After the Party

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Dear R,’ it said, ‘guess what? I’m in London. Where are you?’

  He phoned her on the number she had embedded into the signature of her e-mails and after three days of virtual silence Ralph found himself talking, too much. He told her all about his conversation with Joel on Wednesday night and she soothed him and she said, it’s OK, I’m here. I’m here now. Come home. Come back to London. It’s OK. I’m here. And all Ralph wanted then was to be back in his own bed and to feel someone’s warmth against him, hold something in his arms, be with someone who understood. So he hustled his old friend back into his car and they took to the motorway and within four hours Gil was back in his little house on his estate and Ralph was letting Rosey in through the front door of his flat.

  Ralph didn’t ask Rosey what she was doing in London. He didn’t ask her much at all. He gave her a cold beer from his fridge and apologised for the mess and then he put his hand against her face and stared into her remarkable green eyes. She clasped his hand against her cheek with her hand and then she brushed the side of his hand with her lips and Ralph’s sleeping lust burst into life.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ she said. ‘I knew,’ she said, ‘I just knew –’

  But Ralph stopped her words with his lips.

  It was fast and it was furious. Very little clothing got removed. It was the first time that Ralph had had sex with someone who wasn’t Jem since 1996. He barely had a chance to absorb the nuances of Rosey’s body, the differences, the feel of her. He was consumed with a desire to get lost in her, he pushed his face into her fine silky hair and he breathed in his own hot, sour breath. He kissed her hard. He sought oblivion inside her. And he found it.

  For the seventeen minutes that it took Ralph and Rosey to consummate their passion, Ralph was nowhere; sweet, numb, hot nowhere.

  ‘You know,’ said Rosey, falling away from him afterwards, letting her knees fall together again, ‘I’ve wanted to do that with you since the very first moment I set eyes on you.’

  Ralph fell on to his back and blinked at the ceiling. He thought back to the first moment he’d set eyes on her, the lightning bolt of her beauty, the shock of his attraction.

  He smiled at her. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so have I.’ It wasn’t strictly true. He’d wanted to do that to her the first time he’d met her and he’d wanted to do it to her just now, but really, he hadn’t thought about doing it to her at any other point in between. He’d had other things on his mind. He’d been too busy finding himself to think much about sex with beautiful strangers. And all the while he’d been finding himself, Jem had been too busy thinking about sex with beautiful strangers to find herself. And so they’d passed each other, like night trains, at speed and in opposite directions, blurred and indistinct. He turned to look at Rosey again. Her skin, he could see, now that he was no longer consumed with the business of having her, was smooth and toned and tanned. Her breasts, which he’d barely glanced at, were small and full with nipples like jelly tots. She was firm and young, her body as yet unused by life. She was young. It was good to look upon something so young.

  Is this what it was like for Jem? he wondered. Had she too looked upon the half-naked body of her young lover and marvelled at its newness? Had she felt a thrill of gratitude for once more being allowed to have something she thought she’d never again be granted access to?

  He turned from Rosey’s body then and closed his eyes.

  Rosey turned on to her side and let her arm fall across his torso. He was still wearing his T-shirt. She pulled the fabric up so that her arm lay against his bare skin. He tensed slightly.

  ‘You know,’ she began, tracing a fingertip across the skin around his belly button, round and round, in a slow circle, ‘you know you’re the reason why I ditched Smith? You know I’ve …’ she paused. ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Since then. Since that very first moment. I knew there was something special about you. Something, I don’t know, something magic. And then that night, after the gig, Jesus, when I kissed you, I thought you were going to kiss me back. And I wanted you to, so very, very badly,’ she laughed. ‘But you didn’t. Because you’re a good man. And you said you’d paint me. Do you remember?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you still think you’d like to do that?’

  Ralph felt a vein under his eye start to twitch. He kissed her shoulder. He couldn’t tell her about the painting in his cupboard, a painting he could never sell, but could never hang on a wall either, a painting that would spend for ever in a cupboard. It would make her think too much about everything. ‘Maybe,’ he said eventually, ‘maybe.’

  What would Smith think, he mused as they lay together in silence, what would he think if he could see me here with Rosey? Taking his disillusioned girl away from him, again. Being the preferred option. And if this remarkable woman found him preferable to Smith – hell, had finished with Smith because of him – then what did that say about Jem? Did it make her remarkable also? Did it mean that she was in fact everything he’d always thought she was? Special? Magical? Enchanted? And that he too was something special? He hadn’t felt special for so long.

  He stroked Rosey’s hair and he smiled down at her. He felt the calmest he’d felt for days, ever since he’d spoken to Joel on the pavement outside Lulu’s house. Everything suddenly seemed so simple. Everything was suddenly utterly clear. They’d made a mess between them, he and Jem, but now, blindingly, he knew how to clear it up. It would mean taking himself out of the real world, it would mean weeks away from Jem and his children, but it would also be the start of a new beginning.

  He was going to recreate history.

  He and Rosey ate takeaway pizza in bed that night and they made love again, this time slowly and gently, and this time Ralph drew everything he could of this perfect young woman into himself, every smell, every texture. He caressed her and he explored her and he lasted as long as he possibly could before he came inside her, because he knew, even as it was happening, that it would never happen again.

