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.
And downstairs, James. Julia could hear him moving around the kitchen, though it was barely dawn. She wondered if he had slept. He had come in as angry as she had been—she’d seen his face, and barely recognized it. Angry with Nathan, angrier with Gwen, raging with Julia for having witnessed his son behaving with such callous immaturity. She had caught him out being imperfect, and knew from experience that for each to bear witness to the other’s child’s foolishness became quickly unforgivable.
But hours had passed and James would already be calm. He would have poured himself a glass of wine and talked himself around. Julia had all but banned his son from the house; to carry on James would decide to forget she had spoken that banishment. His door must always be open to his boy—no other way for him was possible.
Their love had seemed enduring and immutable, huge and sturdy as an ancient redwood, and was in the end, she saw, so easily felled. No matter how broad the trunk, each light fall of the axe deepens the wound and now, though it still appeared to stand, its roots were severed. Just a single stroke and the whole vast tree would crack and topple. She would not bear its slow precarious decay. For in the half-shadows of Queen’s Crescent she had seen James’s expression and had understood, as she had never before allowed herself to believe, that he hated Gwen. She realized with a sharp contraction of pain that he hated Gwen as she herself hated Nathan, for he had nurtured such wild, unrealistic hopes for his son, only to see them dashed to pieces against the solid enduring bulk of Gwen’s foolishness. James hated her daughter. The thought fell into her consciousness with the steady clarity of a stone dropped in still water and settled there, black and solid. She had seen his hostility, and could not unsee it. By now he would have hidden it, packed it tidily away again beneath the right words and an appearance of limitless tender understanding. But she would raise her daughter only with love, and for that, she now understood, she must raise her daughter alone.
She would not be needed long. Three years, maybe four, while Gwen made her painful, inelegant transition into womanhood and strode, or tiptoed, or limped back out into the world. Gwen would leave and Julia would be—where? But she could not think of it. That sorrow was inevitable and didn’t, couldn’t alter her course now. Julia took a breath and stood. Then she went downstairs to break her own heart. Wasn’t this, after all, a mother’s love? And if she could not know it yet, one day, Gwen would learn.