Vince and Joy (42 page)

‘Well, it does to me.’

‘Well, then, we’ve obviously got very different outlooks on life. I’m two weeks’ pregnant, Vince. All that’s in there is a few cells that are not going to be harmed by a couple of drinks and a sniff of coke. If that really were the case then 50 per cent of the kids in the world would have something wrong with them. Obviously now I know I’m
pregnant, I’ll stop drinking immediately. But it was taking so long to get pregnant and I just really needed to let my hair down. I’ve got it out of my system now, and from hereon in my body is a temple. But I am not going to let you make me feel guilty about a couple of nights out.’

‘But it’s not just that, is it?’ said Vince collapsing on to the sofa. ‘It’s not just that.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s everything. It’s you. It’s us. It’s…’

‘Christ, Vince. What are you saying?’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’

‘Are you getting cold feet?’

‘No. Of course not. It’s just… I don’t know. You and I. We’re so different. So completely different. How are we going to raise a child together?’

‘You are! I don’t believe it! You’re getting cold feet!’

‘I am not. I’m just thinking about things from a different perspective. Ever since Jon arrived I’ve seen another side of you and, to be honest, it’s scared me.’

‘Scared
you?’

‘Yes. I don’t feel as if I know you any more. In fact, I don’t feel as if I’ve
ever
known you.’ ‘Of course you know me.’

‘No. I don’t. I knew a girl who liked a quiet life, who liked early nights and lie-ins. A girl who respected her body, possibly a little too much, but that was the girl I knew.’

‘But I told you – I told you the sort of person I used to be, the sort of person I
am.
I was honest from the outset.’

‘Yes, I know you were. But I thought that part of your life was over…’

‘Yes. And so did I. But seeing Jon. It just reminded me of the good times, you know. Being young and reckless. I suppose I just wanted a bit of a last fling, a bit of fun, before settling down.’

Vince nodded tersely. She was starting to make sense, but there was still a part of him that couldn’t quite accept that everything was going to be all right, just because Jess was ‘over’ her party phase. There was still so much to consider. The stale old boyfriends hanging around in her life like unwanted party guests. Her ability to compartmentalize her life with an almost pathological exactitude. Her inability to empathize, to put herself in other people’s shoes. Their informal living arrangement. And the fact that after nearly a year together, she’d never even told him that she loved him…

And now there was this. Two pink lines. A baby.

It was what he’d always wanted, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

He looked at Jess. She was sitting perched on the edge of the sofa, her hands clasped together between her knees, staring at him imploringly. She was scared. Fearless, cocky Jess was scared. She’d expected Vince to come home this afternoon and whoop with delight when she told him her news. She’d expected champagne and celebrations. She hadn’t expected doubt and confusion. She lived so firmly in the World According to Jess that she was unable to deal with the imposition of other people’s reality. She was thrown. She was terrified.

‘It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?’ she said softly ‘We’re going to do this together, aren’t we?’

Vince took a deep breath and took Jess’s hands in his
own. ‘Yes,’ he said, pulling her in towards him, ‘it’s going to be fine.’

Jess brightened as she felt Vince softening. ‘So can you get excited now, please.’

Vince turned and smiled at her. ‘Oh,’ he said, cupping her belly with the flat of his hand, ‘all right, then.’

Joy studied the papers, then picked up a black Biro and started writing.

1) On the second day of our honeymoon the respondent stopped talking to me. He didn’t talk to me again until the fourth day of our honeymoon at which point he explained that he’d been angry with me because some local men had been looking at me outside a temple. He claimed it was my fault because I’d been wearing shorts, although our tour guide had assured me that the shorts would be perfectly acceptable attire for visiting a Thai temple. The respondent then suggested that my behaviour was so unacceptable that we should probably consider getting a divorce.

She sighed and continued.

2) Three years after our marriage the respondent and I moved house. The respondent oversaw the move. He asked me what I would like to be done with some personal effects in a cupboard in the spare bedroom – diaries, old photographs, schoolbooks etc. I said that some of it could be thrown away, but that I wanted to keep the photo albums, diaries etc. I was very clear about exactly what I wanted to be kept. When I arrived home that night, he told me that he’d disposed of everything in the cupboard except one
photo album. He maintained that he had followed my instructions and refused to apologize, even though he could see how devastated I was by the loss of so many elements of my personal history.

This was harder than she’d expected. She had to give five examples of George’s unreasonable behaviour, but there were just so many countless examples that she didn’t know where to start. George had said she could claim infidelity as a basis for her divorce action, but she didn’t want to lie. She wanted to state for the record, in black and white, for evermore, the truth about their marriage.

She took a deep breath and continued.

3) In January of this year, two friends of mine arrived unexpectedly at our house at around nine o’clock. The respondent initially refused to open the door to them, but relented once he realized that they knew we were in. He then refused to talk to them, and when I attempted to offer my guests wine told them that we didn’t have any even though there was a bottle open in the kitchen. My guests left an hour later after which the respondent didn’t talk to me for over twenty-four hours.

4) In 1995 I was invited by my mother to join her for a weekend at a health farm. She was in need of some pampering and some quality time with her daughter. When I broached the subject with the respondent he claimed to have made plans for the same weekend that I planned to spend with my mother, but when I asked him what his plans were he refused to elaborate. On the morning of my trip the
respondent claimed he felt unwell and suggested that I should cancel my trip. There was no outward manifestation of his illness, so I went ahead with my plan for a weekend with my mother. The respondent claimed that my neglect was grounds for divorce, then refused to talk to me for nearly a week.

