After the Party (4 page)

Ralph left the thought suspended outside his consciousness like a spoonful of something he wasn't sure he could put in his mouth. And then he shut the door on it.

God was for freaks.

Christ was for idiots.

He turned his attention to his heart rate and brought it, as quickly as possible, up to 160.

J
em scooped her baby boy into her arms and felt relief suffuse her body. “How was he?” she asked, secretly wanting her sister to say, “Oh, you know, devastated to be apart from you.”

“He's been great, haven't you, little man?” said Lulu, running her hand across his cheek and smiling at him fondly.

“How much milk did he have?”

“He had about three ounces just after you left, and then another three just now. He's slept most of the time.”

“Typical,” smiled Jem, sliding the bridge of her nose across Blake's cheek and inhaling the scent of him as though he were a flower.

“How'd it go?” asked Lulu.

“Oh, great, fine, it was just a preliminary meeting, nothing scary.” She carried Blake to the sofa in Lulu's kitchen, laid him across the cushion and unstrapped her high heels, kicking them off triumphantly. “Those,” she said, pointing at them where they lay on the floor, “were a mistake.”

“Yeah, you should have worked your way back up the heel scale a bit more slowly. Converse to skyscrapers in one swoop, not good for the calf muscles.”

Jem stretched her aching legs out in front of her and examined her feet. What would he think now? she wondered. What
would Joel think if he could see her here, flopped, ungainly, feet in damp tights, a squelchy baby at her side? She could feel curls escaping from the pins she'd trapped them with three hours earlier. Her left breast was leaking warm milk. She was halfway between the two states, halfway between ragged mother and desirable woman, a changeling. She unbuttoned the Vivienne Westwood Red Label jacket that she'd won in a fevered eBay auction three weeks ago and peeled it off, shedding her layers. Then she picked up her baby and held him over her shoulder and let his warmth and stillness soothe her back into being.

“The funniest thing happened,” she said to Lulu.

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes, it was like something out of a novel. There's this man—”

Her sister's face registered her surprise.

“No, nothing like that, just this man, a dad, I see him around, he's cute, but it's nothing . . . it's not
significant
. Just, you know, something to do.”

Her sister smiled knowingly. Silly crushes on men they weren't married to was something of an ongoing joke between them, a way of maintaining some sense of girlishness.

“Anyway, he's always with his little girl, I think he's a house-husband, never seen the mum, we smile and stuff and he's cute and then today he was there, on the tube, without his little girl and it was a bit . . .”

“Oooh,” smiled Lulu.

“Well, yes, a bit oooh, and we were, I think you could say,
studiously
ignoring each other and then he got off at my stop, at Warren Street, and I thought, oh my God, this is it, one of those moments, like something from inside your head has escaped, gone feral, you know, doing its own thing.”

“And so, what happened?” urged Lulu.

Jem shrugged, and moved Blake onto her other shoulder. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing happened.
Of course
. He went off to the Northern Line, I went to the exit. I watched his back disappear from view. I breathed a sigh of relief . . .”

“Because you don't really want anything to happen?”

“Exactly,” said Jem. “I don't really want anything to happen. It's just sometimes you get the feeling that something was supposed to have happened, you know, that a door was left open deliberately for you and you have to wonder why.”

“The ‘sliding doors' thing.”

“Yup,” said Jem, sitting Blake up on her lap and smiling at his little floppy head. “Timing is everything. And maybe, you know, if me and Ralph had been going through a bad patch or something then—”

“You'd be in a wine bar with Mystery Dad right now, banging on about how your husband doesn't understand you.”

Jem smiled at her sister. “Something like that,” she said. “Oh, look at him, he's exhausted.” She appraised her baby son. “I'd better get him home.”

“No time for a cup of tea?”

“No, honestly, I'm exhausted and so's this one and if I time it right, I might just get a lie-down when we get home.”

Her sister gave her Blake's coat and sat down next to her, helping her to thread his floppy arms through the sleeves. “So everything is all right, is it, with you and Ralph?” She sounded concerned, as if it was a question she'd wanted to ask for a while.

