After the Party (34 page)

They reached the head of the line and a waitress showed them to a table. The conversation got squashed by the perusal of menus and the placating of children and the distribution of crayons and coloring kits. Jem ordered herself a cocktail and ignored Lulu's look of surprise. It was summer. There were men outside playing steel drums. She'd had a stressful journey getting here. She wanted a cocktail, with fruit in it, and rum. She wanted something to alleviate the discomfort in the pit of her stomach.

She had two cocktails that day, but no lunch.

She didn't quite have an appetite for it.

•  •  •

Five nights later Jem went out with her sister and some of Lulu's friends from the local area. Lulu had had children at school for six years and had built up quite a gang of mothers in her neighborhood who liked to go out drinking. Jem had never been out
with them before. Jem and Lulu were close but their social circles rarely bled into each other. Jem knew these women by name and had met them on occasion if one of them had had a child over at Lulu's house for a playdate, but beyond that they were not a part of her life. But Lulu had persuaded her that it was time to get involved.

“You'll really like them,” she'd said that afternoon on the South Bank. “Some of them are a bit painful, but en masse, you know, it's fine. And we always have such a laugh.”

Ralph had been strange when she'd mentioned it to him.

“Sorry, you're going out with who?”

“Friends. Of Lulu's. Just some local women.”

“Okay,” he'd said, “and why?”

“Because Lulu invited me.”

“Right. And where are you going, you and Lulu and her mates?”

Jem had shrugged. “Don't know yet. Probably somewhere local. Or one of them's a member of Soho House, we might go there.”

He'd raised his eyebrows at her.

“What?” she'd demanded.

“Nothing,” he'd said. “Just, I can just imagine the type of woman who lives round here, who has a child at Theo and Jared's school and is a member of Soho House.”

“Well, yeah, so can I, and Lulu did say that some of the group are a bit painful, but I don't really care. I just want to go out. I just want to have some fun.”

Ralph had sneered slightly and sighed. “Good,” he'd said, “that's good. I hope you have it.”

He'd been offish with her for the rest of that day. It was very unlike Ralph. Sulking and brooding were not his traits and he'd
always been happy to see Jem going out to enjoy herself in years gone by, particularly since they'd had children. Jem couldn't quite see why the prospect of her going out after dark with a few local mums should have unsettled him so much, but she ignored his mood and waited for it to pass. She had not been out drinking since before she was pregnant with Blake. If Ralph wanted back the girl he'd fallen in love with all those years ago, and she suspected that he did, then he would have to accept that her independence was all a part of it.

On Wednesday night she wore her vintage chiffon blouse again, with skinny jeans and high heels. She wore her hair down, with a diamanté clip holding it out of her eyes, and she wore more makeup than she normally wore, including a smudge of something from Benefit that turned her lips postcoital red. And then, with a flourish of liberation, she removed the obligatory packet of wipes and spare nappy from her handbag and dropped them on the bed.

Ralph was downstairs on the sofa with Blake on his lap and Scarlett curled into him in her nightie and a dressing gown. Scarlett let her thumb fall from her mouth when she saw Jem walk into the room.

“Mummy,” she said, “you look very beautiful.”

Jem smiled and hugged her. Ralph looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “Very pretty,” he said, and lowered his gaze back to the TV. Jem kissed her daughter and her son and then she kissed the dry cold side of Ralph's face that he presented her with when she attempted to kiss him on the lips.

J
em felt a warm buzz of vitality that evening as she crisscrossed the damp streets of Soho to find the small door in the wall of Greek Street, which was the only outward sign of the exclusive club within. She had not walked alone through Soho at night for many a year. She took the long route, although it was cool and wet. She retraced the journeys that she and Ralph used to make, the Chinese restaurant on Lisle Street where they used to share a crispy duck, the sex shop on Brewer Street where they'd stared at all the customers in awe one night when they were stoned, and an anonymous door on a street corner in Chinatown they'd once passed through to get to the flat of a guy called Pete from Manchester who'd invited them in for a beer and a smoke about a thousand years ago.

