After the Party Read Online Free

want to stop talking. We might have made a connection and I am not free to make a connection. Do you see?” “Oh,” he would say and smile, his cheeks coloring slightly. “Yes. I see.” And hopefully that would be enough to explain, to ensure that he never spoke to her again.
    The man called Joel did not, as she’d predicted, get off at Victoria, nor at Green Park, nor at Oxford Circus. The spaces between stops felt interminable. She read the opening line of the silly book around twenty to thirty times. Please get off this train , she chanted to herself, please get off, I need to breathe . But the longer he stayed on the train the more convinced she became that this meant something, this coincidence, this proximity, and when the tube pulled into Warren Street and the man called Joel rolled up his freebie paper and sauntered toward the doors, Jem knew it. This was her stop. It was also his stop. Something was going to happen. She slid the silly book into her handbag and got to her feet.

Chapter 2
    R alph felt the emptiness of the house and it chilled him. This wasn’t the same emptiness that he felt when Jem and the kids were out; this was a different emptiness. Today, for the first time in a very long time, his family was disparate. Scarlett was at nursery, Blake was at Lulu’s and Jem was off to a business meeting somewhere in central London. She’d left the house half an hour ago in heels and tailoring, her scruffy curls tightly secured in clips and bands, her lips painted vermilion. It was her, the other Jem, the Jem who didn’t wander in and out of the house all day in well-worn skinny jeans and scuffed Converse sneakers, lugging shopping-laden strollers behind her, smelling of milk and Johnson’s wipes. From the studio window, he’d watched her and the baby leave, and it looked as if she were stealing their baby, that petite, elegant woman in tartan and heels an inch too tall for her. And then they’d turned the corner and suddenly he was alone.
    Rather than feeling liberated by this open expanse of solitude, Ralph felt distracted by it and immediately put down his paintbrush and headed for the tiny balcony off his studio to smoke a cigarette. The balcony had been added when the previous owners had converted the loft into a studio space and it had always seemed unpleasantly flimsy to Ralph, a few pieces of metal bolted together with oversized wing nuts, barely seemingstrong enough to hold his weight. Whenever he stood on it he subconsciously held on to the wall with his left hand, as if, in the event of the balcony’s finally giving way under his feet and hurtling three storeys to the patio below, he would somehow be able to embed his fingers into the brickwork, where he would dangle, Harold Lloyd–like, until his rescuers arrived.
    The balcony overlooked the garden, a typical south London patch of land the shape of an A5 envelope and not much bigger. The beginning of March was not a happy time for gardens. The grass was mulchy, the neglected plastic toys that littered the decking and the lawn were tinged green and the swing under the apple tree swung forlornly back and forth in a chilly breeze. Beyond their small garden, Ralph could see more terraces, more sad gardens, a school playground and the fire escapes skirting the roofs of the parade of shops around the corner. He could be anywhere, he thought desolately, absolutely anywhere. He might as well be in the suburbs. All that effort, all that money, all that saving and searching and financing and settling and this was it: a three-bed terrace in the back end of Herne Hill, a view of nothing, a scrap of grass, a dangerous dangly balcony.
    He sucked the last dregs from the end of his cigarette and brought it back inside, where he let it drop into a jar of brown water on the windowsill. The email was still open on his computer. It had arrived this morning, from California, from Smith, his oldest friend.
    â€œIt