After the Party (27 page)

She waited a full three minutes like that, crouched behind her front door, sweating and vaguely hyperventilating. Then she ran back to the front room, studied the road through the window and, having finally reassured herself that he was gone, she opened the front door and glanced at the doorstep.

It was a bunch of flowers.

White flowers.

She wasn't sure what they were; they were somewhat undistinguished, saved from ugliness only by their stark whiteness. (Though of course, the moment the thought passed through her head she knew that it was exactly the sort of thing that Joel imagined she would think about a bunch of perfectly nice white flowers. “Hmph,” she imagined him grunting, “I suppose only the best lilies are good enough for you, or meadow flowers hand-picked that very morning by rosy-cheeked organic wenches in Somerset.”)

Attached to the cheap flowers was a card in a pale blue envelope. She eyed the street, both ways, to make sure nobody was watching and then took the flowers and the card indoors. With slightly trembling fingers she pulled the card out and read it.

Jem—I don't know what came over me. I am truly sorry. I hope you will forgive me and that we can still be friends. Yours, with respect, Joel.

Jem read and reread the card three times before conceding a small smile. Her immediate reaction was relief that someone she'd feared disliked her had rethought his position. The idea, in fact, that someone disliked her had been so sickeningly overwhelming for the past few days that it had tainted her every waking moment. Jem had spent most of life ensuring that everyone she came into contact with found her pleasant, even charming. For someone to have taken against her so vigorously had been a big shock. So now that he had clearly changed his mind, she felt a warm sense of vindication. Of course she wasn't an awful person! Of course not! And for someone who barely knew her to suggest such a thing was clearly an aberration.

But still, the words could not be taken back completely. Whether or not he regretted saying them, he had meant them at the time. And whether or not his words held any truth (Jem had enough self-awareness to know that they probably did), the fact that he'd felt able to say them to her in such a vociferous and aggressive way pointed Jem very much toward the conclusion that he was a) unpleasant, b) an inverted snob and c) possibly mentally unstable.

Which led her back to the plain white flowers on her kitchen table. She did not want to be in receipt of any kind of flowers from a man like Joel. She had been led astray by flowers before. While sharing a flat with Ralph and Smith all those years earlier, she had convinced herself that Smith must be the man of her
dreams, purely because he had come home one night bearing a bunch of nodding peonies—her favorite flowers. She had then wasted a few months of her life that she would never get back in Smith's bed, unaware of the fact that all the while Smith was using her to give him some kind of kudos in his silent pursuance of the woman on the top floor of their house. She still shuddered when she thought about it, all these years later, shuddered at her stupidity, her blind adherence to her self-imposed laws of romantic destiny.

But then it had been flowers, again, that had saved her from herself. A whole room full of them. Not real flowers, but the painted flowers that Ralph had exhibited in a small room in Notting Hill. It was not just the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her, but the most romantic thing that had ever happened to anyone she knew. And to recall that moment, the mania of it, the youthful, lustful craziness of it, and then to look upon the sad handful of supermarket flowers left on her doorstep by a lonely, bitter man she barely knew—well, it was obvious what she had to do. She took the flowers and with some relish she dropped them, blooms down, into the slightly rancid, nappy-scented depths of her large, shiny and terribly middle-class Brabantia trash bin.

•  •  •

Jem could not sleep that night. There was nothing worse, for a mother of two small children who made it their lives' work to drag you out of bed and away from sleep once if not five times a night, than to be the architect of your own wakefulness. It was painfully infuriating, and feeling infuriated was, of course, the very best way to ensure that you would remain awake.

So, the house slumbered. Ralph, for once, did not snore; the road outside was still and quiet; no caterwauling foxes patrolled
the gardens; the baby snuffled and Jem lay on her back, her hands clasped across her sore breasts, wondering and cogitating and worrying and thinking.

