After the Party (43 page)

“They didn't
cut it out
, Ralph . . .”

“No, I know, but they took it away. And I was scared that it would happen again. That there'd be another baby and another miscarriage or another abortion and seeing you going out and about, so lighthearted, wanting to get drunk, wanting to try and recapture your youth. It made me feel kind of sick, to be honest.”

“Sick?” Jem gulped.

“Yeah. But not just that. More than that. That man.”

“What man?”

“The guy with the little girl, the guy you had a pizza with . . .”

“Joel?”

“Yeah, whatever his name is. I don't know. But I saw him on Monday night. I saw him and I asked him”—he paused for a moment—“I asked him if there'd been anything between you.”

“You didn't!”

“Yeah, Jem, I did, because I needed to know, because it's been eating away at me, all these text messages and taxi rides, and I know you've given me all these perfectly good explanations but I wanted to know for myself.”

“Oh, Christ, I can't believe you said that to him. What did he say?”

“He said exactly what I thought he'd say. He said no.”

“Well, of course he said no,” said Jem, “I mean, I can't believe you could even have thought that about me.”

“Well, you thought it about me,” Ralph said softly. “You thought it about me and the girl in the painting.”

The kitchen fell silent for a moment as they both absorbed the new balance of things.

“Why did you paint her, Ralph?” Jem asked in a softer voice.

Ralph shrugged. “Because she was beautiful,” he said. “Because she asked me to. Because I wanted to thank her, I suppose, for showing me the light.”

“You've made her look like a saint or something, like an angel. Is that how you see her?”

He shrugged again. “I suppose I do,” he said.

“Do I need to be worried about her?”

Ralph gazed at her for a moment. “Are you?” he said.

“What?”

“Are you worried about her?”

Jem blinked and paused to consider the question. “Yes,” she said eventually. “I am worried about her. Are you in love with her?”

“No,” he said simply. “Are you in love with that man?”

“No,” she replied.

“Are you in love with me?”

The question blindsided Jem. It was a question she'd been avoiding for months. She threw it back at him: “Are you in love with me?”

“Yes,” was Ralph's immediate response. “Not in the same way I once was, for sure. But enough to know that my journey stops here. That this is it for me. You, me, the children. What about you?”

She echoed his answer with a nod of her head. “The same,” she said, “I feel the same as you.” Jem drew in her breath. It was as close to the truth as she felt she could get for now.

“Why didn't you stop me?” she said a moment later. “Why didn't you stop me from booking the abortion?”

Ralph shrugged again. “What was the point?” he muttered. “You'd made up your mind.”

“I had no idea you felt that bad about everything. I thought you were relieved when the baby didn't come. Why didn't you tell me how you felt?”

“It was too late. What good would it have done to have said anything? Just made you feel guilty. About something we could do nothing about.”

“So you turned to God, instead?” Jem could barely believe she was uttering the words. They sounded bizarre in her mouth, utterly ludicrous. This was Ralph they were talking about.
Ralph McLeary. There was no room for the concept of God within her definition of Ralph McLeary.

Ralph nodded and stared at his feet.

“And is this serious, this God thing, I mean, really serious?”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess so. It feels real. It feels . . . well, at first it felt really weird, but now it feels just . . .
normal
.”

“And what do you do, at these prayer things?” Jem tried not to sneer as the words left her mouth.

Ralph pulled his gaze from his shoes and squinted his eyes at her. “We pray,” he answered simply.

“But who to?”

“I don't really know,” he said. “To myself. To the world. To whatever's out there, God, or whatever. It's fine”—his tone of voice softened—“honestly. It's nothing to be scared of. It's not Christianity. It's not evangelistic. It's just . . .
prayer
.”

“Yes, I see that, but I still, I just don't understand. I mean . . .” She paused for a moment, trying to find the salient question, until, eventually, she said, “
Why
?”

Ralph sighed and lowered his gaze again. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I have no idea. It's just something that's happened to me. And it's something that feels right.”

“And I just need to accept that?”

Ralph sighed again and raised his gaze to meet Jem's. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose you do.”

