After the Party (37 page)

Her footsteps were heavy as she pushed the stroller up the hill toward the park. She'd cooked Ralph a nice meal the night before and made sure to sit and eat it with him, although she hadn't felt hungry. He'd returned from an early evening run looking bright and almost freakishly happy. He'd kissed her on the crown of her head and hummed a tune under his breath. She'd tried to engage him in a conversation about their wedding plans. They'd barely discussed the wedding in recent weeks. Jem had bought dresses for herself and Scarlett, both eBay bargains, and they'd posted their banns and booked the registry office, but they hadn't discussed the logistics: how would they
get there, where would they spend the night before, the night after, where would they eat, how much would they spend, who would take the children?

She'd drawn up a list, a checklist, and presented it to Ralph. He cast his eye fleetingly over it and said, “I thought we'd decided all this?”

“No,” Jem had said, “not the details. Not yet.” Jem poured herself a glass of wine and let half of it splash into the depths of her empty stomach before picking up her cutlery and starting to eat.

“So,” she'd said eventually, “what do you think?”

“I think it all sounds fine.”

“But what do you think about having the reception at the Soho Hotel? I thought it would be nice, you know, a reference to our history, the old days.”

“Brilliant,” he'd said brightly, his gaze shifting from the wedding plans to the newspaper.

“And you're all right to go into Hatton Garden next Saturday, to get our wedding bands.”

“What are wedding bands?”

She rolled her eyes. “You know,” she said, “wedding rings.”

“Yeah. Cool. Sounds great.” He smiled at her again. It was a full smile that showed all his teeth yet it seemed strangely hollow.

Eventually she'd said: “Ralph, do you actually have any interest in this wedding, at all?”

He'd looked up then and squinted at her. “Of course,” he'd said, surprisingly softly. “Absolutely. How about you?”

Jem threw him a look of bemusement. “Well, I'd hardly be sitting here with a bullet-pointed to-do list if I wasn't interested in our wedding, would I?”

“No, I don't mean the wedding. I mean, getting married. Do you still want to go through with it?”

A small moment of silence passed while Jem digested the question.

“Go through with it?” she said eventually. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you still want to marry me?”

“Of course I do! Why on earth would you ask a question like that?”

Ralph had shrugged. “I don't know really,” he said, “I suppose I was just checking. It's getting close now but not so close that you can't change your mind.”

“God, Ralph, I'm not going to change my mind! Why on earth would I change my mind? I mean, we're getting married, you and I, parents of our children, long-term partners, soul mates, et cetera. What's there to change my mind about?”

“But are we?” he asked, circling his fingertip around a mark on the tabletop. “Are we still soul mates?”

Jem had sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Ralph, what's the matter with you?”

“Nothing's the matter with me. I'm feeling fine. I'm just giving you an opportunity, that's all, an opportunity to change your mind.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Jem had laughed nervously, “but I don't particularly want an opportunity to change my mind. I want to get married. Plain and simple. The end.”

“Cool, then,” he'd said, “that's cool. Because I want to get married too. I really do, and I'd hate it if you were going through with it just out of a, out of a . . . sense of duty, you know.”

Then he'd gotten to his feet and loaded his empty plate into the dishwasher. “Thank you for dinner,” he'd said, politely. “It
was really delicious. I'm going back to my studio. I'll see you later.” He'd dropped a kiss onto her cheek then, just to prove that there were no hard feelings. But Jem had felt it, in his kiss, the cool detachment. And it had chilled her to the bone.

•  •  •

The pool was, unsurprisingly for such a perfect day, heaving. She laid towels out in the shade of the small angular Deco buildings that formed the perimeter of the pool and then she started the arduous process of readying the spot for the use of a baby and a toddler. She emptied a small bag of toys onto the towel and then she took Blake from the stroller and stripped him and covered his small fat body in thick cream. She then forced his fat legs awkwardly into a very snug-fitting swimming nappy and then into a pair of trunks she'd bought from the Gap just after she'd found out she was having a boy (miniature Hawaiian print trunks being one of the few things she could think of that was cute about boys' clothes). She topped him off with a hat and then repeated the same process with her daughter, this time helping her into a swimsuit she'd insisted on being bought in Woolworth's half an hour ago that was a very slimy nylon affair with a picture of Ariel, the Disney mermaid, on the front. She puffed into a pair of
Finding Nemo
armbands and slid them up Scarlett's skinny arms and then she topped her off too with a hat and an extra blob of sun cream on the end of her nose, which had burned last summer and which Jem still felt deep guilt about.

