by Lisa Jewell
She cupped her hand over her empty belly and felt a jolt of sadness pass through her. It was gone. Her baby was gone. But rather than feeling relief and liberation, Jem felt deflated. Once again her body her taken control of her destiny, once again her body had failed her. And she wished now for her baby back, just for one more day, just to be able to say goodbye, properly, before it was too late. The baby that had withered and perished inside her felt much more real to her than the one she’d been ready to terminate. She felt love and compassion for that poor blighted lost soul where she’d felt none for the big robust baby she’d imagined to be gestating inside her unwilling body.
She stopped the thought processes there. No, she thought, today is a new day, a new start. Today is the day on which I will begin to plan my wedding, to tell people my happy news, to book baby-sitting nights so that my man and I can spend nights out together drinking beer and rekindling our lost magic. Today is not the day to wonder what if.
She tiptoed quietly from the room and then did something she had not done for seven months because she always had her arms full of baby: she tiptoed into her daughter’s room and snuck into her bed, nestling herself against Scarlett’s warm, bony body and burying her nose into her wild, musty hair. She could trick a moment’s affection out of Scarlett like this, before her consciousness was fully aroused. Scarlett wrapped a small leg round Jem’s knees and the two of them lay like that for a few moments, still and warm, until suddenly Ralph appeared in the doorway, a beaming Blake in his arms.
‘Look who finally woke up,’ he said.
‘I want him!’ said Scarlett, suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘I want Blakey!’
Ralph put Blake on the bed, between Jem and Scarlett, who immediately threw her arms round his neck and rubbed her forehead against his. Jem watched them. Now that Blake was sitting up and eating real food Scarlett was taking more and more of an interest in him. Scarlett’s face lit up at the sight of him in a way that it had never lit up at the sight of either of her parents (well, maybe Ralph, on occasion, but certainly not Jem) and he was now considered something of a treat, especially in his pram at the end of her day at nursery and even more so first thing in the morning. Ralph perched himself on the edge of the bed and smiled at Jem.
‘You OK?’ he said.
Jem smiled at him. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘I’m good.’ The sun was shining, her daughter was kissing her son’s nose, her baby had slept through the night. Yesterday was yesterday and todays didn’t get much better than this.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked again.
Jem nodded. She knew what he was asking her. He was asking her how she felt almost exactly twenty-four hours after the end of her pregnancy.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I really am. Fine.’
She smiled at her children again, children she’d spent months and years gestating, feeding, nourishing and teaching. These were her children. This was all she wanted. She didn’t ask Ralph if he was OK. She didn’t want to hear his answer.
Chapter 12
Ralph had a history of snooping. He found the limitations of questions and answers, the insufficiency of ordinary conversation utterly frustrating. One day, he was certain, some brilliant person would invent a computer that could transcribe a person’s innermost thoughts into text on a screen. But until that day the only way to get any really useful insight into another person’s inner workings was to snoop through their stuff. Eavesdropping was another way. It was not something that Ralph felt proud of, it was just part of his make-up. He’d fallen in love with Jem after snooping through her things before he’d even had a conversation with her. He’d read her diaries, five years worth of them, from cover to cover while she was out at work. He’d found out all about her ex-boyfriends and her PMT and what she really thought about her flatmates. He’d fingered her clothes and examined her shoes, become familiar with the golden retriever called Maisy, whom she kept a photo of by her bed. If it wasn’t for his snooping habit, Ralph and Jem might never have got together. And in fact, in his defence, he had not been actively snooping at all when he found the text message from a strange man on Jem’s phone that morning. He had merely been curious as to why someone would be sending Jem a text message at seven o’clock in the morning.
The fact that he was alone in the kitchen at the time and that Jem was upstairs having a shower was also a contributing factor to him picking up the phone and pressing the mail icon.
He had been expecting something dull, a message from Lulu saying, ‘Don’t forget to bring pizzas tomorrow,’ or a message from the nursery saying ‘Due to inclement weather the planned trip to London Zoo has been cancelled and children will NOT require a packed lunch today.’
