Vince and Joy

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘I do like your surname. And if I really wanted to take your surname, I’d take it even if it was… was… Willy, or something. But I don’t want to take it. Because I don’t believe anyone, regardless of their sex, should have to change their name for any reason whatsoever. I just wouldn’t be me any more.’

  George raised his eyebrows sardonically, and dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a napkin. ‘Me, me, me,’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘absolutely nothing.’

  And a heavy, impenetrable silence fell upon them.

  There were so many points of concern to be pondered as a result of the preceding conversation that Joy could barely think straight. Concerns about differing value systems, about pedantry and snobbishness, concerns about their compatibility and concerns about whether or not they actually liked each other very much.

  Joy had never liked confrontation and had an almost pathological fear of silences. A combination of the two was too much for her to bear. She was also terrified by the prospect of the final destination that pursuing these concerns would inevitably take her to – because once she started to air her misgivings there was only one possible conclusion to be reached: that they were both in the grip of some strange madness and about to make a terrible mistake. That they shouldn’t get married. And whether or not that was true, she wasn’t ready to face it. So instead of addressing these issues head on in a grown-up fashion, Joy decided to sidestep them entirely and change the subject.

  ‘We should sort out wedding rings next week,’ she gushed, breaking into the silence like a drunk at a funeral. ‘It’s one of those things you usually need to do six weeks in advance, apparently.’

  ‘Oh,’ said George, a hint of sulkiness still clinging to the corners of his mouth, ‘fine. Where do we need to go for that?’

  ‘Oh, just a high-street jeweller will do for wedding rings. Nothing fancy’

  ‘Good,’ said George, ‘fine. We’ll go on Saturday’

  ‘Actually,’ said Joy, ‘I was planning on going into town on Saturday. Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Fine. Then we won’t order rings on Saturday.’

  ‘I can go in the morning,’ she offered, sensing yet another conflict about to hatch. ‘Early. Be back by lunchtime. We can go in the afternoon.’

  ‘Good. Fine. Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Good,’ said Joy, her napkin screwed into a tight knot on her lap. ‘Fine.’

  As another silence threatened to engulf them, she chimed, ‘These prawns are absolutely fantastic, aren’t they?’ heroically navigating her runaway boat through treacherous seas.

  The following afternoon a courier arrived at ColourPro with a small parcel wrapped in gold paper and addressed to Miss Joy Downer.

  Roz and Jacquie watched in awe as she peeled off the paper to reveal a black leather box. Inside the black leather box was a beautiful art deco marcasite bracelet, which sparkled under the halogen spotlights like a night sky full of stars.

  The note inside said:

  To my darling Joy, I am so honoured to be marrying you and so impatient to call you my wife. You make my world beautiful. I love you, frantically, foolishly, infinitely… for ever.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Roz, one hand clasping the note, the other pressed against her heart. ‘You are the luckiest fucking bitch in the whole wide world.’

  Thirty-Three

  It was two weeks before Christmas, and Selfridges was heaving with festive bodies. Couples, young families and gangs of friends marauded through the aisles exuding body heat through outdoor clothes and an overwhelming, slightly alarming sense of purpose. Apart from her weekly visits to Bella’s bedsit in Finsbury Park, this was the first time she’d been out on her own since she’d moved in with George three weeks earlier and, instead of feeling unfettered and free, she felt small and lost, like she’d cancelled her membership to the world and was about to be asked to leave.

  George had been slightly gloomy this morning as she’d pulled on her coat and wished him farewell. He hadn’t said anything explicit, just been meaner with his pleasantries, used less syllables, shorter sentences.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m fine. Why do you keep asking me if I’m OK?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘You just seem as if you’re annoyed with me.’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  He could have proved this by wishing her a fun day out, by hugging her at the door or by cracking a joke. But he did none of these things. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed in his bath towel, staring at his toenails, like an abandoned puppy.

  Joy took her handbag from her shoulder and sat down next to him. ‘George. What is it? You always seem so cross when I go out without you.’