Lulu's friend Sam was the member at Soho House and had put their names on a list at the door. Jem made her way up the narrow staircase to a room on the second floor and saw her sister sitting on a sofa with three other women. There was a bottle of champagne already open and chilled by the side of the table and Sam—terribly tall with the sort of geometric and sculpted hair usually seen in the windows of unfashionable hair salons—rustled up an extra glass and poured one for Jem. Jem drank the champagne so fast that she barely had a chance to register the fact that she was drinking champagne, an activity she often
daydreamed about during long, mundane afternoons alone with her children. Another bottle appeared and very quickly Jem had finished three glasses and was feeling thoroughly comfortable in her environment and with these three new and slightly forbidding women. Ingrid—who looked like her name—had four children, including a baby the same age as Blake, and hadn't worked since she was twenty-five. Diana—small and busty with thick yellow hair—was divorced with a nine-year-old daughter called Tansy and sold organic babywear from her own website. Sam had twin boys in Jared's year and a daughter in Theo's year, and was the marketing and publicity director for a women's celebrity gossip magazine.

“Have you got children, Jem?” asked Sam, who was the only one of the three mothers that Jem had not met before at Lulu's house.

“Yes,” she nodded, “a girl of three and a half and a little boy of six months.”

“Ah, so you haven't hit the school years yet, then?”

“No,” she agreed, “I've got all that to come.”

“And what do you do?” asked Sam. “Do you work?”

Jem nodded, shook her head, nodded again. “Kind of,” she said, and explained about the celebrity arm of the theatrical agency she'd been given to develop as an alternative to maternity leave by her much-loved boss. “I've only got the two clients,” she continued. The women looked at her curiously, greedy, it seemed, for some juicy celebrity names to get their teeth into. “Karl Kasparov,” she offered apologetically. The women nodded, encouragingly, as if to say, better luck with the next one. “And Philip Samuel.”

“Ah,” Sam nodded, “the little guy from, what's that soap called?”

“
Jubilee Road
?”

“Yeah, that one. He's cute.”

“Yes, he's been with the agency since he was fourteen. He was in
Oliver!,
and then he transferred to TV and now, well, he wants me to make him famous. But not until his contract's up for the current run of this show. So, yes, in the meantime, I haven't really got much work to do. I guess when the baby's a little older and when my daughter's at full-time nursery . . .”

“Well, look, when you're ready and when little Philip's ready, you should come and have lunch with me,” said Sam, “I know all sorts of people in the industry. I could definitely get you talking to some very helpful people.”

Jem smiled at her words. She was grateful for the offer of lunch. It was nice to have someone take her job seriously. And it was thrilling to think that in a couple of months' time she would be back inside this world, this glossy, frivolous, exhilarating and gilded world of work, properly.

“And you're married?”

“Not yet.”

“Jem's getting married next month,” said Lulu, proudly.

The women all looked at Jem happily.

“And this is to the father of your . . .”

“. . . children, yes,” said Jem. “Finally, after eleven years together.”

“Oh, congratulations,” said Ingrid, holding aloft her champagne glass. “That's wonderful news. Cheers!”

The five women clinked their glasses together and Jem smiled happily. The sun was going down in Soho and the pretty room was bathed, briefly, in a wash of pomegranate light. The lead singer of Kasabian was sitting behind them and over there in the corner was Fearne Cotton, deep in conversation with
someone else who looked familiar but Jem couldn't quite put a name to her. This room, four walls, a few chesterfield sofas, powered-down lighting, low tables bearing snacks and drinks and discarded newspapers, could have been a room anywhere, but it wasn't, it was a room in Soho House, a room that only a select few would occupy, a room with its own potent energy. This place was alive. Pretentious—slightly, yes. Swollen with a disproportionate sense of its own importance—definitely. But a place she'd like to be a member of? Well, it didn't matter much to Jem what any dead comedian might have to say on the matter, yes, she would like to be a member. She would like to belong here. She would like to sail through the reception area and have that pretty girl behind the desk say, hello, Miss Catterick, how are you this evening, Miss Catterick?

