After the Party (41 page)

Jem's hangover had abated. She'd had a poached egg on toast for lunch and four cans of Diet Coke. But she could not shake a terrible overwhelming sense of sadness that had cloaked her since her eyes opened this morning.

She always found Ralph's previews slightly anticlimactic these days. It was inevitable. How could any preview show ever compare to that first one? But last night had been different. She'd felt their lost connection echoing and jarring around the gallery. Everywhere she looked she saw the way they used to be. The wine had tasted sour in her mouth, but she'd drunk glasses of the stuff, just to keep herself in the game. And then they'd sat, side by side, in the cab on the way home, and the air through the open window had been warm and full of London, and Jem had talked too much about the show and the paintings and how great they were and how he was sure to sell loads because they were so beautiful and Ralph had stared from the window and said nothing. Then she'd laid her hand upon Ralph's thigh and waited for Ralph to cover her hand with his own.

But he hadn't.

Instead he'd patted it, gently, condescendingly, as if it were the crown of a well-behaved dog, smiled at her cheesily, and then put his hand back on the seat.

After a moment she'd taken her hand back and placed it sadly in her lap.

•  •  •

Jem put her children to bed that night feeling glad of them in a way that she maybe never had before. “Thank God for you,” she whispered into their damp hair. “Thank God for you both. What would I do without you, my angels? Where would I be?”

After their doors were closed and the house was quiet she poured herself a glass of wine and she sat at her computer.

She opened up her email account and felt her heart jump a little when she saw the words:

FACEBOOK

Lucas Warbush has added you as a friend.

The request came with a note:

Hello there stranger! Sorry not to see you again at the festival. I looked out for you. Just hope this is the right Jemima Catterick—why haven't you got a profile photograph?!

She clicked the link and accepted Lucas's friend request and then found herself very quickly immersed in Lucas-world. He was obviously a keen maintainer of his Facebook page. He had thirty-eight photo albums and a wall chock-full of jaunty messages from some of his two hundred and ninety-three friends. His profile photograph, though, was enigmatic: the top of his head bearing his sunglasses, his perfect ears on either side, no facial features.

He looked so like Ralph. It startled her every time she noticed the similarity and sent her back in time.

His status update read: “Lucas Warbush is going home to see his mummy.”

Jem smiled.

She thought about her own son, curled up in his pink sleepsuit across the landing, and wondered if one day he would have the sheer guts and confidence to tell his peers that he was going home to see his mummy without even a hint of irony. As she thought this thought she heard a banging at the windowpane and jumped slightly before realizing that it was just the rain, a tempestuous rainstorm breaking over the warm pavements, pelting the hot roof tiles with fat droplets. The sky lit up for a moment, she counted up to eight, then bang, distant thunder. She thought of Ralph. Poor Ralph. Running through the angry rain. Getting soaked to the bone. Dodging the forked lightning. She pulled open the bedroom window and smelled the air, the distinctive musty smell of hot, wet, London paving stones. She glanced both ways up the street to see if she could see Ralph returning, but the street was empty. She closed the window and sat down again.

