After the Party (2 page)

Karl nods knowingly. “How is he?”

“Ralph?” Jem still finds it strange saying his name now that the syllable no longer belongs to her. Once she hadn't noticed the word leaving her lips; now it feels like something she's borrowed from someone, something she needs to give back. She swallows another lump of sadness and says: “He's all right. I think.”

Karl raises an eyebrow.

“No, he's fine. I just haven't really talked to him lately, that's all. It's always such a rush whenever I see him.” Jem has begun to hate the weekly handover of the children. She hates it when he's in a hurry and doesn't have time to talk and then hates it when he isn't and he spills over into the new order of her life with his familiarity and his beautiful hands that she is no longer permitted to touch.

“Here,” says Karl, getting to his feet and feeling around the bookshelf beside the TV, “talking of blasts from the past, look at this.” He hands Jem a photograph. It is of a small child, possibly a baby, but hard to tell because it has lots of long dark hair. The baby appears to be Asian, probably Chinese.

“Siobhan's baby,” says Karl, resuming his slouch on the sofa.

Jem's eyes open wide. “She's adopted a baby?”

“Adopt
ing
. She just got back from China. I think there's still a long way to go, a lot of red tape, y'know?”

“Right,” says Jem, staring at the photo, at the little soul somewhere on the other side of the world, a tiny person without a family, whose whole destiny is about to turn on its axis. “Very brave of her,” she says, “adopting on her own.”

“Yes,” says Karl, “I know. That's Siobhan, through and through.”

“How old is she now?”

“Siobhan? She's, God, she must be forty-eight, I guess.”

Jem nods and hands the photograph back to Karl. “Good on her,” she says, “good on her.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “she always wanted a baby and life didn't give her one so she's gone out and made it happen.” He pauses and stares at the photograph of the baby for a moment. “There's a lesson in there for us all.”

“Yes,” says Jem, drawing herself up, readying herself to leave, “yes, there really is.”

•  •  •

Jem pushes open the front door. She has mixed feelings about Wednesdays. Wednesday is handover day, the day that Ralph takes the children for the weekend, or at least until Sunday morning. That is how their week is split. Jem gets the kids Sunday to Wednesday. Ralph gets them Wednesday to Sunday. They both live in the same postcode and equidistant from Scarlett's school and Blake's childminder, and the children barely notice the difference. But Jem does. It is both liberating and depressing in equal measure when the children are away. The house feels both full of potential (Books to read! Emails to catch up on! Clothes to sort through! TV shows to watch! Even, possibly, nights out to be had!) and devoid of life. Her existence feels both joyful and futile. And whether her children are with her or not, the sheer loneliness of living apart from Ralph can sometimes take her breath away.

She stops in the hallway and peers at her reflection in the vast rococo mirror that hangs behind the front door. It is a beautiful mirror, pockmarked and musty and still holding the scent of the distempered walls of whichever lost French palace it was rescued from. It is exquisite, flawlessly tasteful, but it is not Jem's mirror. Neither is it Jem's wall nor Jem's front door. The mirror was picked up from a Parisian flea market, not by Jem in some uncharacteristic moment of extravagant good taste, but by her sister, Lulu, whose house this is and whose house Jem has been living in for the past four months, while she and Ralph wait to see what will become of them.

Jem and her sister see themselves as a modern-day Kate and Allie, but with a few more kids and a husband between them. Or the Brady Bunch, but with one extra adult. Lulu has her two boys, Jared and Theo, and her husband's three older boys from
his first marriage, who live here most of the time because their mother lives in Grenada. It is a remarkable house, Tardis-like, with unexpected mezzanine floors and rooms off rooms and secret roof terraces. It is an odd-shaped building, thrown together in the nineteen sixties. It used to be a pub. They bought it ten years ago as a set of flats and are still only halfway through converting it back into a house, so Jem and the kids have their own floor: a set of three rooms, a small terrace and a kitchenette. It is more than enough.