He had not been expecting to read the words: ‘Dear Jem, I am still waiting for you to forgive me. Did you get the flowers? I miss you. Please let me know that we are still cool. Love, Joel x’.
He dropped the phone to the kitchen counter and reeled slightly on the spot, as though an invisible man had just shoved him roughly in the chest.
After a moment he picked up the phone again and reread the message, trying to extract something from it that might offer a reasonable explanation for its presence on his partner’s phone. But no, it was all there: flowers, apologies, kisses, the word ‘love’. There was no reasonable explanation for it, none whatsoever.
He quickly restored the message to ‘unread’ status and switched off the phone.
He looked at his bowl of Bran Flakes and felt queasy. He heard footsteps overhead, Jem’s, padding from the bathroom to the bedroom. He forced himself to swallow and listened to some buzzing in his ears for a moment. It was the sound of his thoughts arranging themselves.
What to do?
He had no idea.
He was not a fan of confrontation, especially not at seven in the morning.
He tried to step away from the situation by concentrating on making up a bowl of baby porridge for Blake, who was sitting in his Bumbo on the kitchen table looking at Ralph expectantly. He poured boiling water on to the translucent flakes and stirred in a spoonful of puréed raspberry. It looked like something that had been extruded from a lanced boil. He swallowed again and fished a plastic spoon out of the cutlery drawer, waving it in front of Blake’s nose.
‘Have you got any idea?’ he whispered to Blake. ‘Any idea? Who is Joel? Have you met him? God, I bet you have. I mean, Mummy never goes anywhere without you. Except …’ He stopped mid-thought. That day, that day when she’d taken Blake over to Lulu’s, when she’d been wearing those heels. Said she was going for a business meeting in town. He’d never really asked her about it, been too preoccupied first with wanting to get her into bed and then with feeling aggrieved that she wouldn’t let him. Could that have been the first meeting? But then, what since? She hadn’t been out in the evenings, there’d been no more business meetings, she was either here or she was out with the kids. How could she possibly have been conducting an affair with a man called Joel? She didn’t (as she herself would probably have said) have the time.
He spooned the last of the porridge into Blake’s eager mouth and scraped the mess from his face with the side of the spoon.
‘Oh, thanks for doing that.’ It was Jem, in the doorway, hair freshly washed, in jeans and a lavender cardigan. Scarlett was behind her in her pink tartan dressing gown, peering cheekily between her legs.
Ralph glanced at the well-fed baby, the empty cereal bowl, barely able to recall doing it. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, putting it in the sink and rinsing it out.
‘That’s three nights now.’
‘Three nights of what?’ Ralph felt unplugged from reality. Now that Jem was in front of him, in the flesh, in her soft, almost childlike cardigan, it seemed even more unlikely to Ralph that there could be a mysterious, apologetic, flower-bearing man called Joel in her life.
‘Blake,’ she replied, helping Scarlett on to her chair and pulling another cereal bowl from the cupboard. ‘Three nights sleeping through. Y
ou know what that means?’ she smiled at him, impishly.
‘No,’ he said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own because it was so full of words he couldn’t say. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means,’ she curled her arm around his waist, ‘that we can go out and that I can get drunk and go to bed late and not worry about being woken up or giving him boozy milk. It means that you and I are free.’ She kissed him on the cheek and Ralph thought that he could not remember the last time that Jem had voluntarily kissed him on the cheek. ‘So,’ she said, ‘where shall we go? I was thinking … maybe our old stomping ground. Maybe a night out in Soho, a few pints, a curry?’
Ralph nodded distractedly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘why not?’
‘Cool,’ Jem tipped Scarlett’s Shreddies into the cereal bowl and opened the fridge door. ‘I will call Lulu this morning, find out when she’s free. And also, I was thinking I might ask her if she could take the kids for a couple of hours during the day this weekend, so you and I could go ring shopping?’
