After the Party (22 page)

Imagine, she'd thought, if she had been more organized, she would have thrown away the potted plant and never known that it still had life. The same was true of her relationship with Ralph. It had been perfect. It had been everything that Jem could ever have wanted from love and from a partnership. She had not come closer in all her thirty-eight years to such perfection. She could not throw it away because it had lost its blooms.

And it was there, when she saw him for the first time, like the ripe green bulb in the plant pot, she knew it was still there. And then when she saw him holding Blake so close and so tenderly she'd felt it again, for the first time in months, in
years
, that dull ache of love for him in the pit of her belly.

She didn't tell him about her week; he barely told her about his. It didn't really seem to matter for now. And that night, of course, they went to bed together and they took off all their clothes and Jem didn't cry but definitely felt, on reflection, that it was a hundred times more fun than Rollerblading.

•  •  •

Jem didn't see Joel for nine days after Ralph came back from California. It was almost as if, because she had stopped thinking about him, he had ceased to exist.

For nine days she and Ralph had been on Best Behavior. They had spoken to each other in Pleasant Voices. They had Hugged in the Kitchen. They had Kissed in the Morning. There had been much Agreeable Conversation and Positive Mental Attitude.

Ralph, who acknowledged that he had the most ground to cover in making amends, had trimmed his working patterns to a more family-friendly shape. He now stayed behind after breakfast to clear the kitchen and spend some time chatting with Jem. He took Scarlett to nursery twice a week and at five o'clock he came down from his studio to have tea with the kids and, on occasion, to start preparing supper for himself and Jem. He went to the gym three times a week and he went to Tesco when it was required, and sometimes he just took Blake out for a walk in his stroller for an hour so that Jem could get some work done or simply have a bath.

These were all such small things, things that required no physical labor or mental effort, that cut no more than an hour
or two a day from his working schedule, but that made such a difference to the rhythm of Jem's days that she felt like a different person. This was what she'd always imagined having kids with Ralph would be like, that they would be a team, a unit, sharing the workload and making sure that they each got what they needed in terms of space and time.

Once, about two years earlier, pre-Blake, when things were better with Ralph, but not perfect, Jem had been walking down Oxford Street on her way to a meeting and had passed a young family. The parents were no more than thirty years old, both very attractive, both very trendy. Between them was a jogging stroller in which sat a sleeping toddler in cool clothes. The couple held one handle of the buggy each and had their spare arms slung over each other's shoulders, rendering the entire family into one solitary, impenetrable slow-moving unit.

Jem had felt oddly depressed at the sight of them. They were breaking the rules! Having convinced herself that it was impossible to maintain that level of affection and intimacy once you had a child, having persuaded herself that nobody was able to stay in love post-babies, she had felt the crutch of self-deception being ripped away from her. There they were, the perfect family unit, flaunting themselves and their intact relationship on Oxford Street for all to see. Look, they were saying, aren't we just the most perfect thing you ever saw, we never say mean things to each other, we have sex every night and our child is being brought up in an environment of tender, intimate love.

Jem had wanted to beat them round their smooth, smug faces.

But now, tentatively, slowly, she was feeling the possibility of that reality for herself. She and Ralph were yet to walk out in public attached limpetlike to each other and their children, and
possibly they never would, but the suggestion of that image, the suggestion of such familial harmony—it felt as if it were within her grasp.

Until one warm Monday afternoon, nine days after Ralph's return.

It was three thirty and Jem was at home, trying to word Karl's biography to send to the ITV people. It was harder than she'd expected, as so much of Karl's career was lightweight and meaningless, and trying to find words to give it form and substance was rather challenging. Ralph had taken Blake out to collect Scarlett from the nursery and was due back in ten minutes. The house was silent and empty. Jem decided to take a short break from the laptop and rounded the kitchen counter to fill the kettle for a cup of tea, but as she got there the doorbell rang. Assuming that Ralph had returned early and without his keys she tutted and made her way to the front door. There was a man-shaped movement just visible through the colored glass and the sound of a small girl's voice. It wasn't quite Ralph, and it wasn't quite Scarlett but Jem opened the door anyway, assuming that her eyes and ears had been deceiving her. And there, on the doorstep, were Joel and Jessica.

