Vince and Joy (40 page)

‘You’ve got a little brother?!’

‘Yes. And a little sister. Not so little now, though. Nine and six.’

‘Oh, my God. So your mum and Chris…?’

‘Yeah. They’re still together.’

‘Wow,’ Joy smiled, ‘that’s so great. I always thought they were one of the best couples
ever.’

She smiled at him and he smiled back at her. There was a moment’s silence.

‘Are you in a hurry?’ Joy asked eventually. ‘I mean, are you on your way somewhere?’

‘No,’ smiled Vince, ‘just more clothes shops.’

‘D’you fancy a cup of tea?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling a chair out and pushing his shopping under the table. ‘Yeah, that would be great.’

They called over a waiter, and Vince ordered himself a latte and a piece of chocolate truffle cake.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still married, then?’

‘Yes,’ she grimaced slightly. ‘It’ll be seven years in December.’

‘I saw you,’ he said, not sure why he was telling her, but unable to stop himself. ‘I saw you getting married.’

‘What!’

‘Yeah. That bloke, that weird bloke you were living with, with the weird name…’

‘Bella.’

‘That’s it. He told me you were getting married at Chelsea Town Hall, so I came along and watched. From over the road.’

‘You didn’t!’

‘Uh-huh. What kind of a sad stalker does that make me?’

‘But why?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was something to do with that cat…’

‘Oh, God – that cat! How spooky was that? Your cat being in my flat…’

‘Yeah. My flatmate Cass thought it was a sign…’

‘What sort of sign?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – a sign that we should be together or something.’ He laughed to show how ludicrous he thought this was. ‘But that morning, the morning of your wedding, it just looked at me and made this weird noise, and the next thing I knew I was on a tube to Sloane Square.’ He wriggled his shoulders, trying to exorcize the memory of his behaviour being influenced by a cat. ‘You looked amazing,’ he said. ‘Really, really amazing.’

Joy blushed a little. ‘Thank you.’ She ran a finger around the edge of her plate and opened her mouth to say something. ‘Can I just ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘All those years ago, before I married George, when all that business with the cat was going on. My friend Bella told me that you’d been looking for me. And then I saw you outside Hamleys that day and I thought he must have been lying. But he said he was telling the truth. Was he? Were you looking for me?’

‘Yes,’ he said, exhaling the word and wincing. ‘I was. We were. Me and Cass.’ He picked up Joy’s paper and hid behind it.

Joy batted it out of the way and smiled. ‘Really?’ She looked embarrassed, but pleased.

‘Uh-huh. She was trying to work out why I was such a loser in love and decided that it was because I’d never had closure with you.’

Joy blinked at him.

‘Yeah. Now there’s a whole ‘nother conversation. Hunstanton. Our parents. Your note.’

Joy folded her arms and waggled her head. ‘You don’t need to explain.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I do. I’ve been wanting to explain for years. Your note. It rained in the night. I couldn’t read it. All I could make out was “I feel so ashamed.” I thought you’d dumped me. And then I was talking to Chris about it a few years later and he told me what happened between my mum and your dad, and I’d had no idea. No one told me at the time. I thought you’d really regretted what happened that night, you know, what we did. I thought you’d left because you couldn’t face me.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Joy, ‘no. That night. What happened that night, what we did, it was incredible. The whole thing, the time we spent together. It was… I was devastated when we had to go. I nearly woke you up to give you the note, to tell you what was happening, but I thought you’d be angry with me.’

‘Angry?’ said Vince. ‘Why would I be angry with
you?
’

‘I don’t know. I just thought it would be better in a note. I wanted to give you the option of whether or not you wanted to see me again. And when you didn’t call, I just thought, fair enough. I just thought, I wouldn’t want to be involved with my family either.’

There was a silence then as they both took on board the series of mixed messages and bad fortune that had led them to where they were today.

‘So, when your cat found me, when you came to Wilberforce Road, how come you didn’t say anything?’

‘You were getting married in three weeks’ time. I couldn’t help but feel that my timing was a little off.’

‘But then you came to the town hall. Came all the way to Chelsea. Why didn’t you say hello?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It was your wedding day. Your special day. I didn’t want to freak you out.’

She laughed. ‘I don’t think anything could have freaked me out any more than I already was.’

He threw her a questioning look.

‘My wedding day was…’ – she picked at a frill of prosciutto hanging from her ciabatta –
‘strange.
To say the least.’

‘Strange in a good way or strange in a bad way?’ He moved away to let the waiter put his coffee and cake down.

‘Bad, I guess,’ she smiled. ‘Bad wedding. Bad marriage.’

‘No. Really?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded and smiled again. ‘I married in haste. Now I’m repenting at leisure.’

‘Oh, shit. Joy, I’m sorry. He looked really nice, your husband – you both looked so happy. I thought… I thought you’d got it sorted, you know, found your Mr Right, settled down.’

‘And I thought you had, too, when I saw you with your brother. Thought you’d already got a family together. And that woman. That beautiful woman you were with – are you still together?’

‘What –
Magda?
Oh God, no. That finished about two weeks later. And it should have finished a lot earlier than that.’

‘So, who are you with now, then? Who’s the woman you’re not married to
yet
?’

‘Jess.’ He felt awkward, wishing for some reason that
he could say he wasn’t with anyone, that he was available. ‘I’m with Jess.’

‘Jess,’ Joy nodded.

‘That’s who I was talking to. On the phone just now. Or
arguing
with, more accurately’ He wasn’t sure that Joy needed to know this, but he wanted her to know that things weren’t perfect, that things weren’t right.

