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.
part four
50.
“I just wanted to say enjoy, darling.”
It was Iris. In the foyer of the Everyman, Julia wedged the phone between ear and shoulder and continued to hunt for her ticket in the recesses of her battered bag. As usual her mother-in-law had caught her at a moment of minor panic; Julia stepped aside to allow other, more organized cinema-goers ahead of her. Out came pens, dry cleaning tickets, loose Polo mints, car keys, and then a block of fresh fudge wrapped in striped waxed paper, a miniature pot of clotted cream and another of strawberry jam. There, beneath this odd collection, was the ticket. Julia had come from an early supper at a nearby gastropub with the new Dr. and Mrs. Alden, who had just returned from a weekend in Cornwall. It was in Joan’s nature to package up and distribute to loved ones what she herself had barely had time to enjoy or even experience—in another bag Julia also carried a pair of luminous green and sapphire sea-glass coasters, a tea towel printed with a recipe for cheese and onion pasties, and a white cardboard box tied with pink curling ribbon containing scones. “They’ve gone hard since this morning,” Joan had fussed, dithering while she presented them, as if she might decide at the last minute to take the unsatisfactory cakes back again. “You must promise you’ll do them in the oven a little.” Over fish and chips (“so we can pretend we’re still at the seaside”) Joan recounted their adventures in Tintagel, where the purchase of these souvenirs, as well as innumerable others for her sons, daughters-in-law, and assorted grandchildren, seemed happily to have occupied the visit. She and Philip were full of praise for the weather and the coast, and Joan was only sorry they’d had to leave the dogs, who would have loved the beach. By way of atonement Daisy had joined them for dinner, gently head-butting Philip’s shins in gratitude for each scrap he delivered, tenderly, beneath the table. He had caught a little sun, Julia had noticed.
“Thank you. I’m late already; I don’t know how I always do this.” Julia switched her phone from beneath her left ear to her right and offered her ticket to the usher.
“Go, go,” Iris commanded. “I’m envious, I must say I’m rather theater-starved out here. A feistier Desdemona than Verdi’s, no? There was meant to be a wonderful revival in Milan last summer, but of course the Met’s the Met. These live link-up things are so clever, though I do wish people didn’t feel they had to munch their way through it like ruminants; it’s still opera even at the cinema. Oh, and listen, if you speak to Gwendolen, tell her that Katy left some sort of fuchsia straw fedora number in their room; I only spotted it when I got back from dropping them at the train.”
“I’ll text her, I’ve been instructed not to ring.”
“Quite right. And it’s not important, no doubt she can pick up something equally hideous in Italy. It feels like it’s made of polythene, or polyester or polystyrene—I don’t know, something flammable. They’re absolutely fine by the way, though Gwendolen’s done something ghastly with her hair, did you know?”
“She sent me a picture last week, I wasn’t sure if it was that bad in real life.”
“Worse. Sort of carroty-blonde, and patchy. Never mind; it will perhaps fend off the Italians. Enjoy, darling. All those tenors. How bad can it be?”
Julia switched off her phone and went in. She was directed to a wide leather armchair in the back row and she set down her glass of wine to curl into the cushions, pulling her knees up beneath her. She had Pinot Noir and Rossini. What more could she want? Some company, perhaps. The seat beside hers was empty. But Anne had canceled at the last moment and Gwen could never be dragged to opera even had she been in London. In any case it was time, Julia had long known, to get used to doing things on her own.
She spotted him just before the house lights fell. At the front, sharing a burgundy velvet sofa and a small bowl of popcorn with Claire, his former registrar. Claire’s cropped hair had grown long and heavy down her back, and she was laughing as she reached forward into the bowl. Her other hand wasn’t visible, but might have been on James’s knee.