“If we can get her back to school.”
“She has to; it shouldn’t be a negotiation. And she’ll have a huge amount of support during the week; she’s never going to be alone. I’ve told you I’m going to be there for this baby. I’m going to do whatever I can to free them, no one’s life should be derailed, you and I are here, and we can do it. And the other day Pamela was saying she could maybe also arrange to come over for two weeks of each term, if it helped—”
“What do you mean? Our life will be derailed! Our life is going to be totally derailed—I don’t even recognize what’s ahead of us . . . I’m almost fifty, James; it’s too much to even think about starting all over again with an infant in the house. I don’t know how it was for you and Pamela, maybe you had babies who slept through the night and never cried and sterilized their own bottles, but I certainly didn’t; I remember being so tired I felt jet-lagged, all the time, and I never imagined— Of course we’ll be there but you can’t just decide you’ll do it for him, and it’s not as if we’re talking about success or failure here; medical school is medical school and he should be grateful—” Julia halted quickly, though not before noticing that James had raised his eyebrows. She tried again. “He should still be happy and excited about next year wherever he goes. I’m just saying, to get a medical degree from a great university is a triumph under any circumstances. He can go to UCL or Imperial, and most kids don’t have that much choice even when they don’t have a young baby. There’s no reason to go so far away.” The idea of Pamela descending upon them was too alarming, so this she ignored entirely.
“So far away? Julia, it’s sixty-two miles, it’s barely up the road.” James pointed behind him, toward the front door, toward Golders Green, toward junction eight of the M40, toward the rosy gold horizon over which his golden son was to set sail. She knew what he valued—he had been to Harvard for both his degrees, and before Harvard Medical School, nauseating Pamela had read Natural Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge. They were speaking more often these days and she could imagine their discussions—why ought their son to turn down a world-class institution when they could manage his temporary absence? Even for a good London college, it would be symbolic self-sacrifice. James could keep the baby cared for, the household mollified and managed, and would of course do it with better grace, better humor, and a great deal more competence than his teenage son. She understood it, in principle. It was atavistic. To launch your child into the world toward success and freedom, wasn’t it this for which every parent strove, lifelong? If an impediment lay in Nathan’s path, James would raze it to the ground like a bulldozer, but in this case the impediment was her own child and she would not allow Gwen to be flattened for an indulged, overprivileged little so-and-so. She took a deep breath and began her explanation again, from the beginning, and saw him grit his teeth with unaccustomed irritation. But then her phone rang and she sprang for it. It would be Gwen, reporting on the final exam. Those, at least, seemed to have gone without incident. James checked his own phone.
“Hi, my darling, how was it?”
“Mummy,” the voice on the other end was muffled and warped by digital interference. It sounded as if Gwen was underground, or perhaps under water. “Mummy, can you come?”
“I can’t hear you very well, my darling, where are you? What happened? It’s only one module, my love, I’m sure it will be okay.”
“I’m in the loos. Mummy, please come.” Julia heard a shuddering sob. “I’m bleeding.”
39.
When Nathan tiptoed in, Gwen was in her pajamas on the sofa, her hair in two thick braids, her knees drawn up, a hot water bottle cradled in her arms. Behind her glasses her face was very white, her eyes fixed on the flickering television. She had the cuticle of her right thumb between her teeth, and did not appear to hear or sense him entering. The room was stuffy, the only light in the room the screen and a reading lamp casting a yellow glow on the far wall.
Nathan hovered in the doorway, uncertain. He spoke her name softly, as though waking her from sleep, and she looked up and gave him a wan smile.
“You didn’t have to come back.”
He sat down beside her, very gingerly. He did not know whether she was in pain, nor what to say if she was. What had been done to her, in the bright white sterility of the hospital? What had been taken?
“I mean, it’s lovely that you did. But you’ve got two exams tomorrow.” Her voice was husky, as if her throat was very dry.
“You’re more important,” he said, fiercely. His father had said the same on the phone: exams tomorrow. But how could they possibly think he’d care about exams today? How could he stay in his boardinghouse tonight? His father’s voice—filled with warmth and pity and a promise of his own reassuring solid presence, at that moment just out of reach, across London—had brought on such a violent lurch of homesickness that he could not have stayed in school another moment. As soon as he stepped out into Victoria Street, arm aloft, purposeful, he felt better. At first in the taxi he felt himself racing against the clock, in a panic to reach the heroine for the climactic scene in which he would be tested and would comfort her, and triumph. Nothing of these last, strange weeks had felt real—around him weird storms had raged, but when he kept his head down life remained unaltered, the threat too far ahead to fear, too abstract to comprehend. Now he felt electrified. Telling the driver “as fast as you can” was manly and exhilarating. This was reality. But then near-stasis in the red neon and clamor and spewing traffic of Edgware Road, and the film crew departed and left him alone, and he was no longer needed to perform. The adrenaline seeped away and left him shaking. No one was picking up the phone. He tried his mother, over and over, but it was midafternoon in Boston and she would be in clinic, inaccessible for hours. Then he had screwed shut his eyes and bitten the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger to try and punish himself into control; he had not been able to answer when the cab driver turned and asked him if he was alright. He did not understand the source of all this sorrow, only its magnitude, and that it had engulfed him.