  ‘I can assure you I am not “cross”.’

  ‘Then what? Why are you being all sulky?’

  ‘Sulky?’

  ‘Yes. Sulky’

  ‘Good God,’ he snapped, pulling himself off the bed, ‘I’ve been awake for less than an hour, I haven’t even had a coffee yet and you’re already throwing accusations at me. I can’t take this.’ He strode angrily towards the kitchen, where she could hear him filling the kettle.

  ‘So,’ she said, standing in the doorway, ‘you’re not cross with me; you’re just tired?’

  ‘Yes,’ he hissed, without turning to address her.

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘fine. So give me a hug.’ She circled him with her arms and felt him stiffen slightly at her touch. His arms hung limp at his sides.

  What! she wanted to scream, What is it?! Talk to me!

  But it wasn’t in Joy’s nature to question other people’s behaviour; it wasn’t in her nature to demand explanations – it was in her nature to soothe, to remove the root of others’ displeasure. It was in her nature to make everything better. So she fussed over George and she stroked him and promised she wouldn’t be late, diminishing her enjoyment of the day ahead of her before she’d even set foot out of the door.

  And now here she was darting around Selfridges, feeling time falling through her fingers like grains of rice. She’d bought her mother a dressing gown, in plain cotton lawn, and a sachet of potpourri. She’d bought Maxine, her best friend from school who lived in San Diego, a tin in the shape of a London bus and filled with treacle toffee, and her cousin Tracy who lived in Poole a book about iguanas because she collected them.

  It was already twelve o’clock and that was as far as she’d got. She hadn’t bought anything at all for George yet, and he’d been her primary target for the day. She let the price tag of an overpriced silk tie fall sadly from between her fingertips and made a decision.

  A wok.

  She would get George a wok. A proper steel, round-bottomed wok from Chinatown. And some of those bamboo steamers. And nice chopsticks and some rice bowls. He’d love them.

  She didn’t have time to walk to Chinatown, so she hopped on a bus outside Selfridges with the intention of getting off at Piccadilly Circus.

  The lower deck was jammed full, half with humans, half with carrier bags, so she hoisted her own bags to one side and made her way up the narrow staircase to the top deck. She grabbed a window seat to the left of the bus, tucked her bags under the seat in front of her and turned to stare out of the window. The pavements of Oxford Street were awash with humanity. They streamed across junctions, so heavy in numbers that they overrode the traffic lights – cars came a poor second in these circumstances.

  The sky above the rooftops of Oxford Street was a chalky white. The Christmas lights strung across the road on steel gibbets creaked gently back and forth as the bus passed under them. On the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street a man in a donkey jacket baked chestnuts over a glowing brazier, scooping them into paper bags for tourists. Joy felt a sudden surge of excitement at her state of relative freedom and hugged it to herself. She loved travelling by bus. All there was to look at on the Tube were rows of ugly people an
d the floor. The bus, on the other hand, was a moving theatre, and after her claustrophobia in Selfridges just now it was nice to get some distance from other human beings.

  The bus turned right into Regent Street, and Joy stared down on to the tops of strangers’ heads, trying to imagine lives for them, wondering what it felt like to be them. As the bus passed Hamleys her gazed passed briefly over another stranger standing by the front doors, before being dramatically snapped back towards him.

  A man. A hugely handsome man. A handsome man in a charcoal grey overcoat and Levi 501s.

  Vincent Mellon.

  Her heart bounced up towards her throat, and she sat bolt upright.

  He had one hand in his pocket and the other was clutching a mass of carrier bags. He turned slowly to watch the window display, a family of robotic dinosaurs arranged on a snow-covered hill behind a window emblazoned with the Jurassic Park logo, before turning back again.