Jem nodded, a small childlike gesture. “And us,” she asked, in a soft voice. “What about us?”

“What about us?”

She let her gaze fall. “Well, are we still cool? I mean, you've said some pretty extreme things tonight. You've brought up some, some . . . issues. And, Christ, we're getting married on Saturday. I mean . . .”

“It's up to you, Jem.”

“No, but it's not. It's up to both of us. This is both of our lives we're talking about. Our future. Our destiny.”

“I know I love you. I know I love myself. That's enough for me. And everything we've said tonight, I feel like I know you better again. I feel better about everything. The final call is yours.” He threw her a pragmatic look and Jem blanched.

She gulped and nodded. “Okay,” she said, “yeah. I get it. I am a sinner.” She followed this with a wry laugh.

Ralph immediately leaned in toward her, his face full of concern. “No!” he said. “No! That's not what I'm saying! I'm just saying, I can deal with the changes in you, but—can you deal with the changes in me? I love you, Jem. I've always loved you. I want to marry you. I want to be with you. Forever. No matter what. Okay?”

Jem let him hold her hands in his, but as she looked at his hands she felt something raw and animal deep inside her come bursting to the surface of her consciousness. She wanted to marry Ralph, she wanted to make him happy, she wanted to make her children happy, she wanted to make a secure life and future for herself and her family but she also wanted to run away, open the front door and run through the cool night air, faster and faster, farther and farther, until her lungs were fit to scream.

But she couldn't run. This was her home. This was her life.

She smiled tightly and she squeezed Ralph's hands. “Okay,” she said, “okay. It's going to be okay.” But somewhere deep inside she wasn't sure that that was true.

R
alph and Jem's wedding day dawned pale and watery. There was a suggestion of rain in the air, but also a hint of potential splendor. The weather forecasters were not sure either. It would be a day of mixed fortunes.

Ralph had spent the night in Croydon with his father and would be arriving at the registry office with him at two o'clock. Ralph hadn't wanted to go. “It's silly,” he'd said, “we're technically old enough to be going to our own children's weddings, why be coy?” But Jem had never been married before and wanted to treat at least part of the day traditionally. Lulu and her other sister, Isobel, had stayed the night and last night they'd drunk three bottles of champagne and half a bottle of tequila between them. Lulu was now busily frying up a pan of bacon and Jem was popping thick slices of bread into the toaster and all of them were feeling that the last thing they wanted to be doing today was going to a wedding.

Jem sometimes wished it could always be like this, her, her sisters, her children, her sisters' children, no men, just them, cooking, chatting, drinking, sharing the running of the house. It was a strange thing to be thinking on the morning of her wedding, but then everything felt strange about the morning of her wedding. Since their conversation on Thursday night, Jem had been drifting around in a kind of miasmic trance. Life
suddenly seemed tinged a different hue, a kind of putrid green. She couldn't quite get a grip on the substance of her life anymore. It all felt ephemeral and slightly slippery.

The morning of her wedding passed in a haze. Her parents arrived from Devon at around twelve o'clock and with such a critical mass of people in her small house she shooed them all out into the garden and went into the kitchen to make a pitcher of Pimm's. Her hangover was fading now and she found herself caught between two states: acceptance and discomfort. And as she pushed ice cubes into a large plastic jug, and stared idly through the kitchen window at her family beyond, her gaze was drawn back once again to the orchid on her windowsill; the orchid that had died two years ago and then come miraculously back to life.

Each of the four white flowers that had formed earlier that summer was gone, scattered along the windowsill like cast-off stockings.

The stalk was bare.

Stung by the obvious symbolism, Jem took the Pimm's out into the garden and then, while nobody was looking, she scuttled upstairs to her bedroom.

