“Julia needs dry footwear,” he told Pamela, who freed Gwen and spun round, silks flying, and bent over Julia’s feet. Julia was afforded a clear view down the front of her shirt, beyond the swinging crystal.
“Boston’s brutal. It’s brutal. It took us two winters—you remember, two long winters?—to get it, really. You have to be dressed like Shackleton to survive. I did a whole winter the first year with a coat from Marks and Sparks, I nearly died, I was so unhappy and I kept begging James to go back to miserable old England with me, or transfer to Stanford or anywhere. And then he came home one day with a fur hat, and I thought, well, I might just about survive. Fur, I know,” she addressed the gray-haired man who had let them in. “You’d have been shocked to know me then. But those creatures died so I could live. I still have that hat, I was going to give it to Saskia but perhaps I should bury it. Take those impractical things off immediately,” she commanded. Several other guests were visible through the open door of the living room and Julia was aware that people to whom she had not been introduced were now looking on with curiosity. “James, you didn’t tell her! Boston’s not a town for pretty little heels. Come upstairs, there’s no rush at all, everything’s out. We were far too many to sit down, I’ve flung together a buffet. Start, people! Go, start!”
Julia was now in stockinged feet in the hallway and Pamela held her shoes captive, suspending them by their ankle straps like a pair of shot birds. “Come up here, lovely lady,” she commanded, surging up the stairs, holding Julia by the wrist. “I’ll introduce you once you’re sorted out. Jamesy, just man the bar till we get back.”
4.
Gwen stuck close to Saskia, who had ambled downstairs moments after Julia’s kidnapping. This meant remaining regrettably close to James, who had not seen his daughter since the summer, though they spoke, as far as Gwen could tell, nine million times a day. She ate sugar-coated peanuts, crossly, and waited for her mother. She had been promised family time in America; obviously she had misunderstood Julia’s definition of family.
“I missed you. Let me see you.”
“Same as when you saw me on Skype yesterday.” Saskia pulled away from her father’s bear hug and gave a lazy twirl, and then a slow dipped curtsey. She tucked her long loose hair ineffectually behind her ears, and it fell forward over her face again.
“You look beautiful, kiddo, you really do. Did your mom book your Christmas flights?”
“Not sure, I’ll ask her. Is that sorted? Am I definitely coming?”
“You’re coming. Tell me if Pamela hasn’t and I’ll do it, I need my girl back home with me for a few weeks. I tell you something, your brother’s a pain in my ass. Enough with all this college and independence bullshit, come home already. How are you? How was the drive back? How did the paper go, did you turn it in on time in the end?”
Saskia rested her head on James’s shoulder and smiled mildly. “So many questions.” She yawned, as if merely hearing them had exhausted her. “I told you stuff.”
“Tell me more stuff about stuff. Tell me about the term paper.”
Gwen gave her studied attention to a bowl of potato chips on the mantelpiece, between a photograph of small Saskia and smaller Nathan on bicycle and tricycle respectively, and a burnished ebony statue of what looked like, but surely could not be, a vagina. She hoped James would take his revolting display of paternal concern elsewhere, but he had noticed her turn away and took his arm from his daughter’s shoulders and drew Gwen back into the conversation. “If you’re looking for some impressive small talk, that guy,” he whispered, raising a blonde eyebrow toward the far wall where a round, white-haired man in frameless spectacles sipped a large tumbler of whiskey and studied Pamela’s straining bookshelves, “holds a gastroenterology chair at MIT. He’s the world’s leading expert in flatulence. Seriously. Enjoy.” He then strode off, promising to return with sodas.
Gwen had liked Saskia from the beginning, the single ray of pale sunshine to penetrate the bank of black cloud that James had cast upon their former life, and was slightly in awe of her calm and serenity in the face of life-altering family developments. Saskia was three years older, a solid girl with unkempt dark blonde hair, broad shoulders, and a bust (an unimaginable asset to Gwen, who hoped that her own might burgeon into noteworthiness when she reached seventeen). An entirely different creature from rangy, high-strung flame-haired Gwen, she moved in languid slow motion. Her detachment was radical, and thrilling. It wasn’t that she didn’t notice what her parents did but that, having noticed, she then returned, unfazed, to the concerns and interests of her own life. Gwen, in the active process of collecting characteristics with which to furnish her future adult self, coveted this one in particular. For as long as she could remember, her mother had seemed in constant danger of error or accidental self-harm, and only Gwen’s anxious vigilance and interference could stave off certain disaster. Wasn’t this evening, coming to James’s ex-wife’s Thanksgiving, evidence of Julia’s poor judgment? Gwen ought to have put a stop to it.
“It’s awesome you’re here.” Saskia put a plump arm around Gwen’s waist and squeezed.
“Is it not superweird for your mum, having my mum here?”
“No way, Pamela loves having the house full of randoms, and FYI you are not the most random of randoms here. I think she dated that professor of farting. She’s beyond that you guys are visiting. How’s it been?”
“Weird. Whatevs. The same. Mum and your dad obsessed with each other, it’s ongoing. It’s beyond foul.”
“It’s such a weird thing to study. Like, I think I’m going to study gas?”
Gwen gave an indistinct reply and returned to what preoccupied her. “They’re literally obsessed.”
Saskia shrugged. “But if they’re happy together . . .”