Then she set about removing her own clothes, keeping her gaze very much in short range, not wanting to discover that she was in fact surrounded by nubile Danish au pair girls and the crème de la crème of the local yummy mummy brigade. She rolled her elasticized dress quickly down her stomach and let it fall to the floor, where she stepped out of it and was about
to squirt some sun cream onto her stomach when she heard a familiar squeal.

“Scaaaar-lett!” And there was Jessica, in a sensible navy swimsuit, the type that girls had always worn when Jem was a child, and a pair of goggles hanging around her neck. “Scaaaar-lett!”

Scarlett eyed her up and down, circumspectly.

“Hello, Jessica!” said Jem, greeting her with extra cheerfulness, to compensate for Scarlett's reticence. “Scarlett, say hello to Jessica!”

Scarlett mumbled something under her breath and Jessica skipped happily from foot to foot, oblivious to Scarlett's lack of effusiveness.

“Scarlett, come swimming with me! It's so cold! But it's so fun! Come now! Come now!”

Jem slid her sunglasses onto her head. “Where's your dad?” she asked, as breezily as she could.

“He's at home! He's working!”

“Oh,” said Jem, feeling relieved. “You with your mum?”

“No,” said Jessica. “No. I'm not with my mum. I'm with my brother. Look!” She pointed behind her to a spot on the other side of the pool. “He's called Lucas! He's my big brother! Come on Scarlett, let's SWIM!” She grabbed Scarlett's hand and dragged her toward the shallow end of the pool.

Jem put her hands to her hips and glanced across the water. Lucas smiled lazily at her and raised his hand to his head in a gentle salute. Jem put up a hand too and felt the color drain from her face.

He was dressed in oversized swimming shorts in a sludgy green color that set off the caramel tones of his skin. His hair was shorn and he had sunglasses on his crown and even though he was sitting with his arms wrapped around his bent knees, his hairless stomach was smooth and flat.

Jem felt mortification on two distinct levels. The first was born of the fact that the last time she had seen this man she had been the most drunk she had been in over four years, had probably stunk of booze and stale tobacco and had been linking arms with his dad. The second was that looking at him made her feel old. His gloss and vigor, his direct gaze, his sheer unapologetic youth—she knew that to his eye she was pointless. To Lucas she was just that nutty woman who got into a cab with him and his dad two weeks ago. She was not a girl. Jem's father referred to any woman of his age or younger as a “girl.” A girl, basically, was any woman that a man would have an interest in sleeping with, either real or theoretical. A “girl” was therefore entirely objective.

She sat down and busied herself with Blake, who had started to whimper ominously in a manner that suggested that he had just discovered that he DID NOT LIKE THE POOL (taking small children to new places was always a bit like Russian roulette).

“He's hot,” said a male voice, by her right ear. “I'll take him in the pool for you, if you like, cool him down?” Lucas beamed at her and yes, his teeth were white as ivory and very straight. Jem and Blake both gazed at him for a second. “Would you like that, little guy?” he said, tickling the soft pink soles of Blake's feet. Blake gazed at him for a moment longer and then he smiled. “I'll take that as a yes then.” Lucas smiled at Blake and then smiled at Jem. “If that's all right with your mummy, of course?”

Jem stared at him, agog. She had no idea what to say. Lucas spoke with a soft northern accent and when he smiled, which he did a lot, his green eyes literally twinkled. There was something about him, Jem suddenly realized, that reminded her of Ralph. When he was younger. When she'd first met him. The beauty of him, the leanness of him, the sweet simplicity of him.

She found her tongue and she said, “Er, yeah, okay, sure. If it's okay with you?”

He directed his smile at Blake and said, “Come on then, buddy, fancy a dip?”

