Vince and Joy (21 page)

‘Well, well, well,’ he purred over a can of Strongbow when Joy walked in that night, look what the cat dragged in’ That was another thing about Bella – he was incapable of saying anything even vaguely original.

‘Darling!’ Julia leaped from the sofa. ‘Thank God! I was starting to think you’d been abducted. You should have phoned!’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling off her coat and flopping down on to the sofa. I didn’t think’

‘I
bet
you didn’t… ‘ Bella pursed his lips in mock disgust.

‘Darling,’ Julia said as she perched herself on the edge of the sofa and lit a powder-blue cigarette, I want you to tell me everything. I want to hear every last gruesome detail…

‘Oh, please,’ Bella tutted and looked away, letting it be known that the mere concept of heterosexual sex was too much for him to stomach.

Joy started at the beginning, with the huge flowers and the posh pizza, and as she retold the story she began to see it through the eyes of her audience and it suddenly didn’t seem so strange and off-centre any more. A lovely man whom she’d met in unconventional circumstances had taken her for dinner and treated her like a queen. They’d enjoyed each other’s company so much that they’d gone back to the lovely man’s flat, drunk champagne and had sex. It looked great on paper, sounded wonderful in relation, but the reality? Well, she still wasn’t entirely sure about that.

‘Looks aren’t everything,’ said Bella, slapping Julia’s hand away from a spot on her chin she was fiddling with. ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Joy, thinking that not only was he trite, but also he was wrong. Looks weren’t
everything,
but they were definitely, significantly,
something.
‘But it’s not just his looks, it’s just… it all just feels, I don’t know…’

‘Oh, invite him over,’ said Julia. ‘Let’s have him over for dinner and have a look at him. We’ll tell you whether he’s good-looking or not.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ muttered Joy.’ I mean, I haven’t even decided if I want to see him again or not’

‘Er, sorry?’ Bella clasped his hand to his chest and let his jaw drop. ‘You’ve just spent twenty-four hours shagging this poor bloke to within an inch of his life and you’re not sure you want to see him again? There’s a name for girls like you, you know…’

Joy was too tired and too disoriented to want to find out exactly what name he was thinking of and decided to play it a bit more positive. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘it’s all to do with expectations. You know, maybe if he’d said in
his letter that he looked like a dog’s arse, then I would have been pleasantly surprised when I saw him and my whole perception of him would have been different. Maybe it’s the fact that I was expecting “handsome” and I had a very particular image in my mind of what “handsome” looked like and, when he wasn’t it, it just cast a negative vibe over the whole thing’

‘Yes,’ soothed Julia, whose whole being was openly consumed with the desire for Joy’s romantic liaison to work out. ‘That’ll be it. You just need to look at him afresh. I mean, he can’t be that bad if you had sex with him four times, can he?’

Joy nodded, but then thought back to the two years she spent being fondled in Kieran’s bedroom and wearing his engagement ring as a teenager and the two months she spent kissing Miranda and fiddling with her nipples in the sixth form. And then she thought of that bloke, the one who’d stood her up outside the Swiss Centre on a Wednesday night – she hadn’t fancied him at all, but she’d accepted a date with him because he’d asked her so nicely. She thought of pretty much every man she’d ever slept with or been out with and realized that, with the exception of Vince and Ally, she had a long and painful history of being intimate with people she wasn’t sexually attracted to. The fact that she’d slept with George – more than once – was no indicator of sexual attraction. It was an indicator of the fact that she was a complete moron with an apparently pathological inability to say no.

‘Look at it this way,’ said Julia, ‘when I first came to see this flat my gut reaction was that it wasn’t the place for me. I’d always said that when I found the right flat
I’d know immediately – that I’d just walk in and fall in love with it. But then I got an offer on my place in Cambridge and I needed to move quickly so I thought, fuck it, just buy the fucking flat and worry about it later. And it took me a few months, just putting my mark on it bit by bit, and now I adore it – couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. And that’s what you need to do with poor old George. Put your mark on him.
Personalize
him. Men are very impressionable when it comes to clothes and stuff, you know – they’re just gagging for some woman to come along and tell them how to dress and how to do their hair.’

It’s true,’ nodded Bella. ‘Straight men are missing a gene. The
style
gene. Poor lambs. It’s tragic’

Joy looked at Bella, who was wearing red denim bell-bottom jeans, a skintight grey jersey polo neck that showed every rib in his chest and a red bandana with a skull and crossbones on it. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again.

‘And I guarantee you, darling, once you’ve got him exactly how you want him you’ll fall instantly in love with him and marry him. I mean, he sounds
divine!

And he was. He was gentle and polite and old-fashioned. He was funny and eccentric and clever. He was chivalrous and interesting and made her feel like not only the girl of
his
dreams, but of the dreams of every living man.

And after months of feeling herself fading away like an old Polaroid left in a shoebox in the loft, George’s fulsome, fervent and soft-focused attentions were exactly what she needed.

Over the course of the next two weeks, George took Joy to a stupidly posh restaurant in a Chelsea back street where they were the youngest couple by about twenty years, to the Renoir to see a Czechoslovakian film with subtitles, to the RNT to
see Arcadia
and to the Café Royal for afternoon tea.

He bought her two pairs of vintage diamanté earrings, an art deco marcasite bracelet and a silver Edwardian pendant in the shape of an angel, and he sent her flowers at work on three separate occasions.

After their second official date they went back to George’s flat and Joy discovered that he’d bought her a brand-new blow heater which he insisted she have switched on wherever and whenever she wanted it. ‘I don’t care about the cost – I just can’t bear the idea of you being cold,’ he said when she commented on the effect that this might have on his electricity bill.

