After the Party (19 page)

If Jem were to look back on her eleven years with Ralph,
as though it were a bullet-pointed time line, that night would have been one of the key and utterly pivotal points. If that night hadn't happened then it was very likely that none of what came afterward would have happened either. If it hadn't been for the cooking of that curry and the eating of those chilies, there would have been no Ralph and Jem, no Scarlett and Blake and no festering, moldering, dysfunctional long-term relationship to fix. Ralph had not phoned since their terse phone conversation the previous morning, and his last words to her, “Something has got to change,” still rang in her head.
Something's got to change
.

Yes, something
did
have to change. Starting with her.

Jem decided there and then that she would cook a curry for Joel. Not to impress him and not to seduce him but just to remind herself of the girl she'd once been. She positively rampaged from aisle to aisle then, filling her basket with chicken breasts, with cans of coconut milk, with miniaturized eggplants and with clutches of Tiger beer. In her absolute certainty about what she was doing she failed entirely to add a much-needed roll of tinfoil to her basket, or the two-pack of paper towels or the four-pint bottle of organic full-fat milk that she actually needed. In her slightly unhinged mood of urgency she sailed past the Shreddies and the fresh bread and the Dove deodorant. She was growing an evening in her shopping basket. It was all there, from the Red Thai Curry–flavored Kettle Chips to snack on while she prepared the meal to the chocolate truffles she would bring out afterward as though her larder always held a spare box of chocolate truffles.

Before anything happened to defuse her conviction, she pulled out her phone, opened up the draft message and pressed send. There. It was done. The ball was officially rolling, and it was rolling straight toward his court.

She headed toward the brand-new self-serve checkouts, thinking that it might be fun, thinking that Blake might enjoy the sparkling red laser light, the chirruping of the scanner over the bar codes.
Beep
went the chicken,
beep
went the coconut milk,
beep
went the Kettle Chips, but as she passed the Thai Curry Kit across the glass panel, there was no
beep
. She checked the screen: “Unexpected item in bagging area.”

She smiled to herself. It was almost as if the machinery knew.

Unexpected was an understatement.

R
alph spent his last day in California on the beach. Alone. Smith would be joining him here at four o'clock, after his last appointment of the day. But for the next four hours it would be just him, a beach towel, a book and the sand. Ralph felt slightly self-conscious as he sat there, his pale English body glowing like a silver birch in a forest of glossy teak.

Ralph sat for a while, his arms wrapped around his knees, and stared into the ocean. It glittered beneath the midday sun as if it had been laced with fairy lights. In the distance he saw small white boats and the trailed foam of Jet Skis. To his left was the Santa Monica pier, gaudy and loud, even from this distance. He contemplated the last six days. He remembered his thoughts before leaving home, what felt like a month ago now, how little he knew about Smith and his lifestyle, how hard he'd found it to imagine being right here. And now here he was, on the beach, a person in Santa Monica, a person who had been here, who knew it, who could navigate his way round town, who could picture the inside of Smith's apartment, who had felt the rhythm of Smith's days, been inside his car, gotten to know his girlfriend, eaten from his fridge. The experience was complete. The nebulous concept was now fully upholstered. And what could he take from these strangely peaceful, uneventful few days?

Well, for a start he could go home safe in the knowledge that the only thing now keeping the long and unillustrious connection between himself and Smith alive was purely that—the sheer length of their association. There was the fact of Ralph's state of semiconflicted fatherhood and Smith's state of happy and enduring childlessness. And there was the fact that Smith and he simply didn't have much to say to each other, a state that is fine when sharing a home, but awkwardly jarring when trying to socialize, and Ralph knew that things would settle back into the pattern of occasional two-line emails about nothing in particular the moment he returned to English soil.

But this trip had never been about him and Smith having a Good Time Together; this trip had been about something much more tenuous than that. It had been about finding answers and even before that it had been about finding questions, because before he got here he really had had no idea at all what it was that he needed to know.

For a moment on Tuesday night he'd thought he'd found what he needed. He'd thought it was Rosey. He'd thought that if he could make a beautiful young woman with creative rather than reproductive preoccupations fall in love with him, if he could be set free to start life over again with someone fresh and sharp and bright and cool, someone like Jem used to be, then maybe he would remember what it was all about. But that had been a red herring. He had very strong feelings for Rosey. He wanted to have sex with Rosey. If he was going to run away and have an adventure and leave all his commitments behind then Rosey would be just the woman to do it with. She was beautiful and bright and fresh, and all those other things, but she wasn't the mother of his children. Ralph didn't need another woman,
he just needed to work out how to make the one he already had like him again. And now, he knew how to do it.

He hadn't spoken to Jem since their fractious phone conversation on Wednesday morning. When he was awake she was either asleep or looking after children, and trying to talk to Jem about anything of any importance when there were children in the room with her was completely impossible. And besides, this was not a conversation he wanted to have on the phone from five and a half thousand miles away; this was a conversation for the two of them on Saturday night, face-to-face over the kitchen table and possibly a bottle of wine.

The day passed dreamily for Ralph. He knew it would be a very long time indeed before he could sit on a beach alone again. He read his book, he lay on his back in the sun, letting the hot beach play its auditory tricks with the sounds around him, the hazy drone of strangers' words, the dreamy hum of traffic on the road behind him, the occasional shard of laughter or the horn of a car.

At four o'clock Smith joined him and they passed the early evening in gentle talk, about nothing in particular. Rosey didn't join them that last night. She was out with friends, and Ralph was glad. He wanted to keep his head clear on this, his last night away from home. He wanted to empty his head of everything except his determination to make things better at home. He felt alive and clean, he felt ready to do whatever it took to be a better husband and a better father.

