Vince and Joy

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘I know,’ said Barbara, ‘I know. But maybe another time, eh? Plan it in advance. Give your father some warning. You know’ She pulled her handbag on to her lap and readied herself to stand up. ‘But thank you for inviting me. It was a lovely thought. Really lovely.’ She hugged her handbag to her soft chest and threw them both a tight smile.

  Joy and Julia saw her to her car and watched her drive away, her headlights cutting holes through the late-afternoon gloom, a dry rectangle stencilled on to the wet road where her car had been parked.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Julia, turning back towards the house. ‘It would have been lovely if she’d stayed.’

  Yes, thought Joy, sadly, it would have been. It would also have been unprecedented. Barbara never did anything independently of her husband. She had no friends that hadn’t been Alan’s friends first, no hobbies, no pastimes. She shared his opinions on everything from politics to Sue Lawley’s new haircut, and was an appendage in every sense of the word. Joy had occasionally seen small sparks of another Barbara inside the nylon dresses and cowed demeanour over the years. She’d seen her giggly after a glass of sherry on Christmas morning or flushed with pleasure at the news of a birth or an engagement. She’d seen her jump to her feet and punch the air with delight when Bjorn Borg (whom she decreed ‘gorgeous’) won the finals at Wimbledon. And she’d seen pictures of Barbara in her youth, lumpy-kneed in belted tweed mini-dresses, shiny-faced in unflattering Alice bands, puddingy in printed cotton dirndl skirts and helmet hair. She’d never been slim, she’d never been pretty, but maybe once upon a time she’d been charming, delightful, playful, a flirt. Maybe she’d been out dancing, cycling, to coffee shops and ice-cream parlours. Maybe she’d had suitors, young men vying for her attention. Maybe she’d even slept with some of them.

  What had her father done to her, she wondered? How had he managed to make such a limp cushion of her? Had it been a slow process, pulling her spirit out of her, bit by bit, like feathers from a pillow. Or had something happened, a one-off, long-ago event?

  She followed Julia back towards the flat and shivered as the cool, damp air made itself felt through her thin clothes. She drank a glass of wine with Julia and took a second into the bath with her. On closer inspection she noticed that the grout between the mint green tiles that rimmed the bath was mouldy. There was a three-dimensional limescale flume from the overflow to the plughole, and Julia’s soap clung to the edge of the bath, green, lumpy and swollen, like a pat of rancid butter. A damp smell emanating from the clammy shower curtain took the edge off her strawberry bubbles and, as she lay in the hot bath sipping chilled wine, Joy tried not to think about the fact that her new flat wasn’t perfect and that her new flatmate had low standards of domestic hygiene.

  She tried not to think about her lovely little shower room in Hammersmith, with its pristine white tiles, used by her and only her. She tried not to think about Saturday nights gone by, Saturday nights spent eating takeaways and drinking wine on her very own sofa with a man who loved her. And she tried not to think about the wretched humiliation of standing outside the Swiss Centre for three-quarters of an hour waiting for a not-particularly-attractive man who evidently couldn’t stomach the prospect of spending even one night with her, just to be polite. She tried not to think about the fact that all her friends in London had moved on, moved out and moved away, and that her social life had slowly whittled itself down to the size of a pea. And while she was at it, Joy tried not to think about her mother, driving sadly away in her ugly little car, back to her ugly little husband, sitting waiting for her in their ugly little house. She tried not to think about the night they could have been having and the conversations they could have had, and she tried not to feel guilty about not trying harder to persuade her mother to stay the night.

  Instead she focused on the future.