On their third date he’d brought along a huge pile of Dulux colour cards and told her she could redesign the flat to her own specifications, even if that meant pink polka dots and leopard skin. ‘It is quite clear that you have a surfeit of good taste, whilst I, unfortunately, have none. I trust you implicitly.’

And on their fourth date the subject of clothes shopping had arisen and he’d handed himself over to her on
a plate. ‘I’ve bought no new clothes in four years. I haven’t had any awareness of fashion since I was a punk. You, on the other hand, are hugely stylish, so if at any point you were to feel like steering me in the direction of a particular shirt or pair of trousers, I would not take the slightest offence.’

George claimed that he’d started looking at life completely differently since he’d met Joy. ‘My aesthetic sense has been completely transformed,’ he’d said. ‘I just have to look at you and I suddenly want to buy new curtains!’

In the three weeks that they’d been seeing each other George had swiftly and effectively eliminated the source of every single one of Joy’s misgivings about him. The only misgiving that now remained was the not insignificant fact that Joy wasn’t physically attracted to him, but they were having so much fun together that Joy had kind of forgotten about that little impediment and was going with the flow.

Everyone at work knew about George now.

Joy had told one of her regular customers, a chatty girl called Mimi who worked across the road at Sony, and within two days everyone at ColourPro knew that Joy had met a man through a personal ad who was now completely sweeping her off her feet. Not that she minded everyone knowing her business – she wasn’t a particularly secretive or mysterious person – but it was just that the more people knew about it, the more real it became.

Men on the whole seemed a bit perplexed that a perfectly normal, presentable girl such as Joy had been reduced to scouring the classifieds for a bloke, but women were overwhelmed by the notion of finding love in the
lonely hearts. Girls who’d never shown that much interest in Joy before were cornering her in the staff room to ask all about it.

What was it that had attracted her to the ad, what did she think the first time she saw him, which restaurants had he taken her to, what plays had they been to see?

She was being accosted now, by Jacquie and Roz, incredulous eyes bulging over chicken mayonnaise sandwiches.

‘So, has he told you that he loves you yet?’ said Roz.

‘No, not in so many words.’

‘Bet he will though – bet he’ll tell you soon. God, it’s so romantic. I can’t believe it. I’ve never met anyone who actually
met someone
through an ad before.’ She shook her head in wonderment.

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s an accountant.’

‘Oh, my God, an accountant!’ squeaked Jacquie. ‘Bet he’s really rich, isn’t he?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘What car does he drive?’

‘Oh, it’s just a company car. A Ford something.’

‘Is it big?’

‘Ish.’

‘Christ.’

Both girls stopped and stared at her for a moment, letting the existence of a big-ish company car sink in.

‘What does he look like?’ said Jacquie.

‘Oh, just kind of ordinary really. You know…’

‘Have you got a picture of him?’ said Roz.

‘No.’

‘Oh, you should get one.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Jacquie, ‘you should get one. Let us have a look at him.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Has he got a nice flat?’

‘Well, you know, it’s OK. Needs a bit of work doing to it.’

‘Yeah, but it’s
his.
He
owns
it. That’s the important thing. No flatmates. God, Roz, can you imagine going out with a bloke who had his own place?’

‘No way,’ Roz shook her head slowly. ‘Or a bloke who takes you out to fancy restaurants. Or a bloke who buys you antique jewellery. Or a bloke who sends you flowers at work for
no reason.
Christ.’

‘Christ,’ said Jacquie, ‘you’re so lucky’

They both stared at her in awe.

‘Do you love him?’ said Roz.

‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course not. We’ve only been on five dates.’

‘That doesn’t mean nothing. My cousin met her husband on the Tuesday and was on honeymoon in Lanzarote by the following weekend.’ She shot Joy a look that suggested that there was virtue in such foolhardiness. ‘They’ve got four kids now
and
they still love each other.’

‘Well, that’s lovely, but really, I don’t think that I’m headed down that particular road.’

‘God, makes you want to answer an ad yourself, doesn’t it, Roz?’

‘Yeah,’ Roz nodded, ‘too fucking right.’

And then a strange thing happened – Big Lee spoke to her.

‘Erm, hello,’ he said, ‘erm, Joy.’ He disgorged her name as if he’d only just learned how to pronounce it. ‘There’s a, er… phone call for you. Urgent. Er… ‘ Then he disappeared again.

She locked herself into the tiny office off the supplies room and lifted the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello.’

‘Joy, love. It’s mum.’

‘Mum. What’s the matter?’ Her mother never called her at work.

‘Oh, love…’

‘Oh, God,’ Joy felt her bloodstream fill up with adrenalin. ‘What?’

‘It’s your dad…’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘He’s left. With Toni Moran.’

‘What!’

‘He’s left me, Joy’

‘But, when? Where? I don’t understand.’

‘Just now. I was microwaving some soup for him. It had just pinged and he walked into the kitchen with a suitcase. Told me he was going.’ She sounded flat, like someone had their foot on her larynx, ‘It never stopped,’ she said, ‘all these years – it never stopped. They’ve been…
doing it,
all along.’

Joy could almost hear her shaking her head in disbelief as she talked.

‘Stay there, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m coming straight home.’

Joy and Barbara sat in the early gloom of the afternoon, sipping sherry from musty crystal glasses, letting the reality of the day’s events sink slowly in.

Alan was gone.

He wanted a ‘quickie’ divorce.

He loved someone else.

He’d been lying for years.