After the Party (26 page)

He'd decided there and then that he couldn't live with that. There were already two ghosts in their house: the baby that should have been born in May 2002 and the baby that should have been born in July 2005. Ralph could be philosophical about those babies. They were not meant to be. They were genetic rejects of some sort, or maybe, if you followed some of Jem's crazy fate-focused thinking, they were just not the right babies for them. But this baby, this ghost, would crawl the corridors of their consciences, wailing and clanging chains, crying, why me, why me? There could be no philosophical musings on
the lost existence of this child.
Well, really, we just didn't have the room, the time or the inclination. It had to go, terribly sad, but really, anyone would have done the same in our position
.

No, thought Ralph, not anyone. The world was full of people who would not think twice about going through with the pregnancy, about bringing the baby into being, welcoming it into their family. Ralph was painfully aware that it was not him who would have to carry the child, bear the child, nurse the child, but he also knew this: he had been a so-so father to Scarlett and a worse than useless father to Blake. He had decided early on in the parenting game that because it was Jem who had forced the issue of having a family, the children she so dearly craved would be hers. She would be the one to fill her brain with schedules and socks and term times and goody bags and toothbrushing and nappy purchasing. She would be the one to carry her children around in her head all day like unwieldy bags of heavy shopping. She would be the one to work her own life and her own needs around those of her children. Ralph would continue to do what he'd always done: stand alone in a well-lit room and paint.

She could have it worse, he'd always reasoned with himself. It's not as if I go out every night and come home steaming drunk. It's not as if I'm out with clients or off on business trips. It's not as if, he'd even thought self-righteously to himself, it's not as if I hit her.

But that person had gone and now he wanted to experience fatherhood through this new, clean lens. He wanted to watch Jem growing daily with a sense of wonder and awe rather than the slightly nauseating dread he'd felt before. He wanted to look forward to the birth of this child, to feel that this was something that they were doing together rather than something that Jem was doing to him.

He and Jem had not really discussed the concept of termination since that first conversation three days earlier. In four days' time they would have that conversation and although Ralph knew in his heart that Jem had probably already made up her mind, he felt sure that he could persuade her, that once she realized the extent of his commitment to her, to the baby, to their family, she would feel more relaxed about the concept. But just now, in the kitchen, he'd seen something inside her, something sad and scared, and he'd been inspired. Suddenly he knew exactly how to fix this thing.

He pinned a piece of cartridge paper to the wall and gave Scarlett an old tin of watercolors and a jar of water. Then he propped Blake up between some cushions on the floor and gave him a ball of blue nylon string, which he gnawed at gratefully as though all his life he'd been waiting for someone to give him a ball of blue nylon string. Then Ralph flipped open his mobile phone and called Lulu.

“Hi,” he began, “it's Ralph.”

“Oh, Ralph, hello, how are you?”

“I'm fine,” he said, “I'm great, just, er, thinking about stuff and thinking that I really need to take Jem out for a night, you know, a nice dinner, somewhere local. It's been ages, and she's, er, well, a bit run-down . . .”

“A bit pregnant, you mean?”

“Oh,” said Ralph. Of course. Of course Jem had told her sister. And her sister probably already knew exactly what she planned to do about it. “Yeah,” he continued, “she is. And anyway, I was wondering, would you be able to babysit one night soon, just for a couple of hours, you know, not for a whole night . . . ?”

“Tonight?”

“You can do tonight?”

“Uh-huh. Walt's been working from home today, so I could get away whenever you need me, really. Just say when.”

“Oh, right, the thing is, I haven't actually spoken to Jem yet.”

“She'll love it. Just book something. Tell her it's a done deal.”

“Right, okay, I'll—”

“Actually, I'll leave now.”

Ralph glanced at the time. It was five o'clock. “God, you don't have to . . .”

“No, I know I don't. But if I get there now I can help you with the kids while Jem has a bath and makes herself look gorgeous. I literally have one arm in my coat as we speak. I'll see you in ten minutes. Bye!”