  She could take a bottle of bleach and a scrubbing brush to this bathroom tomorrow. She could make herself at home here. She could phone her mother tomorrow, make a proper plan for her to come and stay, arrange things for them to do, think about questions she’d like to ask her about her father and their vile marriage and all the mysterious empty spaces in their lives. She could make more of an effort with her remaining colleagues and maybe even track down some of her old friends from Bristol to kick-start her social life. And then her thoughts turned to a letter currently folded neatly in three and slotted between the pages of London Fields in one of her many unpacked boxes. A letter written on two sheets of thin lined paper with a fine-nibbed fountain pen in midnight-blue ink. A letter she’d read so many times since it had arrived on her Hammersmith doormat ten days ago that she’d almost committed it to memory. It was postmarked SW8 and was from man called George who liked big dogs, cooking, Catherine Deneuve, Cheech and Chong, Bill Hicks and Julian Barnes, and claimed not be the type of man to usually place a personal advert in a classified paper. A man who’d thoroughly enjoyed Joy’s ‘charming’ letter and wanted to meet up with her, as soon as possible. He’d included his phone number – two phone numbers, in fact. One belonged to the ‘comfortable but somewhat unruly’ flat in a Stockwell mansion block where he lived alone and the other belonged to the ‘sterile and soul-destroyingly corporate’ office space he occupied in a firm of chartered accountants in deepest Mitcham. So far Joy had picked up the phone on at least ten occasions, even called the number of his flat during the day once, knowing that he’d be out at work, and listened to a warm, well-spoken, almost plummy voice tell her that he wasn’t at home right now. But that was as far as she’d taken it. She didn’t know quite what it was she was waiting for. But she would call him. Definitely. Tomorrow.

  And at this thought she felt herself feel suddenly more positive about everything. She would sort out everything tomorrow – her mother, her job, this bathroom, her love life, her social life, all of it. Her life wasn’t such a disaster, she decided, just at a juncture, that was all, at a turning point. Everything would work out in the end, she knew that.

  Everything would be peaches and cream.

  Sixteen

  Joy looked at her watch: 12.55 P.m. Early as usual. It didn’t matter how hard Joy tried to be fashionably late, she always got everywhere early. But under the circumstances it was probably a good thing.

  She was standing outside a Thai restaurant on James Street, just behind Selfridges, waiting for the mysterious George to show up. She’d finally phoned him last week; they’d talked for half an hour and arranged a date. She’d suggested Sunday lunch, had thought it sounded unthreatening and gave them both some leeway to bail out if it turned out to be a disaster. He’d sounded nice. Very posh, but nice. He described himself as having a ‘mop’ of hair, glasses and a ‘rather unimpressive physique’ – ‘but I’ve been told I have a lovely face,’ he added when Joy had been unable to think of anything to say in reply. She’d described herself as small, mousy and kind of pointy. She hadn’t seen any point in talking herself up after George’s charming self-deprecation. He’d said she sounded absolutely delightful and that actually, he had a ‘particular fondness for pointy women’. He’d suggested this place as he’d never been here before but had read good things about it and now here she was, on a sunny October Sunday, in her least sexually provocative clothes, about to embark on her first blind date.

  George’s description of himself had done nothing to properly define her mental image of him and consequently every man who passed suddenly presented himself as a possibility. Maybe George wasn’t wearing his glasses today. Maybe he wasn’t quite as puny as he’d suggested. And what exactly was a ‘mop’ of hair, anyway? She had no idea if he was tall or short, or what colour the mop was, and he’d given no indication of the style of clothing she should except him to appear in. She could reasonably expect that as an accountant he wouldn’t be a fashion plate, but his interests suggested a man with a grasp of the alternative, a certain lack of convention.

  And in spite of his less-than-promising self-description on the phone, Joy was still c
linging to the very first word of his advert: handsome. Would an ugly man ever describe himself as handsome? It was highly unlikely. No – he would be unassumingly handsome, she mused, floppy-haired, cute, lambswool-jumpered maybe? A sort of English teacher type, maybe. Boyish. Bookish. Cute.

  A boyish, bookish, cute man in glasses appeared in the distance, and Joy caught her breath. The closer he got, the more boyishly, bookishly cute he became. By the time he was within touching distance, Joy had stopped breathing entirely and was primed and ready for him to make his approach. He walked straight past her, without even casting a glance in her direction.

  Joy exhaled and reassured herself that this wasn’t a stupid thing to be doing. Replying to an advert in a classified paper and arranging to meet a strange man on a Sunday afternoon was adventurous, and unusual and… and… proactive. She set her chin in resolve and hoped for the best.

