2013 Summer

The summer of 2013 is a brief season of sunshine, sexual freedom and domestic pleasures in Bridget Jones’s life, but not a settled happy ending. Its July heat seems to suspend ordinary obligations; by the end of August, Bridget can count holidays and family visits among its successes while still facing no boyfriend, no screenwriting job and mounting anxiety about school. The season’s promise is real, but so is its instability: reconciliation with Roxster does not become a secure partnership, and a new professional possibility arrives just as the school term threatens to revive an unresolved confusion about Mr Wallaker.

Heat and the return of contact

On 11 July, Bridget records eleven consecutive days of sunshine and no raindrops. At two in the afternoon, the heat has become a public event: people are out in the streets, skipping work, drinking, seeking sex and complaining that it is too hot. The collective abandon makes the season feel temporarily released from normal routine, a backdrop for Bridget’s own renewed contact with Roxster.

Their texting is fully active again, and Bridget finds him lovely. That pleasure comes with cautions from several directions. Talitha warns against taking back someone who has already ended the relationship; Tom warns her about men who communicate by text but do not follow through sexually; and professional advice raises the possibility that their future would consist of mixed messages. Bridget is also pressed to consider what she actually wants beyond endless messages and occasional sex. The warnings do not prevent her from welcoming the renewed connection, but they make its uncertainty part of the reconciliation rather than an afterthought.

Roxster explains the circumstances of the breakup night. The curry had not been a meal with colleagues: he had been alone, eating chicken korma and poppadoms and drinking lager, confused and suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of being a proper boyfriend and perhaps becoming a father figure. He had also read Bridget’s immediate response to his breakup speech as relief, even delight, until her later rant about farting left him unsure how to proceed. His account replaces Bridget’s suspicion with an awkward, particular explanation, but it does not erase the fact that he had ended things. They arrange to walk on Hampstead Heath the following Saturday. By the season’s later reckoning, Roxster remains an attachment Bridget is trying to bear without assuming that it will return to her; Tom and Arkis give the lost possibility the melodramatic name Love That Could Not Be. The July resumption of texting and the late-summer count of zero boyfriends mark the difference between renewed contact and a settled relationship.

Work, travel and a changed summer

By 31 August, Bridget describes the summer as brilliant, even though her tally is mixed: she weighs 133 pounds, has two children, many friends, three holidays including a mini-break, no screenwriting jobs and only a slight possibility of future work. The list sets practical anxieties beside pleasure without pretending they cancel each other out. The summer has been full, but employment remains precarious.

One consequential change is Bridget’s decision to call Brian the Agent and ask to leave The Leaves in His Hair. Brian laughs and asks what took her so long, then suggests developing her new screenplay idea, Time Stand Still Here. Bridget describes it as an updating of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with more structure, set in a former lighthouse and coastguards’ cottages converted into a holiday complex. Its Mrs Ramsay has an affair with a friend of her son James. The proposed project is still only a possibility, not a secured job, but leaving the old screenplay and imagining a new one give the end-of-summer account a modest professional opening.

The season also takes Bridget and her children beyond their usual domestic routine. Magda and Jeremy invite them to Paxos for a week among friends with children. Woney, after liposuction, parades in brightly coloured swimsuits and matching sarongs with hair extensions, to Cosmo’s alarm. Although Rebecca and the children are away touring with Jake, Bridget has play dates with Jeremiah and his mother, Farzia and Bikram, and Cosmata and Thelonius. An attempt to improve the garden amounts to planting three begonias: a small, concrete measure of activity rather than a transformation.

Family life and the approach of school

Bridget and the children spend three nights in a little cottage by the sea in Devon with Bridget’s Mother, and Bridget reports that they have a great time. Her mother now comes over often to bake with Billy and Mabel, no longer criticizes Bridget’s housekeeping or child-rearing, and has the children stay with her. Bridget says they all like the arrangement and that the children love staying there. The change gives the summer a domestic warmth distinct from its romantic uncertainty. Her rueful observation that the empty house leaves her with nobody to sleep with keeps that pleasure in Bridget’s characteristic comic register without undoing the improvement in the family relationship.

The return to school, however, interrupts the ease of the season’s closing account. Four days before term begins, Bridget is alarmed by unfamiliar homework, different show-and-tell days and the need for shin pads. More unsettlingly, she revisits her encounters with Mr Wallaker: the tree, the snow, Sports Day, Botox and the concert. His acts of kindness now seem capable of meaning more than an effort to make her feel foolish, and Bridget wonders whether he really cared. Yet she remembers that he was married and had children, and remains angry and confused about his nearly kissing her. She recalls giving him an earful, being seen with Roxster, and the possibility that he regards her as a shallow cougar who buys condoms and has syphilis. The season therefore closes on a coming change in routine rather than a romantic resolution: Bridget expects to face Mr Wallaker at school every day, carrying questions that the summer has not answered.