Blake didn't protest at all as Lucas bore him toward the water. Jem watched anxiously from the side. She had only taken Blake swimming at the indoor pool, where the water was tepid. She waited for Blake to yelp with horror as his naked feet hit the cold water, but his face registered nothing but pure delight as Lucas splashed him inch by inch into the shallow end.

It occurred to Jem that she should be worried. She may well have spent forty minutes in the company of this man two weeks ago but she had no recollection of it and now she'd allowed him to carry her one and only son off into a swimming pool. A picture zipped through her mind: Lucas smiling malevolently at Blake as he slowly forced his head under the water and held him there wriggling until . . . Jem shook it from her head. Jem had spent her whole life trusting first and asking questions later, and her instincts (with a few dishonorable exceptions) had always proved to be spot on. And her instincts about this young man were good. He was good. And Blake was loving him.

Lucas spent a full fifteen minutes in the pool with Blake before finally bringing him back to Jem. Jem was so busy staring at her darling son, at his bonny face and his swirls of wet dark hair and the mound of his fat, shiny belly over the drawstring of his colorful shorts, that she didn't really register the fact of Lucas's own wet, shiny skin, gleaming like French-polished walnut in the lunchtime sun. And when she did she caught her breath.

She put her arms out for her cold baby and wrapped him swiftly in the thickest of the three towels she had brought. She
bundled him onto her lap and cuddled him to her, letting the sun and her body heat bring him back to room temperature.

“Thank you,” she said to Lucas, who was squatting by her side.

“No worries,” he said, “we had a gas, didn't we, little man?” He rubbed the top of Blake's head and smiled his strip-light smile again.

This was the point at which Lucas would head back to his spot on the other side of the pool, if he intended to, but a moment passed and he didn't. “So,” he said, falling from his haunches and onto his butt. “You get home all right the other night?”

Jem flinched and blanched. “Oh, Jesus,” she began. “You know,” she said, feeling total honesty would be the best approach, “I do not remember you at all.”

“And you just let me take your son and heir for a swim?” said Lucas, one of his eyebrows arching suspiciously, before he laughed to let her know he was teasing.

“No, really,” continued Jem, “the only reason why I know I've ever met you before is because my sister told me about it the next day. Seriously, otherwise I would have been at a loss.”

“But would you have still let me take your baby in the pool?” he teased again.

“Yes, probably.” Jem smiled. “I'm kind of a trusting person. And I knew you were Jessica's brother and Joel's son. So you came recommended.”

“Yeah.” He turned and squinted into the sun. “I love kids. Can't wait to have a few of my own.”

Jem frowned. “Oh, but not yet,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “why not? If the right woman came along. I'm coming up twenty-five. I'm not a kid anymore, but I wouldn't mind being a young dad.”

“Like your dad, you mean?”

“Yeah.” Lucas drew his arms around his knees and surveyed the pool, his eyes looking for Jessica, then finding her and turning back to Jem. “Yeah. Not that he was a dad in that way. I mean, he wasn't there. But he's my dad now and it's cool, it's good that he's young. So what about you, you must have started out young?”

Jem looked at Lucas, looked at her baby, looked at Scarlett, looked at Lucas again. She could not judge his comment. Was he teasing her again? Was he visually impaired? Or was he, heaven forfend, flirting with her? She decided to play it straight, hopefully to extinguish anything playful between the pair of them. “Bless you,” she said, “but no. I was a very old lady when I became a mother.”

“Well, then, what? You can't be more than thirty, tops? That's not old.”

“I'm going to be thirty-nine in October,” she said.

Lucas let his jaw drop and stared at her agog. “No way,” he said.

“Yes way, sadly,” said Jem.

“Well”—he held up the palm of his hand for a high-five—“in which case you must have one of those paintings in your attic. Because you do not look that old. No way.”

Jem smiled and said thank you and made a fuss of taking Blake out of his wet trunks. This was uncanny. This was silly. This was not what she had expected when she'd left the house this morning. She unpopped a carton of raisins and tipped them onto the towel in front of Blake, who started plucking them one by one like a human skill crane and popping them robotically into his mouth.