Julia stayed up very late with James, talking. Just before midnight the evening’s silence had been briefly broken by shouts and scuffles as the pub around the corner disgorged its Friday-night punters and by intermittent caterwauling as these liberated drinkers carried their singing from the bar into the streets. Tonight, though this was not always the case, it sounded spirited but good-natured, out of sight behind the sturdy Victorian terraces. Julia and James stood at the window, intertwined and unmoving, frozen in their bubble of shock. The solidity of James’s arm around her waist was, quite possibly, the only thing that kept her standing. Disbelief came crashing back over her in waves, and each time it receded left a shoreline sullied with debris. Strands of anger and guilt. Empty shells of self-reproach. She felt a hundred years old.
“Maybe that’s what we should have done this evening,” Julia said. “Maybe we just should have walked out and gone to the Lord Southampton and drunk ourselves into oblivion.”
“What, take up binge-drinking? Sing our troubles away on a karaoke machine somewhere?”
“Yes, exactly. It would have been cathartic. Or numbing. Oh”—she turned and laid her head against the broad solidity of his chest—“let’s run away. Let’s just go. I’ve got a hotel room in Verbier ready and waiting, right now, that I’m meant to be in. We could conceal ourselves among the violinists.”
“We could pay our way across Europe giving recitals. You can play and I’ll . . . dance. South of France? Tuscany?”
“We could start a vineyard.”
“Let’s make buffalo mozzarella.”
“I think you might need buffalo to make buffalo mozzarella.”
James considered. “So you’ll look after the buffalo. I’ll make the wine. I really think we’re onto something, it will be more economical to make our own if we’re going to become full-time alcoholics.”
“Not alcoholics,” Julia amended. “Binge-drinkers.”
“Right. Tuscan binge-drinkers.” James sat down on the bed and pulled her hand, gently, until she was sitting beside him. “It’s a real shame about your master class, as well as everything else. I know it’s not . . . This does happen, you know. I see a lot of kids at work—”
“Everyone you see at work is pregnant, it’s not representative.”
“True. But what I mean is . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m in shock, I think. I’m sorry, I won’t quote statistics at you.”
“We should have stopped all of this, the whole thing. The sex. The unprotected sex. The utter stupidity of the relationship itself. How could they be so bloody stupid? How did this actually happen?”
James could not reply to this question for in truth he blamed Gwen, and was so angry that he did not think he could ever again be civil to her. Pamela had waged a relentless sexual health campaign with their own children since long before it had been relevant or even appropriate, and despite these assurances, James himself had given Nathan stern reminders about the importance of condoms ever since Valentina’s first appearance. Each of these unsatisfactory discussions had ended with a withering dismissal of, “It’s all taken care of, Father,” or more tastelessly, “Dad, this ain’t my first rodeo.” But it had been established that they had not been using condoms, and that this current debacle was therefore entirely due to Gwen’s laissez-faire attitude to taking the Pill. Nathan, James judged, had done his medic parents proud. He had taken himself off to the Royal Free for a full sexual health screening before trusting to the hormonal contraception alone, which was mature and considerate, especially given his rather limited sexual history. Nathan had been gentlemanly, principled, irreproachable. Gwen, by contrast, was a spoiled, selfish, and irresponsible little airhead. Despite tonight’s earlier display, in which she had been the embodiment of abject misery and contrition and bewilderment, James thought it more than possible that she had done it on purpose. To share her mother’s attention made her frantic, and with a single move she had commandeered it all, trapping Nathan in the process. Regardless of her insecurity, Gwen was a girl accustomed to her own way and now she had created such a tornado of dramatic tension around herself that it was possible she would once again get it. She had behaved indefensibly toward his beloved son. His beloved son who was staying over at Charlie’s house after a gig, whose phone was still off, and who had absolutely no idea of the bedlam that awaited him at home.
He had stood outside the bathroom while the stupid girl had peed on a stick that would reaffirm what, with a little hindsight, ought to have been perfectly obvious, and by the time the three minutes of waiting had elapsed he had regained outward mastery of himself. Nathan would need his father to be calm. In any case, amid the howling and shrieking, someone had to remain clear-headed.
He saw that he had been too cautious about discipline, too careful not to undermine or challenge Julia’s rule, and far too deferential to the other, absent man of the house. Once they had all recovered from this unpleasantness he would assert himself, by Julia’s side, at the helm of this family. He would dispatch Gwen to a grief counselor. He would insist that they all see a family therapist. He would fix what was broken around here.
“I promised Daniel,” Julia was saying, and he summoned his mind back to the present, back to her serious, pale face, “I promised I’d take care of her. I promised I’d be two parents.”
“Even kids with two parents can get pregnant.”
“I know, but when we talked about her life, and the support she’d need to get through his loss—he felt so guilty about leaving her, you know, she was only ten and he knew how she would suffer. Can you imagine? She was just skinny arms and legs, and this huge bushel of mad red hair, and all sunshine and energy. He said it was like throwing a beautiful, porcelain plate high in the air—you can see it flawless and unbroken as it arcs upwards and descends, right until the moment you know is coming when it hits the ground and smashes. And he was going to be the one to hurt her like that. He was so angry he’d never see her grow up. And you know, we’d talk about what she’d be, who she’d become; we’d try and imagine it together, and I promised I’d do my best to protect her and give her a good life.”
