After the Party (31 page)

“Yes.” Ralph nodded fervently. “That's it. Exactly.”

“I see,” she said, lowering herself back into her chair. “I mean,” she continued, “you know I'm not a counselor? I can't offer you the world, but I can offer you people.”

“People?”

“Yeah, look, there's a meeting, tomorrow evening. I'll be there, and lots and lots of other people will be there. And if you like those other people, if you feel those other people have anything to offer you, then you can come again.”

“Right,” said Ralph, his internal antennae sending him worrying culty secty Reverend Moon warning signs. The lightly couched invitation sounded a bit evangelical to him. How could he reconcile the idea of joining a church with living with Jem? Jem had once said to him: “I would rather you had an affair than found Jesus. Nothing scares me more than organized religion.” He'd laughed at the time and said, cool, I get to have an affair! But it didn't seem particularly funny now. “So this is your, er, church you're talking about?” he asked, nervously.

“No.” She shook her head, still smiling at him fondly. “No. It's not a church. As I say, I am not a Christian. None of us are Christians. Neither are we Jews, Mormons, Muslims or Scientologists. We are part of a group of people who have read the Bible and rejected it, who have tried many other forms of faith and found them to be lacking, trying or simply barking.
But we want to feel something, that togetherness that comes from group worship, that love that comes from congregational prayer. We are a group. That is all.”

“So you don't worship anything?”

“No, we don't worship any
one
. We find our inspiration in the world around us, in what you can see, smell and touch. And not just that, but in the internal spirit, in the beauty of mankind. It's a cult, if you like, but a cult of humanity, of love. It's a cult for the right-minded, the intellectual, the successful, the creative. We have quite a few celebrity members.”

“You do?”

“Yes, you may have seen them; they get photographed occasionally leaving our center in Notting Hill. It's deliberate, a PR operation, which of course is my area of responsibility. They can choose to leave by the back door but they leave by the front, for us, for the group, to show the world what we're doing.”

“Is it, is it like that Madonna thing?”

Sarah laughed her big, hooting laugh. “No! It is NOT like that Madonna thing, that watered-down Judaism for numbskulls! All that blessed water for a thousand bucks a pop and bits of string that have touched some dead person's ass or whatever.” She tutted and frowned, but her face soon sprang back into its smile-shaped form. “No, what we do is much more personal. We do not impose any form of structure or ritual and we most certainly do not ask for any money.”

“So, how are you financed?”

She shrugged. “People give. They don't need to be sold bits of string. They just give. And if they don't give in financial form, they give in other ways. Their time, their expertise. Like me, with my role as PR director. I don't have any money but this is something I can do. But anyway, anyway, I'm not here to recruit
you. We don't need to actively recruit. I'm just here because you wanted to see me and I'm telling you all this because you asked. And the bottom line is this: if your life is hurting you right now, and clearly it is, then I know a place where you will find strength and love, and if that sounds like a place you'd like to be, then you are so welcome to be there. Tomorrow night. Six thirty. Here.” She scribbled an address on a piece of paper torn from a notepad in her handbag and passed it to him across the table. “I think you should come,” she said, smiling her beatific smile. “I think you're just our kind of person.”

R
alph felt curiously let down. He was sitting on a blue plastic chair in the Maygrove Centre at the bottom of Lulu's road in a room with thirty other people. A guy in a lilac pullover had spoken very briefly about the importance of human interaction to a room full of ordinary-looking people, and then everyone had stood up and started drinking tea. It was neither inspiring nor moving, and not even vaguely controversial. Ralph was at a social meeting of Sarah's prayer group. He had not told Jem he was going to a prayer group meeting. He had told her he was going for a run. He was even wearing his running gear.

As the group splintered apart and started to mingle, Ralph felt both relieved that he would not be joining a prayer group and disappointed that his life appeared not to be about to change its path.

“So,” said Sarah, guiding him away from his seat and toward the group of people, “what did you think?”