Joel grinned at her. “You live!” he said.

Jem smiled back at him quizzically.

“Hello,” she began, “I, er . . .”

“Yes, sorry to butt in unexpectedly, just, well, we were passing and I thought, funny how I haven't seen you around lately . . .”

“I know,” said Jem. “I thought that too. It's been a while.”

“Yes, and, I don't know, last time I saw you, well, anyway . . .” He seemed to have run out of reasons for his presence on her doorstep and looked slightly flustered. “How are you?” he said eventually.

“I'm great,” she said, wanting him to see without words that she was not the same person she'd been two weeks ago, that things had changed. “How are you?”

“Yeah”—he put his hand on Jessica's shoulder—“we're all right. You know. Struggling on.”

Struggling on
. Jem wondered at the choice of words. Struggling on. It sounded so . . . hard, so out of keeping with living a reasonably comfortable life in a modern country with all your basic needs provided for.

Sensing the awkwardness, Joel sighed deeply, almost a sigh of deep disappointment. “Anyway,” he said, “we were passing. Just wanted to check on you, make sure you're okay. Now that the
artist's
back.” He ended on a little laugh and Jem found it vaguely offensive. She no longer wanted to share spiky in-jokes about Ralph with a stranger. That wasn't funny anymore.

“I am,” she said, “I'm okay. Everything is okay.”

Joel squinted at her briefly, as though scrutinizing her. “Good,” he said, after a brief pause. “Well, anyway, nice to see you. Glad you're well, and we'll, er, see you around, no doubt.”

Jem turned up her smile. “No doubt.”

He guided Jessica away from the door with his hand on her shoulder and Jem was preparing to close the door when he suddenly turned back. “I saw him,” he said. “Just now. I saw your artist. I knew it was him because I recognized your baby.”

“Oh,” said Jem, “yes, right, on his way to collect Scarlett from nursery.”

“Ah, I see. Good,” he said. And then he went.

Jem closed the door behind him and let herself slump against it.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

Everything about that encounter had been wrong. She felt
itchy and awkward. A moment later she heard voices outside the front door and stood up straight, her heart racing slightly. But the voices belonged to her family, to Ralph, to Scarlett. She breathed in deeply and opened the door. “Boo!” she said.

Scarlett laughed and Ralph smiled. “What are you doing hiding behind the door?” he said.

“Ah, I was just so desperate to see you all that I decided to sit by the door until you got back.” She kissed Scarlett on the mouth and ran her hands over her curly mop. “Did you have a nice day?” she asked.

“No,” said Scarlett.

“Oh, why's that?”

Scarlett shrugged dismissively, and headed past her toward the kitchen. “Can't remember,” she said. “Can I have a fairy cake?”

Ralph and Jem smiled knowingly at each other. Everything with Scarlett was on a need-to-know basis. “Who did we just see?” he called out after Scarlett's retreating figure.

“I don't know,” Scarlett called back.

“Just now?” called Ralph. “About one minute ago. Who did we see?”

“Nobody!” called Scarlett.

Ralph raised his eyebrows in exasperation. “A FRIEND of yours?”

“I CAN'T REMEMBER!” Scarlett cried out angrily.

Ralph shook his head and smiled, defeated. “Did we see a girl called JESSICA?” he shouted.

“YES!” snapped Scarlett. “But it doesn't MATTER!”

Ralph and Jem smiled again. “Anyway,” he said quietly, “yes. We just saw a friend of hers called Jessica. Jessica seemed very pleased to see Scarlett, and Scarlett seemed not quite so pleased to see Jessica.”

“That sounds about right,” said Jem, trying to keep her nerves from her voice.

“Who is she? Is she from nursery?”

“No,” said Jem, “no, they play together at the playground sometimes.”

“Ah,” said Ralph. “Anyway, her dad seemed a bit . . .
strange
.”

Jem looked away. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, looked at me really weirdly. Like he thought I was stealing the kids, or something. Like he didn't trust me.”

