After the Party (14 page)

“Yes.” He lifted his head, as if consulting somebody taller than himself. “Yes, that would be great. Actually”—he looked down and into her eyes for the first time—“we're free tomorrow afternoon, if you are . . . ?”

Jem pretended to think, although she really wasn't thinking at all, more just reacting to yet another unnerving development. “Er, yeah,” she said lightly, “we are free actually.”

“Good, good. Come to us. Come for tea. Does Scarlett like the normal things?”

“Yes. And she also likes some of the abnormal things.”

He smiled. “Well, Jessica unfortunately sticks very much to the normal, so it'll be pasta or something. You've got our address?”

“Yes!” said Jem, overbrightly. “Yes! It's on your card. And I know where it is.”

“Behind the Thai place.”

“Behind the Thai place. What time?”

“Four? Ish?”

“Great. See you then.”

“Great.” He smiled then, a tight, distracted smile, and tapped the face of his watch absentmindedly. He looked as if he were about to say something else, but he didn't. Jem watched him for a moment as he shuffled away from her, his hands deep inside the pockets of his big blue overcoat. She felt sure he wouldn't turn back to look at her. And he didn't.

•  •  •

The following day was Wednesday. It was overcast and drizzling intermittently, and Jem thought of Ralph in California, sleeping, she assumed, though maybe he was not. Maybe he was
sweating in a nightclub full of twenty-year-old girls, or maybe he was frantically mating with a stranger, expunging himself of eight months' worth of pent-up sexual frustration. (She felt, in retrospect, that it might have been prudent of her to have had sex with him at least once before letting him escape to America, though really, she doubted very much that Ralph had either the skill or the inclination to persuade women into bed with him. It had never been his style, even when he was single. He'd always ended up with predatory women.) Maybe he was in an open-topped car, driving through the night on some adventure, she mused, but whatever he was doing, he was doing it in a temperate climate and that, even more than the thought of writhing females and thumping nightclubs, made Jem want to punch the wall with resentment.

She took Scarlett to nursery and then she and Blake went to Tesco.

As she was unloading her shopping onto the kitchen counter fifteen minutes later, her mobile rang. As always, her phone lurked somewhere mysterious and unknown in the bottom of her bag: through handfuls of crumpled tissues, old receipts and spare nappies Jem waded until, finally, she extracted it, dusted off some crumbs and pressed answer.

“Hello, Jem, it's Stella. How are you?”

Jem raised her head toward the ceiling and breathed in deeply. She knit together a smile and a matching tone of voice and said, “Oh, hi, Stella. I'm
fine
, thank you, how are you?”

“How's little Blakey?” Stella butted the irrelevant question about herself firmly out of the way. Stella never answered questions about herself. Stella was the office manager-cum-receptionist at Jarvis Smallhead, Jem's agency. She had been working at Jarvis Smallhead since she was eighteen years old.
She was now somewhere in the vicinity of fifty. She was unmarried and nobody knew where she lived or who she lived with or what sort of things she did when she left the office in the evenings because Stella was only interested in other people.

“Oh,” said Jem, fake sunshine in her voice, “he's fantastic, he's here now, in his bouncy chair, looking right at me.”

“Ah,” said Stella, “that's nice, and how's beautiful Scarlett?”

“Scarlett's fine, she's at nursery today, so it's all nice and quiet here.”

“Oh, yes,” Stella gushed, as if she herself liked nothing more than a quiet day at home with a baby. “I'm sure it is. And Ralph? How's he?”

“Well, he's in California, right now.”

“Really?”
Stella's voice filled with glee, as if the fact of Ralph's presence in California were a special gift, just for her. “How wonderful! Is he there to paint?”

“No,” said Jem, smiling through teeth clamped tight, “just a holiday. Seeing old friends.”

“Oh, lovely! How lovely. What I wouldn't give for a bit of Californian sun right now.” She sighed and Jem inhaled, waiting for her to get to the point.

