“Well, I won’t,” Iris said, with an elegant and unapologetic shrug. She had dressed for the occasion in black slacks and a narrow-ribbed black cashmere sweater with a high turtleneck, unseen since the early years of their acquaintance. Unfamiliar enameled bangles in cobalt and emerald clinked on her knobbed, narrow wrists—clearly this move had unearthed some long-lost, once-loved treasures. “It would be ghastly to have them poking about. They’d manhandle everything and mix it all up and break things. I’d really much rather the family did it.” She kissed Julia, embraced Gwen, and gave James a dry and unprecedented peck on the cheek. Julia felt briefly touched, until she remembered that Iris must also realize that James’s presence was essential. “Is Philip here yet?” she asked, prompted to remember the sweetest and most ludicrous manual laborer among them.
Iris kicked off neat, black pumps and stalked back to the kitchen. Julia and Gwen followed her. “Philip Alden’s not here at present. Shall we start upstairs? Or here? Shall I make us some tea?”
Gwen sagged into a kitchen chair. “It’s so hot,” she said, which was true for no one except herself. “I’m roasting.” She pulled her sweater over her head and fanned herself. Julia averted her eyes in irritation. On the phone earlier Iris had made an unforgivable joke about giving Gwen the heaviest trunks to lift.
Iris nodded. “Very well. Why don’t you label boxes for us; that’s a good, nonstrenuous task. But you’ll need to ask me as you go along, because the most important thing is to mark clearly the name of the room it’s headed for, or it will all end up in the hallway there and be nightmarish. The rest of us can start in the bedroom, I’ve prepared piles. I’m rather pleased with my winnowing; there’s a vast heap of objets to go to Norwood.”
“Shouldn’t the writing be Philip’s job? Maybe Gwen can fold things. He’s been terribly elusive, by the way, is he alright? He’s not answering my calls.”
“I’m sure he’s right as rain. I didn’t want to trouble him with all this; he’s not coming. He can’t lift anything anyway; he’d have been less than useless and got under our feet. And he hates me throwing anything away. We’d only have rowed.”
Julia started to say that she was sure Philip would nonetheless want to be included, but something in her mother-in-law’s expression cautioned her, and she stopped.
“I don’t see that it should take all that long if we’re efficient. If you’ll all come up with me, perhaps someone could dismantle the computer, and then we’ll start at the top.”
“I can do the computer, Granny.”
Gwen set off, and in the hall could be heard to inform Nathan that they were all to begin at the top of the house. Julia began to tidy the kitchen, which was strewn on all surfaces with piles of bills and letters beneath yellow sticky notes. On the kitchen table was a stack of hardbacks in various conditions, Lucky Jim, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Anna Karenina, Les Fleurs du Mal. Julia ran her fingers over their spines.
“Giles’s. They’re all first or early editions. I thought I’d give them to Camilla.” Camilla was Giles’s daughter, a journalist who lived in Brighton and kept urban chickens in an egg-shaped fiberglass hutch in her tiny backyard.
“That’s thoughtful.”
“She’s got most of his others, they ought all to be together. He left his collection here, moldering in my office when he moved to France—oh, don’t be so childish, when he actually moved to France. I kept saying he ought to take them; after all, why own them if you don’t look at them? But he insisted I be custodian, and then he filled that house with cheap paperbacks instead. Typical Giles,” she finished, fondly.
“Shall we post these or is she coming up soon?”
“Just pop them aside, I don’t think we ought to trust them to Royal Mail, not that I wouldn’t willingly see Lawrence dispatched into oblivion. We’ll carry them loose.” These last were the ominous words Iris had spoken about a great many possessions. Julia imagined a column of hundreds of people moving like a line of toiling ants from Parliament Hill to the new flat, each ferrying one teaspoon or a single mug.
“How much is actually packed?”
“Oh, there’s barely anything left, I’ve worked and worked. Look, I’ll show you.” Iris tripped lightly across the kitchen and flung open the pantry door to reveal a tower of neatly taped brown boxes. Julia felt a wave of relief.
“Shall I start taking these out? James found a parking space right outside. It might be good to get things out of the house.”
