“Fuck!” Julia shouted, startling all three of them. Gwen had never before heard her mother use the word and it sounded comical, and disconcerting. Julia clapped her hands across her mouth and looked, for a moment, as if she was about to vomit. “What the fuck is going on in here?” But she did not stay for the answer and instead backed out, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you,” she kept repeating. “I can’t believe you. I don’t believe this.” She turned on her heel and left. A moment later, while Gwen and Nathan were still straightening their clothing, the front door slammed.
“Nathan?”
“Here.”
James came in, surprised to see the children standing up in the middle of Gwen’s bedroom, looking at one another in awkward, complicit silence. “Hey, guys. Was that the door? What’s up?”
“We’ve got something to tell you.” Gwen threw her shoulders back and went on, in a voice that managed to be both imperious and confiding, “We were going to wait a bit longer but—Nathan and I are together.”
James frowned. “What?”
Gwen bit her lip and looked to Nathan for reassurance but he was staring out of the window with his hands crossed behind his head, like a man before a firing squad.
“Together. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Dating.”
James was staring around the room somewhat fixedly, his gaze moving from Nathan to the bookshelves of magazines and trinkets and assorted dolls’ furniture, the mobile of Polaroid photographs suspended with rainbow ribbons from two reshaped coat hangers, to the homemade beaded necklaces slung over the bedpost, to the colony of clay figurines in various stages of completion, guarding the expanse of her desk like a mismatched terra-cotta army. “No. I don’t even— I can’t— I don’t even know where to begin. This seems like a recipe for—what? You’re not serious.”
Gwen, unable to help herself, began to giggle. It was gratifying, after diverse and concerted efforts, finally to see James unsettled.
“How long has this been going on? Nathan, will you turn around, please? Does Julia know? Is this why she just left, is she okay? Was she . . . Hang on—” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I expect to see the two of you downstairs, at the kitchen table, in five minutes. Do not—I repeat DO NOT CLOSE THE DOOR OF THIS BEDROOM. Five minutes. Downstairs.”
• • •
WHEN THE CHILDREN DESCENDED they were hand in hand, a brief chain gang of penitents. This solidarity seemed staged. Gwen looked mutinous and defiant with lifted chin and narrowed eyes, and appeared to be gripping Nathan as if leading an uncooperative child around a supermarket. Nathan was gazing at the tiled floor. A blush crept up his neck and cheeks. They were very sorry, he said, with an unmistakable smirk in his voice. Still, he did not move to free himself from Gwen.
“We’re all going out,” James said, shortly. “Julia and I have discussed it. We’re going to the pub and we’re going to sit and talk like adults. Right now.” He gave Julia a small smile of solidarity before returning to face the children looking thunderous. Beside him she dug her thumbnails into the pads of her ring fingers. Just breathe, James had said. I’ll talk to them. Nathan would soon be back at boarding school Monday to Saturday. Obviously he must stay away at weekends, too, she thought, and in the holidays they could take him directly from Westminster to Heathrow. The children would not sleep another night under the same roof.
Gwen would merely have to be dispatched to a convent in the Hebrides. There were ways, she thought, to—what had James said just now?—curb the insurrection. He had offered castration, a chastity belt, sedation, bromide in the tea, digging a basement and locking them in it for eternity together to get on with it. Or we could leave? Two weeks in the Caribbean? I bet Pamela would take ’em. A few days of a legume-only diet would kill the mood pretty quickly, I promise you. He’d worked hard to calm her. Should James and Nathan move out for a month? Probably that was the best solution but—the idea of him leaving made her frantic. She had waited her whole life for him, she thought, fiercely, and if he left, he might never return. To wake up alone another morning was unthinkable—if Gwen chased him from the house, Julia could not imagine forgiving her easily. Never before had she felt so assaulted by her daughter. And never had she come so close to slipping, and telling James what she thought about his son.
