After the Party Read online

  After the Party

  Lisa Jewell was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the bestselling debut of 1999. She is also the author of Thirtynothing, One-Hit Wonder, Vince & Joy, A Friend of the Family, 31 Dream Street and The Truth About Melody Browne all of which have been Sunday Times bestsellers.

  Also by Lisa Jewell

  Ralph’s Party

  Thirtynothing

  One-Hit Wonder

  Vince & Joy

  A Friend of the Family

  31 Dream Street

  The Truth About Melody Browne

  Lisa Jewell

  After the Party

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446410790

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Century 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Lisa Jewell 2010

  Lisa Jewell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Century

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846055737

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part One: One Year Earlier

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Five: Two Weeks Later

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Epilogue

  For Jascha, Amelie and Evie

  Acknowledgements

  This time round thanks are due almost entirely to Kate Elton. Thank you for taking huge chunks out of your precious maternity leave to read and re-read and re-read again, to thrash it into shape and thank you, even, for the eighteen pages of painstaking (10pt font, single-spaced) edited notes which I would quite happily have doused in petrol and set fire to the first time I saw them. I appreciate every single moment of your time and effort. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked on a book post-delivery and I’m so glad you made me do it.

  Thank you to everyone who said: ‘Ooh, a Ralph’s Party sequel. I can’t wait!’ during the writing of it. It simultaneously spurred me on and terrified me, but ultimately I’m just delighted that people still remember and still care. I really hope I haven’t let you down.

  Thank you to Jascha for being completely unfazed by me writing a book about a Completely Fictional Relationship That Bears No Resemblance Whatsoever to Anything That Has Happened to Us – for the SECOND time. Since you haven’t read any of my books since Vince & Joy, I feel fairly confident that you’ll never get round to this one.

  Thanks to the usual behind-the-scenes people; the amazing team at Random House: Louise, Claire, Rob, Oliver, Georgina, Louisa and everyone else. Thanks to Jonny Geller and to everyone at Curtis Brown. Thanks to booksellers and readers and library workers the length and breadth of the land without whom it would all be a little bit pointless. And thanks, as ever, to my dear friends on the Board, for being there inside my computer whenever I need you.

  ‘A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.’

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Prologue

  The twelfth anniversary of Ralph and Jem’s first kiss falls upon a cool, paper-dry Wednesday at the beginning of March. The wisteria outside Jem’s office window has yet to yield its cascades of perfumed lilac blooms and the hydrangea by the front door is stubby and only just turning green – spring feels a long way off although it is just round the corner.

  At about three fifteen, Jem leaves her office, heading for an appointment in Battersea. She takes with her a small manila folder, her mobile phone, her handbag and a loaf of brown bread. Before she leaves she turns to her assistant, Mariel, who is making tea in the kitchenette, and says, ‘Off to see the recluse.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Mariel, ‘God. Good luck.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Jem. ‘I’ll need it. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  Mariel smiles sympathetically, and Jem closes the door behind her. The sad irony of a trip to Almanac Road on such an auspicious date is not wasted on her. She is painfully aware of it as she walks the fifteen minutes from the office on Wandsworth Bridge Road. When she gets there, she glances down, as she always does, into the basement pit of the house at number thirty-one.

  Terracotta tiles gleam, newly laid and freshly mopped. Three small trees carved into pom-pom balls of varying sizes sit in shiny cobalt-blue pots. The front door is thickly painted in a matt shade of mushroom and dressed with nickel-plated knobs and knockers. Through the window she can see more mushroom paint on walls hung with black-and-white photography. Suddenly, two small hands and a baby’s head appear over the top of the sofa. Jem smiles. The baby smiles, then disappears again.

  Someone else lives here now. A young family, a house-proud family with enough money to renovate the rundown flat they’d bought a year ago, and enough
foresight to have done it when the lady of the house was four months pregnant with their first child, unlike Jem, who had spent the last night of her first pregnancy on a mattress in the dining room of her sister’s flat, her possessions piled around her in gigantic cardboard boxes, like a township, waiting for a woman in Camberwell to sell her flat to a man in Dulwich so that the owner of their new house in Herne Hill could sign the completion forms and hand them their front door keys.

  Before the very neat and well-organised family lived here, a scruffy woman with a deadbeat teenage son and three obese cats had lived here. And before the scruffy woman with the fat cats, a young couple with matching bikes and cagoules had lived here. And before the smug, outdoorsy couple with the bikes, a man called Smith had lived here, alone, having an existential crisis that led, eventually, to him retraining as a reiki teacher and relocating to San Francisco. And even longer ago than that, years before the man called Smith had lived here alone having an existential crisis, Smith’s best friend, Ralph, had lived here with him. And so, for a very short while, over twelve years ago, back in 1996 when Oasis were the most famous band in the country and football was, supposedly, coming home, when she was a child of only twenty-seven, had Jem.

  Jem can feel it, even now, as she stands on the pavement, peering through the window at strangers’ mushroom walls – she can still feel the electric jolt of sudden promise, the thrill of new beginnings. She feels it for just a moment, and then it passes, because for some strange reason things have not worked out how she thought they might during those long-ago days and now it’s just a dull echo of a moment in her life when fate, chance and destiny all came together and took her somewhere quite remarkable.

  She sighs sadly and pushes her hair behind her ears. Then she looks up, her attention taken by the clatter of a sash window being pushed open and then a loud male voice:

  ‘Intercom’s broken!’