He shrugged. He wanted to say: “Was that it?” But it didn't seem polite.

“Is there anyone here you'd like me to introduce you to?” she continued.

Ralph glanced around. Really he just wanted to go home now. He had no idea why he'd come in the first place. He'd
thought . . . well, he wasn't sure what he'd thought. He was about to say, “Well, no actually, thank you, Sarah, but I think I'll be on my way,” when a tall man approached him, a tall thin man with white hair and a long, weathered face. His eyes were china blue and his smile was warm and welcoming. “A new face,” he said, in a baritone Scots accent. “Glad you could make it.”

“This is Ralph,” said Sarah.

“Good to meet you, Ralph. My name's Gil. Where are you from?”

“Croydon,” he replied. “What about you?”

“The Southern Isles,” said Gil, “the Hebrides. The oldest of twelve, the tallest and the strongest. My family worked me into the ground. Escaped on the first boat out of there the moment I turned sixteen. Been on my own ever since. You have any family?”

Ralph blinked, surprised by the frantic pace of Gil's conversation. “Yes,” he replied, “a partner, two small children.”

“Lucky man. I never managed to keep anyone. I lost everyone I ever loved, either by accident or by my own actions. Or inactions, on the whole. Are you happy, you and your family?”

Ralph shrugged. Clearly this was a man who appreciated candor. “Things have been better.”

“Rocky times?” Gil appraised him through slanted eyes.

“Well, yeah.”

“Figures,” said Gil, “otherwise you wouldnae be here. What mountains are you climbing?”

Ralph scratched his chin. “You really want to know?” he replied.

Gil peered at him with dry amusement. “Sonny,” he said, “you cannot know yourself if you do not know others. You
cannot belong to this world if you do not let it touch you. Did you come here for nothing, or did you come here for something?”

Ralph blew out his cheeks. “Well, yeah, for something.”

“Well then, talk to me, man. And when you've done talking, listen. You hear?”

“Right,” started Ralph, “well, the last few months, since our second child was born, they've been a bit of a roller coaster.”

He told Gil about his lack of paternal feelings toward his son, about the state of their sex life, about running away to America and falling in love with his best friend's girlfriend. He told him about finding peace in the little clapboard church, about finding peace within himself, his homecoming and the subsequent pregnancy, miscarriage and uncovering of possible infidelity and worse, and that he was now feeling more lost than ever.

All the while, Gil kept his blue eyes on Ralph, licking his large dry lips occasionally, nodding slowly.

“That's a big tangle, boy,” he said. “You're clawing your way out of a bramble bush there. Have you spoken to your woman?”

“To Jem?”

“Yes, have you told her about your suspicions, about this odd man with his flowers and all?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Why not?”

Ralph blinked at him. It was an entirely reasonable question. “I'm not sure,” he said. “I suppose that if I ask her and it's something, then we'll have to split up and if I ask her and it's nothing then she'll know I've been snooping around and thinking bad things about her and then we'll have to split up. I just don't want to put her on the spot, I don't want to watch her lying or squirming or getting cross with me for doubting her.”

“You don't want a confrontation?”

“I don't want a confrontation.”

“Well, boy, you're going to have to have one. No point standing here talking to me. No point at all. Sounds to me like your little woman is in as much of a mess as you are. Take her out. Give her a beer. Talk to her, man,
talk to her
.”

R
alph and Jem went out the following night. They got a cab to Battersea Park Road and sat in the Latchmere for two hours. Jem was wearing something chiffony and flouncy that she'd bought from an online vintage boutique and which had arrived in the post that very morning. Before they'd even left the house Jem had had two Bacardi and Cokes, which she'd drunk at the kitchen table with Lulu. Not that she felt she needed to be drunk to go out on a date with Ralph, but alcohol, she had decided, had been at the core of their
good times
. They hadn't thought of it as a crutch back then. They hadn't thought: how come every time we go out together we end up in a pub? It had just been a part of their lifestyle: beer, spliff, another beer, wine with dinner, the occasional cocktail or glass of champagne.

