Young love opens up old wounds

THE AWKWARD AGE

by Francesca Segal Chatto & Windus, £14.99 WIDOWED when her daughter Gwen was 10, Julia Alden has tried to fulfil the role of two parents to her bereaved child. The mother and daughter have created their own impenetrable world. So Gwen is profoundly shocked when Julia suddenly falls deeply in love with American doctor James Fuller.

For the first time in six years, Gwen is sharing her mother and, on top of that, she is expected to accept James and his precociously clever 17-year-old son Nathan moving into their North London home.

Caught up in the first flush of a very real love, James and Julia naively hope the warring teenagers will metamorphose into contented siblings.

Instead they become lovers, to the horror of their respective parents, and when Gwen finds herself pregnant, Julia and James start looking at each other across a widening gap.

Gwen is initially shocked but she decides to keep the baby, endangering not only her own future prospects but those of Nathan who is expecting to go to Oxford to read medicine. Secretly blaming Nathan, Julia tries to convince her daughter to have a termination while James, a kind and thoughtful man, tries to be sympathetic to a girl he finds intensely irritating and spoilt.

Julia’s devoted in-laws also look on in despair, acutely aware that Julia’s over-indulgent handling of Gwen has infantilised the girl.

Francesca Segal is an accomplished writer. She neatly describes the clash of cultures between the academically rigorous education enjoyed by Nathan and Gwen’s freer, no-holds-barred comprehensive school.

There is an engaging and colourful cast of characters which include Julia’s dominating but fond mother-in-law Iris, whose presence still hangs “in the air, like woodsmoke” long after she has left the house, and her gentle, conciliatory father-in-law Philip who first introduced James and Julia.

And then there is James’s ex-wife Pamela, a midwife with radical views about childbirth but rather more conventional views about the derailment of her son’s expensive education.

Ultimately Gwen has been turned by her mother into such a monster of selfishness that it is hard to feel much sympathy for either her or for Julia. But Segal vividly conveys the difficulties faced by imperfectly blended families.