“Well, anyway, here's some news!” she opened. “We've just had a call from ITV. They wanted to talk to someone about Karl. Didn't say what it was about, but it must be, mustn't it?”

Jem wiped a slick of spit-up from Blake's chin with a slightly crispy muslin cloth and moved the phone to her other ear. “God, yeah,” she said, “I guess it could be. What was their name?”

“I've got all the details here. Have you got a pen? I said you were at home with your baby today and that you'd call back when you got a chance. They said it wasn't urgent, anytime this week would be fine.”

Jem took down the details and a moment later, thanks in the main to some unprovoked crying from Blake, managed to extricate herself from the grip of Stella's conversational vise. She pulled Blake out of his bouncy chair and he looked at her pathetically. Then he yawned, the vast, toothless, honey-scented yawn of a newborn. His translucent lids started to lower and Jem knew that in less than a minute he'd be asleep. She nestled him into her shoulder and very gently carried him to his room above the kitchen. She laid him in his basket and then tiptoed backward from his room, taking care to avoid the squeaking floorboard near the door, and fled downstairs, empty of arms, light of foot, ready to seize her precious half hour, possibly more, of freedom.

She tended to panic at these moments. Suddenly the mountain of undone jobs and tiny snatched luxuries seemed to loom above her, insurmountable, as though someone had just clicked on a stopwatch and said, “GO!” She needed to put a wash on, she needed to sort out a pile of Scarlett's clothes that had been sitting on the landing outside her bedroom for four days, she needed to write out a check for the nursery fees for this term, a fox had shredded a trash bag two nights ago and left flotsam and jetsam strewn across the small patch of grass in front of the house, which would require squelching about in the rain in rubber gloves with an empty trash bag, and now she had this phone call to make too. Plus she really wanted to have a little nap. And sit down with a cup of tea and flick through the glossy property magazine that had been dropped onto her doormat this morning while she was at the shops. And decide what to wear this afternoon to Joel's place. And return a long overdue phone call to her mother.

She was paralyzed with options; the clock was ticking.
Eventually she decided to do the thing that would take the least time and make her feel the most like she'd achieved something. She picked up her mobile and the piece of paper with the ITV contact details on it and she dialed.

•  •  •

Jem was unable to get hold of Karl. He was not answering his mobile phone or his home line. It was not a matter of urgency, rather that Jem wanted to tell someone and if she didn't tell Karl, there was a real danger she might tell Joel. Or the first person she walked past on the street. Who, on recent evidence, might well be Joel. The call from ITV, had, as Stella had suspected, been from the
I'm a Celebrity
.
.
. Get Me Out of Here
casting office, and they did indeed want to know whether or not Karl Kasparov—famously and publicly regretful adulterer (working as a DJ on a London station, he had spilled his emotional guts live on air, after Siobhan, his long-term love, had uncovered his indiscretions with the leggy blonde on the top floor and left him), slightly chubby, rather shambling and the kind of TV personality who engendered not so much fervent adoration as a kind of oh-yeah-that-Irish-guy-whatsisname fondness—would consider the possibility of going into the jungle for eighteen days to eat grubs, pee in an outhouse and possibly, maybe resurrect his career, earning an amount of money for the same that was, for now, specified only as “negotiable.”

But until Karl answered his phone she had no one to share the news with and she was more or less bursting with it.

For the first time since he'd gone on Saturday, Jem missed Ralph.

She calculated the time in LA and then she called him.

He sounded husky. He sounded like a man who'd spent all night shouting and smoking. He didn't sound overly pleased to
hear from her. She swallowed a bubble of annoyance and carried on regardless.

“Guess what,” she said.

“I don't know,” said Ralph.

“ITV want to put Karl on their long list for the next series of
I'm a Celebrity
.
.
.”

“What, the jungle one?”

“Yes. The Ant and Dec one.”

“Wow,” he said, although his voice did not reflect the sentiment of the word.

Jem felt her excitement wane a degree. “Prime-time telly,” she continued, “major paycheck. Possibly a big career move.”