  And then she saw a man scuttling towards her intently and all her resolve dissipated into a puddle of disappointment.

  Not her type. Not in any way, nor in any detail, from his slightly elderly-looking Barbour jacket, to his Nordic design ski jumper, from his strangely combed hair that appeared to have been taped down flat against his head and glued into place, to his overly shiny Oxford shoes with plastic soles. His glasses were less sexy professor and more son-of-John Major, and framed a face that certainly couldn’t be described as ugly, but wasn’t even on nodding acquaintance terms with ‘handsome’.

  ‘You must be Joy,’ he said, beaming at her nervously.

  ‘I am!’ She beamed back, stoically preventing her disappointment from making an appearance on her face. ‘And you’re George.’

  ‘Correct!’ He forced his hands into the pockets of belted jeans and increased his smile. ‘Well, isn’t this surreal?’

  She laughed, appreciating his frank and immediate summarization of their situation. ‘Bizarre,’ she agreed.

  ‘Shall we?’ He indicated the door of the restaurant.

  ‘Of course.’

  He leaped ahead of her and held the door ajar. ‘Thank you,’ she said, trying to recall the last time a date had held a door open for her.

  They were led downstairs to a basement room by a waitress in a skin-tight red silk dress and shown to a table in a corner. Joy glanced around the restaurant, which contained two other couples and a small group of friends. She wondered if it was obvious – could they tell that she and George had only just met, that they’d placed and replied to lonely hearts ads? Was it obvious that they didn’t match? Were they wondering what this young girl in chic black Lycra leggings and an oversized ribbed sweater from Warehouse was doing having lunch with a man who looked like an off-duty vicar? They shuffled around for a moment, unfolding napkins, opening up menus. Joy peeked at George quickly while he wasn’t looking. His mouth was a touch too full for Joy’s liking and his eyes rather bizarrely widely spaced, but he wasn’t ugly. He had lovely skin, smooth and poreless, like pale-pink suede, and his eyes were a striking shade of pastel green. But really, truly, whichever way she looked at it and however hard she tried, he just wasn’t her type.

  ‘D’you like it spicy?’ he said, his glasses looming over the top of his menu.

  ‘Er… yes,’ she replied. ‘Fairly.’

  ‘Good,’ he grinned, disappearing again.

  A couple of hours, thought Joy, staring blankly at her menu, that was all this was. A couple of hours out of her life. A mere blink of an eye, flap of a wing, beat of a heart. Two hours, then she could bring out her predesigned excuse (a suddenly remembered promise to feed her friend’s cat) and scarper. And no one need ever know…

  ‘So,’ said George, smiling benignly, ‘you work in the arts?’

  Joy laughed. ‘Er, no. Not exactly. I work for a repro company. I’m a screen printer.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s art, isn’t it? Of a kind.’

  ‘Of a kind,’ she allowed, smiling.

  ‘And do you like your job?’

  ‘No,’ she said, bluntly, ‘I hate it.’

  ‘Well, snap!’ said George. ‘I hate mine, too!’

  They laughed and felt the ice begin to thaw.

  ‘What do you hate about it?’

  ‘Oh, the whole stinking thing. It’s just bloody awful. Awful people, awful place. Just the smell of it,’ he shuddered. ‘You know, that dreadful office smell of Formica and coffee machines and lives being wasted in the pursuit of somebody else’s profits. Every morning, from the moment I arrive and see those parking spaces in the car park – Reserved for Managing Director, Reserved for Senior Partner – and realize that they represent, for some, the pinnacle of their lives’ achievements, my heart sinks. And it doesn’t rise again until I get into my car at the end of the day, put on the radio and head homewards.’

  ‘So you don’t want to be an accountant, then, I take it?’

  ‘No,’ he smiled, ‘I don’t want to be an accountant. I want to be a writer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Does that sound ludicrous?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t sound at all ludicrous. What sort of writer?’

  ‘Well, I’ve played around with poetry for a while now. And I’ve done a creative writing course. And one day…’ He paused and took a sip from his lager. ‘One day I’d like to write the Great British Novel.’ He laughed out loud. ‘Now that really does sound ludicrous! What about you? Do you have an escape route planned? Any ridiculously overblown ambitions?’

