Vince and Joy (50 page)

They did talk on the phone after that, a handful of times, and it quickly became clear that, although Charles Yung was not the most exciting person in the world, he was decent, polite and uncomplicated enough for a face-to-face meeting not to be out of the question.

Carrie wouldn’t hear of Joy staying at a hotel and insisted that she stay with them, in their house with the big number.

In the run-up to her departure date, Joy received a flurry of e-mails from Carrie:

We have a small Jack Russell terrier called Barney. I do hope you don’t suffer from any dog allergies or phobias?

I have made up your bed with a goose-down quilt.
Please let me know if you have any feather allergies.

I was just planning your welcome dinner and wanted to be sure that you eat meat. In particular, beef and chicken.

Charles wanted to cook for you one night, some traditional Singaporean dishes. Some of it might be a tad spicy. Are you OK with this?

Curtis was wondering if he might interview you for the school magazine? (He is the editor-in-chief! Grand plans to be an international reporter!) Everyone in his class is very excited about his English ‘sister’!

Please be sure to bring photos of you ‘through the years’! Charles and I would love to see how you’ve changed and grown through the ‘missing’ years.

It was obvious to Joy that Carrie was thoroughly enjoying her role coordinating this exotic visitation. She had corralled cousins and second cousins and great-aunts and great-uncles from five different states to come to visit while Joy was with them and had, it seemed, planned a menu for the full two weeks of her stay.

In the days leading up to her trip, Joy started to feel nervous.

Would she find it suffocating?

Would it be too intense?

Would she end up spending more time with Carrie than with her father?

How would Curtis react to her?

Was she staying too long? Not long enough?

But she put these concerns to the back of her mind and focused on the positives.

Her father was alive.

He was normal and ordinary and wanted to see her.

He’d been incredibly easy to track down. It felt like destiny. It felt like perfect timing.

His family was going out of its way to make her feel welcome.

She had her mother’s full support.

Everything was in place for a successful and constructive experience.

She looked round her flat. Her home. By the time she next sat and looked at these four walls, she’d be a different person. Stronger, maybe; weaker, possibly. But definitely different. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The doorbell buzzed and Joy got to her feet to let her mother in.

The adventure started here.

Halfway through the third week of March, Jess’s friend Clare sent her an e-mail announcing that she was coming back to London after five years in Australia.

Clare had just found out that Dave, her live-in lover and love of her life, was sleeping with three other women, including her best friend. Her heart was broken and she wanted her mum. So she was coming home. In two weeks.

This snippet of girlie gossip from across the globe would not normally have registered particularly with Vince. But this piece of gossip came attached to a bunch of major implications for himself. Because Clare was the owner of their flat. And she wanted it back.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Vince and Jess had been hanging on to each other by a filament since the shocking night of the lost handbag. Jess could no longer claim that her hedonism and pleasure-seeking were fundamental rights to be defended, and the fact that she had lost her grip on the moral high ground made her moody and resentful. Equally, Vince could no longer justify his wife’s shady secret life and long absences from the house with the fact that she deserved it because she was such a perfect, flawless mother, and he had become intolerant and short-tempered.

It wasn’t a good combination of mind-sets and the atmosphere in their little flat had become tense, bordering
on nasty. So the process of renegotiating their living arrangements (which had always been so tenuous anyway) was not something that either of them was prepared for.

The options open to them were:

1. Rent somewhere together.

2. Move in with Jess’s mother while they found somewhere to buy.

3. Beg Clare to stay with
her
mother and let them stay in her flat while they found somewhere to buy.

4. Split up, get divorced, fight for custody of Lara.

They sat and discussed the first three options, but left the fourth option hovering silently in the background of their conversations like a bad smell they were both too polite to mention.

Four days after the e-mail from Clare, Vince did something he’d never done before. He cancelled all his morning lessons, claiming that he had to look after his daughter because she was ill. He then dropped a perfectly healthy Lara off at nursery, parked his car at the station and got the first train into Euston. He didn’t really know what he was planning to do once he got into town – he was simply responding to an instinctive and overwhelming need to get out of his immediate environment and put some space between himself and his dilemmas.

The first building he stumbled upon as he wandered aimlessly in the brightness of a crisp March morning was the British Library. Something about the clean, graphic
lines of the building pulled him in. It looked so new and fresh, full of light and air and space to breathe.

He wandered aimlessly for a while, up and down escalators and corridors, glancing idly at framed ancient manuscripts and works of modern art. A group of schoolchildren was being led around by a very enthusiastic woman in a tight red dress, whose bare legs were festooned with varicose veins that looked like earthworms crawling across her skin. Vince sat down on a bench and watched the children for a while. They were about fourteen. Some looked old for their age, some looked young, but they all that air of self-conscious desperation that Vince remembered so well from his own adolescence.

His peers had seemed so mysterious to him when he was fourteen. He couldn’t have imagined what any of them were really thinking or feeling, what they really dreamed about or what they really wanted. They were each hermetically sealed against the world, hungry to taste it yet terrified to let it in in case it revealed their inherent childishness, unworldliness,
uncoolness.

