by Lisa Jewell
This morning she’d woken up in an empty bed, the day had opened up in front of her free of strictures and routine and she decided that what she wanted to do more than anything was spend the day mooching around London on her own.
London had once been the epicentre of her existence. Wherever she lived, whoever she went out with, wherever she worked, London had been her constant companion. It was solid and dependable and never let her down. Different parts of it fitted different moods. It could make her feel small and anonymous, or brave and conspicuous. It could make her feel young and carefree or old and past it. London had been there, solid in the background, through every chapter of her life for the past ten years. London was her friend.
Before she moved to Esher, she’d been able to maintain her friendship with London, albeit in a somewhat abridged fashion, but since they’d moved to the suburbs London was somewhere she saw only fleetingly through the windows of trains and cars, with barely a chance to wave hello.
She pulled on a pair of her most comfortable shoes, bought a one-day Travelcard and caught the first train to Waterloo.
She walked across Hungerford Bridge, glancing at people as they passed her. They were grim-faced, unimpressed to find themselves walking across the River Thames on a perfect April morning.
You’re all so lucky, she wanted to shout, so, so lucky. You can do this whenever you want. This is just normal to you. You don’t appreciate it and you should. Being able to walk through the heart of your city on a Saturday morning, to see it spread out in front of you and behind in all its magnificent glory, to have somewhere to go and nobody to stop you going there. Embrace every moment. Savour your freedom.
On the other side of the river she walked through back streets, marvelling at rows of Georgian town houses, at the notion of people actually living here in this secret little triangle nestled between Trafalgar Square, the Strand and the river. She caught a random bus to Knightsbridge, glanced at her watch and relished the feeling of time being on her side for once. It was still morning. She wasn’t due to meet Julia and Bella until seven o’clock. She had time to burn.
As she stared out of the window, vignettes presented themselves to her, moments from her own history.
The corner of Jermyn Street and Haymarket where she and Ally had had a stupid, drunken row on her twenty-third birthday.
The Odeon on the Haymarket where she’d been to see The Rachel Papers with some bloke whose name she couldn’t remember one Valentine’s Day.
The first-floor Chinese restaurant next to the flashing lights on Piccadilly where she’d eaten lunch alone when she couldn’t get back to work because of a bomb scare.
The church courtyard at St James where she’d sat one incredibly hot summer’s day and been chatted up by a homeless guy with no teeth who quoted Wordsworth to her.
The underpass at Hyde Park where she’d been mugged trying to find her way to a game of company Softball.
The exact patch of grass near Park Lane where she’d been sitting when Ally had chosen to dump her.
The corner of Knightsbridge and Sloane Street where she’d finally caught a cab at two in the morning after walking all the way from a Christmas party in Islington in a party dress and heels.
Every corner of London meant something to her. Every corner held a memory, however inconsequential or mundane. It was an affront to her that she wasn’t free to visit her city whenever she felt the need. It was an injustice greater in some ways than being unable to see her friends and family.
She got off the bus at Sloane Square and wandered down the King’s Road until she found herself outside Chelsea Town Hall. Confetti dotted the steps. Tiny bridesmaids in lilac fluttered around behind glass doors. Somewhere beyond them Joy could see a bride.
She stopped outside Habitat and stared for a while. It was unthinkable to her that that had been her, that she’d once been a bride, waiting in the lobby of Chelsea Town Hall in a beautiful white dress about to get married. And no matter how she herself had felt on her own wedding day, no matter how jumbled her emotions, how ambivalent her feelings, she felt nothing but joy and excitement for the girl behind those doors. Because she knew without a doubt that the chances of there being two girls in the world stupid enough to get married to someone they weren’t in love with at Chelsea Register Office were so remote as to be nonexistent.
She waited for the wedding party to emerge before resuming her travels. The bride was older than her, probably in her mid thirties. The groom was about the same. They’d probably lived together for years, Joy mused, probably had a joint mortgage, a shared car, a long history. They’d waited until they knew all of each other’s flaws and foibles, weaknesses and strengths, until they knew without a doubt that there was no one better for them out there. They’d waited until they were grown-ups. They’d done it properly.
Joy watched them smile for their photographer and disappear in a vintage Jaguar, then she wandered slowly down to the World’s End, considering her own existence as she walked. It felt bleaker than ever in the light of this beautiful, weightless, freewheeling day. Those mothers with their plastic-cocooned babies on Esher High Street seemed a million miles away from the beautiful girls and boys strolling around Chelsea with nothing to do and Joy felt completely removed from the life she’d found herself living. She didn’t feel like a tourist or an out-of-towner; she felt like she was home. And she had no idea how she was supposed to reconcile this feeling with the future that destiny seemed to have in store for her, with George and babies and living at the furthest outposts of life.
She hadn’t mentioned her baby revelation to George, and now, as she felt some of the colour returning to her cheeks, she wasn’t entirely sure she ever would.