Nathan had taken out his phone. “Why do we—”
“I’m not interested in one syllable from either of you until we are sitting around a table like adults, in a neutral space.”
“But—”
“And I have a beer in my hand. Seriously. Just zip it, Nathan. We’ve been in this house all day and I need air.”
“But—”
“Be quiet. You’ll both do as you’re told, for once. And you will leave your damn devices here and talk like civilized humans.”
Nathan fell silent and Julia rose from the table, fortified. She was too angry to look at Gwen, too angry to speak to Gwen, but James had taken charge and she sagged with inward relief, leaning heavily against the strength of his resolve. He would speak for them both, until she felt able. He could be calm, where she would have raved. He was a good father. He would stop this madness in its tracks.
Nathan and Gwen relinquished their phones sulkily, but without protest. James hesitated, about to set them on the coffee table and then seemed to change his mind and slipped them into his own pocket. Coats were gathered in silence, and they all waited by the front gate while James switched on the alarm and double locked the front door.
They set off down the road in single file—Nathan toggled tight into his hoodie, followed by Gwen, then Julia and James. The pavement was deserted, but light glowed behind curtains and shutters. They walked down the terraced street, rich sand and ocher London stock beneath gnarled and naked winter-stripped wisteria. Functional, nuclear families inside home after home, Julia imagined, obedient, rosy-cheeked children bringing pride to their misty parents at the foot of sap-heavy Douglas firs. Gospel Oak, by Norman Rockwell. I can’t believe them, Julia had said to James, moments earlier. He’d shrugged, his thumb moving gently across her knuckles and said, Remember their ultimate aim in life is to piss us off. We don’t capitulate to terrorists. And she had found herself laughing—with disbelief at her undented happiness, at the power of James’s voice to lift her heart, with gratitude that the sight of his face turned toward hers still made her throat catch, that his eyes upon her could make all the rest mute and fade into insignificance. Her daughter had launched a missile at her life and yet here was James, and so everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.
The pub was closed. It was Christmas Day; their beloved, unrenovated local had bowed out of the race. Better to stay at home, its dark, etched windows advised; it would not compete with marked-down supermarket beer and glutted lassitude, and the rising screech of seasonal family tension. MERRY XMAS, read a small sign on the door in red felt tip, and then on a sloping second line the assurance, REOPEN BOXING DAY.
James swore. He caught Julia’s eye, and she wondered if he was about to laugh, but when he faced the children he looked stern once again. He shooed them away, homeward.
“Back. Now.”
“That was what I was trying to say,” Nathan muttered, as they began to trudge back the way they’d come. “Nothing’d be open.”
They had been out of the house for approximately three and a half minutes. As they turned onto their own street sloppy raindrops began to fall, landing splashily in shallow puddles from an earlier downfall. London seemed under water; it felt like the middle of the night. Back inside they moved by unspoken consensus into the kitchen. Julia put on the kettle, as if they’d been adventuring in the cold for hours. James went to the cupboard and took out two tins of baked beans. Julia went to the bread bin. Gwen opened her mouth to request a bagel, thought better of it, and closed it again. Nathan and Gwen sat side by side at the kitchen table, waiting and watching while their parents began to orchestrate supper. Gwen had begun to find the silence unbearable, which she suspected was the intention.
“What can I do?” she asked, brightly. A new approach. Sunny and amenable.
“You’ve done enough,” said James. He sounded almost cheerful.
Nathan said, “I think we should be allowed to put a case.” Beneath the table his knee pressed reassuringly against Gwen’s. “You can’t sentence us without hearing the case for the defense.”
James began to spoon warmed baked beans onto the plates Julia had lined up beside him. “This is a kangaroo court. I can do whatever I damn well please.”
“Can I have mine—” Gwen began, wanting to ask for her beans on the side, not actually touching her toast.
“Nope.” James was giving every indication of enjoying himself, but then said, in a different tone, “You’ve betrayed our trust. I am deeply disappointed in you both.”
