After the Party (28 page)

Having another baby now would put the whole family back to square one. Their sex life would suffer, her body would suffer, there would be more sleepless nights, more people to shout at and tidy up after and remember things about. She wanted to try to find that girl in the photograph downstairs, the girl who was going to be a fun mum and a great wife. She wanted to start going out on dates with Ralph again, to get drunk, Christ, maybe even get stoned (it had been a Very Long Time). She wanted this family to have at its core a fantastic mum and a fantastic dad who truly loved each other—and showed it. Her children never saw their parents hug. They rarely saw them laugh, except at them. Her children deserved to have two parents who were mad about each other. And if she had to spend another eighteen months pregnant, sober, tired, breastfeeding and stressed then
that would never happen. No. She wanted to shut up shop, turn the sign around on the door, head inside and get on with her life.

She stared for a moment through the glass roof, into the gray blackness of the night sky at the distant stars, trying to find the right words for what she needed to say next. She turned and held his hands. “I really, really don't want to have this baby. I'm so sorry, but I want to have . . . I want to . . . I don't want to have it. And that is my final decision.”

Ralph looked down at her, the moon shining on the scalp beneath his thinning hair. She saw heartache in his eyes. “I thought you might say that,” he said.

“I'm really sorry,” she said again.

“No. I don't want you to be sorry. I don't want you to be sorry about anything. It's your body. It's your decision.”

“But, no, it isn't, is it? I mean, yes, ultimately I have to make the final call, but this would be your baby too, your daughter or your son, and I feel like I'm robbing you of that.”

Ralph shrugged and inhaled. “Look,” he said, “I can't pretend I'm not gutted. I do, I did want this baby. Very much. But I can't make you have it. I wouldn't dream of making you go through with it if you don't want to. I just really hope, though, that you made this decision for the right reasons.”

“What do you mean?” She could not tell Ralph her real reasons for not wanting to have the baby. She could not tell him that she was scared that he would turn his back on them all again, like he did after Blake was born. He would say it wasn't true, he would say it wouldn't happen again, he would say that he was marrying her, that he would never leave her. But babies had taken them so far away from each other before, she had no faith in its not happening again.

“Well, no, not for the right reasons, but I hope you feel like
you've had time to think things through properly, that you haven't rushed this decision . . .”

“Ralph! This is all I've thought about for the past ten days! Literally! I'm half insane with it!”

“No, no, I know, I just mean, you have a very busy life, you don't get much time just to sit and, you know, think. Would it help if you went away for a couple of days? I could look after the kids. Blake's almost off the breast now. You could go away and really, really think about what you want to do. Another couple of days won't hurt.”

Jem shook her head. “No!” she said. “I want this thing out of my head and out of me. I don't need to go away anywhere to know that.”

“But are you sure? Are you really sure you haven't just made this decision in a state of panic?”

“Of course I've made the decision in a state of panic!”

“Well, then . . .”

“Well, then, what?”

“Well, then give yourself some time to stop panicking. Give yourself another couple of days. Please. What I would hate more than anything, more than you getting rid of the baby, more than you having the baby, is that you would make the wrong decision. Do you see? That you would look back and think: if only I'd thought it through calmly and properly, I wouldn't have done that. I couldn't bear there to be any regrets.”

“There won't be any regrets, Ralph.” She wasn't 100 percent convinced that this was true, but she knew that any small regrets would be a price worth paying to avoid the potential devastation to their relationship of another baby.

“Ghosts,” he said suddenly.

Jem squinted at him. “What?”

“Ghosts. We've already lost two babies. I know you still think about them. But this one, could you live with that? Could you live with that date, January 2009? It'll be there every year, every January we'll think: baby would have been one, baby would have been two, baby would have been starting school this year, baby would have . . .”

“Yes,” said Jem, “I could. I could live with that.”

“Fine, then,” said Ralph, in that soft, controlled voice, holding her head against his chest. “Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do.”