She caught a Number 328 bus on the New Kings Road, with a vague notion of getting off at Ladbroke Grove and having a wander around Portobello Market. The bus filled and emptied as it passed through the back streets of Earl’s Court and High Street Kensington. More snapshots from her past flashed through her mind. The day she’d come to Kensington Market with her father’s money burning a hole in her handbag and the perverse euphoria she’d felt as she surfaced from the crepuscular rabbit warren of stalls laden down with carrier bags. And a flat she’d been to see in a mansion block off Earl’s Court Road where ten Australians were living in three bedrooms, with a bed in the kitchen.
She changed her mind about Portobello Market when the bus got to Notting Hill. The sunshine had brought the tourists flocking here in their thousands, and she wasn’t in the mood for crowds. Instead she jumped on the tube and decided to head towards Covent Garden.
She wasn’t sure why she decided on Covent Garden. She didn’t have enough money to go shopping and it didn’t hold any particularly fond memories for her, but the day was dictating its own path so she went with the flow.
Half an hour later she was sitting outside a café in Neal’s Yard, reading the paper and just about to bite into a prosciutto and sun-dried tomato ciabatta roll, when she looked up and saw a man walking towards her, smiling uncertainly.
‘Joy?’ said the man.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Joy, letting her sandwich fall on to her plate, ‘Vince. I don’t believe it.’
Forty-Eight
He’d been taking a shortcut between Shorts Gardens and Earlham Street, heading down towards Seven Dials. He hadn’t even really been paying any attention to people around him as he walked, engaged as he was in an argument with Jess on his mobile phone. He’d stopped in the middle of Neal’s Yard briefly to make a particularly important point, then he’d seen her.
Joy.
His Joy.
Sitting outside a café, turning the pages of a newspaper and about to bite into a sandwich.
He’d known it was her immediately, even before he saw her face. The delicate way her hands handled the unruly broadsheet, the kick of brown hair across her high cheekbones, the narrow feet beneath the table, crossed elegantly at the ankle. He told Jess he’d call her back and folded his
phone back into his coat pocket.
As he approached her table his pace quickened. She looked up when he called her name, and it was like that moment all over again – that moment in Hunstanton when he’d first seen her through his bedroom window, sitting on a deck chair, reading a magazine.
She hadn’t really changed. Her hair was slightly darker and worn longer. She was wearing jeans, trainers, a fitted corduroy jacket in olive green and a fat woolly scarf in baby pink. She still looked chic, slightly exotic. She still looked out of his league.
‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’
‘Me neither,’ she beamed back at him. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Oh, just a bit of clothes shopping.’ He showed her his carrier bags. ‘What about you?’
She shrugged, folded up her newspaper, ‘Just mooching around, really’
‘Are you with your… husband?’
‘No. Not today. He’s in Winchester. Doing a creative writing course.’
‘Oh,’ said Vince, ‘right.’
‘And your wife?’
‘She’s not my wife yet,’ he laughed.
‘Oh. Sorry. I just presumed because you had a kid and everything…’
‘Kid?’
‘Yes,’ she blushed slightly, ‘I saw you once. A few years ago. Outside Hamleys. You had a little boy…’
Vince racked his brain for a second, trying to remember a day when he’d been outside Hamleys with a little boy. ‘Oh,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘You mean Kyle. He’s not my son…’
‘Oh,’ said Joy.
‘No, Kyle’s my little brother.’
‘You’ve got a little brother?!’
‘Yes. And a little sister. Not so little now, though. Nine and six.’
‘Oh, my God. So your mum and Chris…?’
‘Yeah. They’re still together.’
‘Wow,’ Joy smiled, ‘that’s so great. I always thought they were one of the best couples ever.’
She smiled at him and he smiled back at her. There was a moment’s silence.
‘Are you in a hurry?’ Joy asked eventually. ‘I mean, are you on your way somewhere?’
‘No,’ smiled Vince, ‘just more clothes shops.’
‘D’you fancy a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling a chair out and pushing his shopping under the table. ‘Yeah, that would be great.’
They called over a waiter, and Vince ordered himself a latte and a piece of chocolate truffle cake.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still married, then?’
‘Yes,’ she grimaced slightly. ‘It’ll be seven years in December.’
‘I saw you,’ he said, not sure why he was telling her, but unable to stop himself. ‘I saw you getting married.’
‘What!’
‘Yeah. That bloke, that weird bloke you were living with, with the weird name…’
‘Bella.’
‘That’s it. He told me you were getting married at Chelsea Town Hall, so I came along and watched. From over the road.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Uh-huh. What kind of a sad stalker does that make me?’
‘But why?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was something to do with that cat…’
‘Oh, God – that cat! How spooky was that? Your cat being in my flat…’
‘Yeah. My flatmate Cass thought it was a sign…’
‘What sort of sign?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – a sign that we should be together or something.’ He laughed to show how ludicrous he thought this was. ‘But that morning, the morning of your wedding, it just looked at me and made this weird noise, and the next thing I knew I was on a tube to Sloane Square.’ He wriggled his shoulders, trying to exorcize the memory of his behaviour being influenced by a cat. ‘You looked amazing,’ he said. ‘Really, really amazing.’
Joy blushed a little. ‘Thank you.’ She ran a finger around the edge of her plate and opened her mouth to say something. ‘Can I just ask you a question?’
‘Of course.’