J
em yanked clothes across the narrow gap in her wardrobe disdainfully. She hated all of her clothes. All of them. Even her Vivienne Westwood Red Label jacket that she had been so overjoyed about winning in an eBay auction. Her body shape had changed so frequently over the past few years that she had kind of forgotten what shape she was, forgotten what suited her, and she was always just pleasantly surprised to find something that fitted her.

And now, ha! she was bloody well pregnant again. More billowy tops, more elasticized jeans, more voluminous bras. She eyed her clothes angrily, blaming them in some way for her predicament, as if they had somehow colluded to bring her back to square one so abruptly.

Eventually she pulled a floral Jigsaw blouse and a pair of black jeans from her wardrobe. She took off her bulky nursing bra and replaced it with something less functional, slipping a pair of breast pads in first. She hung a string of blue stones around her neck and tweaked her curls. She looked pinched and miserable. She did not look like a person she would want to know. She looked like a shrew. She felt like a shrew. She felt dry and scratchy and spiky. She felt mean and miserly and cruel. Pregnancy did not suit her, it never had, but at least with her previous pregnancies she'd had the lure of the ultimate goal: the baby
in her arms, the extension of their happy family. This time all she could feel was panic and fear. Fear that this baby would be the final undoing of them. Fear that it would tear them apart.

She adjusted the paper pads inside her bra and she headed downstairs.

•  •  •

Ralph thought that Jem had rarely looked as beautiful as she did that night through the amber glow of a flickering candle in a glass jar. He had taken her to Olley's, a quirky pine-paneled fish restaurant around the corner, a place he'd passed a few times on his morning run and been surprised about, not like a London restaurant at all but more like the kind of friendly popular place you'd find in a chichi seaside town. Jem was sipping a sparkling water. It was her pregnancy alcohol substitute. If it had bubbles in it and it was cold she could convince herself it was beer or champagne or even a gin and tonic. The fact that she had ordered it was reassuring to Ralph. If she was not drinking then it meant that she had not yet decided. And if she had not yet decided then what he was about to do was more likely to be effective.

She smiled at him wanly across the table. “Been a long time, eh?” she said.

“Yeah, when was the last time, exactly?”

“I don't know, but I seem to recall I was pregnant then too.” She smiled wryly. “I have spent most of these past five years pregnant, as we know.” She smiled again, a tired, weary smile. A beautiful smile.

Her mobile phone sat on the side plate, blinking reassuringly. She glanced at it furtively, as she had done every thirty seconds since they had sat down. Blake had still been awake when they'd left and Jem would not be properly relaxed until she got the text confirmation from Lulu that he was sound asleep.

“I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier,” she said, tearing apart a piece of crusty bread.

He shrugged and smiled. “It's okay,” he said, “I can take it.”

She nodded and glanced down at her phone again.

“Yeah,” she said, looking up again, “I know. But it still wasn't really fair. I know you've been bending over backward to be, you know, supportive and I really, really, really appreciate it, honestly I do. But I've still got, I don't know, some backed-up resentment issues I guess. And, yippee, now I've got Hormone Soup too! So, I'm just saying, I'm doing my best to be soft and kind but inside I'm still a bit hedgehoggy. You know.”

Ralph reached his hand across the table and took Jem's. “I quite like hedgehogs,” he said.

Jem smiled.

“I mean, I know things haven't been great these last few months—”

“Years,” interrupted Jem.

“Well, yeah, years probably. And I know I've had to do some growing up and that I've left you with too much on your plate and that, well, you know the score, I take most of the blame, and I know we're not going to talk about the baby tonight . . .”

“Ha!” Jem interjected. “Which one?”

“Yeah, you know which one. And we're not. But I just wanted to say something to you tonight, something I should have said years ago, something I can't believe I've never said to you before. You know, you are my life, you are everything to me. I am the luckiest man in the world to be with you, to have made babies with you and I don't know why you've put up with me these past years. I don't ever want to be apart from you and more than anything, I want to, well—I want to marry you.”

Jem, who had been staring accusingly at her sleeping mobile phone, looked up at him with wide eyes. She put a hand to the pale thin skin of her collarbone, where her fingertips rested against the iridescent blue beads of her necklace. “I beg your pardon?” The words tripped off her tongue quickly without spaces.
Ibegyourpardon?