“But—thanks—we haven’t,” Nathan explained, accepting the two plates that Julia had brought to the table and setting one down in front of Gwen. Julia turned back for the others. “It’s only been a few weeks, it didn’t make sense to get everyone all upset if it was nothing.”
“It is nothing,” James told him, taking his place at the table, opposite his son. He cut into his toast with relish and said, with his mouth full, “It’s nothing whatsoever. Whatever it is or was, it’s done. Finito.”
Gwen, who had been elongating and then releasing a single coil of hair, raised her head, her eyes flashing with rekindled fury. “It isn’t nothing! You can’t just say that—you don’t know anything. You can’t tell us what to do!”
Julia set down her fork with a clatter. “Don’t you dare shout at James like that. This is absolutely inappropriate, Gwendolen, and I forbid it.”
“Why do you even care what I do? You’re such a hypocrite, you don’t tell me anything about your life, you barely even talk to me anymore except to tell me to, ‘be nice, be nice, be nice,’ and ‘Oh, by the way, a family of total strangers are moving in, kay, thanks, and I’m going to need you to be a totally different person now,’ and we’re all meant to be best friends and you don’t even notice or care that everybody’s miserable except you two obsessed with each other, and now something nice has actually happened for literally the first time in my life and you only care what it means for you.” She was out of breath and paused. “Well, sorry if it’s not convenient. Nathan’s my boyfriend. You didn’t tell me when you first got together and you don’t tell me anything about your plans for this family and I would have thought you’d be pleased to know I have someone who cares about me while you’re busy replacing me in your new fabulous life. I’m a—a superfluous person.” She dropped her head and began to sob, her face now entirely concealed behind a mass of russet hair that had fallen forward, perilously close to her plate. Julia opened her mouth to reply, but closed it in stricken silence. That Gwen should feel safe, that Gwen should feel cherished: these objectives had been her life’s work. Her anger began to drain from her like water from a pool.
“Can everyone please lower their voices.” James was speaking in a singsong half-whisper, in the tone of one addressing much smaller children, at nap time. He picked up his remaining crust and began to mop up tomato sauce. “One at a time, please tell us what’s been happening. Calmly. Nathan?”
Nathan looked to Gwen and then back to his father. “Can we please scratch everything that happened today, and can you listen as though we’d brought this to you ourselves?”
“No. Next question.”
“Okay, fine. Look, we like each other, okay? And I know it’s a little weird that you guys are dating and now we’re dating and we all live in the same house, but we both understood the ramifications of it all beforehand and considered it worth the risk.”
“You did, did you. How very mature. Well, we all live in the same house, as you so charmingly put it, because you are our offspring and we are your parents. This isn’t a Noel Coward play; it’s not just some unfortunate coincidence in a boardinghouse. I do not allow it, and that’s the end of the story.”
“We’re not related, we never could be even if you guys— We were adults before you even met.”
Both Julia and James began to laugh, which was enraging, and after a moment James set both his palms on the table and stood up, scraping his chair back loudly. “Enough. I’ve had enough hilarity for one night. Nathan, I am phoning your mother, with whom you will now stay this evening, and in the meantime, Gwen, please go upstairs. Take whatever sustenance you need for a good twelve hours, I don’t want to catch sight of you again until tomorrow.”
Gwen, whose usual trick of storming to her bedroom had been whisked unexpectedly from her arsenal, looked wrong-footed and gave James a scathing glance. “You’re sending me to my room. Like someone from the olden days. Fine, I’m going. But newsflash, you’re not my father. And you can’t stop us seeing each other; we both live here.” She, too, stood, clutching her plate in both hands as if in line at a soup kitchen. “You can’t lock me in my room forever.”
James already had his phone to his ear. “I will look seriously into the legality of it. Pamela? Yup. Yup. Minor change of plan. Can I deliver your son in half an hour?”