“They love each other,” Saskia said again, watching Gwen and Nathan approach across the car park. She spoke with admiration. Their arms were around one another and Nathan had taken Gwen’s bag so she had nothing to carry. They were talking intently, not smiling, but not arguing. Gwen’s palm was pressed to Nathan’s chest. Julia turned away. Teenage relationships were always roller coasters, but how had the whole family ended up trapped with them on the ride?
The beach was crowded, utterly unlike her last visit when she and James had come alone and walked for miles along wide empty stretches of blond sand, met only by the odd dog walker and a few determined enthusiasts flying kites in the stiff winter wind. Today the heat had drawn hundreds of families, gathered in untidy sprawls behind candy-striped windbreaks, and in sinking plastic chairs. There were not enough umbrellas—tender English flesh was laid out everywhere like the aftermath of a massacre, gently roasting in the unaccustomed heat. Julia and Saskia unrolled towels, and Julia had read a chapter of her novel by the time Gwen and Nathan approached, fingers interlaced. Intermittently, Julia’s eye was drawn to the baby at the center of a large family group nearby. Naked but for a watermelon-pink sunhat, she was banging a tube of sunscreen onto the towel beneath her, pausing only when her mother spooned mashed banana into her mouth. Watching recalled to Julia the passionate, consuming Stockholm syndrome; the beautiful tyranny of early motherhood. She wondered how Gwen felt to see the slideshow exhibition of new parenthood enacted beside them throughout the afternoon—the endless soothing, changing, feeding—but Gwen showed no signs of having noticed.
44.
“It’s just so nice to meet you.” Joan’s loose nest of blonde curls bounced as she nodded. Over the crook of her arm was a pink paper bag, from which white creamy shredded paper overflowed. In her other hand was a bunch of tall sunflowers, which she pressed shyly into Julia’s hands.
“Thank you so much, they’re beautiful. Come in,” said Julia, brightly and irrelevantly, since they were already in. For Philip she had resolved to make this new woman feel welcome, but could not shake the fear that she had entered accidentally into an illicit affair. “If she tells you to call her ‘Granny,’” Iris had told Gwen, “I’m calling the lawyers.” Iris had visited only that morning and her presence still hung in the air, like woodsmoke. Julia wondered if Philip could smell Chanel No. 5 and lingering, imperious disdain. But Philip, holding a coat and a small, mint-green ostrich-leather handbag with a long gold chain, had barely taken his eyes from Joan. His hair had been swept up and forward, in a rather stylish cut. He was, Julia realized, startled, wearing jeans.
Footsteps thundered above them and Nathan appeared, striding into the hall with a hand already extended to shake Philip’s, as if about to welcome him into a glass-walled corner office for an interview. Gwen padded down after him, drawing with her a scent of nail polish and acetone. The fingernails of one hand were painted green, with white polka dots; Nathan, too, Julia noticed, had a single green thumbnail. Julia made introductions, and they made their way to the kitchen, where James was making a pot of tea and unwrapping a banana bread from the market. He wiped his hands and came forward to greet them.
“How is it to be free, at long last?” Philip asked Nathan. He was still holding Joan’s light mackintosh, which he smoothed every now and again, a patient, attentive valet. Julia took it from him and hung it over a chair, along with the handbag. Joan fussed and protested and said she mustn’t worry, but then began to move kitchen chairs around so that Philip might have one with arms.
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” Nathan told him. Gwen came to sit beside him and from the pocket of his jeans he produced her bottles of nail polish, one green, one white, and set them before her. “Delivered. You remain unsmudged. I never intend to do any exams again. I’m not going to medical school, I’ve told my father already. I’m going to become a crab fisherman in Thailand.”
“When my boys were doing A levels it was a nightmare,” said Joan, accepting the mug of tea that James handed her before sliding it immediately toward Philip. “But then it’s all over before it’s begun, and suddenly that’s it, before you know it. And all these doctors in the family, you’ll sail through.” She looked from James to Philip, and back to Nathan. “Isn’t it a funny thing, all these obstetricians in the family? Both your parents and Phil.”
Iris would die, thought Julia, turning away to hide her smile. She would spontaneously combust. Philip Alden. Phil.
“On a good day Obs and Gynae is the best job in the world,” James told her. “On a bad day I wish I was a plumber.”
“Will you deliver babies, like your parents?”
“No,” said Nathan, rather too firmly. “I’m going to do oncology.”
“Oh, isn’t that wonderful, we need young men like you.” Joan pressed a hand to her heart. “My Steve had lung. And your Daniel had liver, Phil said.” She turned to Julia, who nodded, though her eyes flew to Gwen, who did not take kindly to discussions of her father’s cancer, certainly not to such abbreviated, familiar references to it. But Gwen was at the sink rinsing strawberries and either hadn’t heard or hadn’t minded.
“What a mensch.” Joan looked around for affirmation and found it in Gwen, who was looking at Nathan with an irritating pride. Nathan himself looked down modestly at his hands. He rubbed a finger over his green-painted thumbnail and it smeared. Gwen giggled and dispatched him upstairs for polish remover and cotton balls.
“Where will he study next year?” Joan took Philip’s hand across the table and squeezed it. “Josh, that’s my eldest, was at Guys and St. Thomas’s and he made some lovely friends, though they did work him very hard. I must say, I know it’s not what matters but it’s nice for the parents that all the medicine’s best in London, isn’t it. He did six months of cleft palates in Guatemala, but mostly he was just down in Lambeth and even that feels far away when it’s your eldest and you’re used to having them upstairs. Aaron went to Birmingham. Has he decided?”
“He’s got a place at Oxford,” James told her, while at the same time Gwen said, “He might stay in London.”
“My goodness, isn’t that something?” Joan blinked and nodded several times and looked rather uncertainly from Gwen to James.
James said nothing but stood and moved to the head of the table where he began to slice the banana cake rather formally, as if carving a side of roast beef. Gwen began to run her finger round and round the edge of her empty plate. There was no longer any reason for Nathan to stay in London; Gwen’s convenient misfortune had liberated him. He would go to New College, Oxford, and Gwen, with one more year of school to go, would pine.
James distributed slices of cake and then left for the hospital, apologizing to Joan, who apologized in return for having taken him away from his patients for even this long. After he’d gone Joan gave Philip a small querying glance, received a nod, and then turned to Gwen. She was still holding a paper bag on her lap and this she handed over, hurriedly.