After the Party

by Lisa Jewell

  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 on 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 OK. 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. OK?’

  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 on to 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 apologise 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 like 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.

  Chapter 7

  Ralph had decided. He wanted the baby. He didn’t just want the baby but he really, desperately, dearly wanted the baby. It suddenly seemed so simple and so clear. It was something that Rosey had said in her e-mail 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.’

  He’d decided there and then that he couldn’t live with that. There were already two ghosts in their house: the baby that should have been born in May 2002, the baby that should have been born in July 2005. Ralph could be philosophical about those babies. They were not meant to be. They were genetic rejects of some sort, or maybe, if you followed some of Jem’s crazy fate-focused thinking, they were just not the right babies for them. But this baby, this ghost, it would crawl the corridors of their consciences, wailing and clanging chains, crying, why me, why me? There could be no philosophical musings on the lost existence of this child. Well, really, we just didn’t have the room, the time or the inclination. It had to go, terribly sad, but really, anyone would have done the same in our position.

  No, thought Ralph, not anyone. The world was full of people who would not think twice about going through with the pregnancy, about bringing the baby into being, welcoming it into their family. Ralph was painfully aware that it was not him who would have to carry the child, bear the child, nurse the child, but he also knew this: he had been a so-so father to Scarlett and a worse than useless father to Blake. He had decided early on in the parenting game that because it was Jem who had forced the issue of having a family, that the children she so dearly craved would be hers. She would be the one to fill her brain with schedules and socks and term times and goodie bags and tooth-brushing and nappy-purchasing. She would be the one to carry her children around in her head all day like unwieldy bags of heavy shopping. She would be the one to work her own life and her own needs around those of her children. Ralph would continue to do what he’d always done: stand alone in a well-lit room and paint.

  She could have it worse, he’d always reasoned with himself. It’s not as if I go out every night and come home steaming drunk. It’s not as if I’m out with clients or off on business trips. It’s not as if, he’d even thought self-righteously to himself, it’s not as if I hit her.

  But that person had gone and now he wanted to experience fatherhood through this new, clean lens. He wanted to watch Jem growing daily with a sense of wonder and awe rather than the slightly nauseating dread he’d felt before. He wanted to look forward to the birth of this child, to feel that this was something that they were doing together rather than something that Jem was doing to him.

  He and Jem had not really discussed the concept of termination since that first conversation three days earlier. In four days’ time they would have that conversation and although Ralph knew in his heart that Jem had probably already made up her mind he felt sure that he could persuade her, that once she realised the extent of his commitment to her, to the baby, to their family she would feel more relaxed about the concept. But just now, in the kitchen, he’d seen something inside her, something sad and scared, and he’d been inspired. Suddenly he knew exactly how to fix this thing.

  He pinned a piece of cartridge paper to the wall and gave Scarlett an old tin of watercolours and a jar of water. Then he propped Blake up between some cushions on the floor and gave him a ball of blue nylon string, which he gnawed at gratefully as though all his life he’d been waiting for someone to give him a ball of blue nylon string. Then Ralph flipped open his mobile phone and called Lulu.

  ‘Hi,’ he began, ‘it’s Ralph.’

  ‘Oh, Ralph, hello, how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘I’m great, just, er, thinking about stuff and thinking that I really need to take Jem out for a night, you know, a nice dinner, somewhere local. It’s been ages, and she’s, er, well, a bit rundown …’

  ‘A bit pregnant, you mean?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ralph. Of course. Of course Jem had told her sister. And her sister probably already knew exactly what she planned to do about it. ‘Yeah,’ he continued, ‘she is. And anyway, I was wondering, would you be able to baby-sit one night soon, just for a couple of hours, you know, not for a whole night …?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘You can do tonight?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Walt’s been working from home today so I could get away whenever you need me really. Just say when.’

  ‘Oh, right, the thing is, I haven’t actually spoken to Jem yet.’

  ‘She’ll love it. Just book something. Tell her it’s a done deal.’