Tomorrow it would be a week since she had told Ralph that she was pregnant—and she was still pregnant. Tomorrow they would have a conversation that began with the words: “Well, what have you decided?” And she could not just stand there, as she currently felt she would, hemming and hawing, rolling her thumbs and muttering, “I don't know. You decide.” She would have to have an answer and it would have to be an answer that she was prepared to stand by, otherwise this thing was going to drag on infinitely, painfully.

As she watched the clock turn from 2:59 to 3:00 and realized that she had now been awake for nearly an hour and a half, she gently peeled back the duvet, tiptoed quietly from the room and headed downstairs.

Smith the cat looked up as she entered the moon-bright kitchen. His face lit up at the sight of an unexpected visitor and he headed toward her sleepily, polishing her bare legs with his soft cream fur. “Hello, old boy,” she said, scooping him up into her arms and carrying him to the old sofa by the garden door. Once upon a time Smith the cat had been her baby. Once upon a time she had worried about his eating habits, discussed his behavior at great length with Ralph and other cat-owning friends, bought him toys, missed him deeply when they went on holiday. And then she'd brought Scarlett home from the hospital and barely given him a second thought since. Poor old Smith. He'd been affronted at first, but slowly settled into his new role as bottom fiddle and occasional plaything. It was rare for Jem to have a moment to herself with Smith the cat, and sitting curled up with him on the sofa in the dark, hearing his contented purring,
the pull of his padded feet against her pajama bottoms, she could almost imagine herself at a time before, when it was just her and Ralph in their beautiful big flat in Battersea, in the days when Ralph would cycle off to work every morning to his studio in Cable Street and Jem would jump on the number 38 at the top of their road and go to her job in Soho.

Those days were gone, Jem accepted that. And she didn't really want them back. To take them back would be to give her children back to the universe. Having children meant an irreversible march into the future. And actually, she didn't really want lie-ins and Sunday papers and long baths and spontaneous holidays and summer afternoons in Battersea Park with just a bottle of champagne and a blanket. She loved the padded upholstery that children gave to her existence. She loved fulfilling their needs and requirements, filling them with her love, giving herself to them in chunks of her own precious time. But there was one thing she would like back, one thing from the past. She would like some of the magic that she and Ralph had once shared.

She moved Smith the cat to one side and pulled some photo albums from the shelving next to the sofa. She and Scarlett looked through these albums regularly. Scarlett liked to see the pictures of herself as a baby, the pictures of Jem cradling a large naked pregnant belly, Ralph in green scrubs just before the cesarean. She was less interested in the photos of life before she arrived, unable at only three years old to quite grasp the concept that she hadn't always been here.

Jem found the photos she was looking for: Lulu's wedding. She smiled at the photographs. Ralph in crumpled linen trousers and an old white shirt, his skin soft and tanned; Jem in a floral sundress, shirred across the bust with floaty chiffon sleeves
and strappy silver sandals. They both looked so delighted with themselves.
Look at us
, said their gleeful expressions
, we have found each other!
There was nothing about the young woman in this photograph to predict bitterness or a preoccupation with organic produce or a latent desire to drive a large black vehicle or a tendency to use hapless single fathers as conversational dinner-party fodder. That girl looked like a free spirit, like someone who if she had children would let them run barefoot wherever they chose, pick dark berries from brambly bushes and stain their clothes with them, let the housework slide, chase her husband into the bedroom after the children were asleep and pin him to the bed, read important novels as she pushed a pram down the street, make friends with the local shopkeepers and invite her children's friends home after school to run riot in her home, throw homemade stew into rough-hewn bowls for them to eat off their knees and have enough left over for an impromptu drunken supper for some colorful local friends later that same night. She would flirt innocently with her husband's friends, who would all secretly adore her; she would make potato prints with her daughter on a Saturday morning and not even notice when the paint-muddy water got tipped onto the kitchen floor. That woman, the carefree woman in the photographs, would walk down the street with one arm around her husband and one arm pushing the stroller. Yes, she would.

