Vince and Joy (35 page)

The only one of Jess’s exes who worried Vince in the slightest was Jon Gavin. Jon Gavin had been the love of her life – and the father of her second aborted baby. She always referred to him by his full name – Jon Gavin
because there’d been three other Johns in the big gang of friends they’d hung around with in their twenties. Jon Gavin had been Jess’s partner in crime during her Ibiza days, the one she stayed up all night partying with, the person she associated most with the ‘good old days’ of her youth.

There were pictures of him in various locations around the flat. He was tall and lean and handsome in that Paul Newman way that other men could appreciate. He was a music producer and lived in a beach house-cum-studio just outside LA. But more worrying than the good looks and the sexy job was the fact that Jess never said a word against him. If only she’d just once said something disparaging, even if it was something petty like that he had horrible feet or that he snored, Vince might have felt more relaxed about him. But she didn’t – far from it.

‘I
adore
him,’ she said, ‘absolutely adore him. He’s the most amazing person. I wish you could meet him – I know you’d love him, too.’

The one thing that Jon Gavin had in his favour as far as Vince was concerned was his physical distance from the two of them. He was deeply indebted to Jon Gavin for choosing to live on the other side of the Atlantic and would have happily paid him maintenance to stay there for ever.

So when Vince met Jess in the pub across the road from her flat one night, and she beamed and said, ‘I’ve had some really exciting news – Jon Gavin’s coming back to London,’ Vince had had to take three very deep breaths to compose himself before he could find a proper reaction.

‘How come?’ he managed eventually.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, still glowing with excitement, ‘something to do with work. I don’t believe it – you’re finally going to meet Jon Gavin!’

‘Yes,’ said Vince, ‘it’s great. When’s he back?’

‘Next Monday! I’m going to collect him from the airport. Surprise him.’

‘Cool,’ he said, ‘great idea.’

‘I’d ask you to come along, too, but, you know… ’

Vince didn’t really know but could only presume and nodded mutely. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘that’s fine. I understand.’

‘But you’ll meet him on Tuesday.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘When you come over.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘I’ve asked him to stay with me. Just until he gets himself settled in, finds somewhere to live.’

‘What? Seriously?’

‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

Vince wanted to say, yes, that is a fucking problem, actually. But he was still, ludicrously, at the stage in his relationship with Jess where he wanted her to think that he was cool, that he was secure with a capital S.

‘God. No. It’s not a
problem.
It’s just… isn’t it going to get a bit cramped? With the three of us?’

‘No,’ she scoffed, good-naturedly, ‘Jon doesn’t take up much room.’

She said this, as she said everything about Jon, as if it was yet another unique virtue that he possessed.

‘But where will he sleep?’

‘On the sofa bed,’ she said.

‘Oh. Right.’ Vince sniffed. He imagined the three of them lined up on the sofa watching a DVD. He imagined Jon yawning at nine o’clock and Jess leaping to her feet to unfold the sofa bed with him. He imagined waiting outside the bathroom to brush his teeth as Jon emerged wrapped in a towel with his six-pack rippling at him and his gigantic pecs twitching. And then a fantastic idea occurred to him. ‘I just had a thought!’ he said, brightening. ‘Why doesn’t Jon stay at my flat! He’ll have his own bedroom, and it’s only a five-minute walk away.’

Vince expected to see Jess’s face light up with pleasure at this suggestion, but instead she frowned. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘no. I don’t think so. That flat’s so miserable. And I can’t quite imagine what Jon would make of dear old
Clive.’
She said Clive’s name is if it were slang for a sexually transmitted disease and, for the first time in his life, Vince felt defensive of his dreary flatmate.

‘What’s wrong with Clive?’

She threw him a questioning glance. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said, ‘you know exactly what’s wrong with Clive. He’s old and he’s weird… ’

‘He’s not weird.’