  ‘Right, OK, I’ll –’

  ‘Actually, I’ll leave now.’

  Ralph glanced at the time. It was five o’clock. ‘God, you don’t have to …’
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  ‘No, I know I don’t. But if I get there now I can help you with the kids while Jem has a bath and makes herself look gorgeous. I literally have one arm in my coat as we speak. I’ll see you in ten minutes. Bye!’

  Chapter 8

  Jem yanked clothes across the narrow gap in her wardrobe disdainfully. She hated all of her clothes. All of them. Even her Vivienne Westwood Red Label jacket that she had been so overjoyed about winning in an eBay auction. Her body shape had changed so frequently over the past few years that she had kind of forgotten what shape she was, forgotten what suited her and she was always just pleasantly surprised to find something that fitted her.

  And now, ha! she was bloody well pregnant again. More billowy tops, more elasticated jeans, more voluminous bras. She eyed her clothes angrily, blaming them in some way for her predicament, as if they had somehow colluded to bring her back to square one so abruptly.

  Eventually she pulled a floral Jigsaw blouse and a pair of black jeans from her wardrobe. She took off her bulky nursing bra and replaced it with something less functional, slipping a pair of breast pads in first. She hung a string of blue stones around her neck and tweaked her curls. She looked pinched and miserable. She did not look like a person she would want to know. She looked like a shrew. She felt like a shrew. She felt dry and scratchy and spiky. She felt mean and miserly and cruel. Pregnancy did not suit her, it never had done, but at least with her previous pregnancies she’d had the lure of the ultimate goal: the baby in her arms, the extension of their happy family. This time all she could feel was panic and fear. Fear that this baby would be the final undoing of them. Fear that it would tear them apart.

  She adjusted the paper pads inside her bra and she headed downstairs.

  Ralph thought that Jem had rarely looked as beautiful as she did that night through the amber glow of a flickering candle in a glass jar. He had taken her to Olley’s, a quirky pine-panelled fish restaurant around the corner, a place he’d passed a few times on his morning run and been surprised about, not like a London restaurant at all but more like the kind of friendly popular place you’d find in a chi-chi seaside town. Jem was sipping a sparkling water. It was her pregnancy alcohol substitute. If it had bubbles in it and it was cold she could convince herself it was beer or champagne or even a gin and tonic. The fact that she had ordered it was reassuring to Ralph. If she was not drinking then it meant that she had not yet decided. And if she had not yet decided then what he was about to do was more likely to be effective.

  She smiled at him wanly across the table. ‘Been a long time, eh?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, when was the last time, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I seem to recall I was pregnant then too.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I have spent most of these past five years pregnant, as we know.’ She smiled again, a tired, weary smile. A beautiful smile.

  Her mobile phone sat on the side plate, blinking reassuringly. She glanced at it, furtively, as she had done every thirty seconds since they had sat down. Blake had still been awake when they’d left and Jem would not be properly relaxed until she got the text confirmation from Lulu that he was sound asleep.

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier,’ she said, tearing apart a piece of crusty bread.

  He shrugged and smiled. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I can take it.’

  She nodded and glanced down at her phone again.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking up again, ‘I know. But it still wasn’t really fair. I know you’ve been bending over backwards to be, you know, supportive and I really, really, really appreciate it, honestly I do. But I’ve still got, I don’t know, some backed-up resentment issues I guess. And, yippee, now I’ve got Hormone Soup too! So, I’m just saying, I’m doing my best to be soft and kind but inside I’m still a bit hedgehoggy. You know.’

  Ralph reached his hand across the table and took Jem’s. ‘I quite like hedgehogs,’ he said.

  Jem smiled.

  ‘I mean, I know things haven’t been great these last few months –’

  ‘Years,’ interrupted Jem.