Jem shrugged and began to unpop the buttons of Blake's sling. “Probably just never seen you with them before. Probably just thought I was a single mother.” She winked at him so he would know she was only teasing.

“Yeah,” said Ralph, “probably. Still, funny bloke. I mean, why would he even care?”

Jem didn't answer this question. It didn't appear to require a response and anyway, she had absolutely no idea what she would say.

A
s he'd always half-suspected but refused to acknowledge, Ralph was just as productive in his new truncated days as he had been when he'd allowed himself the luxury of infinite flowing hours in his studio. He just didn't smoke as many cigarettes or drink as many cups of tea or spend as much time on his balcony staring mindlessly into the distance. Neither did he spend the first two hours of his working day on his laptop farting around on the internet or a whole hour at lunchtime reading the
Guardian
online. Now he started his mornings with a small moment of meditation and prayer before turning himself toward his latest canvas and starting to paint.

He was painting some angel's trumpets now, from photos he'd taken in Santa Monica. They were extraordinary flowers, overlarge and unlikely, almost obscene, but tumbling en masse over walls and doors and walkways, juxtaposed against Californian shades of cobalt and whitewash and faded prom-night peach, they were magnificent. As Ralph stared at the image on his wall now, in this watery English light, he could almost smell the warm air and feel the sticky pavement beneath his feet. But did he want to be there? No, not now, because if there was one thing he realized more than anything—and it sounded corny, but it was true—the only place he really wanted to be was where his family was, and right now that place was here, in a small
road of terraced houses in London SE24, in a nice little Edwardian house with original art nouveau features and a kitchen that needed an extension. It wasn't glamorous and it wasn't aspirational, it was just a house in a road, but it was his house, his road, his postcode and his family, and until life changed direction and unforeseen moments collided and showed his family a new path to take, then this was where they would stay.

It was a warm morning. Jem was taking Scarlett to nursery. Ralph was going for a run. Running was an activity that Ralph had always viewed with some suspicion. There were three women who ran past Ralph and Jem's bedroom window every single morning at 6:45 a.m. exactly. In the winter months this would occur in pitch blackness and be utterly unthinkable to Ralph. Why, he wondered, would anyone peel themselves from a warm bed, pull on a pair of leggings and pound the streets in the dark? Even during more civilized hours it struck Ralph as a slightly unnatural thing to do. If an alien were to land in Herne Hill, sit himself at a sidewalk table outside a café and look around himself at humanity, after a while he might think he had worked out what was going on, and then someone in neoprene would run past, pat-pat-pat, ears plugged with white wires, eyes staring blankly ahead, and throw the alien completely off course.

But then spring had happened and the idea of cloistering himself away in the windowless, strip-lit obscurity of the gym had lost its appeal and Ralph had put his prejudices to the back of his mind and his sneakers to the pavement and become a born-again runner.

He loved the feel of his feet against the pavement and the music in his ears. He loved the searing coldness of the air being dragged into his lungs and shot out again. And he especially
loved the sense of being both part of humanity and yet removed from it by speed, by mission.

He left the house at eleven that morning, the precise point in every day when his post-breakfast energy levels began to sag, and he turned his face in amazement to the warmth of the sun. Finally the early outposts of summer were staking their ground and Ralph still had most of his Californian tan. He popped his earphones in and switched on his iPod and began to run. Ralph rarely took the same route twice; this part of London was too unknown to him, there was too much to explore. He had not wanted to live here at all when they'd begun house-hunting in earnest five years ago. Jem had dragged him here kicking and screaming and ranting about weird postcodes (“SE24! SE24! We might as well move to Denmark and be done with it!”) and proximity to Brixton (“You seriously want to raise a family in
Brixton
? Are you
serious
?”) and lack of proximity to various friends and landmarks, which had never appeared to be as important to him as when he was threatened with imminent departure from the hallowed ground of Battersea. He'd hated every house she'd brought him to see on pure principle and had agreed only grudgingly to making an offer on the one where they now lived due to the fact of Jem's being seven months pregnant and having already moved out of the flat in Lurline Gardens.