They moved from the beach to a casual beach bar where they sat with their shoes full of sand and their skin sticky with the last application of sunscreen. Ralph's face felt tight and rough, his hair felt like straw, and for the first time since he'd arrived six days ago, Ralph felt completely relaxed with Smith.

“You should marry that girl,” he said, apropos of nothing much.

“What? Rosey?”

“Yeah, you should marry her. If you don't, someone else will.”

“Nah,” said Smith, turning a coaster round on the tabletop against its edges. “She's not the marrying type.”

“I wouldn't be so sure,” said Ralph.

Smith threw him a puzzled look. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “and what have you two been talking about behind my back?”

“Nothing much,” said Ralph. “I just don't think she's as unconventional as you think she is. I think,” he continued, “it's all a bit of an act. That's all.”

“Well,” said Smith, letting the coaster drop to the table and lacing his fingers behind his head. “I am most certainly not the marrying type, so that kind of puts an end to that. And anyway, you're a fine one to talk—what about you? And Jem?”

Ralph smiled. “I think that bringing two children into the world is quite enough of a commitment to be going on with, but you never know, maybe one day . . .”

Smith studied him for a moment. “Don't you ever worry?” he began.

“Worry about what?”

“I don't know. You're not married. She's a good-looking woman. Don't you ever worry she might, you know . . . ?”

“What—Jem?”

“Yeah.”

Ralph almost snorted. “No way!” he said. “She doesn't even want to have sex with me, let alone someone else. Besides, she's stuck at home all day with two kids. The only people she sees outside the home are her sister, her gay boss and Karl Kasparov. Even if she wanted to . . .” He shrugged, conclusively.

“You need to sort that sex thing out,” said Smith.

“Yeah,” said Ralph, squinting across the beach into the brilliant gold of the lowering sun. “Yeah,” he said again. “Lots of things to sort out when I get back. Loads of stuff to do. But thanks,” he held his beer bottle out to Smith, “thanks for letting me take some time out, thanks for giving me some space to breathe. It's been really . . . useful.”

Smith smiled at him, slightly skeptically. “Glad to have been of service,” he said. “And next time you should bring Jem. And the kids.”

Ralph laughed out loud. “Yeah, right,” he said. “You'd love that!”

“Why not?” said Smith simply. “Just because I don't want kids of my own doesn't mean I don't want to meet yours.”

“Seriously, mate,” Ralph continued, “your lifestyle, and my kids . . .” He drew his finger across his throat. “Not a match made in heaven. But next time you come home, come over. You can see them in their own environment.”

Smith smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I'd like that. That'd be good.”

They both leaned back then, their beers held in their laps, their faces lit by the evening sun, two decent men, no longer best mates, but at peace with themselves and with each other for the first time in eleven years.

And tomorrow, Ralph's life would start afresh.

H
ours before this perfect Californian moment, and over five thousand miles away, Jem had not been giving much thought to tomorrow. Her thoughts were mainly of the next few hours, specifically between
now
(5:55 p.m.) and
then
(roughly 8 p.m.? Possibly even later).

She had had second, third and fourth thoughts about this arrangement from the moment Joel had replied in the affirmative to her text message fifteen minutes after she'd sent it.

She dressed herself carefully in clothes that said, “Just because I've invited you here under the dark cover of night it does not necessarily mean that I wish to have extramarital adventures with you,” but would also make him hope that she did. She chose a loose gray tunic, thick black tights and her rip-off Uggs. She looked cute, not foxy. And everyone knew that there was not a man alive who found Ugg boots sexually alluring.

Her hair, on the other hand, she paid more attention to. She pulled it back to reveal the nape of her neck and then plucked curls from the bun with her fingertips, and it was while she was standing in the hallway, distractedly pulling curls from her bun with her fingertips that it occurred to her that maybe she was insane.

Really.

Was this the behavior of a sound-minded woman? She had
only just given birth. She was sharing her bed every night with a tiny suckling babe. She hadn't had sex with her partner for eight months. And her stomach turned into a tongue when she leaned over.

The only rational explanation for any of it was that she was mad. She contemplated herself in the mirror. Did she look mad? She looked tired, but that was normal these days. And she looked pale, but it was April and her skin had not seen the sun for seven months. Her hair looked reasonably controlled. She was dressed in a very pared-down restrained style. She had no food on her, no holes in her tights. She stared deeply into the green-gray strata of her irises. Was there a sign there? Was there an answer in there to the imminent arrival at her own home of a strange man the night before the arrival home of her long-term partner? No, there were no answers in there, just a soft, faded sadness, just a slightly confused woman looking back at her, wondering what the hell she thought she was doing.

She sighed and was about to head toward the kitchen when her phone rang. She picked it up from the hall table and read the ID. It was Karl. So typical of him to phone her exactly one minute before the official end of the working week. She was tempted to let it ring through to voice mail, but then remembered that Karl never left messages.

“Karl,” she said, smiling at her own reflection in the mirror as if she were smiling at her client.

“Miss Duck. I've had a beer and it's decided me.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. I'm going to frigging well do it.”

Jem watched her face burst into a sunbeam of pure delight. “Yes!” she said, punching the air with a fist.

“I thought that'd make you happy.”

“God, yes, Karl, that really has. That's brilliant. And I think absolutely the right decision. Not just financially, although obviously, that'll be a boon, but for you, for your career. Well done!”

She heard him laugh wryly. “I'm still not convinced about any of it, I'll tell you that, and Christ, if they try and make me eat anything that some animal has shat out of I'll be out of there in a flash, but yeah, what the heck, it's a free holiday. And they usually put someone easy on the eye in there, don't they?”

“They do, Karl.” Jem smiled, little knowing as she said it how the words would come back to haunt her. “They do. So I can phone them, then? Tell them you're a yes?”