After the Party (11 page)

“Ah! The flowers in the hand! I LOVE that painting. I keep telling him he should put it out here, soften the place up. Wow, that's one of yours?”

“Yeah. It's an old one. Very old. But it's kind of the same vein as what I'm working on now. It was supposed to be my ‘floral period' and it's turned into ten years of churning out the same stuff.”

“Well, you know, if that's what you're good at, and you clearly are . . .”

“Yeah, I suppose. Though I could do with testing myself a bit more. That's one of the reasons why I'm out here.”

“Oh, nice, and I thought you'd come to see me,” mocked Smith, returning with a mug of coffee and a croissant on a plate.

“That too,” Ralph smiled. “Just needed to get a fresh perspective on things, see things in a different light—literally.”

“Good on you,” said Rosey approvingly, “good on you. And this must be Scarlett?” She turned a photo round to show him. It was Scarlett, last month, black curls in a cloud around her pale face, almond eyes squinting into the camera, in a white dress and big net fairy wings, her hands green with felt tip pen and a splodge of something orange on her dress.

Ralph nodded and felt a brief burst of adoration at the sight of his perfect girl.

“Wow, she's beautiful,” said Rosey, “and she looks just like you.”

“Er, that doesn't make sense,” joked Smith. “Let's have a look.”

Rosey passed him the photo and he examined it, looking from the picture to Ralph and back again. “Nope,” he said, “looks nothing like you, she's all Jem.”

“Ah, yes,” said Rosey, looking at the next photo in the pile. “This must be Jem.” She turned it to show him. It was Jem, her face still plump with pregnancy, a newborn Blake held against her cheek, her eyes bright with the euphoria of new life, her hair a mass of black curls. It was typical of Jem to have chosen a photo of herself that did her no justice whatsoever. For Jem this photo was an advertisement for parenthood. Look, it said, look at the sheer unadulterated joy in my eyes.
Nothing else in the world could make you feel this good
. It was a look of utter triumph, of Olympian achievement, of world domination. And of total and utter bliss.

Jem was weirdly evangelical about procreation. Ralph didn't get it. He loved his kids, he enjoyed being a dad, but he could see that it wouldn't be for everyone. He could see that it was the sort of decision you could make only if your heart was really, really in it and that if you weren't that keen no number of breathless conversations with besotted parents or ecstatic post-birth photos would change that.

“Let's see.” Smith took the photo from Rosey. “Cute baby,” he said. “And Jem looks . . . well.”

“That's quite old now,” said Ralph. “Just after Blake was born. She's lost all the weight already. She's looking really good actually.”

“Er, mate, there's no need to be so defensive. I meant it. Jem looks good. She looks the same. Hard to believe she's almost forty.”

Ralph smiled, slightly embarrassed by his outburst. It was
still there, still the sense that he'd taken Smith's girl, even after all these years. Except Smith wasn't bothered and he was.

•  •  •

They left the apartment a few moments later and headed for a late lunch on the sea front.

The early afternoon sun glittered off the feathery ridges in the sea and the beach was full of flesh. Ralph, his belly still in GMT, ordered scrambled eggs on toast and an orange juice. Smith and Rosey shared a grilled spatchcock chicken and roasted vegetables.

“So, you do teeth?” he opened, smiling at Rosey across the table.

“Yes, I do teeth. Lovely, shiny American teeth.”

“And how did you go from history of art to teeth?”

“Well, I wanted to come and live in la-la land and there wasn't a great call for art historians so I thought, hmm, what does America really want, and I thought, aha! People to make their teeth look pretty! So I dropped out of uni and signed up for a dental hygiene course. And here I am, ten years later. Knee-deep in American plaque.”

“And you enjoy that, do you?”

“Well, enjoy is not quite the word, no. But it pays well, I live on the beach in the coolest place in the world. And I have my band.”

“Your band?”

“Yeah, I do vocals with a band.”

“What kind of band?”

“Rock. Well, kind of rock-cum-pop, I guess. With a hint of emo, except I'm way too old to say I play in an emo band.”

“They sound like the
Dawson's Creek
sound track,” added Smith drily.

