Gwen slept intermittently all afternoon, stirring only briefly when her mother came in from shopping and sat beside her silently for a time, stroking her hair. When she next woke she was alone and it was cooler—the sky through the window, a bank of dense bruise-dark cloud. There were voices downstairs and she knew without hesitation that Nathan was in the house.
The ground had shifted. When they had eventually gone to bed last night he’d seemed full of a determined, unfocused, angry passion, had pulled her to him urgently but it had been without affection or even much awareness of her. Afterward he had turned his back to her in brooding silence, and later must have crept out while she lay sleeping for she’d woken alone, and a new, sick sense of foreboding had kept her cocooned beneath the muffling safety of the covers. His absence filled the room that morning. It squatted lead-heavy on her chest, and she had the sudden understanding that they could have weathered his physical removal to Oxford, and that if he had won the place she’d so feared, she would have cost him nothing, and might still have been his girlfriend. Now he was going nowhere, but in his bitter disappointment he was moving beyond her reach.
She had planned to change. She had wanted to brush her hair. She had wanted to paint her nails, and find her push-up bra, and paint black kohl over the red rims of her bloodshot eyes. Instead she padded downstairs where she knew he’d be, herself unaltered.
Gwen entered the living room to find Saskia’s friend Rowan sitting neatly on top of Saskia’s closed suitcase, cross-legged, like a pixie. She wore a white vest and black denim dungarees, small, very round mirrored sunglasses, and burgundy lipstick on a very white face.
“It’s a travesty,” Rowan was saying. “Hi, Gwen, cute bracelet. A week is a travesty. I’m going to climb into this suitcase and come with you. I’m going to slip into your pocket.”
“Come with me!” Saskia said, and Rowan sprang to her feet so the two could embrace, rocking from side to side in one another’s arms savoring their maudlin, pantomime sadness. Nathan was lounging in an armchair and as Gwen entered he did not look up, but instead smiled toward his sister with her friend, indulgent, paternal. Behind her James came in with the car keys.
“I’m so sorry, guys, but I have to take Miss Saskia. The time has come.”
Rowan stuck out her lower lip in protest. “Boo,” she said, “boo, boo. Let her stay! We say let her stay forever.”
“Believe me, if I could, I would. Take it up with the college; they claim they need her back.”
“Transfer to Magdalen,” Rowan said, finally removing the mirrored sunglasses and letting them fall. They were, Gwen now saw, on a long chain of black-and-gold links that hung around her neck. “Come back with me; you know it’s the only sensible thing to do.”
“Magdalen? Only losers go to Oxford; all the cool kids are going to UCL.” Nathan swept back his hair. To hear him, Gwen thought, you would never know that he had cried for most of last night.
James picked up the suitcase. “I’m taking this and we’re going in five minutes. Four minutes. Who’s coming with me?”
Nathan raised his hand. “I’m coming. Rowan? You in?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. I’d love to but I don’t have a means of getting home again.”
“I can be your means,” said James, pausing to set down the suitcase he held. “I’ll drop you home. But if you’re coming, we’re all leaving now, now. Gwen?” he asked, squeezing her shoulder. Gwen shook her head. The presence of the others dropped a cloak of public silence and propriety over her; Nathan’s inaccessibility beyond it was insupportable. He still had not looked at her. When they were next alone, he would say things she did not want to hear.
Outside James began to toot the car horn and Nathan jogged out after the others. After a moment Saskia returned. Gwen swallowed, thickly. Saskia’s loss severed yet another fine wire of connection with Nathan and left her perilous.
Saskia took Gwen’s face between her hands, squeezing her cheeks, shaking Gwen gently from side to side. “Please don’t let my brother be a dick.”
“I don’t know how I can stop him.” A tear slipped down each cheek.
“Oh no, don’t be sad, I’m sorry. You’re still my sister; please don’t cry. You are, I mean it, that’s the amazing thing. You’ll always be my sister whatever happens. Always.”
Gwen nodded, tightly. It was not true, of course. Saskia was Nathan’s sister. Gwen had nobody.
? ? ?
“I THOUGHT I’D BE ABLE to talk to him on the way home this evening but then Rowan came to Heathrow with us, so I had to drop her back. I had to listen to him pretend to be fine instead.”
“Well, where is he now?” asked Pamela. She sounded faintly accusing, as though James might have mislaid their son like a dry cleaning ticket or a bunch of keys.
“Asleep, it’s two a.m.”
“Are you at work? Why are you awake?”