After the Party (36 page)

“What is this place?” said Scarlett.

“It's a good place,” said Ralph, stroking the tangled crown of her head. “It's a very good place indeed. It's a place where people come who are feeling cross or sad or unhappy, so that they can feel better.”

“Like a hospital?” said Scarlett.

“Yes, like a hospital. But without medicine and needles and knives. Do you like it?” he asked.

Scarlett considered the question for a moment. “No,” she said eventually, “I don't. It's scary. And it's cold.”

Ralph smiled and rubbed her head again and then together they lit a candle for Nanny Joan, Ralph's mum, and for the cat they'd seen get run over on Brixton Hill over a year ago that Scarlett still talked about to this day. By the time they left the little church a few minutes later, Ralph was calm again, strong and ready to enjoy a morning out with his children.

A
ccording to Lulu, this is what had happened the night before.

They had left Soho House at 2 a.m., apparently the last people there as the management frantically tried to close the place up for the night. The group of fruity young men who had been pestering them all night had gone in one direction, living as they all did in north and east London, and Jem and Lulu went in the other direction. They walked for an hour, trying and failing to locate a cab. They walked, in fact, all the way to Vauxhall Bridge, where they stood for a while on the side of the bridge admiring the lights on the thick black water of the Thames below and sharing a spliff that one of the fruity young men had given them as a parting gift.

On the other side of Vauxhall Bridge, two men had approached them. One was Joel, the other was (despite Jem drunkenly insinuating that he was actually a rent boy that Joel had picked up from under the arches at Charing Cross) Joel's son, Lucas. “The most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life,” said Lulu. “Crazy beautiful. Brown skin. Green eyes. Dark hair. Made me want to
weep
.” The two men were on their way back from a gig in Camden and had been dropped by a friend on the north side of the bridge to make the rest of their way home together.

“Isn't this just, like, the biggest coincidence ever?” Jem had demanded. “No, I mean, really, what are the chances, what are the chances?” Not just once, apparently, but over and over again. “I am very drunk,” she had then declared. “And also a bit stoned.”

They'd walked toward Camberwell New Road, the four of them and Jem had—oh yes, she had—
linked arms
with Joel. Like he was her best friend. Or her boyfriend.

“Honestly, Jem,” Lulu said when Jem began to wail down the phone at her over this revelation, “it was nothing. You were just being silly. He knew that. It's not as if you went to a hotel with him or anything.”

“No, but, God, the last thing I want to do is give him the wrong impression.
Again
.”

“It wasn't like that. It really wasn't. I'd have told you if it was.”

They'd finally flagged down a cab and Lulu could remember very little about what they'd talked about. Except this: “So, your partner,” Joel had said, “not the sort of bloke I'd have expected to be a churchgoer.”

“A what?” Jem had exclaimed.

“Church,” Joel had repeated. “I've seen him a couple of times, visiting that little chapel on Underwood Street. Are you a believer too?”

“Er, no, sorrysorrysorry,” Jem had interjected with her hands in front of her body, “I think you might be talking about the wrong person.”

“No, definitely not. Definitely your partner. He runs, yeah?”

“Er, yes.”

“Well, then, it's him, definitely, halfway through a run, both times I've seen him, stops at the chapel, stays about five minutes, then he comes out.”

“Whoa,” Jem had said, waving her hands again, almost trying to shoo the weirdness away from herself. “This is freaking me out. You are telling me that you have seen my boyfriend going into a church?”

“Er, yeah,” Joel had said, “and I must say I had no idea it would cause such a stir. I mean, I assumed that you must know. Generally that's the sort of thing that a person knows about the person they live with.”

Jem shook her head, very slowly. “No,” she'd said, “no. I had no idea at all. I suppose . . .” but then she'd trailed off. Lulu didn't know what she'd been about to say and Jem certainly had no recollection of her thought processes at the time. But the conversation had quickly descended into a battle of wits as each of them tried to outdo the other with amusing takes on the situation: the possibility that the chapel was a cover for a whorehouse, that he was peeing in the font, drinking the holy water or raiding the poor box.

