by Lisa Jewell
He looked so like Ralph. It startled her every time she noticed the similarity and sent her back in time.
His status update read: ‘Lucas Warbush is going home to see his mummy.’
Jem smiled.
She thought about her own son, curled up in his pink sleepsuit across the landing, and wondered if one day he would have the sheer guts and confidence to tell his peers that he was going home to see his mummy without even a hint of irony. As she thought this thought she heard a banging at the window pane and jumped slightly before realising that it was just the rain, a tempestuous rainstorm breaking over the warm pavements, pelting the hot roof tiles with fat droplets. The sky lit up for a moment, she counted up to eight, then bang, distant thunder. She thought of Ralph. Poor Ralph. Running through the angry rain. Getting soaked to the bone. Dodging the forked lightning. She pulled open the bedroom window and smelled the air, the distinctive musty smell of hot, wet, London paving stones. She glanced both ways up the street to see if she could see Ralph returning, but the street was empty. She closed the window and sat down again.
She looked through Lucas’s photo albums and read his friends’ comments. She saw pictures of Jessica and Joel, and of Lucas with his arm around a pretty black woman with short relaxed hair slicked back off her face, whom Jem assumed was Lucas’s mother. He saw an older black woman with crimped silver hair sitting with a pair of cats with orange mottled fur. And then there were his friends, dozens of friends, all young and happy, in bars, on holidays, in halls of residence, in scruffy flats. Students. She recognised the blonde girl she’d seen him with at the festival. Her name was Malaika Fitzjohn. A very interesting name for a very interesting-looking woman. All his friends looked interesting, in fact, and all the messages and comments left by them on his page were warm and well spelled. And it struck Jem at that moment that it was very sad that she and Ralph had reached the end of their eleventh year together and had no circle of friends. Ralph’s family consisted solely of his sad old dad, a man of eighty-two, who hadn’t exactly been a livewire in his younger days and had lost his spark entirely since his wife had died three years earlier. Ralph’s only real friend lived in California and all the friends he’d hung around with during his flat-sharing days in Battersea, who were mainly hoity-toity PR girls using him to attain some credibility, had gone by the wayside. They’d had two friends, local friends, Alex and Maria. They’d had a daughter the same age as Scarlett and they’d go for lunch together at the Prince Regent and have summer lunches in each other’s gardens, and then Alex and Maria had sold their house around the corner and moved to Hastings. Since then the Catterick/McLeary family had been a somewhat insular little unit, punctured only by the presence of the slightly nutty Lulu and her husband. Ralph was terrified of Lulu and found Walter, at six foot three and twelve years his senior, slightly imposing. Jem had been waiting, subconsciously, for Scarlett to start school. That seemed to her the time that local friendships began to be formed. But as she looked at Lucas’s friends and felt the warmth and extent of their bond, she felt sad for her own small little world and suddenly wanted more.
She sighed and emptied her glass of wine, and was on her way down the stairs to refill it when she heard the door go and Ralph was standing in the hallway in his running gear, looking po-faced.
‘Hi!’ she trilled.
He glanced at her wine glass and said hello.
She looked him up and down. His T-shirt was dry and fresh. His shorts were still as crisp as they’d been when he’d pulled them out of his wardrobe two hours earlier. ‘You’re dry!’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he replied.
‘But the rain,’ she continued.
‘What about the rain?’
‘Well, I thought you’d get soaked. It was torrential.’
He shrugged. ‘Must have missed it,’ he said.
‘But … how?’
‘Localised?’ he suggested, unconvincingly.
She nodded her agreement that yes, it must have been localised, and headed past him to get another glass of wine.
‘Oh God, Lulu, you should have seen it, it was appalling.’
‘What, like badly executed?’