Jem ordered herself a cocktail and when it arrived she drank it very quickly, urgently needing to feel some kind of oblivion descend upon her. She went to the toilet then and engaged someone much younger and more sober than herself in a conversation about the hand soap. She smiled as she sat on the bowl in the cubicle. She felt like a grown-up. She wanted to get back to work, she wanted to plug herself back into the world. She wanted to make a success of herself. She smiled at her reflection over the sink as she washed her hands. She looked fine for an old lady of thirty-eight who'd had one too many to drink. She'd always sworn she wouldn't get drunk over the age of thirty, remembering her parents' friends at their vaguely sordid dinner parties, swaying and hooting, stained teeth and florid open-pored cheeks, usually with their arms around someone else's husband or wife. Drunkenness, like most enjoyable things, was best left to the young. But in the muted light of the toilets at Soho House, Jem concluded that she looked fine. In fact, more
than fine. She looked good. She was going back to work. She was getting married. She and Ralph would find a way forward, of course they would. She fixed a smile to her face, straightened the placket on her chiffon blouse and headed back to the bar.

•  •  •

Jem remembered very little about the rest of the night when she awoke the next morning at six o'clock to the sound of Blake bleating pathetically from his bedroom across the hallway. She turned over heavily onto her side to alert Ralph to the fact that their baby needed attention but found a cool empty mattress where her partner should have been. The monitor next to the bed was flashing frantic red and green as Blake's bleating escalated to anxious screaming. Ralph must be somewhere in the house, Jem concluded, and therefore she could just turn off the monitor, stick a pillow over her head and attempt to get another hour's rest. After a further three minutes the bedroom door opened and an exhausted-looking Scarlett stood in the doorway with quite magnificent bed hair.

“Mummy,” she said, “Blake's crying.”

Jem resisted the urge to respond using base sarcasm and forced a smile. “I know,” she said, “and in a minute Daddy's going to go in and pick him up.”

Scarlett scanned the room. “Where is Daddy?”

“I don't know,” croaked Jem, “I suppose he's downstairs. Why don't you go and see if you can find him?”

Scarlett nodded and Jem sighed with relief. Until, “Come with me, Mummy?” and a small hand proffered across the rumpled bedcovers. Jem groaned and pulled her body from the warm cocoon of her bed. Together they rescued the plaintive Blake from his crib and Jem held his small juddering body against her own small juddering body, and she and Scarlett
padded down the stairs to find out where the hell Ralph was and what on earth he was doing. But a short exploration of the lower floor of the house revealed pretty quickly that Ralph was not in the house and that neither were his running shoes nor his iPod.

Jem felt her way around the kitchen, pulled the corner off a small carton of SMA milk, splashed it into a bottle, slammed the bottle into the microwave, located a plastic bowl with a picture of Peppa Pig at its center, filled it with Shreddies, almost topped it with tap water, stopped herself just in time, topped it with full-fat milk, threw in a teaspoon and banged it on the table. She wedged Blake into his high chair, scattered a handful of dry cornflakes and the bottle of warm milk onto the tray in front of him and then finally busied herself with the work of preparing herself a very large cup of tea and, thank God, a stale croissant, resuscitated briefly in the microwave and smeared generously with butter. There was silence then for a moment, silence enough for Jem to wonder, a) how she had gotten home the night before, and b) what on earth Ralph was doing leaving the house before 6 a.m. for a run.

She remembered ordering snacks. She'd had a goat cheese salad and a bowl of olives. She remembered three more cocktails, she remembered the conversation turning to fun topics such as Isn't Sex Crap? and Men, What Are They Actually For? They'd also discussed schools (Jem now knew exactly what she had to do to get her children into the right schools in her district) and postbaby bodies (Sam had shown them her overhang, the result of bearing twins who'd been born weighing in at almost eight pounds each). And then, amid wide eyes and hanging jaws, they'd discussed Diana's affair with the father of one of her daughter's best friends.