After the Party (25 page)

Deciding that a stilted, rather awkward conversation was preferable to fueling his simmering rage with her, she slapped on her best smile and headed toward him.

“Hi!” she began. “Haven't seen you here for a while!”

“I was about to say the same to you.” He smiled drily.

“How are you?”

“Oh, fine, fine, you know. The usual.” He turned his paper coffee cup round and round between the palms of his hands. “You?” he said after a short pause, as though it had been an effort to pull the word out of his mouth.

“Yeah, great. Nice to have got winter out the way.”

“Well, yes, although today is not exactly a precursor to balmy summer nights.”

“No, today is a bit rubbish, it has to be said.”

“How's the little one?” He gestured at the increasingly fat baby dangling from her chest.

“Er, not so little. Blowing up like a barrage balloon, in fact. Not sure I'll be able to carry him around in this thing for much longer.”

“Must put quite a strain on your back?”

“Yes. It does.”

She smiled tightly and perched herself on the arm of the bench. The conversation was going absolutely nowhere so she decided that she could either slink away now or get something out of it. “So,” she began, “funny to see you outside my sister's house again the other day. Do you have a friend in the area?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “No. It's, er, it's more of a . . . it's a group thing I attend. For partners of people addicted to drugs. A support group thing.”

Jem nodded. It was a plausible and decent explanation that made perfect sense in the light of what Lulu had told her the other day, but still, there was something about his delivery that didn't quite ring true. Feeling a strange need to prod at Joel, she continued.

“That sounds great,” she said. “Must be brilliant to be able to talk to other people who are going through the same thing as you?”

“Yes.” He dropped his head and stared into the lid of his coffee cup. “It's really useful.”

They fell silent for a moment and watched their children playing together. “Does Jessica know?” she said. “Does she know about her mother?”

Joel shrugged. “You know what?” he said, turning to look at her for the first time since she'd sat down. “I don't mean to be rude, but I'd prefer not to discuss my family life with you. I mean, it's clear to me that the time we spent together last month was just a little
blip
in your perfect world”—he made facetious quotes with his fingers around the words—“just something to do because you were bored and your perfect
trendy
artist husband wasn't paying you enough attention. I get all that, and now I think we should just get on with our lives. Don't you?” His face was set hard with repressed emotion as he returned his gaze to his coffee cup.

Jem stared at him in amazement, unsure whether what had just happened was real or something vile offered up by her imagination. “Right,” she said, “okay.”

“Yeah,” he said, to his cup. “Okay.”

Jem wanted to remove herself from this unsavory situation, but she also wanted to try to understand why it had happened.

“Listen,” she began, “I'm not sure what I've done to make you angry—”

“I am not
angry
,” he muttered. “I am just a quiet, ordinary man, wanting to get on with his life, without any of this shallow yummy-mummy
bullshit
.”

“Sorry? What?” She was almost amused.

“Yeah, you women with your stupid boots and your perfect little houses and your fee-paying nurseries and your
big cars
 . . .”

“I haven't got a big car!”

“You think because you've moved to some ‘edgy' little corner
of London that that makes you all kind of urban and cool. But it doesn't, you know. 'Cause all you do is make your edgy little corner into yet another chichi, gentrified little mini Hampstead.”

“Right,” said Jem again, feeling a chill anger slowly percolating through her. “I think it's clear that you and I have had some kind of misunderstanding . . .”

“No, there's no misunderstanding,” he said slowly and coolly, “none whatsoever. You know
exactly
what I'm talking about. See that?” He pointed at their two girls playing together. “That's real, that is. That's two people, different backgrounds, different personalities, coming together,
killing time
. You know, for fun. You and me”—he turned his mouth down to demonstrate his disapproval—“that was just a game, a little fantasy you were playing out inside your pretty little head full of fluff and kittens and organic bloody this and that. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I'm blind? I saw the way you looked at my shoes the other day.”

“What!”

