Vince and Joy (17 page)

‘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 with 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.

They sat together on a bench by the lake at Buckingham Palace Gardens, and Joy found that there was very little physical space between the two of them. George’s arm
brushed against hers and their rumps were firmly bedded together on the wooden bench. But she didn’t find this unnerving or awkward in any way. She glanced down at his hands where they rested on his lap and decided they were his best feature, large and solid with square tips and a smattering of hair. You could forgive a man a dozen physical shortcomings if he had a decent pair of hands, she decided.

He asked her questions about herself and she told him about her birth in Singapore, her subsequently unexceptional upbringing, her unlovable parents, her three years at Bristol University, her crappy job, her most recent love life and her new flatmate. And he watched her while she talked as if she was quite the most fascinating woman he’d ever encountered.

When it started to get dark they decided to prolong the day and find somewhere warm to have a drink. The first place they stumbled upon was the ICA, a place that Joy had visited twice previously in her life, once as a fourteen-year-old, with Kieran, to see Orange Juice playing live, then as a nineteen-year-old fresher, on a weekend trip to London with a dozen overexcited and partly drunk art students. Joy liked revisiting places after a long interval – it gave a sense of time and perspective to her existence. She tried to remember that fourteen-year-old girl as she crossed the threshold with George Pole, tried to remember what she was wearing, how they’d got there, what she’d had to drink, but all she could remember was staring up at Edwyn Collins, wishing that he were her boyfriend instead of the unfortunate Kieran.

They sat on high stools around a high table and sipped designer beer from bottles, surrounded on all sides by
the chatter and enthusiasm of people who’d spent their Sunday morning in the pursuit of culture and knowledge, and their Sunday afternoon in a bar. They toyed with the idea of heading across town to see a film, but never quite got round to doing anything about it, happy just to sit and chat the evening away.

He told her more about his ‘psycho’ ex, a manic-depressive PE teacher called Tara who once knocked him out cold with a rounders bat and accused him of having affairs with every woman in their social circle. And in return, Joy told him about Ally and his decision to leave the country without her, about the man who’d left her standing outside the Swiss Centre on a Wednesday night and about how every man she’d met since she was fourteen years old had been, in one respect or another, a huge and soul-destroying disappointment.

At nine o’clock they decided they’d both drunk enough for a Sunday night and meandered towards the nearest Tube station, and it wasn’t until they came to say goodbye to each other that Joy began to feel awkward again, aware of her situation, on a blind date with a man she didn’t find attractive. Would he try to kiss her? And if he did, how would she respond?

‘Well,’ he said, smiling down at her with evident pleasure, ‘that really was a most unexpectedly enjoyable day. I’ve had a truly great time.’

‘Me, too,’ she said, deciding that, no, she didn’t want to kiss him, and subconsciously rearranging her body to make herself look unavailable for any kind of unannounced physical approach.

‘And might I just say,’ he continued, looking at her
intently, ‘and I do hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you really did undersell yourself on the phone last week. You aren’t pointy in the slightest. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you’re the least pointy girl I’ve ever met. And I have met an awful lot of pointy girls in my time, I can tell you. No – I’d describe you more as…’ – his eyes roamed her face for a second – ‘more as… delicately,
spectacularly
pretty – like a beautiful Meissen teacup. If that makes any sense.’ He didn’t blush as he said this, or laugh, or display any signs of embarrassment, just stared straight into her eyes with a sort of wide-eyed wonder, like an art collector unexpectedly coming upon the finest example he’d ever seen of a favoured artist’s work.

‘Well,’ said Joy, laughing, ‘thank you. That’s lovely.’

‘And if it’s all right with you, I’d like to phone you some time this week. But only if you want me to.’

‘Oh!’ she said, so used to dates that ended in a confused, ambiguous mess of mixed messages and unclear intentions. ‘Of course you can call me. I’d like it very much.’

His soft face melted into a broad smile, and he grabbed her hands and squeezed them. ‘Good,’ he said forcefully, imbuing the word with every ounce of its meaning, ‘that makes me feel very happy.’ He beamed at her, and she beamed back, his joy strangely infectious. ‘Right, then. I’ll be off. And I’ll call you. Probably mid week – say, Wednesday? Would that be OK?’

‘Wednesday’s fine,’ she smiled.

‘Excellent.’ He gave her hands one last squeeze, turned and walked away.

Joy watched his receding figure for a second or two, a
layer of objectivity returning to her as the physical space between them increased. He really was a funny-looking fellow, she decided, gauche, unfashionable, middle-aged in his manner and appearance, yet so switched on to the modern world. He was a walking dichotomy. And Joy had absolutely no idea what to make of him.

Julia was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, wearing some kind of African tunic top and smoking a pink cigarette when Joy got back to the flat on Wilberforce Road later that night.