  In the early morning, while she slept, he packed a carrier bag with pants, a toothbrush, some bananas, a carton of orange juice and a packet of Bran Flakes. Then he rolled together a spare pillow and a sleeping bag, shoved them into another carrier bag and sat down and wrote Rosey a note.

  Dearest Rosey.

  You are so beautiful. I will take your beauty with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life. You are a pure and sweet and perfect human being. Thank you for coming to me last night. I will never ever forget it.

  I have to go now, though. There is something I have to do, something that will hopefully fix the mess of my life. Something that will set me back on the life course I was always supposed to be on. I have to start again. I have to go back to the very beginning and start the whole thing all over again.

  Please feel free to stay in my flat for as long as you need it. I’ll be gone for a while. Here is my key.

  You are an angel.

  Ralph x

  He left the note on the kitchen table and then he left. The sun had yet to rise.

  Chapter 2

  Jem turns the words over and over and over in her head, just as Rosey had dictated them to her on the phone that morning.

  I have to start again.

  I have to go back to the very beginning and start the whole thing all over again.

  No wonder Rosey assumed that he’d come home to Jem.

  But Ralph is not at home. Ralph isn’t anywhere.

  Jem walks the streets of SE24 for an hour after leaving Gil’s house. She wants Ralph to appear, miraculously, from nowhere. She wants to see him, and to touch him and to know that he is safe and to tell him that she loves him, that she has always loved him and that she is ready now, ready to grow up and move on to the next phase. She trails through Brockwell Park, tears coursing down her cheeks, and she stops at the little chapel on Underwood Street, thinking that maybe he has been there all along
, lost in prayer, curled up cold and lonely on a pew. But he is not there. Her Ralph is not there. Of course he isn’t. She closes her eyes and she turns the words over again.

  The beginning.

  When was the Beginning?

  Was it Croydon, was it his childhood home? Was it the Royal College of Art, where his career as an artist had begun? Or was it Almanac Road? Did he mean the beginning of them? When was the beginning of them, she wonders, when had ‘they’ officially sprung to life?

  Before she leaves the chapel she lights three candles, one for each of her lost babies and then she heads back to the reassuring noise and brightness of the street outside.

  She tries to assess her own notion of their beginning. When did it happen to her – when did she know? And of course, it was that moment. Before she’d even met Ralph, when she’d seen just the silhouette of his head in profile through the basement window. She hadn’t known it was his head at the time. It could have belonged to anyone. It was only later that she knew it was him and she knew that it had always been meant to be.

  There’d been the night they’d cooked the curry together; the night they’d eaten raw chillies. Was that when it had begun? Or was it the night they’d got stoned and run around Soho sex shops together? Maybe it was that moment, on Pete the Butcher’s bed? ‘Creep’ by Radiohead had been playing in the background. Ralph had looked at her … well, she’d known then, known he was falling for her, but she’d tried to ignore it because she was with Smith and Jem didn’t want her life to be that complicated. Is Ralph in Soho right now? she wonders. Is he trailing round sex shops, trying to recreate something we lost a long time ago, or is he banging on that door in Chinatown, hoping to get back into that apartment, hoping to get back into that long-lost magical moment when we were young and free and crazy with unrequited love?

  But no, she decides, as she heads back towards Lulu’s house, those are moments, and moments cannot be revisited. They cannot be started all over again. So what, what can Ralph possibly be doing that he thinks will bring the past back to life? Where can he be? Is he lost for ever? Has she missed her chance to put them back together again? A sense of panic rises within her at the thought, the possibility that this might be it for the rest of her life, this regret, this remorse, this terrible loneliness. And then she remembers another time in her life when she’d felt this way, when she’d let Ralph slip through her fingers and feared she’d lost him. Twelve years ago, just after he’d given her his heart and she’d thrown it back at him. He’d disappeared then, too, for endless painful days.

  And that is the moment that Jem knows.

  Of course!

  She knows where he is. She knows, exactly. She knows now that he is alive, that he is safe, that he is thinking of her and that everything is going to be all right. And she also knows that she must leave him there. Leave him until his is ready, once more, to return.

  Ralph returns three weeks later. He stands on Lulu’s doorstep, thin and pale. Jem opens the door and stares at him.

  ‘You look fucking awful,’ she says.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry, Jem,’ he says.

  She lets him into the house and immediately the children are aware of his presence. They stream down the stairs in their pyjamas with hair in wet tendrils clutching warm milk and ragged bears. They jump on top of him and Jem watches as they reunite. Their children have missed their father. And so has she.

  ‘I want to explain, Jem,’ he says, sitting on the bottom stair with both children hanging off him like baby monkeys.

  Jem smiles. ‘Later,’ she says, ‘it’s fine.’

  ‘But really, I really need to explain everything.’

  ‘It’s fine, Ralph,’ she says. ‘Really.’

  ‘But it’s not fine, Jem. I’ve left you here, left you coping with everything. I just buggered off without an explanation.’

  ‘I spoke to Rosey,’ she says.

  Ralph’s face falls.