“Yes,” answered Jem, slightly too abruptly. “Well, as all right as things can be when there's a baby in the house. And we did have a bit of a fight yesterday—”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes, about me going back to work, about the fact that he
was ‘too busy' to look after Blake for a few hours today. You know, it's just ridiculous, he's there all day, in that house, nowhere to go, nothing planned, this is
his
son,
his
baby, yet I've had to bring him all the way over here just so I can go into town for a few hours.”

“Yes,” said Lulu, circumspectly, “I did wonder about that. What was his excuse?”

“Oh, you know,
deadlines
, always deadlines, deadlines that miraculously disappear when there are things going on that he actually wants to do. He just couldn't hack it, that's the bottom line, just couldn't hack the thought of being stuck with his baby for half the day, all on his own. Plus, of course, he thinks my job is some kind of
joke
. He's never taken it seriously. Maybe if I was a lawyer, or maybe even an artist, like him, maybe then he'd be more supportive of me trying to find my way outside the home. But as it is . . .” She paused, and then she sighed. There was no point, she reminded herself, no point whatsoever getting herself worked up about all this stuff. It was just the way things were, not only for her but for nearly every woman she knew. At some point in the last few years Ralph had turned his back, stuck his metaphorical hands in his metaphorical pockets and allowed her to become a housewife. And somewhere deep down inside she hated him for it.

She sighed again. “Anyway, it's fine, it's sorted, for now. And yes, generally things are okay. We just need to get through the next nine months, just need to get to Blake's birthday, and if we get there intact, we'll be fine.”

She glanced down at Blake, bulky and squashy now in his winter coat, and smiled at him. “We'll be fine, won't we, little man?” she asked him in a softer voice. “We always are.”

R
alph watched Jem return. Her hair was looser, but she was still resplendent in her tight jacket and high heels. He watched her negotiate the stroller up the footpath; he could see the rotund form of his son slumbering in his fat winter coat, his outstretched legs cocooned in a thick soft blanket the color of sky. Jem looked great, he thought, trim and tiny and back to her prepregnancy weight already. She was, he thought to himself, a very yummy mummy. He smiled at the thought. And then he thought that he wanted her. He wanted this Jem,
his
Jem. He wanted her out of that jacket, naked, except perhaps for the extraordinary heels. He wanted to breathe in her breath, taste her mouth, be a part of her again, not this useless adjunct, this separate floating particle. He wanted to drift back to port, slot himself in, anchor down. He wanted to be wanted and he wanted it now.

He smiled at her from halfway down the stairs. “Welcome home,” he whispered, “how'd it go?”

“Good,” Jem whispered back, wheeling the stroller into the alcove underneath the stairs.

“And how'd it go with the baby at Lulu's?”

Jem smiled. “Really well. I don't think he missed me in the slightest.”

“See,” he said, descending the stairs, “I told you it would be fine.”

“Hm,” said Jem.

Hm
.

Ralph, with an agenda that didn't involve tedious bickering about whose turn it was to plonk themselves down triumphantly at the top of the moral high ground and stick their flag in it, decided to let it pass.

“I watched you coming back just now,” he said, “from the window.”

“Oh, yes?” Jem unlooped Blake's nappy bag from the back of the stroller and pulled out two empty milk bottles.

“You look amazing,” he said, somewhat breathlessly, as if Jem were some hot stranger in a bar, not the woman he'd lived with for eleven years, not the woman he'd watched give birth to his two babies.

Jem glanced at him, half suspicious, half pleased.

“No, really, I looked at you and I thought, if I were to walk past that woman in the street, I'd want to . . .”

Jem frowned at him.

There it was, the knee-jerk rebuke. Ralph thought about giving up—it would be easier. But then he glanced down at Jem's feet, so small, so feminine, in those heels. He thought about the dull ache in his chest, the empty space in his soul where
they
had once resided. He saw his son, still slumbering; he saw an opportunity slipping through his fingers. “Reckon we could squeeze in a quickie?” he said, a hint of apology tingeing the edges of his words.