“I said, I want to marry you. For us both to get married. To each other.”

“What, seriously?”

He nodded. “Yeah, seriously.”

He drew in his breath. He and Jem had drifted so far apart over the past few years that he found it impossible to hazard a guess as to what might currently be taking place inside her head. Had she started thinking flouncy tulle skirts? Or was she already trying to find the right words to let him down gently? He stared at her beseechingly.

“Fucking hell, Ralph.”

“Yeah.” He smiled pathetically. “I know.” They had discussed getting married before, in a conceptual, nonspecific kind of way. They had agreed that it was not a priority, that there were more important things to focus on. They had agreed that having children together was the greatest commitment two people could make to each other. They had agreed that they might do it one day, maybe run away to Las Vegas, maybe do something small and informal in a registry office.

“Wow,” said Jem, “I'm flabbergasted. But in a good way.” She put a reassuring hand against his arm. “I just, er, well, I was going to say, I need to think about it, but that's a bit stupid really. Of course I don't need to think about it, obviously I'm going to say yes.”

“You are?”

“Yes! Of course I am! You're the love of my life. You're the father of my children. What would it say about any of that if I were to say no?”

“So you mean you're only saying yes because if you said no it would be far more damaging to the status quo?”

“No! No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that getting married is the right thing to do. I'm saying that yes, I want to marry you! Maybe not for the same reasons I would have wanted to marry you five years ago, ten years ago, but for better reasons, probably, because it would make sense, practically. And because Scarlett would love it. And because, I don't know, because in spite of everything, we still love each other.”

Ralph looked at her over the tips of his fingers and tried to smile. “Ooh,” he said, “romantic!”

Jem groaned. “Oh, Ralph, come on, how can you expect me to be romantic?”

Ralph smiled sadly. “No, of course, I don't expect you to be romantic; I just thought you might be, that's all.”

“Listen, Ralph. I'm really sorry. I'm tired. I've had a bad day. I've got a lot on my mind, but I want you to know this: I'm really glad you asked me to marry you. It's wonderful and I am delighted. Really I am.”

“Even if you don't seem it?”

“Even if I don't seem it. Honestly, inside me there is a giddy twenty-year-old doing a happy dance.”

“With the hedgehog?”

Jem smiled then, properly, with her whole face, for the first time that day. “Yeah,” she laughed, “she's dancing with the hedgehog.”

J
em's head felt like it had been opened up, emptied of anything sensible, intellectual or useful, stuffed with horsehair and mud and closed up again. The world appeared to her like a thick gloop of disconnected events and appointments. Her life, which had once felt like a smooth machine of routines and schedules, now felt chaotic and strange. Everyday activities and situations had lost their soothing veneer of familiarity. Partly, of course, it was hormonal; baby-brain they called it, though she'd always thought that was a myth. But mostly it was because her territory had grown new humps and hillocks, valleys and ravines. Suddenly there were towering landmarks in her life that hadn't been there before: weddings to plan, babies to decide about, an angry-looking man pacing about outside her house.

Yes. Joel.

He was there right now.

She knew he was there only because she'd just popped out to empty the recycling bin. She'd been aware of a presence, on the other side of the street, a sense of being watched. She hadn't looked up, just slammed the lid down on the green box as fast as she could and returned inside. And then she'd darted into the front room to peer through the curtains. And there he was, leaning against the wall of the house opposite, a folded newspaper
in the pocket of his jacket, staring, not toward Jem's house, but up into the sky, watching the swirls and pirouettes of a swallow overhead. Jem let the curtain fall and sucked in her breath. Her heart began to race. What on earth was he doing there? She had imagined after their last exchange that he would do his best to avoid her. She peered once more through the curtain and saw with alarm that he was moving toward the house, with a sense of urgency and something clasped behind his back. She gasped and ran to the front door, crouching beneath the stained-glass panels. She could hear his footsteps crunching urgently up the front path. She heard him clear his throat. And then she heard something else; a scuffing noise against the doorstep. She held her breath, felt her heart hammering against her rib cage. The scuffing noise stopped and then, after a long painful moment, she heard him walking back down the footpath and toward the street.