“Fuck you,” said Rosey, thumping Smith affectionately
on the arm. “Smith's just jealous because he has no creative outlet in his life.”

“Pah!” countered Smith. “Creative schreative. I've got plenty of outlets. I've got spiritual. I've got emotional. I've got sexual . . .” He counted them off on his fingers.

Ralph looked at him askance. “Spiritual?” he said. “Emotional? Er?”

“Yes,” sighed Rosey, leaning her head into the crook of Smith's shoulder, “just because he is skilled in the ancient art of Reiki massage, Smith seems to think he's got all his spiritual bases covered.”

“Look,” he said, “I'm happy. Isn't that what it's all about? Isn't that the bottom line? Who cares about whether or not anyone's written a book about it, called it something? Whatever. I wake up every morning and I feel good. End of story.”

He folded his arms across his chest and then smiled, before leaning in toward his beer and lifting it. “To happiness, without all the bollocks.”

Ralph picked up his orange juice and lifted it to Smith's beer. “Indeed,” he said, thinking, actually, he would go for happiness any way it came, with or without the bollocks. All he wanted was someone to show him where to find it.

“Hey!” said Rosey, suddenly alert. “Ralph could come to see me play, Tuesday!”

Smith gave her a questioning look.

“Yeah. Why not? You're busy on Tuesday. Ralph could come and see us play. What do you say, Ralph? Fancy a night out? It's a nice venue, a community hall. Free entry. Beer. You'll be in bed before midnight. I'm driving, I'll get you home. Eh?”

Ralph nodded, slowly, numbly. “That sounds great,” he said, “I'd love to. Thank you.”

J
em awoke the next morning and stared into the dark blinking eyes of her infant son. He had shared the bed with her all night and had awoken not hungry, as he had fed on demand like a grazing cow all night long, but fully rested and ready for the day to begin. Jem, on the other hand, was drained, her sleep having been disturbed at horribly regular intervals by not just her greedy baby but also her overactive imagination.

She had spent wakeful hours in the night mentally wording her text message to Joel.

Hi, it's Scarlett's mum, how are you fixed for Wednesday?

Hi, Joel, this is Jem, Scarlett's mum. Still up for a playdate this week?

Hello! Which afternoon would you like to kill off this week? I'm free most days
.

She'd also spent wakeful hours in the night mentally playing out the details of the as yet unplanned meeting. Whose house? What to wear? Would she drop Scarlett and run? Would she stay and roll a glass of wine between her hands while making gentle and revealing conversation with Joel?

She'd then spent wakeful hours in the night wondering why any of this was happening in the first place. Why had this pale, unassuming man about whom she knew absolutely nothing suddenly jumped into three dimensions and taken over part of
her brain? Why was she seeing his smile in her dreams? Why was she courting intimacy with him?

She had only just had a baby. When she had started trying to conceive that baby she had thought of it as the next step in the evolution of her life with Ralph. Blake hadn't been created on a whim, by mistake; he'd been deliberately and specifically manufactured in order to complete their family. Now he was here, in her bed, staring at her, smiling at her, delighted to see her. He was real and becoming more real by the day. They were four: Ralph, the love of her life; Scarlett, the daughter she'd always dreamed of; Blake, this curious boy in her bed; and her. Wasn't this the point at which one drew a line underneath one's existence? Wasn't this the point at which one could say, Well done, me, I have come in on schedule, I have one of each, I have a house, I have a good man, now I can sit and revel in all the work and the wonder and the growing yet to come, I am home?

This surely wasn't the point at which one started making glad eyes at single dads and fantasizing about stolen moments on playdates.

An ego boost. That's what this was, she'd concluded at sometime around 4:30 a.m. She was nearing forty. Her partner had run away from home. She didn't feel pretty anymore. She wanted someone to make her feel pretty. And that man could be anyone. Joel just happened to be the only one she knew who looked as if he might want to.

That was it. That was all. It was nothing more. It was just an ego boost. It was just a playdate. On Saturday Ralph would be home and somehow they'd find a way to fix themselves, and when that happened this thing with Joel would diminish into perspective like a rock falling into a chasm.