‘Ring shopping?’
‘Yes. A ring. For me.’ She looked at him and laughed. ‘You hadn’t even thought about it, had you?’
Ralph shrugged. He couldn’t really remember anything he’d thought about at any point in his life before reading a text message from a man called Joel.
‘An engagement ring. Doesn’t have to be anything flash.’
‘Er, yeah. OK.’
‘You all right?’ asked Jem.
‘Yeah,’ Ralph pulled at the back of his neck with his right hand. ‘I’m just, you know, morning-brain.’
Ralph took his morning-brain into lunchtime and through to the afternoon. He simply could not form a reasonable thought in his head. Everything he tried to contemplate just got ricocheted back into his consciousness as the word ‘Joel’. When he heard Jem leaving the house that afternoon with a cheery ‘Bye, Ralph!’ (another new development, in the past she’d just go, leaving nothing but the sound of a slammed door in her wake) he immediately left his studio and started hunting for more clues.
Without her phone he didn’t really know where to start. He looked for evidence of flowers in vases, on tabletops, in bins and on the patio but found none. He opened and shut all of Jem’s drawers in the chest in their bedroom, wondering what evidence he thought he would possibly find therein – a hastily hidden condom, a stack of love letters tied with silk ribbon? He accessed her e-mail account and scrolled through her in-box, her deleted e-mails, her drafts and even her junk mail. He looked especially at e-mails sent and received around the time of her ‘business meeting’ in the high heels, but there was nothing there. He glanced at her recent documents and found nothing. The whole concept of her affair seemed to be evaporating. Suddenly the little missive he’d seen that morning seemed totally without context.
He wondered how he would get to Jem’s mobile phone without being caught red-handed and then, at the very moment that he thought it, he heard a ringing noise coming from somewhere beyond the kitchen. He followed the noise to the hallway and located the source in Jem’s parka. She’d left her phone behind! He plucked the phone from her pocket and saw that it was Lulu calling. He waited for the phone to go through to voicemail and then he opened up her messages. They were nearly all from Lulu. Lulu, Lulu, Lulu, Karl, Lulu, Mummy, Happy Days Nursery, Lulu, Lulu, Unknown. He clicked on unknown:
‘Friday night sounds great. Let me have your address. Jx’
Let me have your address? Friday night?
With clammy fingers he flicked to the sent messages folder, looking for one to correlate with this one. And there it was. Thursday 17 April, 13.08 p.m.
Hello! Thanks so much for yesterday. Scarlett had the best time EVER and won’t stop talking about Jessica! It’s my last night of single motherhood tomorrow, wondered if you wanted to help me celebrate with a curry and some beers at our place. Maybe 6ish, keep the girls up late? Let me know and I’ll give you the details. J.
Ralph stopped and sucked in a big lungful of air. Jem had invited a man here, while he was away. In Santa Monica. Jem had invited that man. THAT MAN. Of course! The man with the little girl. Jessica, that was her name! The man who’d given him such a funny look that day just after he got back from the States. That man who’d been watching him coming out of the church the other day. That man called Joel.
But no, surely not? I mean, there was nothing untoward in either text message and if you took the fact that Joel was a man out of the equation and pretended that he was a woman called, say, Julie, it would all seem perfectly innocuous. But he wasn’t a woman called Julie, he was a man. A not particularly good-looking man, it had to be said. So maybe there was nothing to it. He came for supper. They had a beer or two, probably Jem’s way of sticking her finger up at Ralph, metaphorically speaking, the children played together, Joel went home. But then he’d obviously subsequently done something to upset Jem. There were flowers involved. He missed her. And now he was prowling about the place looking aggrieved. No, it was not innocuous. It was meaningful.
He switched off Jem’s phone and slid it back into the pocket of her parka.
Then he scurried back upstairs to his studio, smoked a cigarette on his balcony, smoked another cigarette on his balcony and then, with his heart pounding like a piston in his chest, he wrote an e-mail to the only person he felt he could talk to about this. He wrote to Rosey.