Jem puts down her briefcase and starts to unbutton her tartan jacket. The woman in the mirror gazes back at her—she looks preoccupied, she looks tired. She is about to sigh loudly when a noise distracts her. It is the unmistakable sound of her firstborn clattering down the stripped floorboarded stairs in her pink Lucite Barbie Princess slippers.

And there she is, her Scarlett, a vision in mauve nylon net and fuchsia polyester. But instead of sweeping this raven-haired, Mattel-attired lovely into her arms and squeezing her with every ounce of every moment she has spent thinking about her today when she wasn't there, she looks at her aghast and says, “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Daddy's not coming,” says Scarlett, throwing her embrace at Jem's lower hips and almost knocking her over.

“What?”

“He just called. He's not coming.”

To her credit, Jem's first reaction is concern. Ralph has never missed a Wednesday. Ralph lives for Wednesday evenings in the same way that Jem lives for Sunday mornings.

“Is he all right?” she asks, picking Scarlett up and heading for the big kitchen at the back of the house, where she knows her sister and brother-in-law will be.

Scarlett shrugs and runs her hand through the curls at the nape of Jem's neck.

“Did you speak to him?”

Scarlett shrugs again.

Lulu is cleaning poster paints off a small vinyl-topped table, and her husband, Walter, is sautéing potatoes over the hob.

“Yeah,” Lulu begins, before Jem is even through the door. “He didn't show up at six so I phoned and left messages on his voice mail—nothing—then I got through to him just now, literally about three minutes before you walked in.”

“And?” says Jem, putting Scarlett down and heading toward Blake, who is sitting on his knees in front of
In the Night Garden
with a finger up his nose.

“He sounded . . .” Lulu mouths the next word, silently, “
weird
.”

“
Weir
d
?” Jem mouths back, and Lulu nods.

“Anyway,” she continues, audibly, “he said he had to go away for the weekend; he said he won't be able to have the children this week.”

“And he said this an hour
after
he was due to collect them?”

“Yes,” says Lulu. “I know.”

It is clear now that this is a conversation that needs to be had away from small ears, and Jem follows Lulu into the den, which is a small painted concrete box of a room off the kitchen and is where they keep their computer.

“What?” says Jem.

“I don't know,” says Lulu, twirling a heavy silver ring round and round her third finger. “He just sounded . . .
desperate
.”

“Oh, God, what do you mean by desperate?”

“Just, like, like he was going to cry. Like it was all too much. And he said . . .” Lulu pauses, twirls the silver ring one turn in
the opposite direction. “He said to me, ‘Do you know what day it is today?' And I said, ‘It's Wednesday.' And he just kind of went, ‘Humph.' And hung up.”

“Shit,” says Jem, putting the pieces together. “Our anniversary.”

“What, your first date?”

“First shag,” says Jem, distractedly. “First kiss. First, you know,
us
.”

“The night at the art gallery?”

“The night at the art gallery, yes.”

“Shit,” says Lulu. “Is that what it is then, you reckon?”

“Must be,” says Jem. “Should I be worried?” she asks her sister, feeling that it's already too late to be asking that.

Lulu frowns. “Possibly,” she says, “though at least he hasn't actually got the kids with him.”

“Oh, stop it, don't even joke about it. God, what shall I do? Shall I go round there?”

“Well, he did say he was going away.”

“Yes, but maybe he meant
away
.”

“You mean . . . ?”

Jem sighs and pulls her hair away from her face. “No, of course not. I mean he's been a bit weird but not, you know . . .”

“Suicidal?”

“Exactly.” She sighs again, feeling the weight of things she needs to do now that she has the children for the next few days: baths to run, stories to read, clean clothes to sort out. Plus a babysitter to arrange for Friday night when she and Lulu had planned a night out at the theater. But behind all that there is a terrible, gnawing sense that
something is wrong with Ralph
, that he is in some kind of peril. She remembers a terrible conversation she had with a woman on the street just the week before.
She remembers the woman's words. “Imagine if there was no second chance. How would you feel?” the woman had asked. “
How would you feel
?
”

Immediately, Jem knows exactly how she would feel.
Devastated. Finished. Dead
. “Okay,” she says decisively, “I'm going to give him a ring. Upstairs.”

