by Lisa Jewell
‘But it’s not just that, is it?’ said Vince collapsing on to the sofa. ‘It’s not just that.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s everything. It’s you. It’s us. It’s…’
‘Christ, Vince. What are you saying?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘Are you getting cold feet?’
‘No. Of course not. It’s just… I don’t know. You and I. We’re so different. So completely different. How are we going to raise a child together?’
‘You are! I don’t believe it! You’re getting cold feet!’
‘I am not. I’m just thinking about things from a different perspective. Ever since Jon arrived I’ve seen another side of you and, to be honest, it’s scared me.’
‘Scared you?’
‘Yes. I don’t feel as if I know you any more. In fact, I don’t feel as if I’ve ever known you.’ ‘Of course you know me.’
‘No. I don’t. I knew a girl who liked a quiet life, who liked early nights and lie-ins. A girl who respected her body, possibly a little too much, but that was the girl I knew.’
‘But I told you – I told you the sort of person I used to be, the sort of person I am. I was honest from the outset.’
‘Yes, I know you were. But I thought that part of your life was over…’
‘Yes. And so did I. But seeing Jon. It just reminded me of the good times, you know. Being young and reckless. I suppose I just wanted a bit of a last fling, a bit of fun, before settling down.’
Vince nodded tersely. She was starting to make sense, but there was still a part of him that couldn’t quite accept that everything was going to be all right, just because Jess was ‘over’ her party phase. There was still so much to consider. The stale old boyfriends hanging around in her life like unwanted party guests. Her ability to compartmentalize her life with an almost pathological exactitude. Her inability to empathize, to put herself in other people’s shoes. Their informal living arrangement. And the fact that after nearly a year together, she’d never even told him that she loved him…
And now there was this. Two pink lines. A baby.
It was what he’d always wanted, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
He looked at Jess. She was sitting perched on the edge of the sofa, her hands clasped together between her knees, staring at him imploringly. She was scared. Fearless, cocky Jess was scared. She’d expected Vince to come home this afternoon and whoop with delight when she told him her news. She’d expected champagne and celebrations. She hadn’t expected doubt and confusion. She lived so firmly in the World According to Jess that she was unable to deal with the imposition of other people’s reality. She was thrown. She was terrified.
‘It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?’ she said softly ‘We’re going to do this together, aren’t we?’
Vince took a deep breath and took Jess’s hands in his own. ‘Yes,’ he said, pulling her in towards him, ‘it’s going to be fine.’
Jess brightened as she felt Vince softening. ‘So can you get excited now, please.’
Vince turned and smiled at her. ‘Oh,’ he said, cupping her belly with the flat of his hand, ‘all right, then.’
Fifty
Joy studied the papers, then picked up a black Biro and started writing.
1) On the second day of our honeymoon the respondent stopped talking to me. He didn’t talk to me again until the fourth day of our honeymoon at which point he explained that he’d been angry with me because some local men had been looking at me outside a temple. He claimed it was my fault because I’d been wearing shorts, although our tour guide had assured me that the shorts would be perfectly acceptable attire for visiting a Thai temple. The respondent then suggested that my behaviour was so unacceptable that we should probably consider getting a divorce.
She sighed and continued.
2) Three years after our marriage the respondent and I moved house. The respondent oversaw the move. He asked me what I would like to be done with some personal effects in a cupboard in the spare bedroom – diaries, old photographs, schoolbooks etc. I said that some of it could be thrown away, but that I wanted to keep the photo albums, diaries etc. I was very clear about exactly what I wanted to be kept. When I arrived home that night, he told me that he’d disposed of everything in the cupboard except one photo album. He maintained that he had followed my instructions and refused to apologize, even though he could see how devastated I was by the loss of so many elements of my personal history.
This was harder than she’d expected. She had to give five examples of George’s unreasonable behaviour, but there were just so many countless examples that she didn’t know where to start. George had said she could claim infidelity as a basis for her divorce action, but she didn’t want to lie. She wanted to state for the record, in black and white, for evermore, the truth about their marriage.
She took a deep breath and continued.
3) In January of this year, two friends of mine arrived unexpectedly at our house at around nine o’clock. The respondent initially refused to open the door to them, but relented once he realized that they knew we were in. He then refused to talk to them, and when I attempted to offer my guests wine told them that we didn’t have any even though there was a bottle open in the kitchen. My guests left an hour later after which the respondent didn’t talk to me for over twenty-four hours.
4) In 1995 I was invited by my mother to join her for a weekend at a health farm. She was in need of some pampering and some quality time with her daughter. When I broached the subject with the respondent he claimed to have made plans for the same weekend that I planned to spend with my mother, but when I asked him what his plans were he refused to elaborate. On the morning of my trip the respondent claimed he felt unwell and suggested that I should cancel my trip. There was no outward manifestation of his illness, so I went ahead with my plan for a weekend with my mother. The respondent claimed that my neglect was grounds for divorce, then refused to talk to me for nearly a week.