  Jem smiles. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, ‘don’t look so worried. She told me about the note you left her. About starting all over again. And it took me so long to work out what you meant, but then it hit me. I knew where you were. So I called the studio manager at Cable Street and asked him if you’d taken a studio there. Told him not to tell you I’d called.’

  Ralph’s face softens with relief and surprise. ‘You knew where I’d been all these weeks?’ he gasps.

  Jem nods.

  ‘And you didn’t come and get me?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t disturb you the last time,’ she says. ‘Why would I disturb you this time?’

  Ralph looks at her quizzically.

  ‘The beginning,’ she says, ‘the beginning of us. The night at the gallery. The night I knew I loved you. We’d got into a mess before that night, hadn’t we? You’d told me about reading my diaries, I thought I hated you; it had all come apart at the seams. Then you disappeared. Made me ache for you. Made me pine for you. And then you just … came back, quiet as a cat, and fixed everything. Just like now, like tonight.’

  ‘I want you to come and see,’ he says. ‘There won’t be a party. Just you and me. Put the kids to bed. Come and see,’ he beseeches.

  Jem glances at the time. It is almost bedtime.

  ‘Do you want Daddy to put you to bed tonight?’ she asks the children. They squeal and yell their consent.

  Half an hour later they are leaving the house. ‘Where’s the car?’ asks Jem, looking from left to right. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, smiling at her, that old smile of Ralph’s, slightly lazy, lop-sided, from left to right. ‘I assume it’s still outside my house.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t been home yet?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ he smiles, ‘of course I haven’t.’

  ‘So how are we going to get there?’

  He turns his head and he gestures towards a rather elderly moped.

  Jem looks at him aghast. ‘What, seriously?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he smiles, handing her a helmet, ‘why not? A guy at the studios sold it to me; he was leaving for Madrid. It’s not pretty but it does the job. Come on,’ he grins, ‘hop on.’

  Jem looks at Ralph and then she looks at the ugly moped. And then she remembers, she remembers a girl she used to be. A girl who ate raw chillies and went to sex shops and didn’t need half a bottle of white wine just to get her in the mood for life. She jams the helmet over her curls and she mounts the moped. And then they are moving. The moped is loud. She thinks briefly of the parents in the houses they pass who have just put their babies to sleep. She thinks how they will hate the driver of the loud moped with a passion and she thinks, I don’t care! She wraps her arms around Ralph’s waist and she rests her chin upon his shoulder and she watches London, her London, passing her by in filmic stills: the graffitied, shuttered-down shops of Walworth Road, the stage-set arches and Tudor pubs of Borough High Street, the river beneath them, thick and black as they pass over London Bridge, the strobe of amber lozenges as a dozen empty taxis cavalcade towards them on Lower Thames Street, the sleeping locked-down markets of Smithfield, and then they are there, a place that Jem has never been before, but a place that was the birthing pool of the most romantic night of her life. The artists’ studios on Cable Street. The place where Ralph painted twenty-four canvases of her, to tell her that he loved her, but more than that, to tell her that he knew her. Better than anyone had known her before.

  The building is as dead and as blank-faced as a prison block. It does not look romantic. But as they wander through the turps- and oil-scented corridors, as Jem hears the sounds of people working their crafts, late into the night, the occasional shard of radio noise, of muted conversation, she feels the romance of this place being breathed into her.

  ‘This is it,’ says Ralph, ‘this is where I’ve been. Close your eyes.’

  Jem closes her eyes and allows Ralph to lead her by the hand across the room.

  ‘Keep them closed,’ he says.

  She nods her assent and then s
he hears a noise, a clink of heavy glass, then a dull pop, and a fizz.

  ‘Not yet,’ he says. He puts something hard and cold into her hand. ‘Champagne!’ she says, with delight.

  ‘OK,’ says Ralph. ‘Now. Open your eyes!’

  And she does. And she is in a room that is full of art. But not canvases. A frieze. It encircles the room from one side to the other. It is painted on to cartridge paper, three foot high. And it is beautiful.

  She turns, around and around, dizzying herself, trying to decide where to settle her gaze first. There is so much to see. There a child, lazy-mouthed, pulling on a fistful of black curly hair, there is a shred of floral chiffon and a glimpse of pale breast. There is a group of happy women, backlit by flashing Soho lights. There is a baby sleeping at its mother’s breast. There lies a woman in the dark of a sleeping house, stroking a smiling cat as it lies in her lap. She sees a swing, a slide, a man watching from the shadows. She sees a shoe, with a tall tapered heel, cast aside on a staircase next to an upturned sippy cup and she sees a woman, smiling at a young man, her face lit with pleasure. It is her life and her dreams and it is joyful! There is not a dark note to be seen. It is a celebration of everything that she wants and everything that she has been through in the last year of her life.

  She turns to Ralph and the joy she is feeling spills from her in a smile that she cannot control.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ she sighs happily. ‘Absolutely amazing.’

  He walks towards her and holds out his champagne glass. She brushes hers against his and she takes a sip. ‘You like it?’ he says. He sounds nervous, uncertain.

  ‘Ralph,’ she says, ‘I adore it. And I am so, so sorry.’