‘Worse than that,’ Jem rubbed sun cream into her bare ankles, ‘it was ugly. It was unpleasant. And if he’d just said something like, oh, well, you know, it was just a warming-up exercise, or, you know, it was just a bit of fun, I’d have thought, well, that’s OK then. But he didn’t. He just stormed off upstairs with it as if it was his pride and joy and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.’
Lulu sneered delicately. She could not bear the concepts of bickering and sulking. ‘Where is he now?’ she said, her nose wrinkling mischievously.
‘He’s at the gallery, with Philippe, being interviewed for the local rag.’
‘When’s he back?’
Jem shrugged. ‘I don’t know, four-ish, I guess.’
‘Come on then.’
‘Come on what?’
‘Let’s go and have a look.’ She pointed her beer bottle upwards towards the top floor of the house.
‘What. In his studio?’
‘Yeah, why not? Let me see this painting. Come on!’
Jem looked at Blake, who had fallen asleep in his bouncy chair, and Scarlett, who was playing happily in the sand box, and thought, yes, why not? ‘Scarlett,’ she said, ‘we’re just popping inside for a minute. We’ll be back soon.’
Scarlett looked at them listlessly and carried on with her game.
‘Have you asked him?’ said Lulu as they curled up the spiral staircase towards his studio. ‘About the church thing?’
‘You mean about what Joel said in the taxi?’
Lulu nodded.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose because I don’t want to have a conversation that involves mentioning Joel.’ ‘Why not? Nothing happened with Joel.’
‘I know, but it sort of did in my head and I’d rather not mention him, that’s all. It makes me feel uncomfortable.’
‘God, yes, but don’t you just want to know? Don’t you want to know why he’s hanging out in churches?’
Jem shrugged. ‘He took the kids there the other day,’ she said, ‘Scarlett told me. They lit some candles for his mum. Must just be that. Must just be a way of dealing with his loss.’
Jem had not been inside Ralph’s studio since that night weeks ago when she’d told him she didn’t want to have the baby. Then it had been full of his lovely, vibrant Californian flowers. Now it was empty again, just two canvases on display. The first was the one she’d seen the other day, the awful red and black affair.
Lulu gasped when she saw it. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘is that the one?’
Jem nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’
‘Oh, I mean,’ Lulu circled it for a moment, ‘I mean, it’s not even a painting, really, is it? I mean, it’s just marks. Just mess. And, oh my God, what is that?’ She spun round as the other painting caught her eye. This one was a work in progress, still mounted on Ralph’s easel, unfinished. And again, it was a visual affront. Jem stared at the latest creation in horror. Ralph had been so excited about starting off in a new direction. He’d been so looking forward to it, and so too had Jem. And this, it seemed, was it. Mindless, artless, charmless.
And then, just as she was absorbing the awful reality of Ralph’s new direction, she saw something else, something that shocked her to her core. A photograph propped up on a bookshelf, a photograph of himself and a very beautiful blonde girl with thick hair the colour of butter and feline features and a small crucifix in the dip of her neck. Their heads were touching and they both wore smiles as joyful as Christmas.
She was about to say something to Lulu, when she noticed a look of horror on her face and followed her gaze to a dark corner of the studio where a small canvas was perched on a crate. It had been covered up with a piece of muslin but the muslin had slipped and it was obvious that t
he painting underneath bore some resemblance to the photograph on the bookshelf. The two women exchanged a glance and Jem nodded imperceptibly at Lulu, who crossed the room and unveiled the painting. It was, as they’d both suspected, the woman in the photograph, recreated in painstaking detail. Ralph had replaced the background of palm trees with something resembling a large silver sun and put a sprig of mauve bougainvillaea flower in the woman’s hair. It was an exquisite painting, all picked out in shades of white and silver, with the flowers in her hair providing the only colour. It was one of the nicest paintings that Jem could remember Ralph having painted in a long time. Possibly, it pained her to think, since the ones he’d painted of her.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Lulu, biting her lip.
