After the Party (30 page)

He spooned the last of the porridge into Blake's eager mouth and scraped the mess from his face with the side of the spoon.

“Oh, thanks for doing that.” It was Jem, in the doorway, hair freshly washed, in jeans and a lavender cardigan. Scarlett was behind her in her pink tartan dressing gown, peering cheekily between her legs.

Ralph glanced at the well-fed baby, the empty cereal bowl, barely able to recall doing it. “That's all right,” he said, putting it in the sink and rinsing it out.

“That's three nights now.”

“Three nights of what?” Ralph felt unplugged from reality.
Now that Jem was in front of him, in the flesh, in her soft, almost childlike cardigan, it seemed even more unlikely to Ralph that there could be a mysterious, apologetic, flower-bearing man called Joel in her life.

“Blake,” she replied, helping Scarlett onto her chair and pulling another cereal bowl from the cupboard. “Three nights sleeping through. You know what that means?” She smiled at him, impishly.

“No,” he said in a voice that didn't sound like his own because it was so full of words he couldn't say. “What does it mean?”

“It means”—she curled her arm around his waist—“that we can go out and that I can get drunk and
go to bed late
and not worry about being woken up or giving him boozy milk. It means that you and I are
free
.” She kissed him on the cheek and Ralph thought that he could not remember the last time that Jem had voluntarily kissed him on the cheek. “So,” she said, “where shall we go? I was thinking . . . maybe our old stomping ground. Maybe a night out in Soho, a few pints, a curry?”

Ralph nodded distractedly. “Yeah,” he said, “why not?”

“Cool.” Jem tipped Scarlett's Shreddies into the cereal bowl and opened the fridge door. “I will call Lulu this morning, find out when she's free. And also, I was thinking I might ask her if she could take the kids for a couple of hours during the day this weekend, so you and I could go ring shopping?”

“Ring shopping?”

“Yes. A ring. For me.” She looked at him and laughed. “You hadn't even thought about it, had you?”

Ralph shrugged. He couldn't really remember anything he'd thought about at any point in his life before reading a text message from a man called Joel.

“An engagement ring. Doesn't have to be anything flash.”

“Er, yeah. Okay.”

“You all right?” asked Jem.

“Yeah.” Ralph pulled at the back of his neck with his right hand. “I'm just, you know, morning-brain.”

Ralph took his morning-brain into lunchtime and through to the afternoon. He simply could not form a reasonable thought in his head. Everything he tried to contemplate just got ricocheted back into his consciousness as the word “Joel.” When he heard Jem leaving the house that afternoon with a cheery “Bye, Ralph!” (another new development: in the past she'd just go, leaving nothing but the sound of a slammed door in her wake) he immediately left his studio and started hunting for more clues.

Without her phone he didn't really know where to start. He looked for evidence of flowers in vases, on tabletops, in bins and on the patio but found none. He opened and shut all of Jem's drawers in the chest in their bedroom, wondering what evidence he thought he would possibly find therein—a hastily hidden condom, a stack of love letters tied with silk ribbon? He accessed her email account and scrolled through her in-box, her deleted emails, her drafts and even her junk mail. He looked especially at emails sent and received around the time of her “business meeting” in the high heels, but there was nothing there. He glanced at her recent documents and found nothing. The whole concept of her affair seemed to be evaporating. Suddenly the little missive he'd seen that morning seemed totally without context.

He wondered how he would get to Jem's mobile phone without being caught red-handed and then, at the very moment that he thought it, he heard a ringing noise coming from somewhere beyond the kitchen. He followed the noise to the hallway and located the source in Jem's parka. She'd left her phone behind! He plucked the phone from her pocket and saw that it was
Lulu calling. He waited for the phone to go through to voice mail and then he opened up her messages. They were nearly all from Lulu. Lulu, Lulu, Lulu, Karl, Lulu, Mummy, Happy Days Nursery, Lulu, Lulu, Unknown. He clicked on unknown:

“Friday night sounds great. Let me have your address. Jx”

Let me have your address? Friday night?