They stood for a moment or two like that, the moonlight on their crowns, rocking gently back and forth. And then, hand in hand they went back to bed, where Jem slept and Ralph lay wakefully until Blake's first murmurings at 5 a.m.

R
alph flipped open the lid of his laptop at nine o'clock the following morning, clicked on his Outlook icon and waited impatiently for his in-box to load.

Nothing from Rosey. He sighed. He always felt curiously uplifted when he saw her name in his in-box. He clicked on her last email to him and pressed reply. The words poured from his thoughts onto the keyboard.

Hi! Me and Jem talked last night. Late last night. She's decided to get rid of the baby. I mentioned everything that you said. I even offered to look after the kids for a couple of days so that she could get away and really think about stuff. But she's adamant. When she told me, I was really angry at first. I could feel all the old negativity coming back. I just wanted to shout and rant and have it all my own way. But then this weird thing happened—I felt something, like strength, but not inner strength, not like I was having to tell myself to feel a certain way or behave a certain way, but like something external. It was like I was taken over by something . . .

Anyway, I know you won't think I'm crazy for saying something like that, I know you understand. Jem's downstairs now, phoning the clinic. I can't watch her do it.
I'm not happy with the situation, but I've accepted that there's nothing I can do about it, that Jem's happiness is paramount. I just really hope that this brings her the happiness she thinks it will. I really hope that it brings us ALL the happiness she thinks it will.

Sorry to load you up with all this shit, I just haven't got anyone else I can talk to about it, and I know you understand. Now I'm just praying (yeah—literally!) that she has a last-minute change of heart. And if she doesn't, well, then I will just have to try my hardest not to hold it against her and assume that this has all happened for a reason.

Hope you're OK. Lots of love, R x

He pressed send and then pulled on his running shoes. As he sprinted through the house he heard Jem's voice, a thin ribbon of sound, somewhere out of sight, saying words he did not want to hear, and he felt a sense of blessed escape the moment his feet touched the street outside the house.

He pounded the streets that he had only just grown to love, thinking of the baby he had been looking forward to meeting. He tried to be philosophical. Maybe the baby would have been stupid, ugly, evil, hyperactive, a nightmare. Maybe they'd have looked at the child and sighed and thought, we should never have had it, should have stuck with the two we already had.

But Ralph knew that was drivel. Of course they would never think such things, even if the baby arrived two-headed and breathing fire. Well, possibly not, but really, a baby would have to go a very long way indeed not to be innately lovable.

He would go with Jem to the appointment, of course he would. He would tell her all the right things, hold her hand, tell her he loved her, tell her it was fine. But it wasn't fine. It was far from fine.

His feet hit the pavement, thud thud thud, his heart pressed against his rib cage, two lines of sweat formed on his temples and rolled toward his eyes. He found himself, as he did more and more often these days, at the small chapel on Underwood Street. He pushed open the doors and then pulled out his earpieces. The sun was angled through the small windows at the front, filling the room with chunks of rosy May sunshine. He sat in a pew and closed his eyes. Whatever it was he was finding when he sat in this place, he was needing it more and more every day, like a tincture. He found it here, he found it when he ran, he found it when he exchanged emails with Rosey. He'd alluded to God earlier when he was writing to Rosey and although he still wasn't sure that that's exactly what it was, with every day that passed it was seeming more and more likely.

He prayed as he sat there. He prayed a lot these days. He wasn't ashamed to call it that anymore. There was nothing wrong with prayer, as long as it was private, and well-intentioned.

After a few moments, once he felt filled with the stuff of this place, he got to his feet, reinserted his earphones and then left, hoping that someone, somewhere had heard his plea for a second chance for their unborn baby.