She looked through Lucas's photo albums and read his friends' comments. She saw pictures of Jessica and Joel, and of Lucas with his arm around a pretty black woman with short relaxed hair slicked back off her face, who Jem assumed was Lucas's mother. She saw an older black woman with crimped silver hair sitting with a pair of cats with orange mottled fur. And then there were his friends, dozens of friends, all young and happy, in bars, on holidays, in halls of residence, in scruffy flats. Students. She recognized the blond girl she'd seen him with at the festival. Her name was Malaika Fitzjohn. A very interesting name for a very interesting-looking woman. All his friends looked interesting, in fact, and all the messages and comments left by them on his page were warm and well spelled. And it struck Jem at that moment that it was very sad that she and Ralph had reached the end of their eleventh year together and
had no circle of friends. Ralph's family consisted solely of his sad old dad, a man of eighty-two, who hadn't exactly been a live wire in his younger days and had lost his spark entirely since his wife had died three years earlier. Ralph's only real friend lived in California and all the friends he'd hung around with during his flat-sharing days in Battersea, who were mainly hoity-toity PR girls using him to attain some credibility, had gone by the wayside. They'd had two friends, local friends, Alex and Maria, who had a daughter the same age as Scarlett, and they'd go for lunch together at the Prince Regent and have summer lunches in each other's gardens, and then Alex and Maria had sold their house around the corner and moved to Hastings. Since then the Catterick/McLeary family had been a somewhat insular little unit, punctured only by the presence of the slightly nutty Lulu and her husband. Ralph was terrified of Lulu and found Walter, at six foot three and twelve years his senior, slightly imposing. Jem had been waiting, subconsciously, for Scarlett to start school. That seemed to her the time that local friendships began to be formed. But as she looked at Lucas's friends and felt the warmth and extent of their bond, she felt sad for her own small little world and suddenly wanted more.

She sighed and emptied her glass of wine, and was on her way down the stairs to refill it when she heard the door go and Ralph was standing in the hallway in his running gear, looking po-faced.

“Hi!” she trilled.

He glanced at her wineglass and said hello.

She looked him up and down. His T-shirt was dry and fresh. His shorts were still as crisp as they'd been when he'd pulled them out of his wardrobe two hours earlier. “You're dry!” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“But the rain,” she continued.

“What about the rain?”

“Well, I thought you'd get soaked. It was torrential.”

He shrugged. “Must have missed it,” he said.

“But . . . how?”

“Localized?” he suggested, unconvincingly.

She nodded her agreement that yes, it must have been localized, and headed past him to get another glass of wine.

•  •  •

“Oh, God, Lulu, you should have seen it, it was appalling.”

“What, like badly executed?”

“Worse than that,” Jem rubbed sun cream into her bare ankles, “it was ugly. It was
unpleasant
. And if he'd just said something like, oh, well, you know, it was just a warming-up exercise, or, you know, it was just a bit of fun, I'd have thought, well, that's okay then. But he didn't. He just stormed off upstairs with it as if it was his pride and joy and didn't talk to me for the rest of the day.”

Lulu sneered delicately. She could not bear the concepts of bickering and sulking. “Where is he now?” she said, her nose wrinkling mischievously.

“He's at the gallery, with Philippe, being interviewed for the local rag.”

“When's he back?”

Jem shrugged. “I don't know, four-ish, I guess.”

“Come on then.”

“Come on what?”

“Let's go and have a look.” She pointed her beer bottle upward toward the top floor of the house.

“What. In his studio?”

“Yeah, why not? Let me see this painting. Come on!”

Jem looked at Blake, who had fallen asleep in his bouncy chair, and Scarlett, who was playing happily in the sandbox, and thought, yes, why not? “Scarlett,” she said, “we're just popping inside for a minute. We'll be back soon.”

Scarlett looked at them listlessly and carried on with her game.

“Have you asked him?” said Lulu as they curled up the spiral staircase toward his studio. “About the church thing?”

“You mean about what Joel said in the taxi?”

Lulu nodded.

“No,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I suppose because I don't want to have a conversation that involves mentioning Joel.”

“Why not? Nothing happened with Joel.”

“I know, but it sort of did in my head and I'd rather not mention him, that's all. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

“God, yes, but don't you just want to know? Don't you want to know why he's hanging out in churches?”

Jem shrugged. “He took the kids there the other day,” she said, “Scarlett told me. They lit some candles for his mum. Must just be that. Must just be a way of dealing with his loss.”

Jem had not been inside Ralph's studio since that night weeks ago when she'd told him she didn't want to have the baby. Then it had been full of his lovely, vibrant Californian flowers. Now it was empty again, just two canvases on display. The first was the one she'd seen the other day, the awful red and black affair.

Lulu gasped when she saw it. “Oh God,” she said, “is that the one?”

Jem nodded. “ 'Fraid so.”