  ‘No. I used to want to be an actress when I was little. Then I wanted to be an artist. Now I’d be happy doing just about anything apart from what I’m doing now.’

  ‘Well, you’re only young. You’re at the stage of your life when you can try out all sorts of different things – dip in and out of things. But I’m nearly thirty. It’s now or never for me. The doors to the Last Chance Saloon are about to slam in my face! Here,’ he said, picking up his lager, ‘let’s make a toast. A toast to shitty jobs and getting out of them.’

  Joy picked hers up and clinked it against his, smiling.

  And then he smiled at her, a sweet, unaffected smile, and she noticed that he had a tiny dimple on his left cheek. And as she noticed this, she also noticed that she was actually enjoying herself here in this restaurant with this man with the strange hair and the John Major glasses, and that she no longer felt the desire to go to the bathroom, climb on to the cistern and escape through the toilet window.

  After lunch they emerged into a dazzling autumn afternoon and George suggested that they go for a walk somewhere in search of ice cream. Joy gave less than a second’s thought to her imaginary friend’s imaginary cat and agreed immediately. As they walked, heading informally towards Green Park, Joy discovered that George was an Aquarian, that his mother was dead and his father was a distant and unpleasant memory, that he’d bought his Stockwell flat with his mother’s inheritance, that he’d just split up with a long-term girlfriend whom he described as a ‘complete psycho’ and that he had an older sister called Mirabel who’d died of a heroin overdose when she was nineteen years old.

  He and his sister had been brought up by their mother in a beautiful fifteenth-century half-timbered house with turning staircases, wall-hanging tapestries and a minstrel’s gallery, just outside Rye in Sussex. He’d gone to boarding school in Kent from the age of seven, which he’d hated, particularly after his mother met an overly tanned but genial estate agent called Lionel and moved to the Algarve with him when George was twelve years old, meaning that holidays and weekend exeats were suddenly spent flying across the Channel to stay in a stark, marble-floored apartment in Faro, instead of the beautiful, snug, carpeted house in Rye. His sister took an irrational dislike to Lionel and refused to go to Portugal during her school holidays. Instead she stayed with a friend called Genevieve who lived a totally unsupervised adolescence with her delinquent artist parents in a rambling, unhygienic house in Chelsea, and it was here that Mirabel first began her long and unhappy relationship wit
h drugs by putting her head over a plastic bag full of Superglue and inhaling.

  By the time George and Joy arrived at the top of the steps to Green Park, the dull and unassuming man she’d first met three hours earlier was starting to accumulate layers of colour and depth, and Joy was less and less concerned with the incongruity of their pairing and more and more concerned with finding out everything she could about George Edward Pole.

  They found an out-of-season ice-cream van parked outside the park. George had a Mr Whippy with a Flake in it, proclaiming, possibly disingenuously, but certainly charmingly, that he’d never had one before in his life and expressing great excitement at the prospect. Joy had a small tub of Loseley’s vanilla, and they continued wandering in the aimless, meandering manner of newly acquainted people with a whole lifetime of memories, anecdotes and opinions to share with each other in a single afternoon.

  Joy had been out on a dozen dates with a dozen men keen and eager to share their histories and opinions with her, men who’d felt no compunction whatsoever about hogging the conversation and failing to ask her one solitary question about herself, men with the ability to talk and talk until she lost the will to live. But with George it was different. He talked about himself in a soft, melodious voice, with a charming turn of phrase and just the right amount of detail. He didn’t force his history on her like extra homework, or offer it to her uncertainly as if it was a slightly soiled pair of underpants, but instead revealed himself to her page by page, like a beautifully written, unputdownable book.

  She began subconsciously to redesign him while he talked: contact lenses to replace the unfashionable glasses, a good short-back-and-sides, a new wardrobe, maybe a leather jacket or a cashmere overcoat. She imagined placing her fingertips against his scalp and giving his over-tamed hair a damn good mussing. She imagined gently plucking his spectacles from his ears, putting them to the floor and grinding them up under her shoe.