‘What were you arguing about?’

‘Oh, God – just…
stuff.
Jess is – she’s
difficult’

‘Is she nice?’

Vince was about to nod, but then he stopped. ‘She can be,’ he said. ‘She can be really nice.’

‘Would I like her?’

‘Probably not. Girls don’t tend to like her very much. She’s not a girls’ girl. She doesn’t do clothes or gossip or confidences. She can be blunt, you know – thoughtless. And she’s quite…
self-centred’

Joy sent him a look that he translated to mean, so tell me why you love her if she’s so awful.

‘But she’s cool,’ he shrugged. ‘She’s loyal to her friends. Loving. And really great with kids…’

‘So you’re going to marry her, then?’

Vince laughed. ‘I don’t know’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Maybe. We’re trying for a baby right now, so, probably, you know, eventually…’

‘Wow,’ said Joy, nodding, ‘so it’s really serious?’

‘Yeah. I guess so.’

‘So –
what were you arguing about?’ she asked him with a twinkle in her eye.

He laughed. ‘Christ. I don’t know. We’re going through a bit of a tough time right now. Her friend came back
from the States a few months ago and, ever since he’s been here, she’s changed. She was teetotal before, didn’t take drugs, did yoga, ate healthy food, early nights, all that. And all of a sudden she’s turned into this party animal. And it’s not this friend’s fault. He’s a really good bloke. But it just seems to have been a catalyst for her to go back to her old ways. And she was supposed to be meeting me in town this afternoon, but now she’s going to see her new friend
Franco,
I don’t know, she says he’s gay, but I’m not so sure. The thing with Jess is that she does whatever
she
wants to do. If it happens to fit in with your plans, then that’s fine. If not, then…’ He shrugged his shoulders.

And how will all this partying fit in with being a mother?’

‘Exactly,’ he said smoothing back his hair, ‘exactly. I don’t know. It worries me. The whole thing worries me. I just think…’ He was about to say that maybe they were making a mistake, that maybe they should take time to get know one another better before they headed towards parenthood, but he stopped himself. He wasn’t ready to take that turning off the path. Not yet. ‘Oh, I don’t know’ He smiled and dug his fork into his cake. ‘It’ll all work out in the end, won’t it. I’m sure once she’s pregnant… What about you? What’s the deal with your “bad marriage”?’

She smiled wryly. ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘you got all day?’

‘Not all day,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got at least… ‘ He looked at his watch. ‘Oooh – three hours.’

And so she told him a heart-breaking story, a story of a young woman looking for stability and security after
the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and finding it with a man who gave it to her with one hand before snatching it back with the other. A man who mistook marriage for possession. A man who had no idea how to give or receive love. A man who wanted Joy to wither away and crumble into powder so that no one else would want her, not even him.

She smiled stoically throughout the telling of her tale, but there was a weakness around her bottom lip that told of a deep-seated misery and a sense of bitter resignation.

‘I even went to Relate once,’ she said. About a year after we got married. It was all just so awful, we were arguing all the time – this was before I’d submitted entirely to his will and I was still maintaining this pretence of the fabulous fairy-tale wedding to all and sundry. I just really needed to talk to someone, I think, tell someone what was happening to me. And I went and sat in this room in Portland Place, just behind the BBC, and this lovely woman with chopsticks in her hair asked me all these questions about my childhood and George’s childhood. And as I was talking to her I started feeling really sorry for George, thinking of this poor damaged little boy who had no one in his life but me, no one to care about him, no one to look after him, and I suddenly couldn’t say anything bad about him. It was so weird.

‘She said, “you’re very defensive of him, aren’t you?” And I said, ‘Yes. I am.” She told me to try to talk to him, get him to come along to the next session. But there was no way I could ever have done that. If George had known that I’d been talking about his childhood,
our marriage
to
a complete stranger he’d have been devastated. So that was it. I never went back. I was on my own.’

‘And you’ve never told anyone how unhappy you are?’

She shook her head.

‘Not even your mum?’

She shook her head again. ‘I wrote a letter once,’ she said, ‘to my best friend in the States, Maxine. She hadn’t been at the wedding and she’d never even met George. She was so distant from it all, it felt safe telling her. It was ten pages long that letter. Maxine said she burst into tears while she was reading it, then she gave it to her friend to read and she burst into tears, too! And she’d never even met me!’

‘But surely your friends, your family – they must know you’re not happy.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they know. It’s just not spoken about, that’s all. It’s as if I don’t want to let everyone down. My mother who stood by my side so proudly on my wedding day, who made George so welcome into our family. My friends who wanted so much to believe in it, the whole love story thing…’

‘And do you? Love him?’

She looked up at him and smiled, an embarrassed smile.

‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not really. I never did.’

‘Not even when you married him?’

‘No – not even when I married him.’

‘So
why?
Why did you marry him?’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the hardest question I will ever have to answer. Because I really and truly don’t know’

He stared at her for a moment in shock. The idea of walking into a register office and making those vows, saying those words in front of your family, in front of
your friends, with someone you didn’t love was completely horrific to him. He was appalled. ‘You have to leave. You know that, don’t you?’

She nodded.

‘More than six years, Joy – more than six years of your life. Your twenties. Gone,’ he clicked his fingers. ‘Just like that. Shit.’

‘I know. I know. It’s a big old mess. But I made it and I’ve got to clean it up.’

‘Look. Whatever happens, we’ll have to keep in touch. I need to know what happens to you. I need to know you’re all right.’

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘But you can’t call me.’