“Oh, I mean”—Lulu circled it for a moment—“I mean, it's
not even a painting, really, is it? I mean, it's just marks. Just mess. And, oh, my God, what is
that
?” She spun round as the other painting caught her eye. This one was a work in progress, still mounted on Ralph's easel, unfinished. And again, it was a visual affront. Jem stared at the latest creation in horror. Ralph had been so excited about starting off in a new direction. He'd been so looking forward to it, and so too had Jem. And this, it seemed, was it. Mindless, artless, charmless.

And then, just as she was absorbing the awful reality of Ralph's new direction, she saw something else, something that shocked her to her core. A photograph propped up on a bookshelf, a photograph of himself and a very beautiful blond girl with thick hair the color of butter and feline features and a small crucifix in the dip of her neck. Their heads were touching and they both wore smiles as joyful as Christmas.

She was about to say something to Lulu, when she noticed a look of horror on her face and followed her gaze to a dark corner of the studio where a small canvas was perched on a crate. It had been covered up with a piece of muslin but the muslin had slipped and it was obvious that the painting underneath bore some resemblance to the photograph on the bookshelf. The two women exchanged a glance and Jem nodded imperceptibly at Lulu, who crossed the room and unveiled the painting. It was, as they'd both suspected, the woman in the photograph, re-created in painstaking detail. Ralph had replaced the background of palm trees with something resembling a large silver sun and put a sprig of mauve bougainvillaea flower in the woman's hair. It was an exquisite painting, all picked out in shades of white and silver, with the flowers in her hair providing the only color. It was one of the nicest paintings that Jem could remember Ralph having painted in a long time. Possibly, it pained her to think, since the ones he'd painted of her.

“Fucking hell,” said Lulu, biting her lip.

Jem felt her head begin to spin. Her life seemed to be hurtling through space, untethered and out of control. Could this mysterious blond beauty be the root of all the strangeness between her and Ralph? Was she the reason that Ralph seemed so distant these days? Was it possible that all these weeks, while Jem had been crawling across the strange landscape of her own emotions, dealing with her adulterous feelings toward Joel, her growing affection toward his son, her sense that maybe there was another ending in store for her than the one she'd been expecting all these years, that Ralph himself had been crossing the same rocky territory? Was it possible, she thought, that Ralph had fallen in love with someone else, been, in fact, in love with someone else every minute of every day since his return from California? And if that was the case then why the hell had he asked her to marry him? But even as she asked herself the question, Jem already knew the answer: he'd asked her to marry him because he did not want to be in love with the beautiful young girl with the blond hair and the silver dress. Just as Jem wanted to marry Ralph because she did not want to fall in love with the beautiful young man with the shorn hair and the green eyes. They were getting married to protect themselves from the possibility of a different ending. They were getting married to protect their children.

When Ralph got home from the gallery half an hour later, Jem did not mention either the awful paintings or the painting of the girl with the buttery hair. Instead she sucked the discomfort back down deep inside her, where it turned to mild nausea. She asked him about his interview (“I don't know why these people have to intellectualize everything. You know, at the end of the day, it's some flowers. That is all. It is nothing to do with my childhood or the political climate in America or the price of
bloody fish in Beirut, you know. It's just paintings. I am just a painter. Jesus”) and reheated some leftover bolognese sauce for Scarlett's tea. Then she opened a bottle of rosé and poured herself a large glass and took it into the garden, where she sat and watched her daughter playing in the afternoon sun.

Ralph didn't join her and by the time she came back indoors, the kitchen was tidy and Ralph was back in his studio.

R
alph slipped into the Maygrove Centre on his way back from painting at Gil's a couple of nights later, to use the toilets. He peed, washed his hands, examined his face in the mirror and was about to turn and leave when another man walked in. Ralph turned briefly to acknowledge the presence of another person in such close proximity to him. He looked at the man, the man looked at him. There was recognition. A moment's hesitation and then Ralph said: “It's you, isn't it?”