The one possibility that nobody put forward was that he'd gone in there to pray.

•  •  •

Churches disturbed Jem. They were fine for weddings and funerals and christenings, but beyond that she could not find a reason for them. If someone wanted a place to think or to evaluate or just to be, what was wrong with a park bench or a library or a seat on the top deck of a bus? The Church, as far as Jem was concerned, in all its many forms, was an anachronism. And the sort of people who felt the need to be in a church, or worse still, to be a
part
of a Church, struck her as weak and unimaginative. And if she was wrong and there was, in fact, one divine being who sat and oversaw the whole massive, dirty sprawl of humanity, would he really want to watch them sitting in expensive-to-maintain
old buildings, singing dreary songs and reading and rereading and rereading again the same dry old stories from the same dry old book, over and over and over? Would he not, in fact, just want to see them getting on with their lives, loving each other, having a laugh, raising their families, building things, inventing things,
evolving
? No, Jem was not a fan of God, or of organized religion, or of churches or of handing over your destiny to the promise of something impossible to comprehend. Jem was a fan of people and of real life. She was a fan of the inexplicable and the magical and the romantic. She was a fan of chaos and coincidence and random possibility. She didn't want answers and she didn't want salvation. She just wanted to live her life, in the order in which it came, and then to die, knowing that her time here had been well spent. No more than that. Why, she'd always wondered, did people feel a need for anything else? Wasn't life enough? And now it wasn't just nameless, faceless “people” she was questioning, it was Ralph. Her Ralph. Ralph whom she'd known for eleven years. Ralph who'd always had the spirituality of a forklift truck. Ralph who drank and smoked and slept with unsuitable women and railed against family life and referred to people of faith as “God-botherers.”
That
Ralph.

As she lay there, feeling last night's booze fizzing through her veins and the itch and crawl of a thousand tiny moments of remorse (she felt, in retrospect, that she had behaved quite badly), Jem hoped for an easy answer.

Please, she thought, let Ralph have been pissing in the font.

R
alph had a vivid and awful dream that night. It woke him at 3 a.m., cold and clammy, entirely unsettled. He'd dreamed he was in his studio, dark and foreboding, the walls daubed with obscene flowers, himself curled in the corner, pale and gaunt, Jem, looming above him, too thin, too loud, vacuous, overbright. Where are the babies?
I gave them away
. Who to?
I don't know. Here, have a toke on this
.
.
. a spliff the size of a salami, its tip burning ugly red. And then getting to his feet, the floors made of sponge, running to his balcony, the metal cage falling away as he jumped onto it, coming away from the walls and falling, falling, slowly but too fast toward the patio below, and then he felt a song, it sounded like birdsong, simple, repetitive, three notes, la, laaa, lo. He let the song out and he squeezed hard on the rail of the unfettered balcony as if it might keep him from falling, la laaa lo, la laaa lo. And as the melancholic song came from him he felt the picture change. He saw himself leap to his feet on the patio, light and nimble, and then run across the tiny garden, vault across the garden wall and there, on the other side, instead of more gray houses and the backs of the shops, was space. Green, verdant rolling meadows; llamas, deer, birds of paradise, people in white smocks, sitting in circles, holding hands; heaven, nirvana. He looked behind him for Jem, but she wasn't there. Neither was the garden wall,
neither was the house. But then, across the meadow, he could see two small figures, dark-haired and dressed in white. His children! They smiled when they saw him and they ran toward him and Ralph's song came faster now, joyful, tuneful and pure. He watched himself capture his children in his arms and hold them to him and then, suddenly, he opened his eyes and he was back in his bed, clutching the edge of the duvet with his fingertips and the children were gone and the meadow was gone and so was his song.

•  •  •

“Not every issue is a problem,” Gil began. “Not every worry is a concern. Not every closed door is a rejection and not every thwarted plan is a disaster. The most important thing is to separate the real from the perceived problem. The important thing is to waste not a second of your precious given life contemplating the things that you cannot change and that do not need to be changed. Choose your battles, choose your worries, and think now. Think now about your deepest fear, your realest worry. Feel it fill your heart until you fear for the lasting damage.”

