After the Party (17 page)

“You mean, he's not there, emotionally?”

“Oh”—she tried to shrug it off—“it's not that. It's just, men, you know, they always manage to find ways of being busy that don't involve doing anything remotely useful. I don't suppose he's much different from anyone else, just that when there's a new baby around it sort of
magnifies
everything. All the discrepancies. You know.”

Joel smiled knowingly, having clearly picked up on her sudden defensiveness. “All men are useless,” he intoned.

“No. No, it's not that. I don't subscribe to that, just that there is this weird thing that happens when two people who are equal in every way except their gender procreate. There's this sort of
primal separation, this kind of caveman thing that kicks in, and the man just suddenly thinks it's okay to let the woman do eighty percent of the work.”

“Oh, God, now you're making me wish I was married!”

Jem laughed. “No, but it's true and it's not just me. It happens to nearly everyone I know and, as my sister said, you either fight it or get used to it. I suppose I've got used to it. But this week apart, it's been, well, it's been interesting. I think things are going to have to change when he gets back.”

“Well, maybe he'll have changed when he gets back. Maybe that's part of the reason he went?”

Jem shrugged. “We will see,” she said, “we will see.”

“And when is that? When is he coming back?”

“Saturday morning.”

Joel nodded. “So, two more days of solitude.”

“That's right. Two more days of coping on my own without hating anyone for it.” She glanced at Joel, who smiled at her questioningly. “I guess you're used to that then?” she asked.

“Yes. But then, I've only got the one. And I've been coping on my own since day one, pretty much, so never had to hate someone for not being more helpful.” He smiled and Jem laughed.

Blake was growing increasingly wriggly on her lap and as much as Joel had just offered her the perfect opportunity to ask about Jessica's mum, Jem really had to deal with her baby, and dealing with her baby, she increasingly recognized, would require giving him a feed. She'd been expecting this, she'd known that at some point while she was here Blake would get hungry and that she would have to reveal a naked breast in the presence of a strange man, but now that it was actually turning into a reality she was losing her nerve.

Breastfeeding had been a revelation to Jem, something she'd
never envisaged herself doing, something she'd undertaken purely because as a middle-class mum in a certain London postcode it was somehow
expected
of her, and something she'd taken to so naturally that she'd never questioned it for a moment. Before she'd had children she'd been of the opinion that breastfeeding was something very personal and, like other bodily functions, should be conducted somewhere private. But from the moment she'd taken the infant Scarlett out in public for the first time she'd known that unless she wanted to spend her entire life in a branch of John Lewis, that was neither practical nor desirable, and anyway, she felt utterly unselfconscious about it. But this, this was awkward. There was sex in this room. Not blatant sex, but quiet, surreptitious sex, twitching and tugging at the corners of their conversations, ruffling the still air like gentle fingertips through a calm pond, and now, at the prospect of an unclasped bra, an unleashed breast, the sound of her young son taking from her body, Jem froze.

“I, er, I need to feed him. Is that okay?”

Joel gazed at her for a moment, not sure what she was asking. A second later he worked it out. “Ah, right, yes, of course, go ahead. I'll go and check on the girls, give you some privacy.” He smiled and left the room.

By the time he came back five minutes later, Jem was neatly arranged with a baby at her breast, her scarf covering the top of her breast, her baby covering the bottom, and Blake was fast asleep.

She smiled at Joel. “How are they getting on?”

“Brilliant,” he said. “Something to do with stickers and reward charts. I
think
Jessica might just have tried to put Scarlett in the naughty corner but she wasn't having any of it.”

“That sounds about right,” laughed Jem.

“More wine?” he asked.

