Vince and Joy (39 page)

‘What?’ she said. You’re not angry with me, are you?’

‘Jess,’ he said, taking a deep breath in an attempt to sound measured and reasonable, ‘I can’t talk now. I’m in the middle of a lesson. I’ll see you tonight. OK?’

‘You sound pissed off. Are you pissed off?’

‘Yes. I’m pissed off.’

‘Oh, Vince. Please don’t give me any grief. My head’s fucking pounding. I really don’t need it.’

Vince sighed again. ‘Look. I’ll see you later.’ And he hung up.

Charlene threw him a look. ‘Whoah,’ she said, her mouth an agog O, ‘that was a bit heavy’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Wanna talk about it?’

Vince glanced at his phone, then at Charlene. Yes, he thought, he did want to talk about it. ‘If you were seeing someone,’ he began, ‘and that person went out on a Friday night without you, but with their best friend of the opposite sex, then ended up in a nightclub taking drugs – while you were supposed to be trying for a baby – met up with another person of the opposite sex from work and ended up going home with that person at four o’clock in the morning, what would you do?’

Charlene popped a fruit pastille in her mouth and looked him squarely between the eyes. ‘Dump him,’ she said, simply.

Vince stared at her for a second, waiting for her to soften the bluntness of her pronouncement. She didn’t.

He nodded slowly, and turned to find his seatbelt, feeling a strange numbness suffusing his body.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘Mirror, signal… and manoeuvre.’

Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.

The last time Joy had had a day and night to herself was two years ago when George had spent the night in hospital with an ingrown toenail – the particular little window of freedom that Joy was about to enjoy had been afforded by the fact that George had decided that he needed to kick-start his writing career with a creative writing course. He found one in Winchester that fitted the bill – mainly because it promised plenty of one-on-one meetings with top literary agents. George was convinced that all he needed to do was find someone who appreciated what he was trying to do, someone to champion his embryonic work, and success would be guaranteed. ‘Publishing – it’s all a matter of who you know,’ he explained to Joy. ‘It’s all about making contact with these people.’

Joy had nodded sagely, unsure whether his theory was right or wrong, but not wanting to do or say anything that might make him change his mind about leaving her alone for an entire weekend.

Joy could barely believe it when the door closed behind George on Friday afternoon and she watched his car pulling out on to Esher High Street. She half expected him to come back, to bowl through the door saying, ‘What was I thinking? I can’t possibly go through with
it – I might have to talk to people I don’t know and you might end up having fun somewhere.’ She hadn’t moved from her position on the sofa for a full ten minutes after he left, just in case he came back and found her looking like she was up to something.

Which she wasn’t.

Not really.

She’d met Dymphna and Karen on the South Bank last night. They had a drink at the Royal Festival Hall, then headed down the river to a pizza restaurant on Gabriel’s Wharf. It was a pleasant evening, nothing special, nothing that thousands of other people in the capital weren’t doing, too, but for Joy, sitting in a restaurant with her friends on a Friday night, sharing a bottle of Pinot Grigio and not having to check her watch once all evening had felt as close to ecstasy as she’d ever been.

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.’

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.’