‘All those years ago, before I married George, when all that business with the cat was going on. My friend Bella told me that you’d been looking for me. And then I saw you outside Hamleys that day and I thought he must have been lying. But he said he was telling the truth. Was he? Were you looking for me?’
‘Yes,’ he said, exhaling the word and wincing. ‘I was. We were. Me and Cass.’ He picked up Joy’s paper and hid behind it.
Joy batted it out of the way and smiled. ‘Really?’ She looked embarrassed, but pleased.
‘Uh-huh. She was trying to work out why I was such a loser in love and decided that it was because I’d never had closure with you.’
Joy blinked at him.
‘Yeah. Now there’s a whole ‘nother conversation. Hunstanton. Our parents. Your note.’
Joy folded her arms and waggled her head. ‘You don’t need to explain.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I do. I’ve been wanting to explain for years. Your note. It rained in the night. I couldn’t read it. All I could make out was “I feel so ashamed.” I thought you’d dumped me. And then I was talking to Chris about it a few years later and he told me what happened between my mum and your dad, and I’d had no idea. No one told me at the time. I thought you’d really regretted what happened that night, you know, what we did. I thought you’d left because you couldn’t face me.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Joy, ‘no. That night. What happened that night, what we did, it was incredible. The whole thing, the time we spent together. It was… I was devastated when we had to go. I nearly woke you up to give you the note, to tell you what was happening, but I thought you’d be angry with me.’
‘Angry?’ said Vince. ‘Why would I be angry with you?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought it would be better in a note. I wanted to give you the option of whether or not you wanted to see me again. And when you didn’t call, I just thought, fair enough. I just thought, I wouldn’t want to be involved with my family either.’
There was a silence then as they both took on board the series of mixed messages and bad fortune that had led them to where they were today.
‘So, when your cat found me, when you came to Wilberforce Road, how come you didn’t say anything?’
‘You were getting married in three weeks’ time. I couldn’t help but feel that my timing was a little off.’
‘But then you came to the town hall. Came all the way to Chelsea. Why didn’t you say hello?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It was your wedding day. Your special day. I didn’t want to freak you out.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t think anything could have freaked me out any more than I already was.’
He threw her a questioning look.
‘My wedding day was…’ – she picked at a frill of prosciutto hanging from her ciabatta – ‘strange. To say the least.’
‘Strange in a good way or strange in a bad way?’ He moved away to let the waiter put his coffee and cake down.
‘Bad, I guess,’ she smiled. ‘Bad wedding. Bad marriage.’
‘No. Really?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded and smiled again. ‘I married in haste. Now I’m repenting at leisure.’
‘Oh, shit. Joy, I’m sorry. He looked really nice, your husband – you both looked so happy. I thought… I thought you’d got it sorted, you know, found your Mr Right, settled down.’
‘And I thought you had, too, when I saw you with your brother. Thought you’d already got a family together. And that woman. That beautiful woman you were with – are you still together?’
‘What – Magda? Oh God, no. That finished about two weeks later. And it should have finished a lot earlier than that.’
‘So, who are you with now, then? Who’s the woman you’re not married to yet?’
‘Jess.’ He felt awkward, wishing for some reason that he could say he wasn’t with anyone, that he was
available. ‘I’m with Jess.’
‘Jess,’ Joy nodded.
‘That’s who I was talking to. On the phone just now. Or arguing with, more accurately’ He wasn’t sure that Joy needed to know this, but he wanted her to know that things weren’t perfect, that things weren’t right.
‘What were you arguing about?’
‘Oh, God – just… stuff. Jess is – she’s difficult’
‘Is she nice?’
Vince was about to nod, but then he stopped. ‘She can be,’ he said. ‘She can be really nice.’
‘Would I like her?’
‘Probably not. Girls don’t tend to like her very much. She’s not a girls’ girl. She doesn’t do clothes or gossip or confidences. She can be blunt, you know – thoughtless. And she’s quite… self-centred’
Joy sent him a look that he translated to mean, so tell me why you love her if she’s so awful.
‘But she’s cool,’ he shrugged. ‘She’s loyal to her friends. Loving. And really great with kids…’
‘So you’re going to marry her, then?’
Vince laughed. ‘I don’t know’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Maybe. We’re trying for a baby right now, so, probably, you know, eventually…’
‘Wow,’ said Joy, nodding, ‘so it’s really serious?’
‘Yeah. I guess so.’
‘So – what were you arguing about?’ she asked him with a twinkle in her eye.
He laughed. ‘Christ. I don’t know. We’re going through a bit of a tough time right now. Her friend came back from the States a few months ago and, ever since he’s been here, she’s changed. She was teetotal before, didn’t take drugs, did yoga, ate healthy food, early nights, all that. And all of a sudden she’s turned into this party animal. And it’s not this friend’s fault. He’s a really good bloke. But it just seems to have been a catalyst for her to go back to her old ways. And she was supposed to be meeting me in town this afternoon, but now she’s going to see her new friend Franco, I don’t know, she says he’s gay, but I’m not so sure. The thing with Jess is that she does whatever she wants to do. If it happens to fit in with your plans, then that’s fine. If not, then…’ He shrugged his shoulders.