After the Party (42 page)

The man looked at him and squinted. Ralph could tell his struggle to place Ralph's face was pure charade.

“You're Jessica's dad, aren't you?” he continued.

“Er, yeah. That's right. I'm sorry, I er . . .”

“I'm Ralph.” He handed Joel a freshly washed hand to shake. “I'm Scarlett's dad.”

“Oh, yes, of course, right. Good to finally meet you. I think I've seen you about.”

“Yeah,” said Ralph, “you definitely have. I would almost say that you've been stalking me,” he continued. He kept his voice amused and his gaze direct. He was channeling Gil.

Joel pulled back, affronted. “I don't think so,” he countered defensively.

“Yes, you were. Outside the church. A few weeks back. You were there when I went in and you were there when I came out.”

“I was waiting for someone,” said Joel.

Ralph paused. He knew that it was not necessary to challenge Joel's lie. They both knew the truth.

“So,” he continued, the recentness of his afternoon with Gil still fresh in his heart, his head filled with something strong and incontrovertible. “You're quite good friends then, you and Jem?”

Joel shrugged. “Not really,” he said.

Ralph nodded and let a silence form. “You know,” he began, “we're getting married next weekend.”

Joel gave him a “good for you, but what's it got to do with me?” look.

Ralph let another silence form and stared at the man, trying to read his blank expression, trying to find the truth somewhere inside that bland arrangement of facial features. Have you, he thought to himself, have you been fucking my girlfriend?

Almost as if his silent thoughts had become audible, the man flinched slightly and adjusted his body language. Suddenly he looked chippy. “You're very pleased with yourself, aren't you?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” replied Ralph.

“You. You're very pleased with yourself. Smug is another word that comes to mind.”

“Sorry,” Ralph countered with a small laugh, “I don't even know you. What qualifies you to make judgments about me?”

The man shrugged. “I'm just telling you what I see. And what I've been told.”

“Told?”

“Yeah. I get the impression that you're one of those guys who just kind of barrels through life expecting other people to pick up the pieces.”

Ralph threw him a look of amused contempt.

“And I'll tell you another thing. You might be getting married next week, but I don't think she's ready. She's giving off signals. She's scenting the air.”

Ralph stopped and stared at the man. “Scenting the air?”

“Yeah. You know.”

Ralph frowned at the man, who looked smaller now somehow, as if expelling his brash words had somehow diminished him. His choice of words was both revolting and strangely poetic.

“Did you and Jem have an affair?”

The man laughed.

The answer that Ralph had been expecting to hear was wrapped up somewhere inside that laugh, but Ralph waited a beat, just to hear what the man would say. “No,” he said dismissively. “
We
did
not
have an affair. But that's not to say that
she
hasn't
had
an affair. That's not to say that she's not capable.”

Ralph thought briefly about pounding him into the ground, then, pounding away at him, punch after punch after punch, possibly until he was dead. But then he thought, would Gil hit this pointless little man? And he knew that Gil would not. So he inhaled, deeply, and found his inner peace and then he looked the little man in the eye, smiled, just once, and left.

•  •  •

Ralph had another intense dream that night. He had been dreaming more vividly and more frequently since his encounter with Sarah, Gil and their prayer group. He dreamed that it was his wedding day and that they were getting married in Santa Monica. He dreamed that Smith was his best man and that Jem was very late. He stood inside a beach hut, his shoes were full of sand, people were looking at him anxiously and he was telling
them all: it's okay, she's always late. Smith was eating soft-shell crab at a tiny table in the corner and Ralph found himself thinking: why does he have to be eating soft-shell crab right now? How incredibly selfish.

Eventually he left the claustrophobic beach hut and strolled across the hot white beach, looking for Jem. His children were not there. He stopped and asked a policeman if he'd seen a small dark woman in a white dress. The policeman said no. And then he saw her, striding toward him, dressed in black. She was cross and had Smith the cat in her arms. Look, she was saying, look. It's all wrong. It's all wrong. I have to go now. And then she passed him the cat and picked up the skirts of her big black dress and strode away from him, purposefully, elbows jutting out angrily. He stood on the hot white beach and watched her walk away from him, her figure becoming smaller and smaller until eventually she was just a tiny black dot on the horizon.