Jem looked at him in horror. “What,” she said, “now?”

“Well, yes, why not? Blake's sleeping, the house is empty . . .”

“I thought you were busy?”

“No. I mean a real quickie. You know, three minutes, tops.”

Jem blanched. “Jeez,” she muttered. “I mean,
no
.”

“Right,” said Ralph. “I see.”

“No, it's not that, it's not . . . it's just I have to express some milk, look, I'm leaking.” She pulled her tartan jacket out of the way to show Ralph the damp patch on her blouse. “And then I was going to have a lie-down. I only got five hours' sleep last night.”

Ralph nodded. He couldn't argue with that. How could he argue with that? How could he argue with breast milk? How could he say that she shouldn't be tired when it was she who had woken three times in the night to feed their hungry baby? How could he even begin to make a case for his own needs and wants? He couldn't. Which was not to say that there wasn't a case to be made. There was a very strong case to be made indeed.

Jem and Ralph had not had sex for nearly seven months
.

If there were such a thing as a court of sex law, Ralph's case would be open and shut. He was being starved of sex at the very same time as he was being expected to remain faithful. It was a little like being cut with a knife and told not to bleed.

“Sorry,” he said, trying his hardest not to sound cross and hurt, “bad timing.”

“No,” said Jem, “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It's just, you know, everything's all over the place, I'm just a mess, it's—”

“Honestly, it's fine.”

“No,” said Jem, “it's not fine. I know it's not fine. I just can't think about it right now.”

Ralph breathed in. He wanted to shout. He wanted to say, “How come you can get yourself all dolled up for work, how come you can put on heels and make arrangements for the baby and be away from him for half the day and sit in a hotel lobby
with a stranger and discuss their career with them, and get on tubes and make notes and be prepared to think about all that
right now
but you can't even slip upstairs for a few minutes just to be with me?” Instead, he breathed out slowly and forced a smile. “I know,” he said, kissing the top of her head, smelling the underground and the city in her hair, “I know. We'll get there. It's cool.”

She smiled at him apologetically, kissed the top of his hand. “I love you, you know,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know.” And then he turned and took the steps back to his studio at the top of the house.

•  •  •

This wasn't the first time that Ralph and Jem had experienced a sexual drought. The last few years had seen their sex life take more than a few knocks. Four pregnancies. Two miscarriages. Two babies. Ralph wasn't stupid. He knew that that was the way of these things. He hadn't expected all-night sessions, he hadn't expected Jem to be crawling all over him two minutes after losing a baby at twelve weeks' gestation, demanding her conjugal rights, he hadn't really expected anything at all. But four years was a long time for a man to be flung back and forth between being the Absolutely Crucial Supplier of Sperm and being the Utterly Redundant Nonproducer of Milk. Four years was a long time to be expected to pretend that you didn't want something that you wanted really, really badly.

And four years was a long time to wonder if the woman you loved actually even wanted you anymore.

J
em went to bed at nine thirty that night. Blake woke up at ten thirty for a feed. Ralph joined Jem in bed at eleven. At one fifteen Scarlett crawled into their bed, pressing her small warm body up against Ralph's back, the plush fur of her polar bear tickling the crook of his neck. Jem left the bed at two twenty to settle Blake and came back at a quarter to three. Unable to fall into a proper sleep with the thick breath of his daughter thundering past his ear, and the ball of her foot thudding him in the thigh at intervals, Ralph took his pillow, tiptoed from the room and stretched himself, not entirely luxuriously, upon Scarlett's toddler bed, threw her toddler-sized duvet across himself and finally succumbed to a deep and fruitful sleep. It was only when he awoke a few hours later and surveyed the new day through Scarlett's lipstick-pink curtains that it occurred to him that the previous day had been the anniversary of the first time that he and Jem had slept together. Eleven years ago today, he mused, he and Jem had awoken together for the first time, had found each other instinctively, pulled themselves together, made themselves one. Eleven years ago today the air had been full of wonder and tenderness, passion and potential. Eleven years ago today, Ralph had felt his life beginning.