Jem looked at her empty glass and her sleeping baby. She wouldn't have to feed him again now for a couple of hours, she
could
have one more, and suddenly she really, really did want another one. Her baby was asleep, her big girl was playing happily, the sun was going down and there was no rush to get home, nobody waiting for her, nobody to explain to where she'd been and what she'd been doing. She could relax. She could get to know this shabby, bright, mysterious and oddly attractive man in an adult, slightly reckless way. She could even flirt and get pink-cheeked and let him tease her. They could talk into the early evening. Maybe he would move from his eyrie on the old swivel chair across the room and share the sofa with her. Maybe they'd accidentally touch. Maybe they'd start to reminisce about their youth, about their half-traveled lives, their histories, their mistakes, their goals, their dreams. Maybe she'd have a third glass of wine. And maybe something would happen here today that could never be physical but could be something even more powerful. And it all hinged on another glass of wine.

“Yes,” she said, holding out her empty glass. “That would be lovely.”

T
he last time Ralph had been in a church was, predictably, for a friend's wedding. Churches tended to lose some of their “churchness” when filled with nonbelieving thirtysomethings and their offspring. They felt more like holding centers, departure lounges, somewhere to wait awhile before escaping, somewhere stripped of anything godly or ethereal. It was almost as if, sensing the approach of a wedding party, God packed a small bag and left through the back door, muttering something about coming back when it was all over.

As a child Ralph had been taken to church every Sunday, 10:45 a.m., the same vaguely sticky pew, the same indigo-blue hymnbooks, the same overlarge family to their left, the same baggy-faced man in a cassock talking about the same improbable parables and biblical anecdotes in the same slightly camp voice. Ralph had never felt anything but boredom and resentment in church as a child. This was the first time he had been, willingly and for no good reason, to a church since he was fifteen years old.

Rosey's church was out of town, along the coast, a small clapboard building that wouldn't have looked out of place on a prairie. The parking lot was empty. There was no service. “I don't like services,” she explained. “I just like to sit there. On my own.”

Ralph shrugged awkwardly. “You should have said . . .” he began.

“No, I don't mean
all on my own
, I just mean not as part of a crowd, all that standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down. And then, Christ, even worse, all that singing and hallelujah-ing and Jesus-ing. Not to mention the God-awful
clapping
.”

“Listen,” he began tentatively. “About last night. I'm really sorry. If I embarrassed you.”

“Embarrassed me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I was very drunk and I think I might have been, well, overly complimentary, let's put it that way.”

“Christ, yeah,” said Rosey, turning to smile at him. “There's nothing I hate more than getting too many compliments.”

“No, I mean, I shouldn't have. It was . . .
inappropriate
.”

“It was fine, Ralph,” she said, opening the car door. “Really. It was sweet. And if you did want to paint me, well, I certainly wouldn't say no.”

Ralph smiled. “I wish I could,” he said, “but only two more days.”

“True,” she said, swinging a tanned leg out onto the graveled courtyard, “but hey, you could do me from memory.” She winked, and Ralph smiled.

Ralph followed her through into a small sunny entrance hall. The walls were painted white and hung with brightly colored paintings and notices about yard sales and Bible meetings and sewing circles. Two huge patchwork quilts acted as partitions into the main body of the church, each patch handcrafted by a parishioner and illustrating some small detail about the area. Inside the church, the sun pushed through wide stained-glass windows onto pews carved from pale honey-colored wood and
strewn with multicolored cushions in shades of green, red and blue. A large gold and red banner hung behind the small altar, embroidered with an image of Jesus holding his hand to his bleeding heart, his other hand held out toward a dove. There was no gloomy organ music, no dry coughs, no gluey stench of incense and burning candles, just the sun, light and clear, the salty whisper of a sea breeze through the open door, the sense of something living and breathing.

“Can you see why I make the journey out here?” Rosey asked him. “It's a cute little place, eh? Got something a bit special about it.”

