Nathan spread his hands and gestured around, gathering looks of sympathy from an imagined crowd of supporters, though only Gwen and Julia were facing in his direction, neither inclined to solicitude. Julia stepped forward. “Go to bed,” she ordered, attempting the same commanding air that James had achieved moments earlier. “Enough. We will talk as a family in the morning. I’m sorry you feel you’ve had a hard day, Nathan. I know you don’t want to hear it right now but I think in time you’ll come to be very proud of yourself. You’ve had a shock, but now it’s three o’clock in the morning. Go to bed. Now, please.”
“I was under the impression this was a free country.” Nathan was not looking at her but instead continued his slurred address to the invisible audience in the galleries. “I was under the impression people could air their dirty laundry in the privacy of their own homes. This is my home, isn’t it? I was under the impression it was good to talk about our feelings. To express.”
“Yeah, Julia,” said Gwen, which startled Julia and came as an unexpectedly painful betrayal, “it’s actually none of your business. It’s not like I tried to get involved when you guys were screaming at each other earlier.”
“We weren’t screaming,” Julia protested, as Nathan began a rather hollow, mirthless laugh. “Pots and kettles all over the place. ’S’like living in a kitchen cupboard. We’re all mad here,” he added, smiling in a way that suggested that the spectators in the dress circle had appreciated this reference, “I’m mad, you’re mad. They’re Hare and Hatter, baby. Visit either you like, they’re both mad.”
“They were screaming,” Gwen told him. “They were, while you were out. When they couldn’t get hold of you and they were worrying and then they phoned the school, they were screaming their heads off at each other for ages.”
“Love’s young dream. The lesson in all of this, baby, is that there’s no such thing as perfect anything, it’s all just PR bullshit, ’s’what I’ve been saying to you all along if you recall, and you didn’t want to hear it. I get called cynical so often that people forget to call me right, which I also am, but cynical’s just sensible. There, that’s my bumper sticker contribution. Cynical’s sensible, and it’s all sunshine and roses until you start fighting and then next stage is, ‘It’s not you, it’s us, Mommy and Daddy still love you both very much.’ ’S’amazing how everyone reverts to cliché. Here’s a cliché: Life’s a bitch. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Everyone knows I’m right; we’re all dancing on the Titanic and no one will admit the Emperor’s got his cock out. Now please come here.” Nathan opened his arms and Julia was astonished to see Gwen move into them, grateful, and without hesitation. She had hunched over automatically, so that he might put his arms over her shoulders. Moments ago Gwen had been almost unhinged with righteous fury; now she had buried her face against his neck and was stroking his hair and murmuring, inaudibly.
Julia thought she caught the words, “going to be . . .” and, “I hate . . .” but could not hear and so did not know what Gwen hated. Julia, with sharp clarity, hated Nathan. Still too inebriated to modulate his voice, Nathan began to whisper loudly and ardently into the fox-red cloud of Gwen’s hair that he loved her, that he was sorry about the baby, their poor baby, that he hadn’t meant it, that he had never been so unhappy. “I don’t understand,” he kept saying, “I don’t understand.” Julia watched his hands roaming up and down her daughter’s narrow, bent back, the sharp shoulder blades, the knobbed spine visible beneath faded cotton, his gestures both one of reassurance and perhaps preliminary sexual advance. Julia looked away in disgust. She heard footsteps on the stairs and saw James heading upstairs. He gave a grim little smile and gestured to Julia to give up, to join him; together they retired to their bedroom, feeling fragile and somehow brutalized.
In the living room, Gwen and Nathan were still crying and kissing, kissing and crying, cupping each other’s faces in desperation, drawing each other in as if they were reuniting or perhaps parting before an uncertain future on the chill, gray platform of a wartime train station.
46.
“Not good,” said Julia, in response to her mother-in-law’s inquiry. An exhalation could be heard through the phone. Without warning Iris had taken herself to France; her displeasure came through with a Gallic-hinted shrug, the imagined aroma of lavender, and pastis. Julia stepped out of the elevator from the underground car park and battled to release the chain of a tethered supermarket cart, one-handed. “You can’t even begin to imagine how horrible it was yesterday. It was as if everyone finally lost their minds, once and for all. I said such awful things and James looked so hurt and I still couldn’t stop myself. The only thing I’m longing to say and can’t is that I hate his son, and I want him out of my house. And Gwen’s absolutely insistent that everything will be fine once Nathan gets over yesterday, and it won’t be; I saw his face. He’ll never forgive her—not for Oxford, not for getting pregnant. And not for her results. Which by the way, I am bloody proud of.” Julia bit her lip and stared glassily into her empty cart. “Though not as proud as I am of how courageous she’s been recently. Unlike James, I have not raised my daughter to believe that grades reflect the value of a person.”
She had come to lean on James so completely that thinking of it gave her vertigo, yet now it was James’s son about whom she needed counsel and, almost without realizing, she had begun to withdraw from the safety of their private, holy confessional. She took her fears to Iris, leaving with James the banalities, the palliatives, the careful and protective white lies so essential to a new family. We are all fine. It’s fine. Your son is a fine, upstanding citizen who I’m so fond of. Of course he needs to blow off steam. A small, unnerving gulf had opened, a crack in the earth between them two inches wide, a mile deep. She had come to the supermarket for fruit and eggs, and tuna steaks for this evening’s dinner, and to rant in guaranteed, luxurious privacy. She did not care about fruit or eggs or tuna. She was wandering up and down the aisles of Waitrose looking blankly at product after product, and off-loading her anxiety onto Iris. Iris, whom she longed to visit in Parliament Hill, whose face she longed to see. Iris, who no longer lived in Parliament Hill, who made fresh starts with such dignity, who had taken the sorrow she refused to acknowledge to the far side of the Channel.