After the Party (40 page)

Ralph felt so small compared with Gil; he felt ratty and half formed, an insubstantial creature of small mind and limited vision. His mind was shrunken and desiccated. He'd been bursting over with creative energy when he left the Royal College, the star of his year. And then just before he'd gotten together with Jem, when he'd been crazy in love with her but not allowed to have her, he'd found it again, found the essence of himself. But he was lazy and he was fearful by nature, and he'd let it go again.

Maybe this was his third chance, right here, right now, in this place.

He faced his canvas and he let go of everything, everything that had held him back for the past ten years, and he opened his mind, as wide as it would go. He was not painting from life or from a photograph, he was painting from deep down inside him and he waited a beat to see what he would find, and he was about to pick out a color when Gil began to sing. It was loud and it was alarming. He sang without words and without tune. Ralph threw him a quick look.

“You can sing too, if you like,” said Gil, pulling open his own paint box. “Sing a song of your soul. Sing as loud as you like, boy, there's nobody here but me.” Gil smiled at him, his ice-blue eyes bright and open. “Go on, boy, sing!”

So Ralph did. He felt the sounds rise up through him, from deep down in his heels, from the very bowels of himself, and he let them out and there it was, there was his song, light and rosy and sweet as raspberries. As he sang, his hand unconsciously found the deepest, berry-est red in his palette and he squeezed it onto his paint board and thrust a wide brush into it and he let
the brush make marks on his canvas and the feeling as his soft wet brush hit the tense fabric was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. It felt like a sheer bloody miracle.

He sang and he painted and over the next hour his canvas took form and life.

And when an hour and a half later he felt he'd finished, he put down his brushes and he cried tears of utter joy.

•  •  •

Ralph brought his painting home from Gil's the following morning. He'd timed it so that he would return while Jem was dropping Scarlett at nursery, but when he got home at just after nine o'clock, Scarlett was sitting on the bottom step looking puce and tearful, Blake was strapped into his stroller looking confused and Jem was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea.

“What's going on?” said Ralph.

“Oh, indeed,” said Jem, getting to her feet. “We are currently experiencing a marathon naughty step protest. It has been, ooh, nearly twenty-five minutes since Scarlett was put there and she is still refusing to say sorry.”

“What did you do, Scarlett?” asked Ralph.

“Nothing!” she snapped.

Jem raised her eyebrows and tutted. “She threw her cereal bowl. On the floor. On purpose.”

“I did not!”

Jem sighed again. “I then asked her to help me clean it up, at which point she smooshed it in with her shoe. So onto the naughty step and still no apology and now we are late for nursery.”

Scarlett stared at Ralph beseechingly as if she thought he might somehow be able to save her from the cruelty of her mother. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, “you're on your own with
this one. You need to apologize to Mummy or else you will be spending the rest of the day on that uncomfortable stair. When you could be at nursery playing with your friends.”

“I don't like nursery,” she snapped, and then turned to face the wall. Ralph and Jem exchanged a glance and Jem rolled her eyes. This was the great flaw of the naughty step. It was no good at times when getting out of the house in a timely fashion was required.

“What's that?” said Jem, glancing at the cloth-covered canvas by the stairs.

“A painting,” he said.

“Oh, right. Where from?”

“Oh, nowhere, just one I've been working on.”

“Out of the studio?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see it?”

“Erm, no,” said Ralph.

“What, seriously?”

“Yes,” said Ralph tersely, “seriously. It's not finished.”

“Okay, but can I see it when it is finished?”

“Yeah, sure. And listen, Scarlett, if you say sorry to your mummy and help her clean up the cereal, I might just think about taking you to nursery this morning.”

She turned from the wall and stared at him. “Just us?” she asked. “Not Blake?”

He got visual confirmation from Jem that this would be acceptable and turned back to her. “Yeah,” he said, “just us. But first you have to say sorry to Mummy and then you have to go into the kitchen and help her clean up your mess. Okay?”