5) In 1996, during a casual conversation about sex, the respondent claimed that I was ‘not particularly good in bed’. I asked him to explain what he meant by this and he went on, quite enthusiastically, to describe me as unspontaneous, unpassionate and not very sexy. He failed to understand how hurtful I found this and claimed I was overreacting when I began to cry.
She read back through what she’d written and felt a wave of dissatisfaction engulf her. These titbits, these tiny crumbs of anecdotes, did nothing to describe the full tragedy of the past six and a half years of her life. They didn’t explain how two people had come together and imploded into a mulch of insecurity and resentment. They didn’t depict the devastation on George’s face after Bella told him that Joy thought he was ugly or the overwhelming sense of grief she experienced when she learned that ten years’ worth of her diaries were sitting on top of a rubbish tip somewhere in Blackheath.
The court wanted examples of George’s unreasonable behaviour. They weren’t interested in how that unreasonable behaviour had made her feel. As she read back through the form she had a sudden fear that maybe the faceless, nameless people whose job it was to read these paper representations of such intimate moments between people they’d never met might decide that George’s behaviour hadn’t been unreasonable at all. Maybe they would read her form and think that she was a silly girl who was overreacting to a bit of harmless sulking and childishness.
She passed the form to her mother who was sitting on the sofa opposite her, watching Coronation Street.
‘What do you think?’ she said, as her mother pulled on her reading glasses.
Barbara turned to her with tears in her eyes as she read. ‘Did he really say that to you?’ she said. ‘About not being sexy?’
Joy nodded.
‘Oh, Joy,’ she shook her head sadly, ‘how any man could look at you, my beautiful girl, and tell you that you’re not sexy. I just can’t bear to think about it…’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Barbara, nodding enthusiastically, ‘it’s unreasonable. You’ll get your divorce. Don’t you worry.’
‘Can you believe it?’ she said. ‘Can you believe that your daughter’s getting divorced?’
Barbara chuckled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve only just got used to the fact that I’m divorced. What a disastrous pair we are, eh?’
Joy smiled and took the forms back from her mother. This was it, she mused, she was on her way back to shore. George was in Esher and she was in Colchester. All her possessions were here. She’d changed her name back to Downer. She’d given in her notice at the photo lab. She was filling in her divorce papers. She was nearly there. All she needed to do now was move back to London, get a job, get her life back and she’d be home and dry.
Fifty-One
Two weeks after Jess’s big announcement, Vince saw a documentary on Channel 4.
It was about the fact that one in eight babies was conceived by a man other than the man who thought he was the father. Apparently, women were hormonally programmed to play away from home while they were ovulating. It was nature’s way of making sure that their children were born out of as large a genetic pond as possible. The documentary makers interviewed a man somewhere in the Midwest of America who had five sons. After one of them was struck down with a mysterious genetic condition it became necessary to test the DNA of all five of the boys, upon which it was discovered that of the five boys, only one of them had been sired by their ‘father’ and that the remaining four had been sired by four different men – including the ‘father’s’ brother.
The men in this documentary haunted Vince for days after he watched it, as did the thought of rampant, ovulating women, scouring the streets for potential ingredients to throw into their genetic soups. Studies had shown that not only did ovulating women feel more predisposed towards sex with men other than their partner, but also that they favoured men with a typically ‘masculine’ appearance – square jaws, triangular torsos and strong, white teeth. Men, Vince had concluded bitterly, not unlike Jon Gavin.
There was nothing about Jess’s general aura or mood to suggest guilt or doubt about the paternity of the child she was carrying, but then, as Vince now knew only too well, she was very gifted in the art of turning a blind eye to anything that didn’t quite suit her. Equally, Jon seemed to be very buoyant and light-hearted around the subject of Jess’s pregnancy. Maybe it wasn’t his. Maybe Jess had found some other chisel-jawed hunk on the streets of Enfield to impregnate her while simultaneously battling the flu and rejecting Vince’s advances.
And maybe, of course, Vince was being a paranoid idiot and the baby Jess was carrying was his. But until it arrived, until he finally set eyes on the child, he would just have to live with the painful little seed of doubt growing fat and swollen in his heart.
Fifty-Two
Joy finally called Vince three weeks and six days after their meeting in Neal’s Yard.
It wasn’t that he’d been counting the days or anything, just that once Jess told him that she was pregnant, time suddenly came and went in strongly defined parcels of weeks. Jess was two weeks’ pregnant when Vince met Joy and almost six weeks’ pregnant by the time Joy called on Friday afternoon. Therefore it had been three weeks and six days since he’d given her his number.
He’d barely thought about her in that time.
The shock of discovering that he was nine months (or forty weeks) away from becoming a father had sort of obliterated his previous existence. Anything he’d said, done or thought in the weeks leading up to Jess’s big announcement disintegrated into white noise the minute Jess showed him the two pink lines on a white plastic stick.