“That would be lovely, darling, and now I must go and supervise; God knows what the children are doing with my belongings. I’ll send Thing to help you with your labors.” Iris then swept out, and Julia surveyed the contents of the pantry. P.A.’S BOOKS, was scrawled across the top of one box. P.A.’S CLOTHES. P.A.’S MED. TEXTBKS. P.A.’S TENNIS R. AND SPORTSWR. P.A.’S PAPERS. And on the side of each the words, SECOND BEDROOM. SECOND BEDROOM. SECOND BEDROOM.
35.
A brief moment of respite. James at work, the delinquent, enervating, relentless children at school, and Julia alone in the house, alone with her own thoughts and alone, finally, with her piano. No students until four p.m. A few days ago James had come home with some Nigel Hess sheet music for her, a piece he adored, but she had not yet taken it from its bag. Of late, her free hours had been spent envisaging various calamitous paths Gwen’s life might take as a teenage mother, and plotting every possible contingency. Now, turning the pages in silence, she felt her blood slow. Time contracted and folded in upon itself; in this stillness worry lifted, fractionally. This was the reason for James’s gift—to coax her back to a pleasure she had been too guilty and frantic to permit herself. It would last, she knew, only as long as the concerto. But here on this bright, silent afternoon, here was meditation and repair.
By the end of the year she would be a grandmother. A grandmother! Only in the last days had she forced herself to envisage it, as it felt right and necessary to confront what lay ahead. Gwen had made her decision and from now on, Julia resolved, would have no cause to doubt her support. She would bury her fear, and her anxiety. She no longer discussed alternatives. She and James had made a conscious decision to alter their language, and to help one another come to terms with what lay ahead. They would try not to call it “a disaster,” “a nightmare,” “an accident” (at least not too often) but to say, instead, “a baby.” For that was what the nightmare would become. Another person in their family by Christmas.
There had been years in which the longing for another child had consumed her. She had tormented Daniel with it until eventually he’d decreed that for their marriage they must draw a line, must formalize their contentment with their funny, mischievous little Gwen, and Julia had wept silently and had assented, continuing, in secret, to chart her ovulation, to take her temperature, to hope against hope. All that spilled and needless grief for an imagined, unknown soul, and all the while wasting precious, jeweled seconds with the real little girl around whom her whole world turned. Wailing for a paper cut on her fingertip while a fat, vermillion clot slid closer and closer to her heart.
And then James, and happiness, so many years later. Loneliness ended. She had surfaced from the submersion of parenthood and filled her lungs. Who could bear to begin all that again? She had found passion and peace and a future with a man she loved, this time not for the children he would give her but deeply and purely for his own soul. James was all she wanted, and more than she’d ever dreamed.
She watched her own hands moving lightly on the keys. Green veins visible through fragile pale skin, a broken blood vessel between the third and forth knuckle of her right hand. Nails cut short for the piano. They would soon be the hands of a grandmother. The whole household would be beginning all over again, like it or not. James had swept into her life and made her feel young and hopeful, and in an instant Gwen had once again reminded her she was ancient. She turned the music back to the first page and began to play.
>
The phone ringing came as an otherworldly intrusion, and she answered only to make it stop. There was a scrabbling sound and then Iris, panting and shrill: “Julia! Thank God.”
Julia roused herself unwillingly from the treacle depths of the second movement—the pure, sweeping romance, its grand and unapologetic sentiment. When she raised the handset her own damp cheek surprised her; she had not known she had been crying.
“Are you alright?”
“No, I am absolutely not alright. I am the opposite of alright. I am absolutely— This is intolerable, and your concealment is unforgivable, after all our confidences—”
“Iris, hold on, what are you talking about?”
“He’s seeing somebody!”
“What?”
“He’s met someone. He’s got a secret good-time girl, and I don’t know who the hell you think you’re protecting by playing ignorant but I know everything. I’ve just driven past him on Hampstead High Street having coffee with some ghastly, trashy, dumpy blonde and holding hands.”