With clammy fingers he flicked to the sent messages folder, looking for one to correlate with this one. And there it was. Thursday 17 April, 1:08 p.m:

“Hello! Thanks so much for yesterday. Scarlett had the best time EVER and won't stop talking about Jessica! It's my last night of single motherhood tomorrow, wondered if you wanted to help me celebrate with a curry and some beers at our place. Maybe 6ish, keep the girls up late? Let me know and I'll give you the details. J.”

Ralph stopped and sucked in a big lungful of air. Jem had invited a man here, while he was away. In Santa Monica. Jem had invited that man. THAT MAN. Of course! The man with the little girl. Jessica, that was her name! The man who'd given him such a funny look that day just after he got back from the States. That man who'd been watching him coming out of the church the other day. That man called Joel.

But no, surely not? I mean, there was nothing untoward in either text message and if you took the fact that Joel was a man out of the equation and pretended that he was a woman called, say, Julie, it would all seem perfectly innocuous. But he wasn't a woman called Julie, he was a man. A not particularly good-looking man, it had to be said. So maybe there was nothing to it. He came for supper. They had a beer or two, probably Jem's way of sticking her finger up at Ralph, metaphorically speaking, the children played together, Joel went home. But then he'd
obviously subsequently done something to upset Jem. There were flowers involved. He
missed her
. And now he was prowling about the place looking aggrieved. No, it was not innocuous. It was meaningful.

He switched off Jem's phone and slid it back into the pocket of her parka.

Then he scurried back upstairs to his studio, smoked a cigarette on his balcony, smoked another cigarette on his balcony and then, with his heart pounding like a piston in his chest, he wrote an email to the only person he felt he could talk to about this. He wrote to Rosey.

16 May 2008

Dear Ralph, I'm not quite sure what to say. First losing the baby and now this. I'm not sure that a confrontation is the way forward. As you say, you and Jem have a history when it comes to “snooping” and as the messages are so ambiguous you might just end up stirring up a load of trouble for nothing. I have a friend in London. Her name is Sarah Betts. She runs a prayer group near you. If you needed to off-load on someone completely neutral she might be just the person. Here's her email address.

Good luck.

Love, Rosey x

S
arah Betts was not what Ralph had been expecting. She had the voice of a sweet young southern belle, but the look of a hard-nosed City lawyer. She was also older than he'd expected and dressed in what looked oddly like bondage gear—rather shiny black leggings (she had very good legs for a woman of her age), a black brocade waistcoat, high boots in oxblood leather and an oversized Barbour coat that skimmed her ankles.

“I am not a Christian,” she said. “Not in the universally accepted definition of the word, at least.”

She swirled red wine around a large glass and beamed at him, revealing small, wine-stained teeth inside a slickly executed smile. They were sitting in a gastropub at midday. Ralph was sipping a Virgin Mary. He'd been taken aback by Sarah's request for a glass of wine, the clock hand not quite nudging twelve, but then, he mused, she had the look of a woman who subsisted largely on complex red wines.

“No,” she continued, probing an olive with a cocktail stick, “I gave up on that old game a long time ago. The church is full of donkeys. Like everything in this life, there are newer, better versions of faith out there and I found one I like. One that works for me. You know, like a new shampoo!” She leaned toward him as she said this and then laughed, a big pantomime belly laugh. Slowly she leaned back again into her chair and then she let her
smile dim a little and exhaled. “So, Ralph, would you care to enlighten me? Your note was oblique, to put it mildly.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. My friend Rosey gave me your email because she thought you might be able to . . .”

Sarah raised an eyebrow at him, encouragingly.

“Well, I've been feeling things. Strange things, for weeks, ever since I went to California, even before I went to California, really, and there just isn't anyone I can talk to about it. Jem, my partner, well, she's really strongly atheistic. She actually despises religion. And it's like there's this little door, inside my head, a little door I never knew was there and that somehow it got left open and now there's all this stuff getting in . . .”

“Stuff?”