16 May 2008
Dear Ralph, I’m not quite sure what to say. First losing the baby and now this. I’m not sure that a confrontation is the way forward. As you say, you and Jem have a history when it comes to ‘snooping’ and as the messages are so ambiguous you might just end up stirring up a load of trouble for nothing. I have a friend in London. Her name is Sarah Betts. She runs a prayer group near you. If you needed to offload on someone completely neutral she might be just the person. Here’s her e-mail address.
Good luck.
Love, Rosey x
Chapter 13
Sarah Betts was not what Ralph had been expecting. She had the voice of a sweet young Southern belle, but the look of a hard-nosed City lawyer. She was also older than he’d expected and dressed in what looked oddly like bondage gear – rather shiny black leggings (she had very good legs for a woman of her age), a black brocade waistcoat, high boots in oxblood leather and an oversized Barbour coat that skimmed her ankles.
‘I am not a Christian,’ she said. ‘Not in the universally accepted definition of the word, at least.’
She swirled red wine around a large glass and beamed at him, revealing small, wine-stained teeth inside a slickly executed smile. They were sitting in a gastropub at midday. Ralph was sipping a Virgin Mary. He’d been taken aback by Sarah’s request for a glass of wine, the clock hand not quite nudging twelve, but then, he mused, she had the look of a woman who subsisted largely on complex red wines.
‘No,’ she continued, probing an olive with a cocktail stick, ‘I gave up on that old game a long time ago. The church is full of donkeys. Like everything in this life, there are newer better versions of faith out there and I found one I like. One that works for me. You know, like a new shampoo!’ She leaned towards him as she said this and then laughed, a big pantomime belly laugh. Slowly she leaned back again, into her chair and then she let her smile dim a little and exhaled. ‘So, Ralph, would you care to enlighten me. Your note was oblique, to put it mildly.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that. My friend Rosey gave me your e-mail because she thought you might be able to …’
Sarah raised an eyebrow at him, encouragingly.
‘Well, I’ve been feeling things. Strange things, for weeks, ever since I went to California, even before I went to California, really, and there just isn’t anyone I can talk to about it. Jem, my partner, well, she’s really strongly atheistic. She actually despises religion. And it’s like there’s this little door, inside my head, a little door I never knew was there and that somehow it got left open and now there’s all this stuff getting in …’
> ‘Stuff?’
‘Yes, feelings, thoughts, spirituality. I’ve been sitting in this church, just around the corner, most days, just for five minutes and when I’m sitting there I feel moved and when I’m not there I kind of wish I was there. And even when I’m not there I’m full of all these ideas, all these emotions and I keep wanting to call it God, you know, but it’s not God it’s more like …’
‘Love?’
Ralph paused and flicked his gaze towards Sarah. ‘Yes,’ he said, relief softening his voice, ‘yes, like love. But not like a specific love, not like a love for a wife or for a child, just a general feeling of … compassion, I suppose, something bigger than me, something I can’t quite control. And I’d got myself to this point of feeling right with the world. I’d faced up to myself, looked at things I didn’t like about myself, changed them, started to treat my wife with more respect and then …’ He stopped for a moment, not sure what words to use. ‘Well, she got pregnant. We got pregnant. We’ve got a little baby, he’s only a few months, so it certainly wasn’t planned, you know, it was an accident. And I was a bit surprised but ultimately I thought, yeah, a baby, fantastic. I wanted a chance to appreciate it because I wasn’t that over the moon about the other two. I was kind of in denial both times. I suppose, in a way, I felt like this would be my baby. But Jem, well, she just totally wasn’t up for it and then on Tuesday, she went to a clinic, and she got rid of it.’
Sarah’s eyes widened slightly at this declaration. ‘She aborted the baby?’
‘Well, no, she didn’t. Not in the end. Turns out she’d already lost it. But she had the procedure anyway, to, you know, get it out of her.’