  The bus came to a halt behind a long line of traffic that extended well beyond the next set of traffic lights. It occurred to Joy that she could pick up her bags, climb off the bus and go to say hello. That maybe this was some kind of sign. That maybe she wasn’t supposed to be staring at him, but talking to him instead, turning the page in the book, finding out what happened next. This all occurred to her in the space of two seconds. It took another four or five seconds for her to think of all the reasons why she shouldn’t get off the bus and say hello – she’d be embarrassed, not know what to say. He’d be embarrassed, not know what to say. She didn’t have time. She’d be late home.

  By the time she’d persuaded herself that this was much more than a coincidence, that she had at this very moment a piece of paper with his telephone number on it in her coat pocket and that maybe there was a reason for Vince being there, another five seconds had elapsed. She glanced ahead to reassure herself that the traffic wasn’t about to start moving again and was about to lift herself from her seat when the doors to Hamleys opened and a beautiful girl emerged, carrying a small boy in her arms. She was tall and slim, dressed in a shiny black leather jacket and jeans. Her hair was an oil slick of black that hung halfway down her back and was held from her face with black sunglasses. She beamed at Vince, and he beamed at her. She passed the little boy to him and reached to kiss him on his cheek. The little boy threw his arms around his neck, the beautiful girl slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and the three of them turned and strode away towards Oxford Circus looking like an impossibly glossy template for modern family life.

  Joy let her grip loosen on the shopping bags and caught her breath.

  Of course, she thought. Of course.

  Vince was married, had a beautiful little boy. Of course.

  His wife looked like a model.

  It made sense.

  She’d thought he was out of her league that first time she’d seen him in Hunstanton. He must have been feeling a bit desperate, nearly nineteen years old and still a virgin. And it wasn’t as if he’d had a lot of girls to choose from at the Seavue Holiday Home Park. He must have decided that she’d do for a holiday fling, taken advantage of her willingness to sleep with him, found her note the morning after and been thoroughly relieved that he wouldn’t have to take things any further.

  But then, she thought, what about that story Bella had told her? What about the friend with the crystal ball and the tarot cards? What about him being ‘in love’ with her?

  It was a joke, wasn’t it? They’d been mucking about. Maybe he’d told his friend all about the girl he’d lost his virginity to and they’d been laughing about her, about her perverted father and her awful family and her pathetic little note with its declaration of undying love. It all made sense.

  And now he’d moved on and upgraded to pneumatic, chiselled model girls, while she’d moved on and downgraded to moody accountants who placed personal ads. She thought about Stuart Bigmore and Vivica and their wreck in Andalusia and their plans to start a family. She imagined their children, beautiful, ethereal, dark-eyed angels. And then she thought about Ally. He’d probably met someone, too, she mused, probably met some beautiful woman in New Zealand whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life with and have children with. Someone extraordinary. Someone special. Someone completely different to her.

  For weeks, she’d been living under the delusion that she was somehow better than George – that she was out of his league. But now, as she watched Vince and his beautiful family disappear into the Underground, the dislocation suddenly shifted and her life fell into place. She and George were the same; she and George were made for each other. And when she thought of George now, she felt soothed by the knowledge that to him she was every bit as beautiful as the girl with black hair who’d given Vince a son, that to him she was every bit as special as moody, artistic Vivica who’d lured Stuart down the aisle and out of the country at such a young age and that to him she was extraordinary enough for him to want to marry her and be with her for ever to the exclusion of all other women.

  She slipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt around for a piece of paper. She pulled it out and stared at Vince’s phone number for a moment, before folding it in half, screwing it into a small ball and letting it fall to the floor of the bus.

  And then she took Vince Mellon and put him in a little box in her mind, labelled it ‘the past’ and focused afresh on her future.

  Thirty-Four

  Vince finally finished with Magda the following week.

  It happened when she arrived at his flat bearing holiday brochures and talking enthusiastically of Tenerife. Talking about June. Scaring the living daylights out of him.