“Okay!” She leaped to her feet and threw her arms breezily around Jem. “Sorry, Mummy,” she said, “I'll never do it again!”
Then she hurtled into the kitchen and pulled a length of paper towels from the roll on the table and started mopping away at the spilled milk and Shreddies on the floor.

“You jammy bastard!” Jem mouthed at Ralph.

“What can I say?” He shrugged at her nonchalantly and smiled smugly. “I've got the magic touch.”

“Ha! Well, for that,” she cried triumphantly, “I am going to look at your mysterious painting”

The smile fell from Ralph's lips, but Jem didn't notice. “No!” he shouted, as her hand reached for the cloth that covered it.

“Yes!” she retorted, playful still. “I want to see it!”

“No,” he said, harder this time and holding one of her small wrists in his hand, slightly too hard.

“Yes,” said Jem, cross that he was using physical force to stop her fun and more determined than before to see what was on the canvas. She pulled her hand from Ralph's tight grip and then she pulled the fabric from the canvas and then she stopped and stared for just a moment, unsure what to say.

From the kitchen came Scarlett's small, cross voice: “Mummy! You said you'd help me! I can't do it by myself!”

“I'll be in in a minute,” she said, her eyes still glued to the image in front of her.

It was . . . well, it was
rubbish
. It was the sort of thing that an eighteen-year-old boy who'd just had his heart broken might have painted after smoking a big spliff. It was ugly, full of crass symbolism, smears of red paint, shapes that looked like they might be hearts, children, flowers, houses, black spots, ugly faces, but you couldn't quite be sure, just a huge, psychotic, meaningless mess.

“Jesus, Ralph,” she said, eventually, “what the hell did you put in your tea this morning?”

Ralph's face fell and he pulled the fabric back over the painting. “Nothing,” he snapped, “I put nothing in my tea. It's just inspired by nature. You know. Real life. Purity. Spirituality. Things I wouldn't expect you to know anything about!”

Jem's jaw dropped at these words and she stared at Ralph in horror. “I. Beg. Your. Pardon?” she intoned.

“Nothing,” mumbled Ralph, carrying the painting up toward the top floor, “nothing. I just didn't expect you to understand. And you don't. That's all.”

Blake had started crying now and Jem lifted him from the stroller and held him to her, feeling her heart racing between them. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Ralph had never talked to her like that before. He had never been physical with her before. And that painting? It was so ugly. Jem had seen his degree show work, published in a book that he'd kept since he graduated. It was dark and oppressive and dramatic, nothing like the exquisite flowers he'd been painting since, but it had meaning and form and impact. That painting had nothing. It was a mess. And what did he mean; real and pure, nothing like her?

She closed her eyes against tears and the rage and took Blake into the kitchen, where she sat him on the floor and helped her daughter to scrape mushy Shreddies from the gaps between the battered old floorboards.

R
alph's show was called Taco Belle:

McLeary's ninth show at the gallery of Philippe Dauvignon marries together a new sensibility and an old obsession with form, texture and light. Inspired by his travels around the Californian seaside resort of Santa Monica, Taco Belle aims to showcase the “soft” side of Americana. The street life depicted here is given new focus juxtaposed against the elegance and shapeliness of Californian flora and foliage. The light is electric and the mood is playful. This is Ralph McLeary's most energetic work yet.

Ralph folded his arms across his chest and surveyed the room. It was fine. The light in the gallery was perfect for this work, especially here in the middle of summer. His work looked fine, perfectly acceptable. Philippe was overseeing a minion unloading bottles of cheap white wine onto a table and another minion emptying bags of Japanese rice crackers into large white bowls. Ralph was in jeans and a white shirt and pointy-toed shoes. He looked slim and tanned and fit.

“You are looking very good, Ralph,” said Philippe, eyeing him up and down. “Last time I saw you, you were a little bit”—he patted his own slab-flat stomach—“but now, you are fit, no?”

“I've been running,” Ralph said listlessly, “running every day.”

“Well, you should keep it up. It suits you, you look marvelous!”

Ralph smiled, but he was in no mood for Philippe and his incessant Gallic charm. He patted his jeans pockets to ensure that his cigarettes were there and then he went outside and stood on the street to smoke one.

