This time, Philip prepared by standing quietly to recall the name of James’s son in advance, as well as the name of the play that he and Iris had seen together when the subject had arisen, and the name of the current book he was reading, just in case. It was not possible to consider all contingencies, but with this cache he felt able to ring Iris and inform her, “I believe it’s true that a romance has begun between Gwen and Nathan,” with the easy, conversational flow of a late-night radio host. His memory was not getting worse, thank God. But, despite online Sudoku, it was not getting any better.
“Well I suppose it’s not incest.”
“Don’t be ludicrous, of course it isn’t.”
“Aren’t we relieved she’s finally having a romance of any sort? Perhaps there are wiser places to look for it, but since when have teenagers been known for their wisdom?”
“This is a little different,” Philip told her. “Imagine what will happen when they fall out.”
“Well, why should they fall out? What if it all ends happily ever after and we can throw the four of them a cozy double wedding in a few years’ time? One of Julia’s students can play the ‘Wedding March.’”
Philip sat down, heavily, in his armchair. “I don’t understand why you are being facetious about this, it’s your granddaughter we are discussing. It’s horribly inappropriate. And it will put terrible strain on Julia’s relationship with James.”
“Julia’s relationships are her own affair,” Iris said, breezily, and he heard in the background the clamor and a thumping bass line that betrayed she was in Selfridges. “Julia and Thing threw two teenagers into one another’s paths and no doubt instructed them to be nice to one another, so in a sense they’re only following instructions. Meanwhile it is really about time that Gwen had a little romantic interest, even if she might have been a little more discerning. It was becoming peculiar.”
“She’s sixteen!”
“Oh, don’t be such an old woman. Sixteen is the new thirty, according to the papers. Of course, it’s none of it rational when we are meant to believe that sixty is the new thirty-five, but still.”
“Those headlines are appalling. I’m content to be old. One of the privileges of being old is that I get to behave as if I’m old.”
“Well, I used to write those headlines so they don’t appall me in the slightest. What is the source of your information? By the way, I’m buying you a polo shirt as we speak.”
“Gwen’s blog. I don’t need anything. I don’t wear polo shirts.”
“Sales. Dregs. Very nice, though, it’s a sort of slub cotton. Bit see-through but it’s for under things. I looked at the blog a few days ago.”
“This went up today. They’re arm in arm, and Julia and James are in the background with their hands to their ears in paroxysms of a very Munch-like horror. She’s made a public declaration.”
“I hardly think public, I’m sure we’re the only people who read that thing.”
“Well, I was phoning to ask about the party line, whether you think we ought to know or not to know. When we speak to her mother.”
“Oh, it’s always better not to know. Never know anything at all, you taught me that. See no evil, and all that. In my case it was the truth as well as the party line, until you telephoned. Ought someone to put her on the Pill?”
Alone in his dusky living room, Philip covered his eyes with his hand. “Iris. I sincerely hope it’s not necessary.”
“If you don’t want to hear my opinions, I don’t know why you always solicit them. Navy blue or black? I don’t see you in black.”
“Not black,” Philip agreed, and rang off, exhausted.
• • •
NATHAN HAD BEEN THERE, embedded in her family like a sleeper cell, and Julia had welcomed him. She ironed his school shirts and drove him to the dentist, and had recently risked hypothermia on the sidelines of a rugby match watching as Westminster, in startling salmon pink, played a dirty and tedious game against UCS. She kept the house stocked with imported American breakfast cereals, and fruit loaf. She had tried. And then he seduced her daughter.
Since Christmas Day she had found it difficult to address him with civility. He would make polite, ingratiating conversation and she would be assailed by an image of him, conniving and predatory, pawing at Gwen like a middle-aged office roué. The laundry nauseated her; she lifted an escaped pair of his boxer shorts into the washing machine between clenched toes. Their existence was an affront. That he put them on, and took them off, in her house was appalling. She had not voiced her fantasy solution—that Nathan should move back to America to live with his mother—but on Boxing Day she had suggested to James that Nathan stay at school full time instead of coming back for weekends, thinking it seemed not only the obvious but also the most desirable solution. But James had frowned and said that he couldn’t ban his son from home. They would simply have to stay strong, and keep saying no. Yet allowing them under the same roof, even two nights a week, even after a family meeting in which James had reiterated their absolute and unwavering opposition, seemed a tacit permission.
The depth of her initial distress had startled her, as had the white rage that followed it. How dare they? How dare they? And the relationship persisted, flourishing against the odds, and against the express wishes of all but its participants. On and on it went, from strength to strength, however much Julia demanded they stop. It was high treason to recall that Nathan had not long ago been equally devoted to Valentina, whom Gwen, with flamboyant geographic inaccuracy and conflation, had taken to calling the Demon Barber of Seville. The new allegiance had wiped out all that had come before.
Yet since that first awful discovery the children had done little to which she could reasonably object. Unprompted, they began to spend Sunday afternoons doing homework together at the dining table. Gwen developed academic aspirations, in direct contravention of her previously asserted philosophies. Julia more than once overheard Nathan meticulously explaining a concept—once subtracting vectors, another time the factors that limit photosynthesis. He introduced Gwen to the programs he watched, the podcasts he downloaded, and the two of them spent hours glued to the screen of a shared laptop or listening together with a headphone splitter, deaf to the other members of the household. What could Julia say? How could she stop them listening to a podcast? Once indolent, Gwen was now industrious; once furious with James, she was now sunny and acquiescent. Beneath the heat of Nathan’s attention she flourished like a hothouse plant, and after the third weekend during which Julia had exhausted herself lying rigid, listening for forbidden nighttime visits and had heard nothing, she had been forced to admit defeat. Not aloud—she could never give the children the satisfaction. But the truth was that forbidding feelings had got them nowhere. They could forbid only their public expression.
Since James had moved in Julia had suffered her daughter’s resentment and unhappiness. Now, seeing Gwen’s small, private smile as she hunched over her laptop typing messages made her heart hurt in a way that was harder to define. There was a new hauteur in Gwen’s address; a new, polite formality that stung, even though it was almost certainly intended to sting. Blog readers were treated to a dramatic sequence of scenes in which Gwen and Nathan stood firm against the family’s disapproval and finally won them over by making pancakes, and Gwen reported that the online community was thrilled by her new love, that several fans had only expected as much and had long been rooting for the cohabiting teenagers to find one another. Julia felt far away from her daughter, excluded for the first time from her confidence, punished for daring to betray that she was a woman, and not simply a mother. Yet only six weeks had passed—six exhausting weekends—and in that short time Gwen had unfurled, had stopped scowling, had started laughing at James’s jokes, and once again helped to clear the table after dinner, even if James had cooked. And so Julia began to hold her tongue. She missed her child. She missed being needed, even when that need was expressed in baleful stares and tantrums. As a parent it was impossible to foresee anything but snares and brambles along this path, and almost certainly she ought to protect Gwen from her own foolishness by continuing to forbid, by creating obstacles, by allowing herself to be the enemy. But she needed James, and wanted him, and when Gwen was occupied and contented then he and she were granted space for one another. Harmony was hard to resist, however distasteful the price.