After the Party (10 page)

He looked up too. “I see what you mean.” And then he glanced at his watch. “But, God, that leaves a lot of leftover Sunday afternoon.”

Jem hitched her bag over her shoulder and smiled. “Ah, yes. Killing the time,” she said. “And then the next thing we know they'll be twenty years old, never call us and we'd give anything for a long, damp Sunday afternoon in the park with them again.”

“Very wise words.” He rearranged his body into the shape of a person no longer engaged in conversation and smiled. “I'll see you soon.”

“Yes,” she said, “see you soon.”

She met Scarlett on the path in front of her. She had her hand wedged up between her butt cheeks. “I really, really, really need to poo!” she cried again.

“Yes, I know, baby, that's why we're going home.”

“But
I don't want to go home
!” she wailed.

“Well, then,” said Jem, in the slightly lobotomized voice she used to talk to her daughter when resisting the urge to scream, “shall we go and dig a hole in the sandpit and you can do a poo in there, like Smith the cat?”

Scarlett smiled slyly and nodded.

Jem groaned. “Well, unfortunately you're not allowed to poo in sandpits, so unless you want to do it in your pants, I suggest we go home.”

“But argh, Mummy,
we're playing
!”

“I know you're playing, my darling, but you're going to have to stop playing. There'll be other times to play. Jessica will be here on other days, won't you, Jessica?”

Jessica nodded enthusiastically. “Tomorrow, probably,” she said, “and the day after that. And the
day after that. And the day after that.” She pulled a pink button out of her pocket and gave it to Scarlett. “That's my button,” she said, “off my favorite cardigan. You can keep it, if you want, and then you can give it back to me next time.”

Scarlett looked at the button in awe, as though it were the Koh-i-noor.

“Oh, look at that, Scarlett, look at the beautiful button Jessica gave you. Are you going to say thank you?”

“Thank you,” Scarlett muttered, flatly.

“Yes, thank you, Jessica. That's very kind of you. I'll make sure Scarlett looks after it.” She beamed at her and Jessica beamed back and Jem wondered what it must be like to have a child who smiled that radiantly at strangers.

She took Scarlett's hand and began to lead her toward the gate, when she felt someone behind her. It was Joel. “Look,” he was saying, “you know, they get on so well, maybe we should get them together one afternoon?”

“Oh!” said Jem, overbrightly. “Right. Yes! That's a great idea.” It wasn't a great idea, she realized, even as the words left her mouth. It was a terrible idea. It kicked the door of their passing acquaintance wide open and let the possibility of growing intimacy walk right in.

“Here's my card.” He slipped a sliver of blue card into her free hand. “Text me. Maybe one afternoon this week, seeing that you're a full-time mum. We could kill an afternoon together?”

“Cool,” she said, staring unseeingly at the card, stultified by the potential magnitude of this development. “Yes, I'll text you. Great.”

She smiled, one last stiff smile, then waved and headed home, not just for the urgent lavatorial relief of her wriggling daughter but also for her own peace of mind.

R
alph heard a voice, a female voice. It was quite a long way away and it sounded happy.

He tried to open his eyes but they appeared to have been soldered together, so he turned onto his side and attempted to drift back into sleep for a few moments.

It was then that he became aware of a dull pounding across his brow and a thick coating of something on his tongue and slowly he remembered every single one of the double-measure margaritas and numerous bottles of what he'd referred to at the time as “piss-weak Yank lager” that he'd imbibed the night before. He also remembered that he'd landed on American soil only the previous day and that his head, his blood and most of his internal organs were convinced it was either the middle of the night or lunchtime, he couldn't remember which, and that he should probably get out of bed, face the day and hit the hangover and the jet lag head-on.

The female voice broke into a laugh. It was a gutsy laugh, though simultaneously very feminine. It was the laugh of a fresh-complexioned person, a person who had not been drinking the night before, someone wholesome and healthy, someone who'd probably had a nutritious breakfast, a jog on the beach and had flossed between her teeth, rigorously.

Ralph's curiosity—what little he could currently muster—was piqued.