She gathered the gurgling Blake into her arms and rested him on top of her chest so that they were nose to nose. “As if,” she whispered into his ear. “As if I would do anything to make your life anything less than perfect.”

The door opened then and Scarlett stood in the doorway, her polar bear hanging from her hand by the paw, her curls in flaming disarray around her head, her pajama trousers round her ankles.

“I just did a bit of wee in my pajamas,” she said, her teeth catching her bottom lip as she said it.

Jem pulled herself up to sitting and rested Blake on her lap. “Why?” she asked.

“It just came out,” she said, “when I was trying to take my trousers off.”

“That's all right,” said Jem. “Happens to me sometimes. Take 'em off.”

“Where shall I put them?”

“Just there,” she said, “leave them. Are you coming into bed with us?” She lifted the duvet.

Scarlett nodded, kicked off her pajama bottoms and leaped onto the bed, nearly squashing Blake in the process.

“Careful!” cried out Jem.

One of the more unexpected aspects of Blake's arrival into their family was how utterly gigantic Scarlett immediately appeared to be. Her hands, previously the hands of a small girl, looked like shovels, her fingernails seemed as big as roof tiles. She seemed man-sized, a vast threatening figure, big enough to squash and maim and knock the life from Blake in a single blow.

Scarlett crawled across Jem's lap and kissed Blake on the lips. Blake looked at her in surprise. “Is it time to go to nursery yet?”
she asked, rolling onto Ralph's half of the bed and pulling the duvet up under her chin.

Jem glanced at the time on the clock radio on Ralph's bedside table: 6:45 a.m. She groaned inwardly.

“No,” she said, “not for ages. Shall we just all snuggle for a while?”

“Yes,” said Scarlett, “let's all snuggle.”

For a short moment the three of them lay there like that, still figures beneath the duvet, the only noise the slight ruffle of Egyptian cotton as Scarlett adjusted the cover below her chin. Jem smiled. This was good. This felt complete. This felt—it shocked her to realize—absolutely fine without Ralph. She thought of the previous night, the luxury of being able to fuss over Blake without the accompanying tuts and sighs and exaggerated flounces from the other side of the bed. She closed her eyes and imagined that her children might just lie here, might just let her sleep for a few more precious minutes, but a second later Scarlett was out from under the duvet, bouncing up and down, and Blake was fidgeting on top of Jem and trying to climb onto her head, and she gave up.

“Come on,” she said, “let's go and have breakfast. Let's start the day.”

J
em took Blake to her sister's house after dropping Scarlett at the nursery. Jem had two sisters: Isobel, who lived in Rotterdam with her Dutch husband and twin daughters, and Louisa, or Lulu as she was known universally, who lived just round the corner in a massive converted pub with her partner, Walter, a statuesque fifty-three-year-old dermatologist from Ottawa. Lulu was only a year older than Jem and not just her sister but, over the last few years, as they'd both grown into motherhood, her best friend too. Walter earned enough as a consultant dermatologist to mean that Lulu did not have to work, and since the birth of their first son, eight years earlier, she had been a full-time mother.

Jem loved coming to Lulu's house. It was always warm and it was always on the right side of messy, and her sister always made her tea like their mum made and Jem never had to apologize for her daughter's behavior or for her baby's screaming or for being late or being scruffy or not having anything interesting to talk about. Lulu's house was her sane place, the place where everything made sense and nothing really mattered as much as she'd thought it had before she got there.

“Hello! Hello!” Lulu greeted her at the front door with a brush of her warm cheek and a snuffle of Blake's head and a pile
of paperwork in her hands. “How was your weekend? I can't believe you didn't pop over!”

Jem shook her head and unfurled her neck scarf. “No, I know. I thought I would but then suddenly it was Sunday night and I'd got through the whole weekend on my own.”

“So it was cool?”

“It was cool. It was actually . . .”

“. . . quite fun?”

“Yes, quite fun.”

“I know,” said Lulu. “I love it when Walt's away, when it's just me and my babies and my own rhythm, but it's all about the fact that Walt's coming back, you know, not like I'd actually want to be a single mother or anything, heaven forbid, they should all be awarded something, OBEs or something. Come in.”