The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal
Part Four Chapter 50
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.
A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
—ANNE STEVENSON, “POEM FOR A DAUGHTER”
part one
1.
The teenagers would fuck it up. Certainly they always tried; it was the only impulse Gwen and Nathan had in common, besides their hostility toward one another. This morning the thought of waking her daughter filled Julia with a particular foreboding, despite her own excitement about the weekend.
They were all going to America, to James’s hometown, which Julia had imagined since meeting him. They had given one another their futures but she was greedy for his past, too; she would never know him young, but knowing Boston seemed the next best thing, a way to make up the impossible, inconceivable deficit of all the wasted days spent not loving him, before they’d met. She wanted to see the places that had mattered; to visit Harvard, where James had turned his tassel, had become a doctor, a husband, a father; had grown from unknown boy into the cherished man who now lay beside her, breathing steadily, facedown in his pillow, in their bed, on the top floor of what was now their home, a narrow Victorian terraced house in Gospel Oak, north London. She was looking forward to Boston. On the other hand, this holiday meant three intensive days with Nathan, who would no doubt take every opportunity to needle her with casual reminiscence about the halcyon days during which his father had been married to his mother. Meanwhile Julia’s own daughter, Gwen, would be dependably more difficult. Such had been the way.
James stirred, smiled sleepily up at Julia, and hooked an arm round her waist. He drew her back to the horizontal, and began to mumble into her hair. A muscled thigh fell over hers, hot and marble-heavy, and she was pinioned.
“The cab’s in an hour, we’ve got to get the kids up. I have to do the dog.”
He shook his head, without opening his eyes. “Send the kids without us, let’s stay here. It’d serve them right for being pains in the rear end.”
On cue, a thudding bass began beneath them, too loud for the rest of the terrace at this or any hour. Nathan was awake. Impossible to rouse most mornings he was home from boarding school, it seemed he could spring up before daylight when Boston—and an escape from her house, Julia suspected—lay ahead of him. Predictably, dispiritingly, Gwen’s voice now rose, shouting a sleep-slurred obscenity. At the sound of so many humans unexpectedly awake during his early shift, Mole began to bark with joy. The thump of tail on wooden boards was followed by a frantic scrabbling outside their bedroom door. “Shut up!” they then heard, and the dog and the rest of Gwen’s complaint were drowned out when Nathan turned up the volume.
“When will they start to be nice to each other?”
James had tipped forward and was fishing on the floor beside the bed for last night’s T-shirt, bare buttocks in the air. “Probably never,” he said cheerily, from this position. “But we can get rid of them soon. College. The army. Sell them into service.” When this got no reply he sat up again and said more gently, “Give it time, it hasn’t been very long. It’s a big change for both of them.”
“Saskia’s been civilized. Why is your daughter an angel when mine is being such a nightmare?”
“Saskia doesn’t have to live here,” James pointed out. He was squinting at his watch. “Cab’s in an hour and twenty. Have I got time for a run? I’ll take the dog.”
He was out of bed, flexing and yawning, and Julia paused to look at him. It was extraordinary that this man now shared her bed. He was broad chested, solid, beautiful. At fifty-five he was still mostly blonde. He was tall, and square in the way that only Americans are square—as if raised, corn-fed and free-range, on strong sunshine and red meat and the earnest and deliberate pursuit of happiness. Her English imagination placed him in dungarees on a tractor, a piece of straw between white teeth, or tugging on the brim of his cap as he swaggered up to bat on a sun-bleached baseball diamond, a mixing of metaphors inspired mostly by her admiration for his height, and his shoulders. This visit to America would begin to set her imagery straight, and that he was, in reality, a Jewish obstetrician from a working-class neighborhood of Boston would remain a delightful incongruity. In surgical scrubs he looked outsized and vaguely alarming. He saved women’s lives. He saved Julia, every day.