This must be Rosey.

He dragged himself from the bed and pulled a crumpled T-shirt—the same T-shirt he'd been wearing since early the previous morning—over his head, searched for his toiletry bag in his rucksack, failed to find it and then remembered vaguely having taken it out and put it in the bathroom the night before in one of those inexplicable drunken bursts of efficiency.

In the bathroom the extent of his drunken burst of efficiency was clearly evident in the neat row of toiletries lined up on the glass shelf above the sink. He ran the tap, reached for his toothbrush and then glanced at himself. What was it Smith had said yesterday?
London boy
. That's right. And yes, in this light, that's exactly what he looked like. He looked like tube stations and pavements and pigeons and slush and grubby smudged pages of
The Times
. Gray, lifeless, not far off dead, really.

He heard another delicious chime of laughter coming from the living room and decided that before he could possibly face the hearty source of this mellifluous sound, he would have to do something dramatic about his appearance. He found something inside Smith's shower cubicle called Super Strong De-Scaling Scrub, which sounded like exactly the thing for fish, kettles and grimy-looking Englishmen. He applied it generously to his face and neck and then soaped his entire body with a shower wash scented with limes and mandarins and then stepped into the soft embrace of one of Smith's luxurious and freshly laundered bath sheets. By the time he had rehydrated his sour London skin with something green and slightly herbal in a white pot and then put on an outfit consisting solely of unworn clothes (pants and socks included) he felt almost human. He sauntered toward the living room and prepared himself for his first look at Smith's girlfriend.

Except he could never have quite prepared himself for his first look at Smith's girlfriend because she was, quite simply, one of the most exquisite women he had ever seen in his life.

“Ralphy!” Smith got up and patted Ralph matily on the back. “Good morning. Or should I say, good afternoon?”

Ralph failed to register the fact that he'd slept through lunch and smiled blankly at him. “Morning,” he said.

Rosey stood up too. She was wearing a loose cream sundress with straps that tied up in bows on her honeyed, angular shoulders. On her feet were plain white flip-flops. Her hair was thick and blond and, as Smith had described last night, cut off into a chin-length bob, with thick bangs that swept sideways across her forehead. Her jaw was on the square side of things, but very fine-boned, and her nose was dead straight with a slight upward slant to it. But it was the eyes that skewered him, a deep greeny-blue, which, if he were to equate it to a shade in the set of Schmincke Mussini oil paints in his studio at home, would be called Chromium Oxide, framed with fans of thick lash and appraising him confidently, intelligently from beneath the heavy bangs.

“This is Rosey,” said Smith. “And this is Ralph, the only person I'm not related to who's known me since I was a child.”

“Wow,” said Rosey, her smile steady and strong. “So I can get all the dirt off you, then?”

“Oh, yes, definitely,” said Ralph. “And if Smith had let me know that he actually had a girlfriend, before I got here, I would have been able to bring along some pretty embarrassing photos too.”

“Why d'you think I didn't tell you?” interrupted Smith.

“Oh, shame,” said Rosey, fiddling with a heavy silver chain on her left wrist. “I would
love
to see photos of little Smith.”

“Less of the little,” said Smith, and Rosey and Ralph laughed politely. “Coffee?” he asked Ralph.

“Oh, yeah. A coffee would be great.” Smith left them there and headed for the kitchen. Ralph glanced at Rosey. He felt strangely shy, almost as though he'd found himself alone at a bus stop with the hottest girl at school.

As well as the heavy silver bracelet, Rosey had a row of small silver studs in her left ear, a tattooed laurel wreath around her ankle and a small silver cross around her neck, set quite high on the chain so that the cross rested in the dip of her throat. The cross itself did not register in Ralph's subconscious in quite the same way that the curve of her throat did. It was magnificent; long and taut and just precisely the sort of brilliantly designed instrument that a laugh of that quality would require.

“So, Smith tells me you've just had a baby?”

The question picked Ralph up off the wooden floor by the scruff of his freshly scrubbed neck and hurled him against the wall. It took him a moment to recover and when he did he saw Rosey staring at him unblinkingly with her Chromium Oxide eyes, awaiting a response.

