If her marriage had not already begun to cool, the twins might still have exposed it, because children clarify character with brutal efficiency. Eleanor woke for night feeds, colic, fevers, first coughs, first nightmares, first words. Julian loved them in the performative ways admired by outsiders. He carried them for photographs. He bought expensive toys they were too young to care about. He praised himself for “helping” when he changed a diaper once in a blue moon. But the lived work of fatherhood bored him. The dependence of infants did not flatter him enough to hold his attention.
When the boys turned three, Vanessa Cole entered the outer edges of their life.