Julia and James had come to an uneasy truce. Resenting, fearing, longing for the extra hour away from Gwen, Julia thought they should save time and drive, but on James’s insistence they had instead walked in late summer dusk across the bottom of the Heath, keeping pace in a silence that might have been lingering animosity, or new shyness. They went to the Bull and Last for smoked salmon, warm soda bread, and sharp, strong gin and tonics; for space, for fresh air, and above all else for respite from the house, which hummed with steady and claustrophobic tension. Julia had steeled herself for protest, and had been unprepared for Gwen simply saying, “Okay, Mummy,” in a small, dull voice, and then subsiding back onto the sofa with a look of such blank and eloquent wretchedness that Julia had immediately opened her mouth to say that she wouldn’t go. The next moment she’d caught sight of James’s grave, tired face and had bitten her tongue.
“I know, I know, we need to talk about the children,” she’d said earlier, when he told her he’d made a reservation, and he’d looked hurt and said, softly, “We need to not talk about the children.” He was right, but knowing it hadn’t eased her conscience as the front door closed behind them.
How good it would be to walk away. What a relief, not to see that flushed and tear-greased pleading resentful face. What soothing music the silence would be, free from Gwen’s petulant, disconsolate voice; what restorative paradise away from all the weeping. To be alone with James. Julia ached to stay, and longed to flee.
She must not forget that Gwen had chosen this relationship with Nathan. Yet who would choose this? A hurt and angry little girl couldn’t know what she had fought for, and those who understood should have tried harder to stop her. It’s my fault, but then again, Gwen had stamped her feet and demanded adulthood. And on and on, tramping the same tight and tedious circuit over old, worn ground, the same regrets unending, unresolved.
Julia refused a starter and then, barely settled at the table, they almost rowed. James said irritably that they may as well get a takeaway and a taxi home if she had only allowed twenty minutes for the meal; they’d better start back now, in fact; it had been a wonderful evening and, after all, they’d exceeded their yearly allowance of fun. He looked cross and flushed, and he was in the right once again. She noticed that he had shaved and put on a favored, dry-clean-only white shirt. He had come home that afternoon with a bunch of creamy white and violet-streaked Lisianthus, now in a vase on the piano. She said, quickly, it had only been that she wasn’t that hungry but of course there was no rush, she’d have a green salad to be companionable if he was getting two courses, and she watched him decide to believe her, electing to avoid the fight. “And maybe some olives first?” she added as the waitress moved to leave them, returning her small notepad to the pocket of her apron. When their drinks came Julia raised her glass and said, “To us,” and saw relief in James’s face. Across the table his aftershave reached her, lime and faint, spiced wood smoke. She began to feel lighter, threw her shoulders back, pushed the candle aside, and reached for his hands.
“In this family we are the original couple,” James told her, clinking his highball glass against hers again. Beneath the table his knees closed around her own and squeezed, gently. “We need to remember how we all got here. It’s us. Everything else can be figured out.”
“The original couple? You mean, like in the garden?”
“Right. You’d better Adam and Eve it.”
“I don’t know this is Paradise, at the moment.” She intended to say this playfully but it had sounded bitter and she arrested her own train of thought before she could pursue the analogy any further. She did not want either of them hunting for serpents. “London’s rubbing off on you, very impressive,” she added quickly, changing the subject.
James rattled through his brief Cockney lexicon—“apples and pears,” “Sherbet Dab,” “septic tank” (this one, meaning “an American,” was new to her)—and concluded with a demand for another butchers at the drinks menu. Another pitfall dodged, and she relaxed again. Their food came. Julia found that she was ravenous, and took pleasure in a meal for the first time in months.
She had no conversation, could think of nothing to say except to express over and over her disloyal relief and gratitude that they were not at home. Whenever she attempted to speak it was this that rose to her lips: thank God we’re away. But each felt the other’s child had done theirs damage and so had fallen naturally onto the enemy team. James was her best friend, yet could no longer receive such confidences. How she longed for the release: I can’t bear it any longer; Gwen’s passive misery is suffocating me, I’ve worried myself sick about her, lifelong, I am tired.
For a while they ate in silence, until James clattered down his knife and fork, dropped his head back, and said, addressing the ceiling, “God, it’s good to get away with you, I’m sick of those fucking children. We need to do this more often, seriously. For God’s sake, let’s go to Milan for longer; let’s make it a week. I need you. I miss you. I know they’ve needed us but it’s relentless and never-ending—they’re like, they’re like vampires.”
Julia’s eyes filled. “I miss you, too. I can’t bear this. I know, you’re right, I feel bled dry.” That was the way back—not my child to blame, not your child. A safe, bland plural. The children. She risked a question, though she feared the answer: “Do you ever feel like we’re being punished for being people? Instead of parents? I kept telling myself it was for Gwen, too, that it would be good for her to have a man in the house, have a father figure and a family and—but it was because I wanted it so much. I wanted you so much. You came along and changed everything and I was just drunk on it. I was thinking like a person, instead of like a parent. I let myself want.”
“You should want,” he said, fiercely. “Christ, Julia, you are a person.”
“We could have waited, maybe this was all because we rushed them. We could have moved in together once they’d all left home and it was just us—why didn’t we wait?”
