by Lisa Jewell
She sent the message and within five minutes he had replied.
Check out the mirror! You are gorgeous! I’m at my mum’s, up north, haven’t seen my dad for a few days. Spoke to him yesterday, he said he’d seen your husband at the Maygrove Centre? Is he in one of the groups? (Not that I would judge if he was, obviously, given my dad’s history.) But Dad’s still in an ongoing battle with the bitchcowwoman about taking Jessica. Poor guy. Anyway, mum’s calling me down for dinner, then I’m off out with some old school friends. It’s good to be home! Take care. I’m back in a couple of weeks, maybe see you at the lido again?
Jem replied again.
I avoid mirrors as much as humanly possible ;) It must have been someone else your dad saw at the Maygrove. Ralph has his issues but addiction is not one of them! (Unless they have a Runners Anonymous group there?!) Anyway, we’re getting married on Saturday so I hope he’s not been hiding some terrible secret from me! Enjoy your dinner and being at home. I hope my Blakey wants to come and have dinner with me when he’s twenty-four! See you when I get back, fingers crossed for lido weather!’
She pressed Send and then she spent a few minutes perusing his Facebook page, seeing what his friends had been up to and what he’d been up to (‘eating Mum’s chicken and rice and feeling goooood’ apparently). She waited a few minutes but Lucas did not reply. He’d gone down for his dinner, had left cyberspace.
A few minutes later she heard Ralph return. She switched her PC to sleep and tiptoed downstairs to greet him. Once again he was looking fresh and spry, nothing like the way he tended to look after his daytime runs. He was breathing quite heavily and had a glow about him, but not the wide band of sweat down the centre of his T-shirt and the sweaty sheen on his scalp. He looked, it occurred to her, like someone who had just run home from the post box on the corner.
‘How was your run?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘Where did you run to?’
‘Oh, nowhere, just around the park. How were the kids?’ He kicked off his running shoes and put them back in the shoe cubby.
‘Fine, good,’ she said. ‘You don’t look very sweaty,’ she continued.
He shrugged and wandered into the kitchen. ‘It’s quite cool out.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, following him, determined to uncover the truth about his strange absences and his chilly demeanour, ‘but you’ve been running for nearly two hours. Even if it was cold out I’d have expected you to look a bit sweatier than that.’
‘Well,’ he said after a pause just long enough, Jem felt, to fabricate an excuse, ‘I stopped for a while. On the way back. To cool down.’
‘Where?’
‘God, what is this, an interrogation?’
‘No, Ralph, it is not an interrogation. It’s just your partner wondering where you’ve been for two hours.’
‘And I told you. I’ve been running.’
‘Yes. You’ve been running. But you stopped. Where did you stop?’
‘God, I don’t know, just a bench.’
‘You sat on a bench? To cool down?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And then you ran back?’
‘Yeah! I told you. Jesus! What is your problem?’
‘My problem, Ralph, is …’ She paused. This was the point at which she could rein the conversation back in or let it run wild. She took a deep breath and said: ‘Everything, Ralph. My problem is absolutely everything! You came back from California and it was all lovely and gorgeous and then slowly, day by day, it’s all gone wrong. You don’t want to have sex with me, you barely talk to me, you’ve been off painting out of the house and coming back with these – God, I’m really sorry, but I have to say it – these weird paintings that look like they were painted by somebody else. And then there’s this strange Thursday run. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’ve been running. And then there’s …’ she paused again, aware that she was about to lob a conversational hand-grenade into the proceedings, ‘the girl. The blonde one. I saw her in your studio. You and her. In California. And I saw your portrait. It was beautiful, Ralph, really, really beautiful. But it got me thinking, you know, what happened in America? We never talked about it. I just accepted that you were making more of an effort and we kind of got on with it and I never really wondered what it was that happened in America that made you transform yourself overnight. And was it … was it something to do with her. With the girl?’
Ralph had been standing half inside the fridge, about to pluck himself out a beer but stopped statue still as Jem delivered her rant. He blinked as silence fell and then slumped on to a chair. ‘No, he said, ‘it was nothing to do with the girl. Well, it was partly, I suppose. I mean, she kind of started it.’
‘Started what?’
‘This sort of change in me. This …’
‘What?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.
‘Can’t tell me what?’ Jem’s heart quickened with trepidation.
‘I can’t tell you. You’d leave me.’
‘What!’ she cried. ‘Just tell me!’
‘It’s not what you think,’ he continued, ‘and in a way, I think it might be worse.’
‘Oh my God, Ralph, please will you just tell me!’
‘It’s …’ he sighed and pulled his hands across his face. ‘It’s … I’ve found …’
‘What!’
‘The place I’ve been going every Thursday night. It’s a prayer group. I’ve been going … to pray.’
‘Pray?’ Jem slumped heavily into a chair too.
‘Yes. Group prayer.’
‘In a church?’
‘No, not in a church. In a hall.’
‘You go to a hall and pray with strangers?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘But … who do you pray to?’
He shrugged. ‘I pray to God.’
She threw him a look of unabridged horror.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not that God. Not the man with the beard. Not the man in the Bible. Not the one that people kill in the name of. But just my own, personal God.’
Jem let her head roll back on her shoulders, like the weight of his admission had unbalanced her physiognomy. ‘And the girl?’
‘Smith’s girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Smith’s ex-girlfriend. Rosey. She’s a Christian. She took me to her church. I thought it was just a passing moment. I sat in this beautiful church and suddenly everything made sense. I realised how crap and useless I’d been at home, I vowed to be better. It gave me some kind of weird strength. After I came home I thought that was it, that I’d just get on with my life. But then after the, you know, the baby, I don’t know. I just found myself needing it more and more, that feeling I got from her church.’
‘What, you mean after the miscarriage?’
He nodded. ‘I wanted that baby so much, Jem. I wanted it so much it hurt. And I couldn’t believe how cool you were about it. It was like … it was like you’d turned into somebody else. You know. I saw you, Jem, I saw you through the window, reading that magazine, as if you were about to go in to get a tooth pulled or something. And in that moment, Christ, I don’t know, I almost felt like I hated you.’ He paused. Let the word sink in. Jem didn’t flinch. He continued, ‘And then you just seemed to blossom afterwards. But it had the opposite effect on me. I kind of shrivelled up. And as for … sex, I don’t know. It just seemed so wrong. To be there, in that place, where they’d cut out the baby …’
‘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 light-hearted, 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 th
e 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 blind-sided 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. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘yeah. I get it. I am a sinner.’ She followed this with a wry laugh.
Ralph immediately leaned in towards 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. For ever. No matter what. OK?’
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, further and further, 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. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘OK. It’s going to be OK.’ But somewhere deep inside she wasn’t sure that that was true.
Chapter 29
Ralph and Jem’s wedding day dawned pale and watery. There was a suggestion of rain in the air, but also a hint of potential splendour. 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 like 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 any more. 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 c
ritical 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!