Ralph sat down next to Rosey and, without even thinking about it, he closed his eyes. He let the background noise come to him. Small birds. Early evening cicadas. A moped turning a corner. The ocean. Rosey's steady breathing. The blood going through his head. And somewhere out of sight, to the side of the altar, a man clearing his throat, the chink of a coffee cup. He glanced at Rosey, took in her remarkable profile. Her eyes were closed and her head was slightly bowed. He remembered her touching her fingertips to her lips after their kiss last night. He wanted to touch her lips too, to echo her gesture and bring it back to life, but he knew deep inside that he wouldn't and that he couldn't. He ached for the need to hold her and explore her but he never would. There was too much at stake.

Instead he let his chin drop into his chest and then he found himself doing something remarkable; he found himself praying. It seemed so obvious all of a sudden. He was a man with issues, a man feeling lost and directionless, and here he was in a place, small, bright and still, where he could not just dwell on his state of mind but almost open a tiny door in his head and see what happened. And what happened was quite extraordinary.

As the silence drew out and his contemplation expanded into reverie, Ralph found himself talking to someone. It was not a conventional conversation, mainly because it was happening inside his head and because there were no words involved, but it had all the cadence and rhythm of conversation, the speaking and the listening, the pauses and the intonations. There were no questions and answers, just needs and silent reassurance. It was like having a massage, as though someone were silently kneading all the knots out of his psyche. It was a strange, gentle, overwhelming catharsis and through this odd jumble of emotions and sensations he felt something else: Rosey's hand curling around his on the pew between them. He opened his eyes and stared first at their entwined hands and then at her in surprise.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” He nodded.

“You sure?”

He nodded again and then realized, as he felt a wetness around his nostrils, that he was crying. He breathed in deeply, keen to take away the unexpected tears, but it was too late.

“You wanna talk about it, or would you rather just be?”

He smiled, pathetically, gratefully. “I'm okay,” he said. “I'm just, you know, it's okay. It's okay.”

She squeezed his hand one more time and then moved her hand back into her lap.

He glanced at his hand and then he shut his eyes, squeezing back deeply against the tears that he couldn't control. He tried to analyze this sudden onset of emotion, tried to work out where it had come from. What had been the trigger? And then he realized. It was just now, while he was praying, communing, contemplating, whatever the hell it was he'd been doing, he'd suddenly realized that everything was going to be all right. It
was easy! All he had to do was to take himself out of the center of absolutely everything. All he had to do was to surrender. Surrender himself to Jem, surrender himself to his family and surrender himself to his existence. But, in order to do all of that, first of all he needed to surrender himself to something else entirely, and he wasn't sure what that was, but he'd felt it just now and he thought, yes, he really did think, he could barely bring himself to formulate the concept, but it was there, it was real and he thought it might be God.

No! Not God! He shook the idea from his consciousness the second it started to implant itself. Not God. But something. Something bigger than just a one-syllable word, or a stupid bearded icon. Something wider and heavier and lighter and kinder and deeper and just better. He opened his eyes and stared into the eyes of Jesus Christ, picked out in lustrous silk stitching above the altar. No, he thought. It wasn't him. He turned to look at the images on the stained-glass windows, the birds and the butterflies, the trees and the faces of children. It wasn't even them. It was almost as if a voice that had been living deep inside him all his life was finally making itself heard. It was almost like discovering the truth of himself.

He turned to look at Rosey and realized with a start that she wasn't there, that he was all alone. He looked behind him and was about to leave the church when he noticed a row of votive candles on a wooden stand. Like everything else in this quirkily unconventional church, they were brightly colored, flickering like jewel-colored fireflies trapped in glass jars. There was a money jar on the stand and Ralph felt inside his jeans pockets for a handful of loose change. He dropped the coins, clink, clink, clink, then lit a candle for himself. He chose a blue jar, because the candle was for Blake. He stared into the dancing
blue light of the candle and he thought about his boy. He imagined the smell of him and the unformed feel of him in his arms, and for the first time he felt something primal inside him start to unfold its arms and its legs and slowly make itself known. For the first time he felt like Blake's dad.