James had been shaking his head, disagreeing before she’d even finished. “Life is so damn short. I didn’t want to date you, I wanted to make a life with you. This life, the life we have. Every day I didn’t wake up next to you was wasted.” He seized her hand. “With you I’m who I’m meant to be—you teach me how to be. Your honesty, your gentleness, your generosity—I’ve never known anyone who loves like you do; you give with your whole self. It’s humbling, and you do it so quietly, and utterly without guile. You know, when I first met Philip, before he even told me you taught piano or suggested I take lessons, he had already told me a story about you. He said that you’d been dropping by with meals for more than ten years and not once had you ever said you’d cooked for him, always that you’d made too much by accident and he was doing you a favor. ‘She’s terrible at judging quantities, my daughter-in-law,’ that’s what he said, and he said it with such love and I remember thinking, now there’s a woman with grace. And I was right. And I found you and in every way you’re more beautiful than I ever could have imagined and somehow, impossibly, it turns out that I’m fifty-five when I’m sure last week I was twenty-two, and I’m not waiting around . . . and yes, I could have moved out when we found out about the kids—we could have said okay, we tried, we’ll go back to our apartment and I’ll come for dinner every Tuesday and Friday or whatever and keep the kids apart that way and when they leave home I’ll move back in, but we made a commitment to be a family. And don’t forget we said that was an important lesson for them, too; you don’t just quit when things get hard. We live together now, we work through our shit as a family. If we’d waited, we would still be waiting.” For a moment James closed his eyes. “You know what, I actually can’t pursue it. We did the right thing for us, and in any case what’s done is done. I’m sorry, baby, can we just not? I cannot think about them any longer, not for one damn second. Can we just get this”—he glanced down at the dessert menu—“can we just get this Ferrero Rocher ice cream, and focus on that instead? I’m having a Sauternes.”
In the early days, Julia remembered, they had planned for family harmony and anticipated it with patient conviction—the initial disruption and eventually a grudging, more settled, united normality. Love invites magical thinking. But how did we believe such a fairy tale? We had no alternative better than wild, empty hope as we careened toward a cliff edge. Yet—I wanted. I want.
She kissed his rough knuckles, where they still held her own hand. It pleased him when she showed her commitment to this evening, and so she asked for a rhubarb crumble that she did not want and saw his brow clear, as she’d known, or hoped, it would. She then excused herself. In the bathroom she checked her messages, where a text from Gwen said with unsophisticated yet devastating efficacy, I hope you’re having fun, I love you, Mummy. Unwilling to be manipulated and manipulated nonetheless, Julia buried her phone back in her bag and returned stiffly to James. When he asked whether she wanted to see what was on at the Everyman Cinema she shook her head and said she was sorry but she was really a little tired. It had been a very long week. “It’s been wonderful,” she told him, stroking his clean-shaven cheek. “Really.” She pretended not to see the look of disappointment on his face, and when he asked for the bill she did not protest.
• • •
IT HAD NOT BEEN their most successful dinner but it had not ended in a row, and at present that was the best for which either of them could hope. James and Julia walked home hand in hand, in an easier silence.
As they passed Parliament Fields the floodlights were on, and what appeared to be a women’s athletic club had colonized the grassy slope and field. Four runners in striped club Lycra crouched in the starting blocks while the rest zipped themselves in and out of tracksuits, tightened fluorescent shoelaces, touched toes, stretched impressive, geometric calf muscles. The gun fired, and James and Julia paused, leaning on the railings to watch as young legs pounded the baked rust of the track and young arms pumped with savage determination. A hush had fallen among the spectators.
Nearest to them sat a dark-browed girl with tight black curls, waiting alone, knees pulled up beneath her chin, skinny arms wrapped around them, her face tense with concentration as she watched her teammates, or rivals, hurdling below. She reached up to retie her ponytail and something in the gesture was so familiar, the stern contracted eyebrows, the spread-palmed, businesslike gathering in of unruly corkscrews, that Julia caught her breath. James made to move, but Julia put out a hand to stop him. She wanted to see this girl run.
Between races there were long breaks; the coaches began an intense discussion by the far bend, heads together over a clipboard; no one moved to right the hurdles that had fallen. After a while James pushed himself back from the railings and said, “I don’t know how long middle-aged men are meant to watch teenage girls doing calisthenics in tiny shorts, you know, if they’re not actually racing. I’m starting to feel a little creepy,” and Julia dragged herself away. As they left, the black-haired girl remained apart from the others, bending to stretch the back of her legs, pulling her nose toward her own shins with fierce, quick little bounces. As they reached the footbridge, they heard the starting gun.
• • •
THE SHOPS OF QUEEN’S CRESCENT stay open late, offering a charade of purpose to the gangs of teenagers who patrol it. The chicken shop serves chips and battered sausages till the small hours; with the radio tuned to the muezzin, the halal butchers do intermittent business until midnight, two brothers beneath the buzzing fluorescent light strips behind a display of lamb shoulders and blood-dark livers glossy as polished glass. Next door the greengrocers play the cricket coverage with equal reverence, their narrow doorway flanked by plywood steps heaped with taro, okra, yams, jackfruit, as well as plastic buckets filled with less exotic fare—red peppers, granny smiths, pale tomatoes—on sale, along with booze and cigarettes, straight through till morning. To this strip of scrappy, eclectic commercial enterprise come local kids to meet and mate, retiring to its darker side streets for interludes of tender privacy.
When they turned off the Malden Road, James halted. He took Julia’s elbow, slowing her, turning her, pulling her back toward him. “There’s no rush,” he murmured, into her hair. “Home’s not going anywhere.”
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.”