“Yeah,” he said, a beat too late, “well, not me, my, er, girlfriend, partner, you know. But yeah. A little boy.”

He watched her response. He could spot a broody woman at ten paces. Something happened to a broody woman when you mentioned the word
baby,
something raw and animal behind the eyes. The animal thing wasn't there with Rosey, just a kind of, aw, babies, cute wrinkle of the nose and an indulgent smile, no different from if they were talking about tiny little kittens or watching newborn lambs gambol around a field. She seemed, to Ralph, much younger than thirty-three.

“What's he called?”

“Blake,” he said, clearing his throat, which felt suddenly thick with the sound of his son's name. “Yeah, Blake.”

“That's cool,” she said, “like Amy Winehouse's fella?”

Ralph grimaced. Blake was
his
name. When they'd first started discussing baby names, four years ago, when Scarlett was still a gender-nonspecific ball of cells in Jem's womb, when Amy Winehouse was still at stage school, he'd said: Blake. If it's a boy. Blake. Blake for Peter Blake and William Blake and Quentin Blake, not to mention for
Blake's 7
. But not for Blake whatever his name was, who was in prison for beating someone up in a pub. They'd gone ahead with the name anyway, safe in the assumption that by the time their Blake was at school, no one would remember the one in the porkpie hat.

“Yes,” he sighed, “but not named for him. Named for some people of actual substance. Named for some geniuses.”

“Ah,” she said, her eyes widening with understanding. “Peter and William? And Quentin, too?” And Ralph saw it, a flash of something bright and frightening and exceptional. She knew all the Blakes, the rancid tabloid Blakes and the genuine substantial Blakes. He threw her a look of respect and she smiled at him. “I studied history of art,” she said, “well, for a year, anyway—I dropped out.”

Ralph was about to ask her about her course and why she'd dropped out but she sensed the question coming and dodged it. “And is he your first, this Blake of yours?”

Ralph shook his head. “No,” he said, “we've got a girl too. Scarlett. She's three, four in September.”

“Another cool name,” she said appreciatively. “You and your wife—”

“Girlfriend,” he interjected quickly.

“Girlfriend,” she corrected herself, with a knowing smile. “You have very good taste in names. Any pictures?”

“Of the kids? Erm, yeah, I do actually. Jem made me bring some, to show Smith.”

“Oh. Let's see them,” she cajoled.

Ralph went back to his room and delved around in his rucksack, looking for the shiny wallet Jem had forced on him when he was packing on Friday night with the words: Smith will want to see your kids. “No he won't,” Ralph had countered, “he won't have the slightest interest.”

“Of course he will,” Jem had said, “and even if he doesn't, won't you want them for yourself, just to, you know, look at?”

Ralph hadn't replied, just taken the wallet and stuffed it into his bag, wondering why it was that women always thought you should feel the same things they felt and care about the same things they cared about. But now he was glad he had them. He wanted this amazing woman to see his stunning daughter, his dinky son, to see what he'd produced. Although he was forty-two years old, at heart Ralph still felt as unformed and insubstantial as a teenager. The existence of his children gave him the stature of a man.

He took the wallet back into the living room and passed it to Rosey.

She held it unopened for a moment, eyeing Ralph as if he was delicious sport. Ralph felt his temperature rise. This woman was amazing. Everything about her was amazing. The more he looked at her the more beautiful she became. The more time he spent with her the more he wanted to know about her. Ralph was not a man with a roving eye or a weak heart. Ralph was a loyal and faithful man and he was unnerved to find himself feeling a deep attraction to another woman for the first time since he'd fallen in love with Jem.

“So, Smith tells me you're an artist?” She pulled the wallet
open and took out the photos, her eyes still on Ralph, waiting for his response.

“Yup,” he said, glad for a line of questioning that would take his mind off his feelings.

“What sort of stuff do you make?” she asked, glancing at the top photo.

“Oil on canvas. Still life. Smith's got one of my paintings in his spare room.”