  ‘Well, yeah, years probably. And I know I’ve had to do some growing up and that I’ve left you with too much on your plate and that, well, you know the score, I take most of the blame, and I know we’re not going to talk about the baby tonight …’

  ‘Ha!’ interjected Jem. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Yeah, you know which one. And we’re not. But I just wanted to say something to you tonight, something I should have said years ago, something I can’t believe I’ve never said to you before. You know, you are my life, you are everything to me. I am the luckiest man in the world to be with you, to have made babies with you and I don’t know why you’ve put up with me these past years. I don’t ever want to be apart from you and more than anything, I want to, well – I want to marry you.’

  Jem, who had been staring accusingly at her sleeping mobile phone, looked up at him with wide eyes. She put a hand to the pale thin skin of her collarbone, where her fingertips rested against the iridescent blue beads of her necklace. ‘I beg your pardon?’ The words tripped off her tongue quickly without spaces. Ibegyourpardon?

  ‘I said, I want to marry you. For us both to get married. To each other.’

  ‘What, seriously?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, seriously.’

  He drew in his breath. He and Jem had drifted so far apart over the past few years that he found it impossible to hazard a guess as to what might currently be taking place inside her head. Had she started thinking flouncy tulle skirts? Or was she already trying to find the right words to let him down gently? He stared at her beseechingly.

  ‘Fucking hell, Ralph.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he smiled pathetically, ‘I know.’ They had discussed getting married before, in a conceptual, non-nspecific kind of way. They had agreed that it was not a priority, that there were more important things to focus on. They had agreed that having children together was the greatest commitment two people could make to one another. They had agreed that they might do it one day, maybe run away to Las Vegas, maybe do something small and informal in a registry office.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jem, ‘I’m flabbergasted. But in a good way.’ She put a reassuring hand against his arm. ‘I just, er, well, I was going to say, I need to think about it, but that’s a bit stupid really. Of course I don’t need to think about it, obviously I’m going to say yes.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes! Of course I am! You’re the love of my life. You’re the father of my children. What would it say about any of that if I were to say no?’

  ‘So you mean you’re only saying yes because if you said no it would be far more damaging to the status quo?’

  ‘No! No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that getting married is the right thing to do. I’m saying that yes, I want to marry you! Maybe not for the same reasons I would have wanted to marry you five years ago, ten years ago, but for better reasons, probably, because it would make sense, practically. And because Scarlett would love it. And because, I don’t know, because in spite of everything, we still love each other.’

  Ralph looked at her over the tips of his fingers and tried to smile. ‘Ooh,’ he said, ‘romantic!’

  Jem groaned. ‘Oh, Ralph, come on, how can you expect me to be romantic?’

  Ralph smiled sadly. ‘No, of course, I don’t expect you to be romantic; I just thought you might be, that’s all.’

  ‘Listen, Ralph. I’m really sorry. I’m tired. I’ve had a bad day. I’ve got a lot on my mind, but I want you to know this: I’m really glad you asked me to marry you. It’s wonderful and I am delighted. Really I am.’

  ‘Even if you don’t seem it?’

  ‘Even if I don’t seem it. Honestly, inside me there is a giddy twenty-year-old doing a happy dance.’

  ‘With the hedgehog?’

  Jem smiled then, properly, with her whole face, for the first time that day. ‘Yeah,’ she laughed, ‘she’s dancing with the hedgehog.’


  Chapter 9

  Jem’s head felt like it had been opened up, emptied of anything sensible, intellectual or useful, stuffed with horsehair and mud and closed up again. The world appeared to her like a thick gloop of disconnected events and appointments. Her life, which had once felt like a smooth machine of routines and schedules, now felt chaotic and strange. Everyday activities and situations had lost their soothing veneer of familiarity. Partly, of course, it was hormonal; baby-brain they called it, though she’d always thought that was a myth. But mostly it was because her territory had grown new humps and hillocks, valleys and ravines. Suddenly there were towering landmarks in her life that hadn’t been there before: weddings to plan, babies to decide about, an angry-looking man pacing about outside her house.