ‘bilingual past-life regression refresher.’” And so she had told him about having to find a simultaneous translator for the evening meditation master classes, and somehow she had then moved to other topics, and he had listened to her prattle about her son and his family visiting next week (staying with the machatonim, sadly, not with Joan) and her grandson’s upcoming football party and the gift she’d chosen (a kit to make a robot out of a soda can; she didn’t believe in video games though that was what he’d asked for), and Philip had asked all the right questions and said, how hard to have them all so faraway. And then he’d told her about his son, Daniel, who’d died of cancer and she’d cried, and said sorry, it was awful of her to cry over a stranger’s story but she’d just been so sad for him and here she was complaining that she had to fly to see her boys, sorry, sorry, and he’d said, solemnly and, as if he meant it—thank you. Then she had told him about Daisy, who was due to whelp in less than a month, and he had taken such tender interest that Joan had relived the conversation over and over in the days that followed.
And it seemed that Philip had remembered, too, for out of the blue he had phoned her weeks later, on a rainy evening in May, to ask about the dog. Moved to daring she’d asked, would he like to come for tea tomorrow to meet Daisy? And in case he’d got the wrong idea had added, stupidly, that she’d love to hear his medical opinion. He’d been reading up, he told her, when she was defrosting a spinach lasagna for supper and he was still, miraculously, in her kitchen. It would be an honor to be at the delivery. Since that day he had barely left her side. A week later Joan was due in Pinner for her grandson’s eleventh birthday and it already seemed right, by then, that Philip should join her. He met the boys, he attended the birthday party, he helped with the 7-Up can robot assembly. It had been a short time, it was true, but they knew all they needed to know about each other. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, all consumingly, it was love.
37.
Gwen’s exam weeks passed without incident, which was in itself remarkable, under the circumstances. If pressed, she would reply that the day’s module had gone “okay,” or “fine,” or in the case of an art history paper, “alright, I think,” and no more would be forthcoming. Each evening she sat down ravenous to supper, did an extremely brief spell of French vocabulary on the sofa, and then retired to the bath where she would lie for an hour, occasionally memorizing history dates but more often listening to a meditation track that she had recently downloaded from the Internet. Julia would walk past the bathroom and hear snatches of, “allow your mind to empty like the waves receding,” or more oddly, “you can know anything you wish, if you simply wait in stillness for wisdom to enter.” Keeping up the Easter revision intensity for these final few days seemed a more sensible approach than waiting in stillness for wisdom to enter the cooling silted waters of a bathtub, but Julia recalled the tears and nightly hysteria of the GCSEs the year before and passed no comment. Gwen’s morning sickness had been violent but unexpectedly brief and had passed entirely, as had her fatigue. She no longer had any symptoms at all and, she would boast to anyone who’d listen, she felt entirely herself again and could forget about it for days at a time. Nonetheless she took herself to bed each night at nine p.m. “to be responsible,” and James and Julia had a series of improbably lovely evenings alone, curled together on the sofa, as it had never before been. And might never be again, Julia thought, with an ache in her throat. Gwen might be able to set aside her pregnancy while she finished off the year, but it could not be ignored much longer. She was ten weeks pregnant—in some ways very early; in others, late.
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