James did not, in this instance, think that a father’s death years ago offered sufficient excuse or explanation. He never usually acknowledged her daughter’s bad behavior, but with this silence, he now judged, he had also let Daniel down. He had pragmatic feelings about Daniel. He rarely chose to think of him at all, and when he did it was as a vague, benign presence, abstract as an ancestor, and with this unthreatening distance between them the two men could and ought to be brothers in arms. He imagined Daniel’s love for Julia as his own—epic and sweeping as the prairie, broad and generous as the pale sky above it. When he thought of Julia he always saw this same image—vast, open spaces; the pallor and splendor of soothing, infinite skies. He would take care of her. He would not let her be bullied by an unhinged, manipulative teenager. A teenager whose attack had wounded his son as collateral damage. He could give voice to none of this. Instead he said, “You have given her a good life. You are giving her a good life.”
“Maybe, but seriously, I considered making it through secondary school without an illegitimate pregnancy as the bare minimum.”
“No one, no one could love their daughter more than you love Gwen. And we will all get through this together and be fine. It’s horrible, it will be horrible for both our kids, and then it will be over. We found out early, which makes everything vastly less complicated.”
Julia tucked her legs up beneath her and began biting the nail of her little finger. “What exactly will they do?”
“You never had one?”
“No!” She looked scandalized. “Why, did you? I mean, did you ever get someone pregnant by accident?”
“No,” James admitted. “My knowledge is purely professional. Pamela had one, just before we started dating, in fact. She was characteristically robust about it. I don’t think she was entirely sure who had helped her into her condition in the first place, which would make imagining an alternative outcome more abstract. Hard to picture a baby’s face if you’re not sure which dude it might resemble.”
“That’s the bitchiest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” said Julia, briefly cheered.
“Well, there you go. I’m allowed a slip every now and again where my ex-wife is concerned. I should call her but, Christ, I really can’t deal with her tonight. And I don’t want him to hear it first from her on the phone. Or she’ll tell Saskia, or arrive on our doorstep or— I just don’t want to handle it right now.”
“So, what will they do?”
“If she’s right about her last period then it’s very early, she won’t need a surgical abortion and can do it with mifepristone. It blocks progesterone, which then makes the uterine lining break down. Then she’ll go back for misoprostol, which causes contractions, bleeding, and everything hopefully passes out after that. It’s not a party, I will tell you, but it’s pretty quick, they’ll give her pain relief and antibiotics, and if all goes smoothly, that’s it, just a checkup and then back to normal. Codeine, hot water bottle, good TV, distraction.”
“Okay.” She nodded, her fingernail still between her teeth. “Can you imagine, just for a moment, if our children actually had this baby together?”
“Let’s not go there, it’s entirely insane. You would have a grandchild related to me and Daniel. And you and I would have a shared grandchild. It’s pretty fucked up. It might end up looking like both of us.” He raised her palm gently to his lips. “But you’re my family now. And that means any baby Gwen has, any time, with any man, is going to be our grandchild. It doesn’t have to— This isn’t . . . isn’t anything but an accident. Whoever our kids end up marrying and having children with, you and I are going to be a team and we’ll share all those grandbabies between us, and when it happens it will be awesome. We’ll look after them together and enjoy them and then give them back when they cry and go back to our gardening and our vacationing and—and shuffleboard. As long as Nathan doesn’t marry The Demon Barber of Seville we’ll be in clover. Give it a decade, decade and a half, and we’ll see what’s cooking.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” And then, to share her pain, to halve her responsibility, he offered a sacrificial lamb, an echo of the unreasonable resentment he knew she must harbor, “It’s my dumb son who knocked her up.”
“When can she not be pregnant again?”
“Pretty fast.”
“How fast? This weekend?”
“Not that fast. A week. Ten days, maybe.”
“I could literally strangle them both.”
“It’s a legitimate solution.”
She was silent for a moment. “Can we grow tomatoes, too, and basil? And olives, for olive oil.”
“Then I think we need a donkey to turn the press. Or a mule, whatever that may be; I don’t know, we didn’t have mules in Dorchester when I was growing up; they might be a form of female footwear. You’ll wear nothing but mules when you ride the donkey to press the olives. With our buffalo we’ll have an entire farm devoted to the Caprese salad.” He looked at his watch. “It’s two a.m., baby, let’s go to bed. This will still be godawful in the morning, I guarantee.”
She laughed, and his heart lifted at the sound, the promise of future recovery, the first new buds after a hard winter.
“Okay. Do you swear?”
“I swear. You’ll have hours and hours of misery and stress tomorrow. Days until it’s resolved. Let’s go to sleep now so we can really appreciate it in daylight in all its sordid glory.” He took her face between his hands and kissed her, deeply. “I love you more than anything, and I promise you we will put this right together.”