5) In 1996, during a casual conversation about sex, the respondent claimed that I was ‘not particularly good in bed’. I asked him to explain what he meant by this and he went on, quite enthusiastically, to describe me as unspontaneous, unpassionate and not very sexy. He failed to understand how hurtful I found this and claimed I was overreacting when I began to cry.

She read back through what she’d written and felt a wave of dissatisfaction engulf her. These titbits, these tiny crumbs of anecdotes, did nothing to describe the full tragedy of the past six and a half years of her life. They didn’t explain how two people had come together and imploded into a mulch of insecurity and resentment. They didn’t depict the devastation on George’s face after Bella told him that Joy thought he was ugly or the overwhelming sense of grief she experienced when she learned that ten years’ worth of her diaries were sitting on top of a rubbish tip somewhere in Blackheath.

The court wanted examples of George’s unreasonable behaviour. They weren’t interested in how that unreasonable behaviour had made her feel. As she read back through the form she had a sudden fear that maybe the faceless, nameless people whose job it was to read these
paper representations of such intimate moments between people they’d never met might decide that George’s behaviour hadn’t been unreasonable at all. Maybe they would read her form and think that she was a silly girl who was overreacting to a bit of harmless sulking and childishness.

She passed the form to her mother who was sitting on the sofa opposite her, watching
Coronation Street.

‘What do you think?’ she said, as her mother pulled on her reading glasses.

Barbara turned to her with tears in her eyes as she read. ‘Did he really say that to you?’ she said. ‘About not being sexy?’

Joy nodded.

‘Oh, Joy,’ she shook her head sadly, ‘how any man could look at you, my beautiful girl, and tell you that you’re not sexy. I just can’t bear to think about it…’

‘But do you think it’s OK? Good enough for the courts. Good enough for a divorce? I mean, does it sound unreasonable enough to you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Barbara, nodding enthusiastically, ‘it’s unreasonable. You’ll get your divorce. Don’t you worry.’

‘Can you believe it?’ she said. ‘Can you believe that your daughter’s getting divorced?’

Barbara chuckled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve only just got used to the fact that I’
m
divorced. What a disastrous pair we are, eh?’

Joy smiled and took the forms back from her mother. This was it, she mused, she was on her way back to shore. George was in Esher and she was in Colchester. All her possessions were here. She’d changed her name back to
Downer. She’d given in her notice at the photo lab. She was filling in her divorce papers. She was nearly there. All she needed to do now was move back to London, get a job, get her life back and she’d be home and dry.

Two weeks after Jess’s big announcement, Vince saw a documentary on Channel 4.

It was about the fact that one in eight babies was conceived by a man other than the man who thought he was the father. Apparently, women were hormonally programmed to play away from home while they were ovulating. It was nature’s way of making sure that their children were born out of as large a genetic pond as possible. The documentary makers interviewed a man somewhere in the Midwest of America who had five sons. After one of them was struck down with a mysterious genetic condition it became necessary to test the DNA of all five of the boys, upon which it was discovered that of the five boys, only one of them had been sired by their ‘father’ and that the remaining four had been sired by four different men – including the ‘father’s’ brother.

The men in this documentary haunted Vince for days after he watched it, as did the thought of rampant, ovulating women, scouring the streets for potential ingredients to throw into their genetic soups. Studies had shown that not only did ovulating women feel more predisposed towards sex with men other than their partner, but also that they favoured men with a typically ‘masculine’ appearance – square jaws, triangular torsos and strong,
white teeth. Men, Vince had concluded bitterly, not unlike Jon Gavin.

There was nothing about Jess’s general aura or mood to suggest guilt or doubt about the paternity of the child she was carrying, but then, as Vince now knew only too well, she was very gifted in the art of turning a blind eye to anything that didn’t quite suit her. Equally, Jon seemed to be very buoyant and light-hearted around the subject of Jess’s pregnancy. Maybe it wasn’t his. Maybe Jess had found some other chisel-jawed hunk on the streets of Enfield to impregnate her while simultaneously battling the flu and rejecting Vince’s advances.

And maybe, of course, Vince was being a paranoid idiot and the baby Jess was carrying was his. But until it arrived, until he finally set eyes on the child, he would just have to live with the painful little seed of doubt growing fat and swollen in his heart.

Joy finally called Vince three weeks and six days after their meeting in Neal’s Yard.

It wasn’t that he’d been counting the days or anything, just that once Jess told him that she was pregnant, time suddenly came and went in strongly defined parcels of weeks. Jess was two weeks’ pregnant when Vince met Joy and almost six weeks’ pregnant by the time Joy called on Friday afternoon. Therefore it had been three weeks and six days since he’d given her his number.

He’d barely thought about her in that time.

The shock of discovering that he was nine months (or forty weeks) away from becoming a father had sort of obliterated his previous existence. Anything he’d said, done or thought in the weeks leading up to Jess’s big announcement disintegrated into white noise the minute Jess showed him the two pink lines on a white plastic stick.

He’d just dropped a student at the testing centre when she called, and was about to tuck into a cheese-and-ham toastie at a caff around the corner.

‘Vince. It’s Joy’

His heart literally skipped a beat, and he let his toastie fall to the plate. ‘Wow. Joy. You called.’

‘Well, I said I would, didn’t I? Sorry it’s taken so long, though. I’ve had a lot on.’

‘No. No. Don’t worry. I have, too. God. How are you?’

‘I’m good. I’m great. Really great.’

‘And did you… are you still with your husband?’