It was as if she’d had a whiskey and a Valium on a night flight, and was now being shaken urgently awake in order to pilot the plane. Julia blinked and tried to focus. Her eyes moved forward through the music, still listening. She closed the pages and looked down.
“Was it Valentina? He’s back at school; he shouldn’t be anywhere near the High Street. Please don’t tell me—”
“What? Who in God’s name is Valentina? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Nathan’s ex-girlfriend. Italian. Fake blonde. Bit trashy, as you say. But they can’t have been holding hands, were they? Seriously?”
“Whose— What the hell are you talking about? Philip Alden’s on the High Street with a woman. And don’t tell me you don’t know, I’ve no doubt you’ve all been cozy as ever whilst I’ve been sent to Coventry for something trivial from the Stone Age. Who is she?”
“Philip? I don’t know anything, honestly, I’ve no idea—and we’ve not seen him at all, he’s all but disappeared on me. He’s in touch with Gwen; I know they e-mail, that’s it. The first time I’d seen him in ages was the other day and I suppose he was being a bit mysterious but I was so distracted and we only talked about Gwen . . . I did see someone dropping him off, but—”
“Blonde?” Iris demanded, “Moplike corkscrews of yellow sheep’s wool? Outrageous, greasy dark roots? Fat? Clad in jeans?” This last spat like poison, as if jeans on such a person were tantamount to an SS uniform.
“I didn’t see her legs, she was driving. But yes, curly blonde hair. I don’t know who she is, I assumed she was a neighbor giving him a lift.”
“Well, they looked very neighborly indeed just now. Very neighborly. My God, the man’s a quick worker. Although for all I know it’s been years—”
“You sound upset. Come round, where are you?”
“I am not upset!” Iris roared, “I am incredulous. I am at home—ha! How ludicrous. It’s a travesty to use that word to describe this sterile, anonymous green-carpeted brassy wasteland of a building. I am in the spare room of my spare new abode. I’m in Room 101 of my sanitized, elevator-enhanced, elderly-friendly, Finchley-Road-accessible, joyless, white-walled jumbo-sized coffin. I’m in a box, surrounded by boxes. I’m filed.”
“Come over, get a taxi. Come.”
“I’d like you to tell me why in God’s name I am living in this purgatorial block if he doesn’t need me to? Why, may I ask you, am I here? Why, if not to care for Philip Alden in his dotage, did I sell my beloved house with all its very challenging stairs?” Iris shrieked, with climactic hysteria. Julia struggled with this series of questions and the nested series of revelations embedded within them. Iris had only ever mentioned wanting financial freedom to enable Gwen’s future; Julia had not understood that Philip’s, too, had been planned for and secured, had possibly weighed more heavily on Iris’s conscience even than her granddaughter’s. Yet several things now made sense—the urgency with which she’d sold her house, though James and Julia had expressed every intention of taking care of Gwen and Nathan’s needs themselves; the odd location of the new flat. Gwen’s pregnancy seemed only the impetus for executing a plan long brewing. Had Iris actually expected him to move in with her again? Through the phone Julia could hear a musical scale of crashes, as if objects had fallen, or been hurled.
“Come over,” Julia said again, gently. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“There’s no need to speak to me like an invalid. And he stopped using his cards so I’ve not had the faintest idea where he’s been or what he’s been doing and until I clapped eyes on him just now I’ve been beside myself that he was starving in a gutter. He’s not even been to Sainsbury’s. It would have been considerate for someone to tell me that I no longer needed to expend endless time and energy worrying about him. Now I see I went above and beyond to even give it a second thought.”
“What cards?”
“Bank cards,” said Iris impatiently. “I’d hardly take an interest in his library cards.”
“But how do you see his—”
“Well, we have a joint account, obviously,” and then before Julia had a chance to absorb this startling disclosure about a couple who had been separated since time immemorial, went on, “and now there’s all that money from the house just sitting in it that he hasn’t touched while he makes some sort of moral stand, and he’s probably still got his thermostat on fifteen, for God’s sake, while he entertains his lady friend, and I live in an old people’s home that he won’t come to. It’s quite hilarious.”
