She leaned into him. They stood unmoving and she felt his warmth against her, her own blood heat, her own breath slow and deepen. This, after all, was what mattered. Tonight had all been for this fleeting, vital union, the current of energy restored between them, the body reminded. He and she.
Over her shoulder, James caught a movement in the shadows on the other side of Malden Road. On the far corner of Queen’s Crescent two teenagers embraced—a boy in a hooded sweatshirt, his hands lost beneath the denim jacket of the slight, black-haired girl he was kissing. The boy’s hands locked beneath the girl’s backside; he lifted her up, mouths still pressed together, and with her neat legs wrapped around his hips he backed up several steps against the wall, almost disappearing into the darkness. Small white hands roamed up and down his bent shoulders, coming to rest on either side of his face. James caught a glimpse of the boy’s sweatshirt and jerked his head to the left, almost pushing Julia over. He reached out instantly for her hand.
“Come,” he said, urgently, “let’s go home.” He began to stride on but his eyes had clouded, and as Julia followed she turned to where his gaze had been just a moment before. She saw what he had wanted to conceal—Nathan, grinding in a horrible, porn-inspired hip rotation against an equally feverish little Rowan. Before James could stop her Julia stepped forward instinctively, into the road. A car swerved to avoid her with an angry flashing of headlights and a fist held to the horn.
Nathan glanced up, and the color drained from his face. He whispered something to Rowan, who buried her face in his neck, shaking her head with what might have been laughter. Julia stumbled back onto the pavement and began to walk, and then run, toward the house. At their gate James caught up with her and reached for her arm. She shook him off violently and did not turn, but once she reached their front door she hesitated and then stepped back. For a moment she stood with hands on hips, trying to recover her breath.
“Julia.”
She looked past him, vaguely, down the street. “I can’t go in. I have no idea what to say to her.” Her voice was flat, expressionless. “You will have to talk to—your son. Obviously he has to move out. Obviously he has to go.”
49.
Her little girl was curled into a comma, her thumb slack in her mouth, index finger resting lightly on the bridge of her nose. In sleep she frowned, brows drawn low together, the other fist clenched on the pillow beside her. The room was hot and stuffy, the windows closed against the cool, clear summer night. Gwen had kicked off the covers and her long, pale, freckled legs were pulled up to her chest, defensive. So much passionate feeling, even in unconsciousness. Her fierce red hair was loose, spread behind her huge and untamed, like Boudicca, Julia thought, stroking back the bright curls that had fallen over Gwen’s hot forehead. A young warrior, tensed for battle as she dreamed. In sleep, she drew Julia backward in time. Even as a new mother Julia had ached with longing for the infant that still lay in her arms, living over and over in her mind’s eye the moment Gwen would crawl, then walk, then release her hand on the first day of nursery school and one day pack a bag and shatter her heart. She had held six-week-old Gwen to her chest and lowered her head and sobbed; when Daniel had tried to help, to take the baby from her, she had clutched Gwen jealously and could only cry, “She’s so perfect,” meaning, Please God, let this last. This time, too, would pass in a heartbeat, and tomorrow or the next day her daughter would be eighteen, or twenty, or twenty-five, no longer in need. No longer hers.
On the bedside table Gwen had laid out a scene, lit up now by a silver wash of moonlight. She had used the inside of a shoebox as well as its top; the scene spilled out on two levels. On top of the box everyone had gathered. It was a party, or a parade, and behind them was a cardboard backdrop of balloons and glitter and fireworks. Iris, in sunglasses, wielded a huge, outsized croissant. Philip and Joan were arm in arm, four black-and-white woolly dogs frolicking ahead of them on pink cotton leashes. Saskia had a string bag filled with tiny books over one shoulder and a ring-bound notebook in her hands; she danced to the unheard music that filled her ears through miniature headphones. Nathan, ahead of her, wore a white coat and a broad grin and had a stethoscope plugged into his ears, its head held against the obscenely inflated chest of a blonde in a bikini—unlike the family she was cardboard, and in only two dimensions. And farthest away, in the far corner James and Julia embraced, their gazes locked.
Below, inside the shoebox itself was white, and at first glance it appeared empty. Julia bent to look. Gwen had made a new version of herself for this scene, a tenth of the size of everyone else, the little body only roughly hewn in modeling clay. Her face was hidden in her hands. In that huge blank space she looked desolate. By her feet a tiny scrap of paper, a tiny pencil, “I’m sorry” scrawled, doll-size, and above her the parade continued, unaware. Julia touched the minute sculpture and found the clay still soft. Within her something broke, barely perceptible, a snap like a dry twig underfoot.
Gwen had cast a pillow to the floor and Julia sat down and pulled this into her lap, holding it to her chest beneath crossed arms. She leaned back against the side of the bed.
When she opened her eyes it had begun to grow light outside, first oyster gray then faded tulip pink. Pale London sunshine, chill and morning-damp. The birds began, first the low fluting call of a wood pigeon, and then the twittering gossip of brown sparrows assembled outside in the cherry tree. She heard the diesel rumbling of the 24 bus on the Malden Road; outside, the creak and crash of a nearby front gate. Across London Philip would already have risen, moving softly so as not to wake Joan, creeping downstairs to retrieve the newspaper and to prepare the precarious cup of tea that brought him happiness to take to her each morning. An hour ahead on her pine-green French hillside, Iris would be waking to another day of thick golden sunshine and empty silence broken only by the frogs and crickets, and the chug and hiss of sprinklers beneath her window. She would make coffee on the stove, heating milk, laying a cup and saucer on a tray, a teaspoon, a small warmed jug. Later she would sit in the village square beneath the plane trees and study a production she would see when she returned to London. Erect and dignified, in her white linen and her loneliness.