‘OK. Not weird, exactly – but he wears strange clothes and he talks so… slowly… it… makes… you… want… give… up… living. And besides, I haven’t seen Jon for four years. I
want
him to stay with me. He’s good for my soul. He makes me happy.’

Vince gulped. He knew Jess wasn’t deliberately trying to upset him. Jess had no guile, no notion of game playing. People had total responsibility for handling their own
emotions, as far as she was concerned. It wasn’t her job to censor her actions, to edit her feelings. It was the other person’s job to grow up and take it. She had no interest in dealing with other people’s insecurities and that was why Vince was sitting here, taking deep breaths and behaving in a reasonable fashion, when what he really wanted to do was have a full-blown tantrum and storm off like a girl.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, finally. ‘It was just a thought.’

Jess beamed at him and clasped his hand. ‘My two best boys, under the same roof,’ she said. ‘So exciting!’

And as she said it, a mental stopwatch clicked on in Vince’s head, painfully ticking down the seconds until Monday night… until Jon Gavin.

George stood beside his car, outside the station.

He was wearing the shirt he’d worn on their wedding day six years earlier. The top two buttons were undone and the white of the piqué cotton against his olive skin looked cool and fresh. He’d done something different to his hair, too. It was cut shorter, closer to his skull. It looked good. His hands clasped a large bunch of white flowers, unidentifiable from this distance, but probably arum lilies.

Joy pulled her coat tightly around her and smiled uncertainly. In her left hand was a Selfridges carrier bag containing some toiletries, her pyjamas, her diary and a packet of Lil-lets. She’d packed them on Friday while George was in the garden, thrown things into the bag randomly, urgently, fuelled by adrenalin. She’d forgotten her moisturizer and had to use her mother’s cold cream that smelled of damp porches. And she’d brought only one change of clothing, a black Lycra shirt that was now in her mother’s linen basket. She’d intended to come back for everything else, fill the boot of her mother’s car, drive across London yet again.

Instead she was coming back to stay – to make another go of it. Her heart filled up with disappointment, drip by drip. Disappointment in herself. All the planning, the subterfuge, the courage she’d had to muster to leave the
house on Friday lunchtime, all the nerves and the tension and the sheer terror of getting on that train three days ago, all for nothing. One phone call from George and she was back. One ten-minute conversation filled with promises of change and improvement, declarations of love and adoration. That was all it had taken.

George had bought flowers.

She was back at square one.

She flashed her Travelcard at the young man with the pied hair, the young man she saw every day on her way to and from work, the young man she thought she’d never have to see again after Friday, and took a deep breath. She felt shy as she approached George, awkward. She couldn’t remember which muscles to use to make her face smile.

He beamed at her, his face wrinkling into soft folds of happiness. ‘You look beautiful,’ he said, handing her the flowers and taking her carrier bag from her in one smooth movement, ‘absolutely beautiful.’

She smiled tightly, no longer sure how to accept a compliment from George after so many years. ‘You’re wearing your wedding shirt,’ she said, fingering one of the buttons.

‘
Yes,’
he said, glancing down at it, ‘I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to wear it again – now seemed as good a moment as any. I found a piece of confetti, caught under the collar. It was a horseshoe. It struck me as rather portentous.’ He grinned and held the passenger door open for her. ‘It’s lovely to see you,’ he said, ‘really lovely. I’ve missed you.’

Joy slid into the passenger seat and smiled up at George. ‘I missed you too,’ she said. And in a strange way, she
had. She hadn’t missed his long, painful silences or their ritual Saturday-night sex. She hadn’t missed the small-ness of their life together or the near-squalor that they had somehow managed to end up living in. But she’d missed
him.
In the days before she left, as she contemplated the enormity of what she was about to do, she’d opened the wardrobe and sniffed one of George’s suits, and as his scent hit the back of her nose she’d hugged the suit to her and cried into the lapels.

