After the Party Read online

  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! E-mails 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 mum 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 first-born clattering down the stripped floor-boarded stairs in her pink Perspex 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 her husband 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 voicemail – 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 towards 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.’

  ‘Weird?’ 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, 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 baby-sitter to arrange for Friday night when she and Lulu had planned a night out at the theatre. 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. ‘OK,’ 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 OK, 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 ring tones.

  ‘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 OK?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ 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.

  PART ONE

  One Year Earlier

  Chapter 1

  Jem felt curiously light, unfettered, almost limbless as she headed down Coldharbour Lane towards 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 goodbye 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 demeanour 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 dependants or responsibilities beyond the job she was clearly headed towards in her smart black drainpipe trousers, 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 prams 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 colour 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 buggy 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.

  Jem slowed her pace and let him walk ahead of her. She realised she was slightly breathless, a fluttering of panic in the pit of her belly. He’d seen her, she knew that. He knew that she’d seen him. They were now ignoring each other. Maybe he felt it too, she wondered, maybe he felt the danger of the two of them being free to … Free to what, exactly? She was as good as married. They were parents. What was she afraid of? She stared at the back of his head on the escalator and tried to imagine what would happen if she caught up with him at the bottom. What would she say? ‘Hi! Look at us! No kids!’ Then what? A train had just pulled in as she approached the platform and she ran for it, forgetting momentarily about the man called Joel ahead of her and there he was, as she shot through the doors, glanced around for a spare seat. He was already seated, surrounded by spare seats, but she turned the other way, squeezed herself between two men, pulled a paperback out of her handbag, pretended to read it. It was a stupid book; her sister had forced it on to her just now. On the cover was a photograph of a young woman in flimsy clothes, lying in long silky grass, looking forlorn and possibly recently abused. It had a silly title too. Forgetting Amber. Still, it was better than staring at the adverts, or the ridges in the floor. She glanced surreptitiously at Joel. He was reading a freebie paper. He knew she was there. She knew he was there. They were still ignoring each other.

  She imagined another conversation, the one they’d have at the swings, or outside Pizza Express in a few days’ time. ‘So,’ he’d say, ‘I saw you on the tube the other day. How come you didn’t say hello?’ And she would blush and then decide to be truthful. ‘I didn’t say hello,’ she’d say, ‘because I find you attractive. And if I’d said hello, we might have started talking and if we’d started talking I might have found that you were dull, or stupid, or unappealing in some way, and then I wouldn’t be able to find you attractive any more. Or worse still, we might have started talking and discovered that we didn’t want to stop talking. We might have made a connection and I am not free to make a connection. Do you see?’ ‘Oh,’ he would smile, his cheeks colouring slightly. ‘Yes. I see.’ And hopefully that would be enough to explain, to ensure that he never spoke to her again.

  The man called Joel did not, as she’d predicted, get off at Victoria, nor at Green Park, nor at Oxford Circus. The spaces between stops felt interminable. She read the opening line of the silly book around twenty to thirty times. Please get off this train, she chanted to herself, please get off, I need to breathe. But the longer he stayed on the train the more convinced she became that this meant something, this coincidence, this proximity, and when the tube pulled into Warren Street and the man called Joel rolled up his freebie paper and sauntered towards the doors, Jem knew it. This was her stop. It was also his stop. Something was going to happen. She slid the silly book into her handbag and got to her feet.

  Chapter 2

  Ralph felt the emptiness of the house and it chilled him. This wasn’t the same emptiness that he felt when Jem and the kids were out, this was a different emptiness. Today, for the first time in a very long time, his family was disparate. Scarlett was at nursery, Blake was at Lulu’s and Jem was off to a business meeting somewhere in central London. She’d left the house half an hour ago in heels and tailoring, her scruffy curls tightly secured in clips and bands, her lips painted vermillion. It was her, the other Jem, the Jem who didn’t wander in and out of the house all day in well-worn skinny jeans and scuffed Converse trainers, lugging shopping-laden buggies behind her, smelling of milk and Johnson’s wipes. He’d watched her and the baby leave from the studio window, and it looked like she was stealing their baby, that petite, elegant woman in tartan and heels an inch too tall for her. And then they’d turned the corner and suddenly he was alone.

  Rather than feeling liberated by this open expanse of solitude, Ralph felt distracted by it and immediately put down his paintbrush and headed for the tiny balcony off his studio to smoke a cigarette. The balcony had been added when the previous owners had converted the loft into a studio space and it had always seemed unpleasantly flimsy to Ralph, a few pieces of metal bolted together with oversized wing nuts, barely seeming strong enough to withhold his weight. Whenever he stood on it he subconsciously
held on to the wall with his left hand, as if, in the event of the balcony finally giving way under his feet and hurtling three storeys to the patio below, he would somehow be able to embed his fingers into the brickwork where he would dangle, Harold Lloyd-like, until his rescuers arrived.

  The balcony overlooked the garden, a typical south London patch of land the shape of an A5 envelope and not much bigger. The beginning of March was not a happy time for gardens. The grass was mulchy, the neglected plastic toys that littered the decking and the lawn were tinged green and the swing under the apple tree swung forlornly back and forth in a chilly breeze. Beyond their small garden, Ralph could see more terraces, more sad gardens, a school playground and the fire escapes skirting the roofs of the parade of shops around the corner. He could be anywhere, he thought desolately, absolutely anywhere. He might as well be in the suburbs. All that effort, all that money, all that saving and searching and financing and settling and this was it: a three-bed terrace in the back end of Herne Hill, a view of nothing, a scrap of grass, a dangerous dangly balcony.

  He sucked the last dregs from the end of his cigarette and brought it back inside, where he let it drop into a jar of brown water on the windowsill. The e-mail was still open on his computer. It had arrived this morning, from California, from Smith, his oldest friend.

  ‘It is 81 degrees today and I am off to the beach. Wanna come??’

  It was meant as a joke, just a throwaway line to rub Ralph’s face in the fact that while he was trapped in a loft in south London on a dreary Wednesday morning, Smith, tanned and lean, was jogging past girls with augmented breasts and minimal pubic hair along vast expanses of creamy beach. It wasn’t supposed to be an invitation, but every time Ralph looked at it, it seemed more and more as if it should be. And now, seeing Jem leaving the nest, taking her baby bird to be looked after by someone else, wearing high heels, it seemed a phase of his life had just drawn to a close. They could be separate now. They could be apart. For the past seven years Ralph and Jem had been bound together by trying to get pregnant, by miscarriages, by more trying, then, finally, by babies and breastfeeding schedules and now that glue was starting to unstick. They’d finished. They were fragmenting. He could go. He could go.