She tore off her clothes and she peeled apart the clothes hanging in her wardrobe to find a dress she'd hidden in there two months ago, when Ralph had first proposed, snapped up after a frantic last-minute eBay auction. It was a Vivienne Westwood dress, a riotous twisty curvy hourglass affair, printed with snapdragons and peacocks, low across the bust, draped to the calf. She'd tried it on only once, just after she'd unwrapped it. It had fitted her like a dream. She wanted to put it on now. Once it was on, then she was halfway to getting married. Once it was on she could stop thinking all these shady half-thoughts and just get
on with it. She would go downstairs in her beautiful dress and everyone would tell her how stunning she looked and she'd have a glass of Pimm's and suddenly everything would seem all right again. But it all started here with the dress.

She climbed into her brand-new underwear—black, trimmed with lilac, lace-tufted and divine—and then she pulled on the dress and turned to face her reflection in the mirror.

Loose.

The dress was loose.

It hung from her frame like a pair of billowing curtains. Her breasts, which had still been full of milk when she'd first tried it on, sat flat and exposed inside her bra beneath the gaping fabric. Her waist, which had previously been pulled in like a tailor's dummy by the internal boning of the dress, had now disappeared. The dress looked wrong on her. The dress looked unhappy. In her mind's eye Jem imagined Vivienne herself, watching her from the corner of her room, shaking her head sadly. No! she imagined the satsuma-haired one snapping. No! That is not what it is supposed to look like!

The dress hated her. And Ralph was right. She was too thin. She sat down on the bed and dropped her face into her hands. She did not feel like a beautiful bride. She felt like a fraud. An emaciated silly little girl. What would her beautiful daughter say to her when she walked into the garden looking like a mad old lady wearing someone else's designer dress? She would be letting her down. How had she allowed herself to lose so much weight? She hadn't even noticed it happening. It was, she supposed, her way of taking back control after the sadness and confusion of losing the baby. She'd reclaimed her body as her own. And ha! irony of ironies, had ended up with a body that looked nothing at all like hers.

She wiped some tears from beneath her eyes and then she rummaged through her wardrobe for something else. It was only a registry office, something else would do. She had lots of lovely clothes. She would find something else.

And so she walked out into the garden a few moments later in a perfectly nice scarlet slip dress, one she'd worn to a friend's wedding a few years earlier, before she'd had any children. It hung straight and square, neither hugging nor caressing any part of her but showing her elegant porcelain collarbones and her delicate birdlike arms. It matched perfectly the red silk shoes she'd bought to go with her Vivienne Westwood dress and everybody said she looked beautiful, that she'd always suited red, that it was a lovely choice. And none of them, not even her sisters, knew anything about the existence of the beautiful snapdragon and peacock dress now tucked back into the bowels of her wardrobe.

•  •  •

Jem could not shake the sense of sadness and wrongness that possessed her as she and her family headed in a minivan for the registry office at Camberwell. She looked at her sisters: beautiful, excited, happy for her. She looked at her parents, so serene and so together as they always had been, as they had been since a day like this forty-two years ago in a registry office in Paignton, and then she looked at her children: Scarlett resplendent in her layers of tulle and froth, a small tiara tucked into her curls, and Blake oblivious to the occasion, strapped into his baby seat, dressed like a very small man. Here it was, her wedding day. A day she'd never really imagined before. She was off to get married. To Ralph. Her love. Her destiny.

The taxi dropped them all at the side of the road and her father was dispatched into the building to ensure that Ralph was already there.

“He's there,” said her dad, smilingly, a moment later. “He's with his dad. He looks very nervous.”

Jem felt something at the pit of her stomach lurch at his words. This was it, she thought, here comes the bride. At two o'clock Jem, Lulu, Isobel and Scarlett entered the building and were shown to their room, the smallest in the building, seating fifteen. Ralph sat in front of the registrar's desk next to his father. In seats to the right were Philippe and Smith's mum and dad.

On the other side of the room sat Jem's parents, Blake on her mother's lap. Jem felt her legs soften beneath her. Her brain needed sugar, desperately. She felt as light and insubstantial as a cloud. Everyone turned to smile at her and Jem tried to smile back but her face was rigid with fear. And then Ralph turned to look at her and he smiled and he looked as he'd looked at the art gallery that night all those years ago: smart in a suit, pale with nerves and handsome as hell.