  It had been one of those awful, clichéd, ‘We need to talk’, ‘It’s not you; it’s me’ type of conversations. Magda had cried the whole way through, huge glassy tears that seemed to emanate from every part of her eyeballs and streaked her face brown with muddy mascara. That was the worst thing about girls crying, Vince felt. It didn’t just make you feel like a prize bastard, but it made them look ugly as well, and when a girl looked ugly it made you feel sorry for them, and once you felt sorry for a girl then the whole dynamic of the thing changed completely. The girl ceased to be a proper human being and became instead an asexual object of pity, like a little old man with a dowager’s hump or a tiny puppy with a broken paw.

  The whole awful scenario had lasted about four hours. Four wholly unnecessary hours as far as Vince was concerned. Everything that needed to be said got said within the first ten minutes; after that it was all pointless hypothesizing, recriminating, regurgitating and questioning. But because the dumping had taken place at his flat he’d had no choice but to keep going until she called a halt to it – asking her to leave, he felt, would have been beyond the pale.

  There’d been a foul thirty-minute wait for the minicab he’d called to collect her, mainly because they’d said it would only be ten minutes and he and Magda didn’t have an extra twenty minutes’ worth of conversation left between them. And then she’d gone. He’d stood at the window to watch her leave, as he’d done a hundred times before, checking out the minicab driver, making sure he didn’t look like a sadistic rapist, memorizing his number plate. And then he’d let the curtain fall back, collected his empty mug and some wine glasses, and gone to bed. Single and alone.

  Single and unemployed.

  It was the first time he’d been either since he was nineteen years old.

  And suddenly finding himself both at the same time was a very peculiar feeling indeed.

  He woke up the following morning in the full knowledge that nobody cared where he was. There would be no chirpy phone call from Magda asking what he was up to, no call to the office to explain his absence. It was like he’d suddenly ceased to exist. The sensation was as scary as it was liberating.

  He spent that week doing all the things that he’d always imagined he’d do if he didn’t have to go to work. He read an entire book in a day. He ironed five shirts, six pairs of trousers and a bed sheet. He wen
t to the supermarket and spent forty-five minutes deciding what to cook for his dinner. He drank beer at lunchtime. He met up with friends in their lunch hour, friends who smelled of offices and the Underground, feeling smug as they watched hands racing round clocks and hurtled back to their desks at one o’clock. He discovered shops in Finsbury Park he’d never known existed before and came home clutching exotic-smelling jars of Moroccan chilli paste, strange vegetables he didn’t know what to do with and cans full of things called ‘foul mesdames’.

  After a few days of this, the novelty began to wear off and he remembered that there were other things he’d always dreamed of doing in the absence of having the stupidest job in the world.

  Like writing a book.

  Like learning something new.

  Like travelling.

  Like having a job that made him really happy.

  He bought a copy of Floodlight and perused it for self-improving evening classes, but never got further than circling a few options before losing it under a cushion on the sofa.

  He bought a book called How To Write a Bestseller and read the introduction.

  He went to Trailfinders and picked up some round-the-world brochures, realized that he couldn’t afford to go and gave them to Cass to read in the toilet.

  He bought the Guardian and searched the recruitment pages for the perfect job, only to discover that it didn’t exist, and that, even if it did, he wouldn’t get it because he was too young and too inexperienced.

  And every single day, without fail, he fabricated some excuse or other to walk past 44 Wilberforce Road and glance nonchalantly at the front door.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He knew she’d moved out, that she was living in south London somewhere. But you never know, he reasoned with himself, she might have left something behind, come back to visit, changed her mind.

  He saw the big woman, Julia, occasionally. He ducked out of view if he happened upon her, not really wanting to have to explain his presence outside her house to her, not wanting to have any kind of discourse with her at all, really. But he liked to see her. It gave him a kind of warm glow to catch a glimpse of someone who’d been on such recent intimate terms with Joy, made him feel connected in a way, as if, if he really wanted to see Joy, he could. Not that he did want to see Joy. That was off the agenda for now, obviously. He’d totally missed the boat there.