“Yeah,” said Ralph, his voice still hollow and dull. “I guess it could be. What did he say?”

“I haven't spoken to him yet. He's not answering his phone. I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but you know that never includes you.”

“Yeah, well, I don't think he'll do it.”

“Oh.” Jem was momentarily winded by the bluntness of this pronouncement.

“Well, it's just a piss-take, isn't it? Who the hell would want to go on telly and make a tit of themselves in front of the world?”

Jem drew up her shoulders. Having just spent the last four hours persuading herself that this was the Best Thing That Could Possibly Have Happened, she wasn't about to let Ralph pour water all over it. “It will be good for him,” she countered. “Not just professionally, but on a personal level. Get him out of his rut. He hasn't even been on a plane this millennium.”

“Yeah, and there's probably a reason for that.”

“Laziness. That's all. And there's nothing like the promise of a big fat check to cure someone of laziness.”

“Okay,” said Ralph, dismissively, “whatever. He's your client. It's your job. You know best. I just personally think he'll laugh in your face. That's all.”

Jem inhaled. She'd called Ralph in a burst of pure, childlike excitement, because he was her best friend and because he was always the first person she wanted to talk to when something important happened to her, but everything about his attitude and tone of voice suggested that he wished she hadn't called.

“Right,” she said circumspectly, “okay. Well, anyway, I just thought you'd like to know. Obviously if it comes off it means I'll be bringing some proper money into the house. It could even cover the kitchen extension.” She hoped that waving some cash in Ralph's face might awaken some enthusiasm.

“I thought we'd decided against the kitchen extension,” he said.

“Er, no.
You
decided against it because we couldn't afford it. But if this deal comes off, we will be able to afford it.”

She heard Ralph sigh. “Look,” he said, “I had a late night. It's early. I can't say I'm in the right frame of mind to be talking about extensions.”

“Oh, God, I'm SO SORRY,” said Jem, lacing her voice with uncontrollable sarcasm. “Of course, you're on HOLIDAY. I forgot. I'm really sorry to have disturbed you with my stupid news. I'll let you catch up on your beauty sleep. While I trudge through the rain to collect your daughter from nursery.”

“Oh, Jem, come on . . .”

“No, come on what? I let you go on holiday and leave me at home with your children and the very fucking LEAST you could do is make the effort to be pleasant and conversational when I call you and not wind me up with talk of late nights and early starts. Okay?”

“I am not winding you up, it's just—”

“I don't want to know. Really. I don't. I have to go now or I'll be late for Scarlett.”

Ralph sighed again. “Jem.” There was a long, brooding silence. “This is . . . Christ, something's got to change, something . . .”

“Too bloody right,” said Jem. And then her finger hit the end call button and suddenly she was in her silent kitchen, staring at her baby son, her head spinning with adrenaline, her heart racing with emotion, tears threatening.

Ralph had been right about one thing. Something had to change. It really, really did.

And with that thought she forced back the tears, painted on a smile, dressed her baby for the rain and headed off to a strange man's flat for the afternoon.

R
alph left the phone by his ear for a moment, not because he hoped that Jem would suddenly come back on the line but because he didn't have the energy to move it. He had conducted his entire conversation with Jem in a prone, semifetal position, the phone a few centimeters from his head, her voice like smashing glass to his delicate ears. He groaned and licked his lips.

He'd only answered the phone because somewhere deep down inside his addled thoughts it had occurred to him that it might be an emergency, that something might have happened to the kids. But once he'd realized that Jem had called only to talk to him about some stupid TV show and the bloody kitchen extension that she was so obsessed with, he'd lost the wakefulness of potential disaster and fallen back into the dark corners of his half-conscious state. For a moment he was cross with Jem, for waking him up when he'd had only four hours' sleep, for giving him grief about his tone of voice, for making him feel guilty yet again for the fact that he wasn't as perfect as she was. But then, as the light kept him from dipping back into sleep, as noises outside the apartment entered his consciousness, and as he remembered the rather surprising conclusion to his night out with Rosey, so did the truth.