Eleven years ago, he thought, eleven years ago I stood outside this gallery in a £600 Dolce & Gabbana suit smoking this same brand of cigarettes. Eleven years ago I'd pumped £500 of my own money into the evening so that my friends could drink champagne and eat canapés and be surrounded by plush arrangements of fresh peonies. Eleven years ago I was pale and thin and sick with nerves waiting for a woman to arrive.

Not Jem, but a girl called Cheri—Cheri, the love of Smith's life. He'd invited her to the private viewing of his exhibition deliberately so that she could sabotage Smith's stupid affair with Jem, so that Jem would see Smith for the idiot that he really was, so that Jem would be free, free to love him. And it had worked. Smith had gotten himself disgustingly drunk (so drunk in fact that he hadn't touched alcohol again for nearly three years afterward) and asked Cheri to marry him. In front of Jem. Jem had taken one look at Ralph's lovingly rendered paintings, another look at Smith in a pool of his own vomit in the gallery toilets and fallen swooningly into Ralph's arms. And they all lived happily ever after. Except they hadn't.

They had seven years of fun and loving and then they bought a house and had a baby and slowly they became different people. And then they had another baby and began to drift even further apart. Then Ralph had kissed a stranger in California and Jem had gotten flowers from a stranger in London and
Ralph had found prayer and Jem had lost a baby and somewhere in the middle of all this they'd decided to get married. Ralph still thought that getting married was the right thing to do—it was right for the children and right for the future of the relationship—but he wasn't so sure about Jem. She seemed to be going through some kind of midlife crisis. She was drinking too much, not eating enough, trying, it seemed to him, to be something she wasn't. Or maybe just trying to be something she used to be. Except she could never be that girl again and they could never be that couple again. Ralph had accepted that and he just had to hope that Jem would accept it too.

There were, he supposed, many different kinds of happily ever after.

There would be no drama here tonight, just a slow trickle of the critical and the curious and the local and those with nothing better to do. His father would come up from Croydon and arrive looking old and proud, as he did every single time. He would eat some chips, sip half a glass of wine, tell Ralph which one was his favorite and then he would leave again, saying, “Another great show, Ralph. Your mother would be proud.” Jem would come, but for her, he suspected it was just another opportunity to put on something pretty and drink too much wine. There might be a critic or two, a blogger or two; there might be a buyer or a collector. He might, if he was lucky, even make a sale. But there would be no punch-ups, no declarations of love, thwarted or otherwise. It was just another night in just another gallery in W11.

He trod his spent cigarette under the heel of his expensive designer shoe and then he went back inside, trying to rustle up enthusiasm for something that, unlike the work he'd displayed on these walls eleven years earlier, he felt had nothing to do with him at all.

T
he following evening Ralph emerged from his studio at six o'clock and told Jem that he was going for a run.

Ralph usually ran during the day. Since he'd gotten back from Santa Monica all shiny and transformed, his evenings had been devoted to his family, to group meals and bath times and the clearing away of toys. This was the second Thursday in a row that he had left at six to go for a run. Jem was about to call something out after him, a question of some description, but as she opened her mouth to speak she heard the front door go. She let her mouth close again and went back to stacking the dishwasher.

She was still a little hungover from the night before. She'd drunk too much nasty wine at Ralph's preview show. And then forgotten to eat. She'd gotten in the habit of taking a pair of Nurofen with half a pint of water before she got into bed every night these days, just to preempt the ill effects of half a bottle, sometimes more, of Chablis. But she'd forgotten last night, sort of landed in bed with very little recollection of how or when, in pajamas and full makeup, and slept like a corpse until eight o'clock, when she'd awoken to the sight of all three members of her family sitting on the end of the bed, staring at her.

Ralph had been kind to her. He'd taken Scarlett to nursery
with Blake in the stroller. She'd been able to come round slowly and gently, enjoy a long shower, eat a peaceful breakfast, make herself a proper coffee. He'd put Blake down for his morning nap when he returned about an hour later, checked that Jem was feeling okay and then tiptoed to his studio, from where he had not emerged until just now.