Ralph looked around him at the other members of the prayer group and did as he was told. He sucked the thought of Jem's mysterious flowers, the lost baby, the magazine in the waiting room, his inability to contemplate having sex with her, his growing hatred of his Californian flower paintings, the fact of the sense of impending doom that seemed to accompany his every movement of late and let it sit there for a moment. And it felt like a train crash in his soul.

“Hold it there!” he heard Gil implore from the podium at the front of the room. “Hold it there until it almost kills you!”

He let the feeling of fear and despondency grow and grow inside him, this awful feeling that he'd been trying so hard to
avoid for days now, this terrible lurch in the pit of his belly, and he let it almost subsume him until he felt that he wanted to peel off his own skin and throw himself bodily through the window.

“There!” shouted Gil. “There it is. Now tell yourself this: God loves me. I have nothing to fear. God loves me. I have nothing to fear. Say it out loud. Say it again. Say it LOUD!”

And Ralph did say it. He said it quietly at first, not entirely sure even if he believed the words he was saying. But each time he said it he felt belief suffuse him. Yes, God DID love him and no, he had nothing to fear. He and Jem would be fine! Love would pull them through. God would pull them through. In a few weeks he and Jem would be married. His exhibition of California flowers would be over. If he could just hold on to this feeling, this strength, then everything would be all right. He felt the faith of the dozen other people in the room pulsing through him and he felt the sick dread in his belly start to abate. Sarah, who was standing next to him, placed a cool hand against his and glanced at him, reassuringly. He smiled at her. And then he shouted again: God loves me! I have nothing to fear!

•  •  •

“How was that, boy?” Gil boomed into his ear as the group dispersed half an hour later.

“Yeah,” said Ralph, “it was good.” He was still feeling slightly shaken after what he fully believed to be his first real religious experience.

“Not too frightening then, eh?”

“No,” said Ralph, “I was scared, and then I was . . . safe.”

“Good,” nodded Gil, “that's good. And here, now, Sarah tells me that you are an artist?”

Ralph nodded.

“Much like myself then. Though I would classify myself as
more of a painter than an artist. What interests you then, man? What do you paint about?”

Ralph wondered at his choice of words: “paint about.” He'd never heard it put like that before but the phraseology interested him. Because he didn't paint “about” anything. He just painted.

“Still life,” he said, “flora, mainly. But I'm drawing to the end of that phase. I don't want it to be just a job anymore. I want it to mean something again.”

Gil looked at him and nodded his head slowly up and down. “It's got to mean something,” he agreed. “Everything's got to mean something. Here, you should come to my place. I paint in my shed. It's a magic shed.” He winked, but didn't smile. “Bring a canvas. We can paint together. See if we can't find a meaning for you, boy.”

“Where do you live?”

“Ah,” he said, almost sadly, “just there, just behind this hall.”

“On that estate?”

“Yes, on that estate. Been there forty years, since those buildings were fresh out of the box. I have a little house, a little garden. I have a little shed. I like my neighbors. It'll do. Anyway, what do you say? Come over. We'll paint together, man. Eh? What do you say?”

Ralph looked at the strong, handsome old man and smiled. “Yes,” he said, “yes. Definitely. That would be amazing.”

I
t was hot enough for outdoor swimming the following day, and after collecting Scarlett from nursery Jem took the children to the public pool in Brockwell Park. She was wearing a yellow sundress with a shirred bodice and shoestring straps and apple-green Havaianas flip-flops and her hair was tied up messily on top of her head. Underneath her sundress she wore a bikini. It was a bikini she had not worn for almost five years and, at some points during the weeks following the births of both her children, had thought she would never wear again. Her stomach was not what it was, but this was Brockwell Lido, not the pool at the Mondrian, and she knew that there would be others in a far worse state than her.