His head was stuffed full with the business of his life and Elbow were on volume 22 in his ears so it took him a moment to realize that he was being watched. A man, across the street. He'd been there when Ralph arrived at the chapel and he was still there now. And yes, as Ralph gazed at the man, he realized that he recognized him. It was him, that strange man he'd seen when he was out with the kids. The dad. The one that Jem knew. Ralph stopped for a moment, his hands on his hips. A car zipped along the road between them. Then a van. The man still stood and stared. It was possible, of course, that he was staring
at some random point just behind Ralph, but no, Ralph could see the man's gaze following his, even from here. Ralph lifted his hand from his hip and held it up to the man, in a kind of neutral greeting. The man mirrored his movement. Ralph smiled, tentatively. The man did not. A small line of cars passed between them then, and by the time the road was clear again the man across the street had gone.

Ralph looked from left to right, grimaced and then headed toward Brockwell Park.

J
em took the first available appointment.

“Is tomorrow morning, eight a.m., too early?”

“No,” said Jem, “no. That's perfect.”

She knew that meant that Ralph wouldn't be able to come. He'd have to stay at home to get the children up, to take Scarlett to nursery. She was sure if she'd asked she could have been given a later appointment, something that Ralph could have attended. But she didn't need him there. It would have been nice to have had him there, nice but not altogether necessary.

In her bag, Jem packed photos of her children, a banana and a book. At the last moment, just before she left the house in the early morning sun, she took the photograph of herself and Ralph at her sister's wedding from the album in the kitchen. She put it in her handbag, in case she lost her resolve and needed to remember why she was doing this.

Ralph saw her off at the door, Blake in his arms suckling on a bottle of formula. He looked tired and wan, but managed a smile and a lingering kiss. She brushed the kiss away. She did not want lingering kisses or any kind of intimacy at all until this was done. Jem, who spent most of her life feeling like pretty much everything could go either way at any time, who left most of her decisions until the last minute, who believed in fate and destiny and the theory of probability, had never felt so certain
or in control before in her life. This was absolutely the right thing to be doing, she had not a shadow of a doubt.

“I love you,” said Ralph, “I'll come and pick you up at eleven, okay?”

“I'll call you,” she said, “once I know for sure.”

“Okay,” he said, “I'll keep my phone on loud.”

Jem smiled, pulled her hand from his.

“Say bye-bye, Mummy.” Ralph flapped Blake's hand from side to side. “Bye-bye, Mummy.”

Jem smiled at Blake and kissed his tiny hands. “See you later, baby boy! And give your sister a big kiss from Mummy when she wakes up!”

Jem ignored the film of tears she'd seen over Ralph's blue eyes and the dull sadness in his voice. He's just tired, she told herself, just tired and full of sleep.

In the waiting room she read a copy of
Grazia
magazine and tried not to look at the two other women—not actually women, but girls; eighteen, twenty, possibly twenty-four. Here she was, nearly forty, the twilight of her fertile years, a nice house, a good man; would either of these conflicted, surprised, unprepared girls have had the slightest understanding of what she was doing? She didn't suppose so.

She pulled out the photo of Blake.

Her baby.

Now he would get to stay her baby, unusurped.

She pulled out a picture of Scarlett. Sweet, kind, shirty, opinionated Scarlett. Enough personality for all of them.

And then she took the Tuscan photo from her bag. She stared into the bright, shining eyes of the girl and the boy in the photograph.
I'm doing this for you
, she told them,
for you and for all your silly, wonderful, crazy dreams
.

“Jemima Catterick?”

“Yes.” She slid the photograph back into her bag and looked up. “Is it time?”

•  •  •

Ralph dropped Scarlett at nursery fifteen minutes earlier than usual and found his way, as fast as possible, to the Marie Stopes clinic in Streatham. He could not let her do this. It would destroy them. They would never be able to tell their children about it and there it would be: a secret, a lie, buried within the heart of their family. Ralph did not want secrets and lies inside his family. He wanted transparency and honesty. And how would he and Jem ever be able to talk about this to each other, let alone their children? It was a conversation that they would never be able to have. One or other of them would end up hurt. There wouldn't just be a ghost in their house, there would be a chasm.