Jem felt her head begin to spin. Her life seemed to be hurtling through space, untethered and out of control. Could this mysterious blonde beauty be the root of all the strangeness between her and Ralph? Was she the reason that Ralph seemed so distant these days? Was it possible that all these weeks, while Jem had been crawling across the strange landscape of her own emotions, dealing with her adulterous feelings towards Joel, her growing affection towards his son, her sense that maybe there was another ending in store for her than the one she been expecting all these years, that Ralph himself had been crossing the same rocky territory? Was it possible, she thought, that Ralph had fallen in love with someone else, been, in fact, in love with someone else every minute of every day since his return from California? And if that were the case then why the hell had he asked her to marry him? But even as she asked herself the question, Jem already knew the answer: he’d asked her to marry him because he did not want to be in love with the beautiful young girl with the blonde hair and the silver dress. Just like Jem wanted to marry Ralph because she did not want to fall in love with the beautiful young man with the shorn hair and the green eyes. They were getting married to protect themselves from the possibility of a different ending. They were getting married to protect their children.
When Ralph got home from the gallery half an hour later, Jem did not mention either the awful paintings, or the painting of the girl with the buttery hair. Instead she sucked the discomfort back down deep inside her where it turned to mild nausea. She asked him about his interview (‘I don’t know why these people have to intellectualise everything. You know, at the end of the day, it’s some flowers. That is all. It is nothing to do with my childhood or the political climate in America or the price of bloody fish in Beirut, you know. It’s just paintings. I am just a painter. Jesus’) and reheated some leftover Bolognese sauce for Scarlett’s tea. Then she opened a bottle of rosé and poured herself a large glass and took it into the garden where she sat and watched her daughter playing in the afternoon sun.
Ralph didn’t join her and by the time she came back indoors, the kitchen was tidy and Ralph was back in his studio.
Chapter 27
Ralph slipped into the Maygrove Centre on his way back from painting at Gil’s a couple of nights later, to use the toilets. He peed, washed his hands, examined his face in the mirror and was about to turn and leave when another man walked in. Ralph turned briefly to acknowledge the presence of another person in such close proximity to him. He looked at the man, the man looked at him. There was recognition. A moment’s hesitation and then Ralph said: ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
The man looked at him and squinted. Ralph could tell his struggle to place Ralph’s face was pure charade.
‘You’re Jessica’s dad, aren’t you?’ he continued.
‘Er, yeah. That’s right. I’m sorry, I er …’
‘I’m Ralph.’ He handed Joel a freshly washed hand to shake. ‘I’m Scarlett’s dad.’
‘Oh, yes, of course, right. Good to finally meet you. I think I’ve seen you about.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ralph, ‘you definitely have. I would almost say that you’ve been stalking me,’ he continued. He kept his voice amused and his gaze direct. He was channelling Gil.
Joel pulled back, affronted. ‘I don’t think so,’ he countered defensively.
‘Yes, you were. Outside the church. A few weeks back. You were there when I went in and you were there when I came out.’
‘I was waiting for someone,’ said Joel.
Ralph paused. He knew that it was not necessary to challenge Joel’s lie. They both knew the truth.
‘So,’ he continued, the recentness of his afternoon with Gil still fresh in his heart, his head filled with something strong and incontrovertible. ‘You’re quite good friends then, you and Jem?’
Joel shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said.
Ralph nodded and let a silence form. ‘You know,’ he began, ‘we’re getting married next weekend.’
Joel gave him a ‘good for you, but what’s it got to do with me?’ look.
Ralph let another silence form and stared at the man, trying to read his blank expression, trying to find the truth somewhere inside that bland arrangement of facial features. Have you, he thought to himself, have you been fucking my girlfriend?
Almost as if his silent thoughts had become audible, the man flinched slightly and adjusted his body language. Suddenly he looked chippy. ‘You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ replied Ralph.
‘You. You’re very pleased with yourself. Smug is another word that comes to mind.’