But no, just like Jem's unborn babies, that mum had never existed and instead the flushed, exhilarated girl in Tuscany had become just another harried suburban mum, caught up in routines and timetables and the sheer utter bloody exhaustion of trying, and failing, to keep everything perfect. She had become the shallow yummy mummy that Joel had accused her of being, with no life outside her house, no sense of adventure
or spontaneity, little to no libido and a deep-seated antipathy toward her husband for his part in letting her become this way.

She flicked faster and faster through the photo album. She flicked through Tuscany and Bruges and Port Isaac and Sydney and Bordeaux. She flicked through weddings and births and thirtieths and fortieths and the funeral of Ralph's old mum. And suddenly as her life swarmed in front of her eyes, month by month, year by year, event by event like a zoetrope, it was blindingly obvious what she needed to do.

She went upstairs then, to Ralph's studio. She rarely went into Ralph's studio. It was never quite warm up there, except on scorching summer days when it was pungently hot. There was nowhere comfortable to sit and Ralph was always distracted when he was working.

Ralph's studio was light. The moon was directly overhead and falling through the glass panels in the roof like milky sunshine. She walked gently across the knotty wooden floors, careful not to cause a squeak, and she studied Ralph's works in progress. He'd told her that he was painting flowers from his Californian trip for his next exhibition but she hadn't seen any of them yet. Strange, really, that she expected Ralph to take an interest in her career yet she showed very little in his. She'd stopped being interested in Ralph's art a long time ago. It was good, he was a very talented man, but once you'd seen thirty minutely detailed studies of sweet peas and ranunculus you had, Jem suspected, seen them all. They left the house like a factory production line, two, four, sometimes ten at a time. Every now and then there was an exhibition and a lorry would arrive and fifteen or twenty would be shuffled down the spiral staircase and out through the front door. They were bread and butter. They were, from Jem's point of view, no different from packets of biscuits or cars. If someone had told her twenty years ago that one day she would
be living with an artist, a remarkably talented artist, a man who could paint anything he saw in breathtaking, lifelike detail, she'd have imagined that she would have been swathed from head to toe in chiffon all day, muselike, swanning around parties full of interesting people, bursting with pride. But no, she was not impressed by Ralph. He would have to go a very long way these days to impress her, not just paint a flower but possibly grow a flower within his own body and allow it to blossom forth from his belly button. There was no mystique left about what Ralph did for a living. There was no mystique left about Ralph. But as she eyed the two canvases at the far end of the studio, she was vaguely surprised to note that there appeared to be a new mood in play.

Flowers, yes, but not reticent British flowers: long, slightly phallic flowers, tubular in shape, dangling pendulously across vividly colored backdrops, hints of graffiti on sun-bleached walls, acid sunshine, the stenciled shade of a palm frond. She remembered Ralph saying something about trying a new style, but, typically, she hadn't really been listening.

“What do you think?”

She jumped.

Ralph was in the doorway, naked except for his boxers, his newly recovered abs gleaming in the moonlight. Jem felt oddly shy for a moment.

“Yeah,” she said, turning back to look at the paintings, “they're great. I can see what you've been working on now. It's a real change.”

“Yeah.” He walked toward her. “It's so good to finally have got out of that rut. Although, ha, knowing me I'll probably just end up spending another ten years painting Californian street flora.”

Jem smiled. “Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing up here?” she asked.

“Well, I'm going to suppose that you couldn't sleep.”

She shrugged and nodded.

He smiled and leaned against the wall next to her.

“Want to talk about it?” he said.

She looked at Ralph's paintings and then she looked at Ralph. He had changed. He was now the man she'd wanted so badly for him to be. He was fit and considerate and caring and involved. He pulled his weight, he acted without instruction, he treated her with respect and affection. But still her defenses were up, still she resented his second-in-command role in their lives. He had changed but
she had not
. And now it was up to her to change too. And in order for her to change she needed to draw a line underneath this stage of their lives, the baby stage, the pregnancy stage. She needed to be able to look back upon it and say, yes, it was tough when the children were small, yes, I found pregnancy stressful and it all took its toll on our relationship, but now the kids are older, well, we've never been happier.