“But Iris, you don’t really hate that flat, do you?”
“I do,” snapped Iris, tight and decisive. “I hate it. I loathe and detest it and now it’s where I live and that’s the end of it. More fool me for feeling responsible for a doddering old imbecile feigning interest and dependence. Perhaps I shall move to France. Camilla never goes; she’s always offering the house. I’m coming round. May I?”
Julia had never before known Iris to ask permission for anything, and it moved her. “Of course, come right now. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure he was just with a friend.”
36.
Joan Perelman was a scorpio, a part-time travel agent and full-time widow who lived, worked, and bred miniature Schnauzers in a semidetached pebbledashed house in Stanmore, airy and spotless (despite the proliferating puppies), the mortgage of which she had recently and triumphantly finished paying off. She was sixty-six, had been only fifty when her Steve had died, and had been alone and lonely since then though she would never have admitted it, not even to the girls in her Thursday book club, perhaps not even to herself. Her two sons (journalist and doctor, Aquarius and Pisces), matching pair of fire-sign daughter-in-laws, and five grandchildren all lived in Israel, and while she was glad they were settled, and happy for them that they were all together, it did make life in London very quiet.
She had been e-mailing Mr. Philip Alden, MRCP, MD, FRCOS, FRCOG, intermittently for several months. He was supposed to be a speaker at an assembly for trainee holistic midwives in Paris organized by a British woman named Pamela Fuller who lived in Boston and who, though demanding, had given her a great deal of business over the years. Joan had made the travel arrangements for the last three of these retreats and so when Pamela had asked her to pin down an elusive participant, she’d hopped in the car armed with some encouraging soft-lit beauty shots of the Left Bank and a spa menu, as well as the material for the conference itself. She would coax him to commit, if Pamela so wished it.
It had been, as Joan had confided in her friend Cathy in the changing rooms after Hip Hop Hips, a whirlwind. Of course he was quite a bit older, but he had such a beautiful face, and clear, sad eyes that shone with humor and wisdom, and after setting her straight about the conference, which he had done almost immediately, he nonetheless offered her a coffee. This he made on the stove and then carried through on a precar
iously clattering tray. He had poured her coffee, offered her UHT milk, the sight of which had touched and saddened her, and had asked, with ever such a naughty twinkle in his eye, for her to tell him all about what he’d be missing. “Tell me about the”—he’d reached for the top two brochures—“tell me about the ‘bilingual past-life regression refresher.’” And so she had told him about having to find a simultaneous translator for the evening meditation master classes, and somehow she had then moved to other topics, and he had listened to her prattle about her son and his family visiting next week (staying with the machatonim, sadly, not with Joan) and her grandson’s upcoming football party and the gift she’d chosen (a kit to make a robot out of a soda can; she didn’t believe in video games though that was what he’d asked for), and Philip had asked all the right questions and said, how hard to have them all so faraway. And then he’d told her about his son, Daniel, who’d died of cancer and she’d cried, and said sorry, it was awful of her to cry over a stranger’s story but she’d just been so sad for him and here she was complaining that she had to fly to see her boys, sorry, sorry, and he’d said, solemnly and, as if he meant it—thank you. Then she had told him about Daisy, who was due to whelp in less than a month, and he had taken such tender interest that Joan had relived the conversation over and over in the days that followed.
And it seemed that Philip had remembered, too, for out of the blue he had phoned her weeks later, on a rainy evening in May, to ask about the dog. Moved to daring she’d asked, would he like to come for tea tomorrow to meet Daisy? And in case he’d got the wrong idea had added, stupidly, that she’d love to hear his medical opinion. He’d been reading up, he told her, when she was defrosting a spinach lasagna for supper and he was still, miraculously, in her kitchen. It would be an honor to be at the delivery. Since that day he had barely left her side. A week later Joan was due in Pinner for her grandson’s eleventh birthday and it already seemed right, by then, that Philip should join her. He met the boys, he attended the birthday party, he helped with the 7-Up can robot assembly. It had been a short time, it was true, but they knew all they needed to know about each other. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, all consumingly, it was love.
The Awkward Age Page 21