‘Sorry,’ Ralph countered with a small laugh, ‘I don’t even know you. What qualifies you to make judgements about me?’
The man shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you what I see. And what I’ve been told.’
‘Told?’
‘Yeah. I get the impression that you’re one of those guys who just kind of barrels through life expecting other people to pick up the pieces.’
Ralph threw him a look of amused contempt.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing. You might be getting married next week, but I don’t think she’s ready. She’s giving off signals. She’s scenting the air.’
Ralph stopped and stared at the man. ‘Scenting the air?’
‘Yeah. You know.’
Ralph frowned at the man, who looked smaller now somehow, like expelling his brash words had somehow diminished him. His choice of words was both revolting and strangely poetic.
‘Did you and Jem have an affair?’
The man laughed.
The answer that Ralph had been expecting to hear was wrapped up somewhere inside that laugh, but Ralph waited a beat, just to hear what the man would say. ‘No,’ he said dismissively. ‘We did not have an affair. But that’s not to say that she hasn’t had an affair. That’s not to say that she’s not capable.’
Ralph thought briefly about pounding him into the ground, then, pounding away at him, punch after punch after punch, possibly until he was dead. But then he thought, would Gil hit this pointless little man? And he knew that Gil would not. So he inhaled, deeply, and found his inner peace and then he looked the little man in the eye, smiled, just once, and left.
Ralph had another intense dream that night. He had been dreaming more vividly and more frequently since his encounter with Sarah, Gil and their prayer group. He dreamed that it was his wedding day and that they were getting married in Santa Monica. He dreamed that Smith was his best man and that Jem was very late. He stood inside a beach hut, his shoes were full of sand, people were looking at him anxiously and he was telling them all: it’s OK, she’s always late. Smith was eating soft-shelled crab at a tiny table in the corner and Ralph found himself thinking: why does he have to be eating soft-shelled crab right now? How incredibly selfish.
Eventually he left the claustrophobic beach hut and strolled across the hot white beach, looking for Jem. His children were not there. He stopped and asked a policeman if he’d seen a small dark woman in a white dress. The policeman said no. And then he saw her, striding towards him, dressed in black. She was cross and had Smith the cat in her arms. Look, she was saying, look. It’s all wrong. It’s
all wrong. I have to go now. And then she passed him the cat and picked up the skirts of her big black dress and strode away from him, purposefully, elbows jutting out angrily. He stood on the hot white beach and watched her walk away from him, her figure becoming smaller and smaller until eventually she was just a tiny black dot on the horizon.
When he went back to the beach hut, Smith had transmogrified into Joel, and Ralph lifted the plate of soft-shelled crab and dropped it on to his head.
Chapter 28
When Ralph announced to Jem for the third Thursday running that he would be going for a run at six o’clock, an alarm bell finally began to ring inside her head. Three Thursdays in a row was not random. Three Thursdays in a row was habitual. Why Thursdays? Why six o’clock? And really, now she thought about it, how localised could a torrential tropical downpour actually be?
She saw him from the house, as brightly and cheerfully as she could manage. ‘Have a good run,’ she trilled robotically. She gave the children their tea, put them in the bath, put them in their pyjamas and put them in their beds. Then she raced, as she always did, to her computer. She checked her e-mail. A Facebook message from Lucas:
You need to get some photos up here. I want to see regular updates on my little Blakey! And how is the beautiful Scarlett? And, come to that, how is the beautiful Jemima?
She smiled and typed her reply, keeping her words, as ever, neutral and unflirtatious:
Working on the photos, apparently I have to download some fancy software, will get round to it eventually. But Blakey is still fat and magnificent and is showing no signs of wanting to crawl. I think he wants to be a Buddha, just sit on his bum, getting fatter and fatter, for the whole of eternity. Miss Scarlett is still the Diva of the family and I am not beautiful but thank you for saying that I am! How is your dad? I haven’t seen him for ages.’
