Chapter Julian #2
Maia comes through from the living room and gathers knives and forks from the drawer.
Out of the corner of her eye, Cora can see she’s been flustered by Gordon’s change in tone.
But before she can take over, the cutlery is clattering to the floor and Julian startles, clutching at the air around him with shaky hands, frowning in his sleep.
For a moment Cora freezes. Don’t cry, please don’t cry.
Julian, sky father, grounded, she thinks.
And miraculously, the frown disappears and, moments later, his face has resettled, and he is asleep again.
“Butterfingers,” Gordon says to Maia, and Cora turns toward the cookbooks for a moment to breathe silent thanks, where the spines of Prue Leith and Mary Berry seem to almost vibrate with the pressure of the birth certificate pressed between them.
Please make this okay, Mary, Cora pleads inwardly.
She imagines lemon pie with billowy meringue frosting, its peaks toasted evenly, believing if she can make the image perfect enough, everything will be fine.
She wonders at this trust she’s placing in random things—the scent of damp sandstone, a vision of a well-turned-out pudding—but what else does she have?
Cora places a hand on each of Maia’s shoulders, hoping to channel comfort into her small, anxious body, which feels rigid beneath her palms. Perhaps she should have rung Mehri, asked if swimming was on. “Don’t worry about the table. I can do it,” she tells her.
Over dinner, they talk about the practice, about a new scheme Gordon is piloting to recruit patients with depression to work as outreach volunteers, delivering prescriptions to those who are housebound. But then the question comes. “Did you register the birth?”
“Mm,” Cora says. She is mid-mouthful and holds up a hand to show she has more to say.
She finishes chewing, and swallows. “I was going to mention that. I wanted to do something special. It’s a celebration.
Of you, really. But, well, I’d been looking into names, and realized that Julian—” And she stops for a moment because Gordon has put down his knife and fork.
“Well, I realized that Julian, it means father. And I know Gordon is your family name, but I liked the idea of something more personal, that honors you. Just you. And so, well, I hope you don’t mind, but that’s the name I registered. ”
The room is quiet.
“You—You’ve called him Julian? Not Gordon?” Gordon asks, and she can see he is struggling to take in what she’s said. She wants to fill the space with words but can’t think of any, and so she nods. And then nods again, as though he has asked the question twice. “What the—”
But then Maia is talking over him, brightly, with confidence, as though she does this all the time, as though she’s used to interrupting her father.
“That’s what the moon and stars around your plate are for,” she is saying.
“Julian means sky father. I traced around your paperweight for the moons and did the stars the way you showed me: two triangles. I rubbed them out afterward, but you can still see the lines a bit, on the back. Turn them over,” she says.
And she gets up from her place and goes to stand by his side, lifting the chain of shapes.
“Look,” she says, tracing the faint pencil lines with her finger.
“Do you like it? The name? What it means?”
“Julian,” he says.
“Father,” Maia translates again.
And Cora realizes her daughter has learned what to do.
How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished.
If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.
And despite how impossible it feels—the unscalable obstacles of where they’ll go, how she’ll get money, who’ll even believe her, how she’ll stop him taking the children from her—a switch is tripped. Cora knows she must make a plan.
“Do you like it?” Maia is asking again.
Gordon smiles and says, “So, tell me, Big Sister, was this your clever idea? Or your mother’s?”
“Mainly Mum’s,” Maia says, sitting down at the table again, “but I like it too.”
There is only the scrape of cutlery on plates.
Julian’s wispy breath as he sleeps in the bouncer at their feet.
And then the penny-drop of Maia’s jerky hum as her father’s silence lasts too long.
Cora is crushed for her. She has the sensation of her throat closing as she goes to swallow, and it is like drowning, and so she mimes eating, balancing tiny morsels on the fork tines, as Gordon—slowly, neatly, with his usual meticulousness—chews each mouthful, until his plate is clear, still saying nothing.
The room is an overtightened violin string.
It is just a question of when it will snap.
“Go and run yourself a bath,” Gordon says to Maia eventually. Cora sees her blink, unable to look at them, sees her touch the ends of her knife and fork together on her plate, push in her chair, and walk from the room. Cora wants to hug her small rod-bar shoulders.
Gordon stands, and although Cora does not turn to look, she can sense him behind her chair.
Feels the flat of his palm pressed lightly against the back of her head.
Waiting. It is only when they hear the pipes groan overhead, when the bathwater begins to run, that he pushes her face down into the uneaten lasagne, the plate hard against her nose, sauce covering her lashes, stray hairs sticking to her cheeks.
His words come quiet, but clear. “A name that goes back generations and you really thought I wouldn’t mind?
” He laughs, a dinner-party laugh, a laugh for friends.
Then he pulls her face from the plate using her hair as a lever.
She stills her hands, which instinctively move to wipe away the food, and instead rests them in her lap.
Holds her head high. Blinks. “I won’t be letting this go,” he says. “Understood?”
She nods, a slight inclination of the head, as she tells herself this will be the last time.
That she will never again sit with a dinner she has made dripping down her face.
That she will never again watch her daughter try to mollify this man.
That she will not change their son’s name.
Everything—everything—has already changed.
She sits, spine straight, neck long, feet planted firmly on the carpet.
She feels the floor, and still, even now, it has her.
“Now eat your dinner,” Gordon says, and releases her hair with a jerk.
She waits as he strides from the room and climbs the stairs.
And when she hears nothing but the noises of the house, the click of the boiler, the quiet hiss of the radiator, she reaches for a napkin and wipes the sauce from her skin in swift, decisive movements.
She looks down and sees Julian’s eyes—wide, blue, clear—fixed on her.
As though he has witnessed it all and, inexplicably, is not scared.
But, instead, believes in her. Julian, sky father, she thinks, knowing he will transcend the one upstairs.