  A small shiny object leaves his hand and hurtles towards her, catching the light as it falls, landing on the pavement within an inch of her toes.

  ‘Let yourself in!’ The large hands slide the noisy window back into place. Jem tuts and picks up the keys. She climbs the front steps and prepares herself, mentally, for the next half an hour of her life. She picks her way through the debris of Karl’s life: forgotten T-shirts, a broken guitar, a carrier bag full of recycling, and, oh God, a pair of underpants. She finds him on the sofa, eating a ham sandwich and watching an old episode of Murder She Wrote.

  ‘I thought you said you needed bread?’ she says, waving the loaf of Warbutons Malted she took for him from her own kitchen cupboard that very morning.

  ‘I do,’ he says, ‘that’s the end of it. Had to scrape some spores off it, make it, you know, edible.’ He takes the fresh loaf from her and smiles, gratefully. ‘Thanks, Miss Duck.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ says Jem, lowering herself on to the very furthest edge of a grubby yellow armchair. ‘What happened to the cleaner?’ she asks, looking around the room.

  Karl smiles, his catch-all, ‘forgive-me-for-I-know-not-what-I-do-but-oh-I-am-lovely-aren’t-I? smile. It is a good smile, a smile that has seen him through a ten-year career in B-list television presenting, but not quite a good enough smile to stop him killing that career stone dead after a terrible episode in the Australian jungle last autumn, in front of six million viewers. ‘I kept forgetting to pay her,’ he replies in his smooth Irish croon. He shrugs. ‘Who can blame her?’

  ‘How’ve you been?’ Jem squints slightly as she asks the question, almost not wanting him to answer it.

  Karl rearranges his large form on the sofa, so that he’s facing her. ‘Oh, you know, the parties, the premieres, the hot dates, it never ends.’ He looks old. Not a line on his face, not for a man of forty-seven, but his face looks dead, like someone has taken a sheet of sandpaper to him and scoured away all the gloss, all the glitter.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like this, you know,’ she says, opening up the manila folder. ‘Everyone’s ready to forget.’

  ‘What you got in there?’ he asks, eyeing the folder sceptically.

  ‘Well, it’s not money, that’s for sure.’

  He winks. ‘Maybe I need a new agent,’ he jokes.

  Jem sighs. Jem is Karl’s agent, and Karl’s joke (this is not the first time he has made it) is not funny any more. She takes out a letter that arrived this morning, printed on sky-blue paper. It is confirmation of a phonecall that she had last week with a production company who are filming a series of interviews with ‘controversial’ celebrities.

  Karl takes it from her and scans it, rapidly, with a furrowed brow. ‘Jeez,’ he says, ‘what is this – the Last Chance Saloon for Battered B-listers? Christ. You’re going to make me do it, aren’t you?’

  Jem shrugs. ‘I can’t make you do anything, Karl. But it’s money in the bank –’

  ‘How much?’ he interrupts.

  ‘Five thousand. And if you handle it well, if you paint yourself in a good light, it’ll open all those doors again.’

  Karl puts the paper down on the sofa and picks up his sandwich. He stares at it disconsolately for a second. ‘If that’s what I want,’ he says, so quietly that Jem only just hears him.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘if that’s what you want. But here’s the thing, Karl.’ She pauses. She didn’t come here to give Karl a piece of paper. She could have put it in the post. And she certainly didn’t come here to replenish his breadbin. ‘Here’s the bottom line: if you don’t do the interview, I’m letting you go.’

  The words are gone now, the words that Jem has been carrying round in her head for days, for weeks. She’s imagined this conversation a thousand times and every time her heart has raced, her skin has flushed. Letting a client go. And not just any client, but her first client, the one who started it all, twelve years ago. And not just a client, but a friend. It’s harsh, but it’s for his own good, she reminds herself – without the threat he wouldn’t do the TV interview, and without the TV interview there is no career for her to manage.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he drawls. ‘That’s bribery!’

  ‘Well, yes, though more gentle bullying, I would have said.’ Jem pauses and stares at the sleeves of Karl’s jumper, which are encrusted with some kind of beige paste. ‘I only want what’s best for you, and I think this,’ she points at the sky-blue paper, ‘is what’s best for you.’

  ‘I know,’ says Karl, ‘I’m not stupid. It’s fine. I hear you loud and clear. And yeah, OK, I’ll do the show. But if it backfires in my face, I reserve the right to sack you.’ He winks at her, smiles, and then sighs. ‘I’m sure life used to be simple,’ he says. ‘I’m sure there was a time.’

  Jem smiles, thinking of a night, exactly twelve years ago, when for a while life had felt far from simple. Exciting, romantic, crazy – yes, but not simple. She thinks again about the way she’d felt when Ralph had proclaimed his love for her, when she realised that she loved him too, when the gates to the Rest of Her Life had swung open and she’d taken her first tentative steps on to the open road. And now she is here: separated, a single parent, inhabiting a desperate, heartbreaking place that she never expected to be. She swallows a swell of tearfulness and smiles. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s never been simple. Did you know, for example, that it is precisely twelve years to the day since you beat up Siobhan’s boyfriend outside an art gallery?’

  Karl smiles. ‘What, really?’

  ‘Yeah. Really and truly.’

  ‘You have a very good memory,’ says Karl.

  ‘Well, it is also twelve years to the day since Ralph and I first …’

  ‘What, shagged?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she laughs, although she doesn’t really feel like laughing. ‘It’s our sexiversary! Well, it was,’ she adds sadly.

  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?’

  ‘Adopting. 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.’