Scarlett had seemed pleased to see them leaving the house together that night, thrilled, almost, that her mum and dad had nice clothes on and were going somewhere on their own to have a nice time. Jem was excited too. Not only was she keen to re-create the sort of nights that she and Ralph had enjoyed in their early years, but she hadn't been out since she'd lost the baby and she needed desperately to let her hair down and forget for a night at least about the last few unsettling weeks.

Jem looked around the old pub, the place they'd been to once or twice a week when they'd had their flat in Lurline Gardens. It
hadn't changed at all. Except—well, it did seem that everyone in here was very young. She was sure that hadn't been the case five years ago. She was sure that back then everyone had been about thirty, thirty-five and now they all looked, what, about twenty-six, possibly younger. But still, it was nice to feel plugged back into a world that she'd previously inhabited so carelessly.

When she looked back at her life before children she wanted to leave a little metaphorical Post-it note for her unknowing self. And that note would say: “GO OUT MORE!” She thought back to the nights in, because they were (yawn) too tired to go out.
Too tired to go out?
At thirty-four years old? With nothing but a cushy job in an office and a cute commute on a double-decker bus to drain her energy resources? What had she been thinking? She should have been out every night. She should have never seen the four walls of her home. She and Ralph should have met up every night after work, in Soho, in Clerkenwell, in Marylebone. Every night should have been a pub crawl, every weekend should have been lost. Why had they spent so much time in garden centers and Wickes when they should have been daytime drinking? Why had they decided not to go on holiday one year “because we haven't got enough money”? She looked around her again at the young and the child-free and knew that for the majority of them it was only a matter of time, a year, maybe five, maybe ten to fifteen, but most of them eventually would end up in a little house with a kid or two, tied to babysitters and feeling old. All that divided Jem from them was time.

“Funny, getting old, isn't it?” said Jem.

Ralph smiled. “Well, we're not quite there yet.”

“No, I know, and I know that forty these days is nothing like forty thirty years ago and that we're all much younger than we used to be, but still, let's face it, we're the oldest people in here.”

Ralph looked around and shrugged. There was something eternally youthful about Ralph. While Jem had kept her figure and her looks, she had said good-bye to a fresh face. She looked mature. Ralph did not look mature. His style of dressing, his slightly gormless teenage demeanor, his slouchy walk, his air of injured vulnerability, the way his jeans hung low around his hips because he didn't have much of a bum; he could have passed for a thirty-year-old with laughter lines. He was not much interested in the process of aging; he didn't care much about his hair loss or the diminishing elasticity of his skin. Ralph, Jem suspected, was one of those people who would remain forever youthful just because it had never occurred to him that he could get old.

Ralph shrugged. “Not really,” he said, “look at them.” He pointed at a group of people in their early to mid-thirties, perfectly proving Jem's theory.

Jem laughed. “Ralph,” she said, “they're not even thirty-five! God, I can't believe I'm going to be forty soon,” she continued. “Forty. I mean, I remember my mum's fortieth birthday party. I was fifteen! And I thought she was ancient. Her and all her really old friends. And here I am with a baby, feeling like I've only just started out in life.” She shook her head slowly.

Ralph smiled tightly and drummed his fingers against the tabletop. He seemed preoccupied.

“Are you okay?” said Jem.

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine.”

He didn't look fine, but Jem didn't push him. This was supposedly the night that they would begin to rediscover each other and she hoped that rather than drawing them into a tedious discussion about whether Ralph actually was “fine” or not, she could lead by example and keep the evening buoyant. So she chatted and she nattered and she yakked and she blathered, and
all the while she poured cold lager down her throat and felt some kind of happiness descend upon her thickly and obscurely.

By the time they left the pub at nine thirty, Jem was too full of beer to contemplate curry, so she went into a mini-mart a few doors down and bought herself a packet of cheese puffs and an envelope of Rizlas rolling papers.