When he went back to the beach hut, Smith had transmogrified into Joel, and Ralph lifted the plate of soft-shell crab and dropped it onto his head.

W
hen Ralph announced to Jem for the third Thursday running that he would be going for a run at six o'clock, an alarm bell finally began to ring inside her head. Three Thursdays in a row was not random. Three Thursdays in a row was habitual. Why Thursdays? Why six o'clock? And really, now she thought about it, how localized could a torrential tropical downpour actually be?

She saw him off from the house, as brightly and cheerfully as she could manage. “Have a good run,” she trilled robotically. She gave the children their tea, put them in the bath, put them in their pajamas and put them in their beds. Then she raced, as she always did, to her computer. She checked her email. A Facebook message from Lucas:

You need to get some photos up here. I want to see regular updates on my little Blakey! And how is the beautiful Scarlett? And, come to that, how is the beautiful Jemima?

She smiled and typed her reply, keeping her words, as ever, neutral and unflirtatious:

Working on the photos, apparently I have to download some fancy software, will get round to it eventually. But
Blakey is still fat and magnificent and is showing no signs of wanting to crawl. I think he wants to be a Buddha, just sit on his bum, getting fatter and fatter, for the whole of eternity. Miss Scarlett is still the Diva of the family and I am not beautiful but thank you for saying that I am! How is your dad? I haven't seen him for ages.

She sent the message and within five minutes he had replied.

Check out the mirror! You are gorgeous! I'm at my mum's, up north, haven't seen my dad for a few days. Spoke to him yesterday, he said he'd seen your husband at the Maygrove Centre? Is he in one of the groups? (Not that I would judge if he was, obviously, given my dad's history.) But Dad's still in an ongoing battle with the bitchcowwoman about taking Jessica. Poor guy. Anyway, mum's calling me down for dinner, then I'm off out with some old school friends. It's good to be home! Take care. I'm back in a couple of weeks, maybe see you at the pool again?

Jem replied again.

I avoid mirrors as much as humanly possible ;)

It must have been someone else your dad saw at the Maygrove. Ralph has his issues but addiction is not one of them! (Unless they have a Runners Anonymous group there?!) Anyway, we're getting married on Saturday so I hope he's not been hiding some terrible secret from me! Enjoy your dinner and being at home. I hope my Blakey wants to come and have dinner with me when he's twenty-four! See you when I get back, fingers crossed for pool weather!

She pressed send and then she spent a few minutes perusing his Facebook page, seeing what his friends had been up to and what he'd been up to (“eating Mum's chicken and rice and feeling goooood” apparently). She waited a few minutes but Lucas did not reply. He'd gone down for his dinner, had left cyberspace.

A few minutes later she heard Ralph return. She switched her PC to sleep and tiptoed downstairs to greet him. Once again he was looking fresh and spry, nothing like the way he tended to look after his daytime runs. He was breathing quite heavily and had a glow about him, but not the wide band of sweat down the center of his T-shirt and the sweaty sheen on his scalp. He looked, it occurred to her, like someone who had just run home from the postbox on the corner.

“How was your run?” she asked.

He nodded. “Good,” he said.

“Where did you run to?”

“Oh, nowhere, just around the park. How were the kids?” He kicked off his running shoes and put them back in the shoe cubby.

“Fine, good,” she said. “You don't look very sweaty,” she continued.

He shrugged and wandered into the kitchen. “It's quite cool out.”

“Yeah,” she said, following him, determined to uncover the truth about his strange absences and his chilly demeanor, “but you've been running for nearly two hours. Even if it was cold out I'd have expected you to look a bit sweatier than that.”

“Well,” he said after a pause just long enough, Jem felt, to fabricate an excuse, “I stopped for a while. On the way back. To cool down.”

“Where?”