“Yes, feelings, thoughts, spirituality. I've been sitting in this church, just around the corner, most days, just for five minutes and when I'm sitting there I feel moved and when I'm not there I kind of wish I was there. And even when I'm not there I'm full of all these ideas, all these emotions and I keep wanting to call it God, you know, but it's not God, it's more like . . .”

“Love?”

Ralph paused and flicked his gaze toward Sarah. “Yes,” he said, relief softening his voice, “yes, like love. But not like a specific love, not like a love for a wife or for a child, just a general feeling of . . . compassion, I suppose, something bigger than me, something I can't quite control. And I'd gotten myself to this point of feeling right with the world. I'd faced up to myself, looked at things I didn't like about myself, changed them, started to treat my wife with more respect and then . . .” He stopped for a moment, not sure what words to use. “Well, she got pregnant. We got pregnant. We've got a little baby, he's only a few months, so it certainly wasn't planned, you know, it was
an accident. And I was a bit surprised but ultimately I thought, yeah, a baby, fantastic. I wanted a chance to appreciate it because I wasn't that over the moon about the other two. I was kind of in denial both times. I suppose, in a way, I felt like this would be
my
baby. But Jem, well, she just totally wasn't up for it and then on Tuesday, she went to a clinic, and she got rid of it.”

Sarah's eyes widened slightly at this declaration. “She aborted the baby?”

“Well, no, she didn't. Not in the end. Turns out she'd already lost it. But she had the procedure anyway, to, you know, get it out of her.”

“The dead fetus?”

“Yes,” said Ralph, running a fingertip round and round the rim of his glass. “But I know she would have gone through with it. I saw her in the waiting room, through the window, before she knew the baby was already dead, and she was reading a fashion magazine. Literally, just reading it.”

“So you'd both agreed, had you, to having this abortion?”

Ralph shrugged. “Well, yeah. Up to a point. I let her take control. I let her choose, because it's her body and her life and because I love her so much. So I let her do it. She knew I didn't want her to do it. But I let her do it. And after she left that morning, for the clinic, I sat there, sat there with our baby just hoping and praying that she'd walk through the door and say she'd changed her mind, that she couldn't go through with it. I really thought she would, because she's soft like that. She's a soft person and I thought that once she was there, once she was right up against what it was she was about to do, she'd buckle, you know? But she didn't, so I put the baby in the car and I went to the clinic.”

“To stop her?”

“Yes. That's right. To stop her. And I kept looking at my baby in the back of the car, in the rearview mirror, and just feeling overwhelmed by the baby, by his innocence and his potential, and that he was completely oblivious to the fact that his mother was about to kill his sibling. I just thought, wow, in years to come people will say to you, so, have you got any brothers and sisters, and he'll say yeah, just the one, an older sister, and he'll never know that he should have had another, a little brother, a little sister, another piece of . . . family. And you know, it was one of the most shocking things I've ever seen. I can't get it out of my head—I looked through the window and she was sitting there reading a magazine, as though she were about to have her legs waxed, you know? And now Jem's just bouncing around like nothing ever happened, planning our wedding, the wedding I suggested because I thought it would make her feel more secure about having a third baby, and now that there is no baby I'm just not sure I've got the heart to go through with it anymore—not that I don't want to be married to her but that I just can't feel enthusiastic about it. It was for the baby. And now the baby's gone. And Jem's just carrying on as if everything is absolutely fine. But everything's
not
fine. It's not fine at all, and the longer it goes on with me pretending that I'm okay, the more knotted up I'm getting inside and the harder I'm finding it to be . . . to feel the way I'm supposed to feel, that way I want to feel.”

“You mean you're resentful?”

Ralph nodded. “Yes. I am. And it's bad. It's negative. So much of what was wrong between me and Jem for so long was about resentment, hers against me, and I've worked so hard to turn that round and now it's all starting up again and I don't know how to stop it.”

“Right.” Sarah drew herself up and spread her fingers out along the edge of the table. “There are a few issues there. You seem to be having trouble defining your spiritual path right now. You are battling to keep your marriage afloat. And you are mourning the loss of your baby. Added to which you are now feeling negative emotions at a time when you are desperate to stay positive.”