He’d just dropped a student at the testing centre when she called, and was about to tuck into a cheese-and-ham toastie at a caff around the corner.
‘Vince. It’s Joy’
His heart literally skipped a beat, and he let his toastie fall to the plate. ‘Wow. Joy. You called.’
‘Well, I said I would, didn’t I? Sorry it’s taken so long, though. I’ve had a lot on.’
‘No. No. Don’t worry. I have, too. God. How are you?’
‘I’m good. I’m great. Really great.’
‘And did you… are you still with your husband?’
‘Nope.’
‘Seriously?!’
‘Yup. I left him the day after we met.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. I waited till he got back from his creative writing course the next day and told him I was going.’
‘Oh, my God. What did he say?’
‘He was cool, actually. I’d really psyched myself up for it. It was incredible, as if I was possessed by some kind of demon spirit. As if after all those years of being so submissive, so scared of him and his moods, I was suddenly somebody else, someone strong and fearless. There was nothing and no one that could have stopped me leaving him. I was so impatient for him to get home, I was literally pacing back and forth. I just wanted to do it. To say it.’
‘So what did you say? How did you tell him?’
‘I said, “George, I’m leaving you.” Just like that. And it was weird because he didn’t look at all surprised. He tried persuading me to stay for a few minutes, but it was a bit half-hearted. And he asked me if there was anyone else. But after that we just talked. We talked for five hours and it was great. It was as if he’d been expecting it, as if he was relieved. I think he felt the same as me. I think he thought when I came back last month, that things could change, that he could be different, that I could be different, that we could still live up to this big romantic ideal he had in his head. But then he realized that it was impossible, that we’d gone too far to ever get back to where we were – or, at least, where he thought we were. It was all really, really civilized.’
‘Wow. Joy. That’s great. I’m so pleased for you. You must feel extraordinary.’
‘I do. I feel amazing. To be out of that situation. To know that I never have to go back. To know that he’s happy, that I haven’t ruined his life. I just sent off my divorce papers. And I’ve told him to keep the house and the furniture and everything. I really don’t want anything material. I just want a clean break. I just want my freedom.’
‘Well, you deserve it. Totally. I’m really pleased for you.’
‘And I just wanted to thank you. That day, when we met. I think I was at my lowest ebb ever. I’d even thought about getting pregnant, having a baby, just to give it all some sense of purpose. It felt as if… I don’t know… ever since I met George I’ve had this weird feeling, as if I was veering off course, taking the wrong path. In my head I felt like a ship that was out of control, in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight, but always with the hope that I’d find my way back to dry land eventually. But just recently, before that day we met, it was like the ship had capsized… and I was drowning. And then you turned up in Neal’s Yard and all of sudden I was rushing up through the water, I could see the light above, I could breathe again. Does that sound stupid?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘You rescued me. Do you see? You pulled me out of the water and plonked me on a life raft.’
‘Like that bloke at the end of Titanic?’ he laughed.
She laughed, too. ‘Yes. Exactly. Like that bloke at the end of Titanic’.
‘Well, I’m glad to have been of assistance.’
‘You really were in the right place at the right time. Although, if you’d marched into Chelsea Town Hall on the 24th of December 1993, bundled me into a cab and taken me home then, you would have been a real hero!’
‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘I feel awful.’
‘Oh, don’t feel bad. I was only joking. I had plenty of opportunities to bail out. I just chose not to take them. I wanted somebody else to make the leap for me. You know, sometimes I used to sit in George’s
car, outside the off-licence, or outside the video shop, and wish that someone would kidnap me, wish that some big brute of a man would leap into the driver’s seat and take me away somewhere. Anywhere. Isn’t that tragic?’ She laughed.
‘That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard,’ said Vince.
‘I know. It’s pathetic, isn’t it.’
Vince smiled. ‘So, where are you staying?’
‘Back at my mum’s. Which isn’t so great.’
‘Yeah – I moved home for a while when I came back to Enfield. It’s weird, isn’t it? It feels like such a step backwards…’
‘Yeah. Exactly. And my mum’s doing her best to make it feel all right, but it doesn’t make any difference. I just want to get myself a place as soon as possible. Get my life back.’
There was a brief silence, during which Vince contemplated suggesting to Joy that she come to stay in his flat, the one he shared with Clive. He was only there a couple of nights a week and it wasn’t anything special, but it was better than living in Colchester with her mum. But then he thought of his own circumstances, of Jess, the baby, of everything that was about to happen to him in the coming months, and he decided against it. Joy took the continuing silence as a sign that Vince was tiring of the conversational theme and broke it.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s more than enough about me. How about you? What was Jess’s big announcement?’
‘Aah, yes,’ he said, dropping a sugar cube into his tea. ‘The announcement. You were right.’