“God, what is this, an interrogation?”

“No, Ralph, it is not an interrogation. It's just your partner wondering where you've been for two hours.”

“And I told you. I've been running.”

“Yes. You've been running. But you stopped. Where did you stop?”

“God, I don't know, just a bench.”

“You sat on a bench? To cool down?”

“Yeah.”

“And then you ran back?”

“Yeah! I told you. Jesus! What is your problem?”

“My problem, Ralph, is . . .” She paused. This was the point at which she could rein the conversation back in or let it run wild. She took a deep breath and said: “Everything, Ralph. My problem is absolutely everything! You came back from California and it was all lovely and gorgeous and then slowly, day by day, it's all gone wrong. You don't want to have sex with me, you barely talk to me, you've been off painting out of the house and coming back with these—God, I'm really sorry, but I have to say it—these
weird
paintings that look like they were painted by somebody else. And then there's this strange Thursday run. I don't believe you. I don't believe you've been running. And then there's . . .” She paused again, aware that she was about to lob a conversational hand grenade into the proceedings. “The girl. The blond one. I saw her in your studio. You and her. In California. And I saw your portrait. It was beautiful, Ralph, really, really beautiful. But it got me thinking, you know, what happened in America? We never talked about it. I just accepted that you were making more of an effort and we kind of got on with it and I never really wondered what it was that happened in America that made you transform yourself overnight. And was it . . . was it something to do with her? With the girl?”

Ralph had been standing half inside the fridge, about to pluck himself out a beer, but stopped statue still as Jem delivered her rant. He blinked as silence fell and then slumped onto a chair. “No,” he said, “it was nothing to do with the girl. Well, it was partly, I suppose. I mean, she kind of started it.”

“Started what?”

“This sort of change in me. This . . .”

“What?”

“I can't tell you,” he said.

“Can't tell me what?” Jem's heart quickened with trepidation.

“I can't tell you. You'd leave me.”

“What!” she cried. “Just tell me!”

“It's not what you think,” he continued, “and in a way, I think it might be worse.”

“Oh, my God, Ralph, please will you just tell me!”

“It's . . .” He sighed and pulled his hands across his face. “It's . . . I've found . . .”

“What!”

“The place I've been going every Thursday night. It's a prayer group. I've been going . . . to pray.”

“Pray?” Jem slumped heavily into a chair too.

“Yes. Group prayer.”

“In a church?”

“No, not in a church. In a hall.”

“You go to a hall and pray with strangers?”

“Yes. I do.”

“But . . . who do you pray to?”

He shrugged. “I pray to God.”

She threw him a look of unabridged horror.

“No,” he said, “not that God. Not the man with the beard. Not the man in the Bible. Not the one that people kill in the name of. But just my own, personal God.”

Jem let her head roll back on her shoulders, as if the weight of his admission had unbalanced her physiognomy. “And the girl?”

“Smith's girlfriend,” he said. “Smith's
ex
-girlfriend. Rosey. She's a Christian. She took me to her church. I thought it was just a passing moment. I sat in this beautiful church and suddenly everything made sense. I realized how crap and useless I'd been at home; I vowed to be better. It gave me some kind of weird strength. After I came home I thought that was it, that I'd just get on with my life. But then after the, you know, the baby, I don't know. I just found myself needing it more and more, that feeling I got from her church.”

“What, you mean after the miscarriage?”

He nodded. “I wanted that baby so much, Jem. I wanted it so much it hurt. And I couldn't believe how cool you were about it. It was like . . . it was like you'd turned into somebody else. You know. I saw you, Jem, I saw you through the window, reading that magazine, as if you were about to go in to get a tooth pulled or something. And in that moment, Christ, I don't know, I almost felt like I hated you.” He paused. Let the word sink in. Jem didn't flinch. He continued, “And then you just seemed to blossom afterward. But it had the opposite effect on me. I kind of shriveled up. And as for . . . sex, I don't know. It just seemed so wrong. To be there, in that place, where they'd cut out the baby . . .”