“Please, don't patronize me by trying to deny it. I saw it, it was blatant. You looked at my shoes like they disgusted you, like
I
disgusted you. And that's fine. I don't really care either way. But do me a favor, eh, don't treat me like some special case, like, oh, I know this guy, his wife's a crack addict, yada yada yada. Like I say, I'm just a guy, living his life. I'm not here for your entertainment. I'm not here to give you something to talk about at dinner parties.”

Jem got to her feet. She was halfway between tears and fury. “Look,” she started, “you're entitled to your opinion.”

“
You're entitled to your opinion
,” he mimicked. “How very Jeremy Kyle of you. That's exactly the sort of thing someone
says when they don't give a shit about anyone else's opinion. Look, I'm not saying I don't think you're a nice person. You are a Very Nice Person. You're just not what I thought you were. That's all.”

Jem drew in her breath. She wanted to let it out and scream, “What the fuck is your problem, you crazy son of a bitch?” After a moment she managed to say this: “Well, I must say, neither are you.”

He shrugged at these words and then he sank his face back into his coffee cup, looking for all the world like a sulky teenage boy.

Jem strode then to the other side of the playground, to hide behind the climbing frame. She sat there for a moment, determined that she would not be chased from her local playground by a psychotic man with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, but once the adrenaline had stopped pumping through her veins she realized she needed to cry and she did not want him to see her crying, so she ignored Scarlett's squawks of protest and two minutes later they left the playground and headed for home.

•  •  •

Ralph came downstairs a moment after they returned home. Scarlett was still screaming and crying because of the unexpectedly abrupt end to her playground jaunt and Jem had had to drag her pretty much the whole way home by the wrist, looking, no doubt, to people passing by, as if she were abducting her. Her shoulders were aching from the weight of the hefty infant Blake and she was hot, flustered and out of sorts. It was ironic that after all the times she had cursed Ralph for cloistering himself away from moments such as this when all she wanted was another human being to appear and say, “God, looks like you're having a bad afternoon,” now she wished he had stayed in his studio. She
was not ready to see him. She was not ready to see anybody. The last fifteen minutes of her life had been so unsettling on so many levels that she needed just to sit down with a glass of wine and stare at a blank wall for half an hour.

“You're back early,” he commented.

“Yes,” she said, stepping over Scarlett's prone and writhing form on the kitchen floor. “It was a bit chilly. And this one was getting cranky. That one”—she pointed at the hysterical Scarlett—“as you can see, was not impressed.”

Ralph gathered Scarlett into his arms and she threw her arms around his neck with melodramatic relish. Ralph smiled at Jem over her small heaving shoulders. “Oh, well,” he soothed, “you can always go tomorrow. The playground will always be there.”

Jem smiled tightly. No, she thought to herself, no, the playground will not always be there. Some insane man had set up camp in the playground and now it was somewhere she would have to avoid for eternity.

“What are you going to have for your tea?” he continued, trying to distract Scarlett from her tantrum. “What's for tea, Mummy?”

“Er . . .” She pulled open the fridge door and stared at the contents blindly. None of it made any sense. Her head was too full of Joel and his cold, hard face and his spiteful words. “Pizza?” she offered, her eye suddenly caught by the royal blue of a Pizza Express box.
Pizza Express
. What would Joel make of that, she wondered. Would that be shallow and yummy-mummy? Would that make him hate her even more?