Another time, she’d caught a glimpse of the back of George’s head, the softness of his neck, the little trickle of a burgundy birthmark just peeping from his hairline, a tuft of unruly hair sticking up at an angle, and had suddenly and overpoweringly seen him as a little boy, a small, lonely child with no parents, no friends, no one at all apart from her. She’d wanted to get up and hug him, bury his face in her shoulder, but he would have looked at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses and shrugged her off. They didn’t do affection any more.

She should have seen these as signs that she wasn’t ready to go, that even though every bone in her body ached with the desire to escape from the tiny, messy, cold and suffocating world that she had somehow found herself in, her head wasn’t ready to make the leap back to shore. She’d been adrift at sea for so long, she’d lost her land legs. She couldn’t remember how to be without George. She was lost with him and lost without.

‘So,’ said George, buckling up his seat belt, ‘I’ve booked us dinner at the new Japanese place. Is that OK?’

‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘I’m in a fishy mood.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Excellent. But first, let’s get you home.’

Jon Gavin arrived on the same day as Jess’s fourth period.

He was sitting on Jess’s sofa when Vince got to her flat at seven o’clock that evening. He got to his feet the moment Vince walked in and shook him vigorously by the hand.

‘Vince. It’s an honour to finally meet you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Vince, staring into a pair of the most dazzlingly blue eyes he’d ever seen in his life, ‘you, too.’

‘Jessie’s really been talking you up – Vince this, Vince that… ‘ He smiled and let Vince’s hand drop.

Jessie? How come he was allowed to call her Jessie? Vince had called her Jessie once and she’d snapped that only her father was allowed to call her that. ‘Well, that’s nice to hear,’ he said, smiling back.

Jon was shorter than he looked in photos, but that was the only thing about his physical appearance that Vince could take any comfort from. He was dressed casually in combat type trousers and a crewneck in soft grey lambs-wool. His hair was shorn into an all-over number two, but not because he was losing it – it was thick and covered his scalp densely like plush velvet – it was shorn because it suited him shorn, because he had incredible bone structure and a well-shaped skull. It was shorn because it set off his ridiculously blue eyes and thick, dark eyelashes so well.

He even had nice feet.

The one part of the anatomy that was more often than not to be found lacking in aesthetic appeal, the one bit that was allowed,
expected,
to be horrible, and Jon’s were, like the rest of him, tanned, shapely and toned.

Vince wished he’d made more of an effort getting dressed this morning. Spending all day sitting in a car, his primary concern regarding clothing was comfort. He wished he’d had his hair cut, too. It always tended to look thicker when he’d just had it cut. He felt pasty, British, bald and old. He felt totally and utterly inadequate.

Jess emerged from the kitchen in jersey trousers and a tight vest top with no bra. Vince stared helplessly at the profile of her nipples. Yesterday they’d been
his
nipples; today he was sharing them with another man.

‘Good evening, my lovely man.’ She planted a warm kiss on his cheek and cupped his right buttock. ‘I see you’ve made your acquaintances?’

They both nodded and smiled.

‘Bloody period just started,’ she tutted, arranging cutlery on the dining table. ‘Just now – about half an hour before you got here.’

‘Oh,’ said Vince, glancing at Jon to see how he would react to this unexpected and somewhat personal announcement.

But Jon looked completely unfazed. ‘Oh, shit, Jess,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry’

‘Erm, does Jon… have you told him… ?’

‘Yes,’ she said lightly.

‘But I thought we said we weren’t going to tell anyone.’

‘No –
you
said you weren’t going to tell anyone. I just
chose
not to. Until now’

‘Oh,’ said Vince, ‘right.’

‘Hey, look,’ said Jon, ‘don’t worry about it. If you guys are trying to keep it low-key, you can trust me. I won’t blab.’

‘No, no, that’s fine. It’s just, you know, if people know then they start wondering why it’s taking so long and it’s just added pressure, and we just want the whole thing to be, you know,
fun.’