“Good,” says Lulu, standing aside to let her pass, “I'll keep the kids out of your way.”

Upstairs, in the tiny room that she and the kids use as a living room, Jem pulls her phone out of her bag and calls Ralph's home number. Her hands shake slightly. It goes to the answerphone and Jem clears her throat: “Hi,” she says, “it's me. Just got home. Erm, don't worry about the kids, that's okay, I'll cover it, but just wondering . . .” She pauses, tries to picture the inside of Ralph's flat, who might be there listening to her plaintive, slightly pathetic voice. “Actually, I'm going to try you on your mobile. Bye.”

She calls his mobile number and is surprised and overwhelmed with relief when he replies after five ringtones.

“I'm sorry,” he says, before she's even spoken. His voice sounds soft and childlike.

“It's cool,” she says, caring about nothing other than that he is not dead. “We've got it covered. Are you okay?”

“I'm okay,” he says, and it sounds to Jem like the kind of thing you'd say if you'd just been asking yourself the same question.

“Where are you?”

“In the car.”

“Right. And where are you going?”

“Er . . .” He pauses and Jem can hear the swoosh of other cars passing his, the blast of wind through an open window. “I was on my way, halfway there, to your place, then something came up.”

“Something came up?”

“Yeah, I'll explain it all when I see you.”

“And when will I see you?”

Ralph exhales softly down the phone. “I'll come for the kids next Wednesday. I'll be there. I promise. I just need to . . .” The line fills up with cracks and bangs and shards of interference. Then it dies.

One Year Earlier

J
em felt curiously light, unfettered, almost limbless as she headed down Coldharbour Lane toward the tube station. She was wearing shoes with heels. This was the first time she had worn shoes with heels since the previous spring. It was also the first time in three months that she had left the house without a child either in a pram, strapped to her front, hanging off her back or gripped to her by the hand. The sun reflected her mood, neither bright nor gloomy, neither warm nor cold. Jem had just said good-bye to her tiny baby for the first time since he was born. She'd left him in the care of her big sister, a woman who'd given birth to and successfully raised two of her own children and been a mother to a further three belonging to her partner, but still, he was so small, so used to her, such a part of her, so . . . she stopped the thoughts, considered the afternoon ahead. Back to work.

It amazed her that the people she passed on the street were unaware of the existence of her baby, had no idea that she had another one too, a small girl with long, string-thin legs and curls of ebony and the haughty demeanor of a fifteen-year-old It girl. Scarlett and Blake. Beauty and Innocence. Her children. It alarmed her that a stranger might see her and consider her a woman alone, without attachments and dependents or responsibilities beyond the job she was clearly headed toward in her
smart black cigarette pants, tartan jacket and carefree shoes. She thought about wearing a T-shirt, emblazoned with the images of her offspring, so that people would know that she was more than just this, more than just a woman going to work, and it was while she was thinking this that she saw him.

He was also without his child, also wearing a jacket, also, she assumed, going to work. She caught her breath, feeling suddenly unguarded and stripped naked. She had never before seen him without his child; he had never before seen her without hers. They were not friends, merely two people occupying the same small square of London, pushing their children on the same swings, eating at the same child-friendly cafés, wheeling strollers along the same grimy pavements. Their daughters were the same age and had once played together in the small timber house in Ruskin Park. Ever since then she and this man had exchanged nods, smiles, hellos, the occasional how-are-yous. His name was Joel (she'd overheard him answering a call on his mobile) and he was the sort of man who made no first impression at all but climbed his way slowly inside your consciousness, grew outlines and texture and color like a photo in a tray of developing fluid. And at some unknown point over the past three years Jem had begun to notice him in a way that made her blush at the sight of his rounded back over a stroller on the street ahead of her, his pale, unremarkable hair behind a hedge in the playground, his odd, shuffling walk in soft leather loafers, his daughter's hand in his, emerging from the nursery across the road. But she was safe from the way that he made her feel because of them, the children. The children made them occupied, distracted, hurried. But here and now they were two adults, alone, coincidentally headed the same way at the same time, in matching work attire, hands free, heads free.