Scarlett shook her head glumly, but Jem knew that it was just her mood, that if Jem just ignored her and cooked the thing, Scarlett would eat it. She switched on the oven and appraised her surroundings. They still had the kitchen that had been here when they bought the house nearly four years ago. It was
farmhouse style, distressed pine, wrought-iron fittings, and Jem had a strange fondness for it. She did tend to salivate a little when passing kitchen showrooms full of sleek lines and glittery extractor fans that looked like chandeliers, and shiny aubergine veneers, but in her heart she knew she wasn't that type of person. In her heart she knew that she and this rather modest, rather bashed-about kitchen were soul mates. In fact there was nothing in her entire house that could be seen in any way as aspirational or chichi, nothing to inspire the ire and contempt that she had just been subjected to. And so what if she'd looked at his shoes in a less than enthusiastic manner. The only reason she was looking at his shoes in the first place was to persuade herself that she should not have a potentially seismic extramarital affair with the man, not because she was some snotty, four-wheel-drive-owning, high-maintenance gym bunny. What did he mean, she wasn't what he'd thought she was? What had he thought she was? As these thoughts swarmed angrily around her head, she began to take out her feelings on inanimate objects. She slammed the oven door open and smashed the baking tray onto the draining board. She ripped the Pizza Express box apart and pulled violently at the cellophane wrapping. Cubes of cheese fell from the top of the pizza onto the floor and she growled loudly.

Ralph watched her quietly. “You all right?” he asked.

“What?” she snapped.

“I said, are you all right? You seem a bit tense?”

She brushed the mozzarella cubes from the palm of her hand and into the bin. “No,” she said, “I'm not tense. Well, no more tense than I always am. Apparently.”

Ralph looked at her, slightly alarmed, clearly biting back the words he wanted to say.

Jem sighed. She had broken the truce. For four weeks they
had been pleasant to each other, bat bat bat, like a friendly game of tennis, and now she'd broken the rally. The ball had gone over the fence. Someone would have to go and collect it. And even though it was her fault that it had landed there, she was not in the mood for being conciliatory. She was too angry and she was too shaken. So she left it lying there and hoped that Ralph would pick it up. He did.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn't trying to get at you. I was just checking you were okay. Here, I'll take the kids up to the studio, give you some time to yourself.”

“Fine,” she snapped gracelessly. “But not for too long. Pizza will be ready in fifteen minutes. Okay?”

Ralph shrugged. “No problem. Did you hear that, Scar? Fifteen minutes in my studio, before tea. Yeah?”

“Yeah!” shouted Scarlett, who was rarely allowed inside Ralph's studio and viewed it as the Biggest Treat Imaginable. Ralph plucked Blake from the rug where Jem had left him and the three of them disappeared upstairs to the attic.

The silence was immediate and overwhelming. Jem slumped onto a dining chair and exhaled. She felt bad about snapping at Ralph. Ralph had been nothing but great since he'd returned from his trip to the States. She would apologize to him later; she would blame it on the pregnancy. And now that she had excised her anger and her humiliation she also felt bad about Joel. He'd obviously read even more than she'd imagined into their brief dalliance. And deep down she couldn't really blame him for being so angry with her. She'd led him on. She'd brought him into her life. She'd toyed with his affections. All in the name of idle experimentation. She was a stupid, vain and very hormonal woman.

And not only that, but he'd seen through her flimsy façade.
Just as Ralph had done—
you mums
. She had spent so long blaming Ralph for everything that it had never really occurred to her that maybe she'd been a disappointment too. Maybe Ralph was right, maybe she had turned into a dull and shallow mum. Maybe she was far from the woman he'd fallen in love with all those years ago. Maybe it was time for her to take a long hard look at herself and see what needed to be changed. But then she remembered she was pregnant. Change would have to wait.

She sighed again, and then she let herself cry for exactly twelve minutes before slowly getting to her feet, mopping her eyes and taking a slightly overcooked pizza from the oven.

R
alph had decided. He wanted the baby. He didn't just want the baby but really, desperately,
dearly
wanted the baby. It suddenly seemed so simple and so clear. It was something that Rosey had said in her email reply to his.

“What is an unwanted child? An unwanted child is just an unknown child. You'll want it once it's here.”

He had argued back that actually it had taken him nearly five months to “want” Blake, but she had come back with: “So what? You want him now. Five months is not very long in the scheme of a lifetime of love. And anyway,” she'd continued, “if you go through with it, there'll be a ghost in your house for the rest of your lives. You have to decide whether or not you can live with that.”