But now, more than twenty years on, he could look at these half-formed people and read them like books. That one there, wearing too much hair gel, with the crescent of acne around his jawline – he was his mother’s favourite. He liked her cooking and wanted to marry someone just like her one day. The boy standing next to him with the hint of patchy stubble and the angry blue eyes – his mum shouted at him from the minute he woke up to the minute he went to bed, and he just wanted to get out of here so he could have a fag. That one was a virgin; that one wasn’t. That one had an eating disorder; that one
was the school slag. That one cried herself to sleep every night; that one practised her Oscars’ acceptance speech.

And then he saw the boy who was him – the Melonhead of his year. He was standing slightly to the left of the group with his hands buried deeply into the pockets of voluminous black combats. A pair of earphones dangled from the breast pocket of his blazer. He was slightly overweight in an unkempt, middle-aged way, and his hair was dyed black and grown long in an attempt to cover a face that God appeared to have had no hand whatsoever in the creation of. Vince stared at him. He could tell he wasn’t listening to the enthusiastic woman with the varicose veins. He was either listening to music in his head or just praying and hoping that no one would look at him. He just wanted to be left alone.

Vince wanted to talk to him. He wanted to tell him that everything would be all right, that one day beautiful girls would talk to him and that everything would make sense. Because if someone had tapped him on the shoulder in the British Library when he was fourteen years old and said that one day he’d be thirty-five years old and married to a beautiful woman who loved sex and that they’d have a gorgeous daughter together and live in a cool flat in Enfield he would never have believed them. And he certainly wouldn’t have asked questions about the quality of the relationship or whether or not the foxy wife went out too much or took too many drugs or played Russian roulette with their daughter’s security. He’d just have smiled and said, ‘Cool!’

But then, he thought, what if that same man had told him that one day he’d be thirty-five years old and losing
his hair, that he’d be teaching people to drive for a living and was about to be evicted from the cool flat with nowhere else to go? He wouldn’t have been quite so pleased with his prognosis, then.

And that was when it dawned on Vince – he’d been looking in all the wrong places for an explanation for the collapse of his marriage to Jess. He’d been so busy blaming her for everything that he’d forgotten to look at himself. And really, who could blame Jess? Who could blame an exciting, passionate, spontaneous woman for looking outside of her dull, safe relationship for stimulation, to find
herself?
What did he really have to offer someone like her? Yes, he was a good father, but that wasn’t enough for Jess. She needed more than security and safety. She needed a man she could feel proud of – a man she wanted to spend time with.

And Vince needed more from himself, too. He was thirty-five. He should be able to afford a house for his family. He should have put money aside for this sort of eventuality. He should be in a position to be planning for the future instead of sitting stalled at this junction like a clapped-out old motor.

He looked at the boy in the combats and smiled to himself. He was going to make him proud. He was going to get a job that stimulated him, that took him around the world, that paid for a house for Jess and Lara with a garden and a playroom and a spare bedroom for another baby. He was going to take his family on Mediterranean holidays and take up a hobby. Maybe he’d learn to ride a motorbike. Or start playing football on a Sunday. Maybe they’d all go skiing or sailing together. Maybe he’d learn
to cook or play the guitar. Join a band. Write a novel. Learn massage. Take up yoga. Study a foreign language. Evening classes. Painting. Theatre. Salsa. Tae kwan do.

His head began to race with all the possibilities, with all the things he’d forgotten to think about since he gave up on London and moved back to Enfield. He wasn’t a
driving instructor.
He was a
man.
There was a whole world out there and Jess was right – he’d forgotten to look at it. He’d become embedded in his little corner of Enfield and set in his ways. He’d become middle-aged. And he was only thirty-five.

He jumped to his feet. He wanted to see Jess now. He wanted to apologize for dragging her down, for thinking that decency and reliability were acceptable substitutes for passion and life. He wanted to pick her up and swing her around and tell her she was beautiful and amazing. He wanted to start making plans with her. He wanted another baby. He wanted three. Four. He wanted her to enjoy her life
with
him as much as she enjoyed her life
without
him. He wanted her to see him the same way she saw Jon. He wanted
her.
He loved her.

He headed for the foyer, stopping as he passed the boy in the combats. He looked at him and opened his mouth to say something. The boy looked back at him, lifeless eyes appraising him slowly. There was no spark there, no opening. Vince closed his mouth and smiled at him instead.

And then he walked triumphantly outdoors, the tender spring sunshine touching his face as he walked as fast as he could back to Euston Station.

*

Jess was eating a noodle salad from a clear plastic bowl when Vince arrived at the radio station an hour later.

‘Vince!’ she spluttered, dropping her plastic fork into the bowl and looking up at him in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, not wanting to pause for breath, even for a second, in case he lost his momentum, ‘about everything. About us. I love you, Jess. I always have and I always will. I don’t want to lose you. And I’ve got to accept some responsibility for what’s been happening between us these past few months. I haven’t been living up to my potential. I haven’t been making an effort. And I want us to make a fresh start.’

‘Vince, I – ’

‘I’m prepared to do whatever it takes, to make you happy, to make this work…’

‘Oh, God, Vince…’

‘We could go and live in Ibiza! Or maybe take a year off and sail around the Med. The three of us. I don’t want to be a driving instructor any more. I don’t want to be this dull, middle-aged man. I want to change. I want to be the man of your dreams –’

‘Vince. I’ve got to tell you something.’ She pulled his hand towards her across the table.