Vince and Joy (16 page)

Two cups of incredibly strong coffee and the sound of Julia singing loudly in the shower greeted them on their return. Joy showed Mum round the flat, showed her her lovely bedroom with its wooden floorboards and stripped-pine double bed, showed her the cute little back garden with its table and chairs and still-flowering rose-bushes. And then Joy filed back and forth between Mum’s car and the flat for the next hour, unloading her possessions while Mum, with the lung capacity of a baby
mouse and the muscle tone of a gnat, set about the clearing away and washing up instead.

Julia was in raptures when she emerged into a clean and tidy flat an hour later, and called Barbara a ‘beautiful angel’. Barbara blushed and looked thrilled, and Joy realized that it was probably the first time in her life she’d been called either. At four o’clock Julia, now clothed and coiffed, decreed that it was time for sundowners.

‘Come on, Barbara,’ she said, flourishing a huge wine glass, ‘you will be having a glass of wine, won’t you? You deserve one after all your hard work.’

‘Oh, no, thank you, Julia,’ she said, waving it away, ‘I’m not really a drinker. And besides, I’ve got to get back. I won’t be able to drive if I have a drink.’

‘Well, stay the night, then. The sofa folds out into a bed.’

‘Oh, I don’t know…’

‘We can go out for pasta – there’s a fab place in Stokie, on Church Street. Great atmosphere and all the waiters look like Sylvester Stallone.’

Barbara started to smile. And then she started to laugh. ‘Oh, Julia, that sounds lovely, it really does. But I can’. My husband’s expecting me back.’

Joy had a sudden thought then, an image of her stiff, awkward mother laughing in a cosy Italian restaurant, slurping spaghetti, drinking red wine and being flirted with by handsome waiters. ‘Oh, go on, Mum,’ she urged. ‘Dad won’t mind. Call him.’

‘Yes,’ said Julia, pulling the cordless phone off its base and waving it at Barbara, ‘go on. Tell him Joy’s scary new flatmate won’t let you go.’

Barbara looked from Joy to Julia and back again, a naughty twinkle in her eye that Joy had never seen before, like a Tiffany lamp in the corner of a dark room. ‘Oh, all right, then,’ she said, taking the phone from Julia’s outstretched hand and looking at it like it might make a sudden lunge for her throat. ‘How do I work this thing?’

Julia got her a line and Barbara pressed in her home number, smiling nervously, her eyes swivelling from Julia to Joy and back again.

‘Oh, hello, Alan, it’s me. I’m at Joy’s new place. Yes, yes, it’s all gone very well. Yes, it’s very nice. Finsbury Park. Further north. That’s right. Anyway, the thing is it’s got quite late now and the girls are planning a nice Italian meal. Locally. And they’ve asked me if I’d like to come along. And I was thinking I might… yes… yes… I see…’ Her head dropped slightly and she started talking more quietly. ‘No. I understand. No. That’s fine. Right. Right. I’ll see you soon, then.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘About six o’clock. Maybe a bit sooner. All right, love. I’ll see you then. Bye.’

She pulled the phone from her ear and smiled wanly. Julia took it from her and switched it off.

‘Looks like I’m needed at home,’ she said, still smiling that watery smile.

‘Why?’ said Joy.

‘Oh, you know your father. He’s not very good with his own company’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ muttered Joy.

‘I know,’ said Barbara, ‘I know. But maybe another time, eh? Plan it in advance. Give your father some warning. You know’ She pulled her handbag on to her
lap and readied herself to stand up. ‘But thank you for inviting me. It was a lovely thought. Really lovely.’ She hugged her handbag to her soft chest and threw them both a tight smile.

Joy and Julia saw her to her car and watched her drive away, her headlights cutting holes through the late-afternoon gloom, a dry rectangle stencilled on to the wet road where her car had been parked.

‘What a shame,’ said Julia, turning back towards the house. ‘It would have been lovely if she’d stayed.’

Yes, thought Joy, sadly, it would have been. It would also have been unprecedented. Barbara never did anything independently of her husband. She had no friends that hadn’t been Alan’s friends first, no hobbies, no pastimes. She shared his opinions on everything from politics to Sue Lawley’s new haircut, and was an appendage in every sense of the word. Joy had occasionally seen small sparks of another Barbara inside the nylon dresses and cowed demeanour over the years. She’d seen her giggly after a glass of sherry on Christmas morning or flushed with pleasure at the news of a birth or an engagement. She’d seen her jump to her feet and punch the air with delight when Bjorn Borg (whom she decreed ‘gorgeous’) won the finals at Wimbledon. And she’d seen pictures of Barbara in her youth, lumpy-kneed in belted tweed mini-dresses, shiny-faced in unflattering Alice bands, puddingy in printed cotton dirndl skirts and helmet hair. She’d never been slim, she’d never been pretty, but maybe once upon a time she’d been charming, delightful, playful, a flirt. Maybe she’d been out dancing, cycling, to coffee shops and ice-cream parlours. Maybe she’d had suitors, young men vying for her attention. Maybe she’d even slept with some of them.

What had her father done to her, she wondered? How had he managed to make such a limp cushion of her? Had it been a slow process, pulling her spirit out of her, bit by bit, like feathers from a pillow. Or had something happened, a one-off, long-ago event?

She followed Julia back towards the flat and shivered as the cool, damp air made itself felt through her thin clothes. She drank a glass of wine with Julia and took a second into the bath with her. On closer inspection she noticed that the grout between the mint green tiles that rimmed the bath was mouldy. There was a three-dimensional limescale flume from the overflow to the plughole, and Julia’s soap clung to the edge of the bath, green, lumpy and swollen, like a pat of rancid butter. A damp smell emanating from the clammy shower curtain took the edge off her strawberry bubbles and, as she lay in the hot bath sipping chilled wine, Joy tried not to think about the fact that her new flat wasn’t perfect and that her new flatmate had low standards of domestic hygiene.

She tried not to think about her lovely little shower room in Hammersmith, with its pristine white tiles, used by her and only her. She tried not to think about Saturday nights gone by, Saturday nights spent eating takeaways and drinking wine on her very own sofa with a man who loved her. And she tried not to think about the wretched humiliation of standing outside the Swiss Centre for three-quarters of an hour waiting for a not-particularly-attractive man who evidently couldn’t stomach the
prospect of spending even one night with her, just to be polite. She tried not to think about the fact that all her friends in London had moved on, moved out and moved away, and that her social life had slowly whittled itself down to the size of a pea. And while she was at it, Joy tried not to think about her mother, driving sadly away in her ugly little car, back to her ugly little husband, sitting waiting for her in their ugly little house. She tried not to think about the night they could have been having and the conversations they could have had, and she tried not to feel guilty about not trying harder to persuade her mother to stay the night.

Instead she focused on the future.

She could take a bottle of bleach and a scrubbing brush to this bathroom tomorrow. She could make herself at home here. She could phone her mother tomorrow, make a proper plan for her to come and stay, arrange things for them to do, think about questions she’d like to ask her about her father and their vile marriage and all the mysterious empty spaces in their lives. She could make more of an effort with her remaining colleagues and maybe even track down some of her old friends from Bristol to kick-start her social life. And then her thoughts turned to a letter currently folded neatly in three and slotted between the pages of
London Fields
in one of her many unpacked boxes. A letter written on two sheets of thin lined paper with a fine-nibbed fountain pen in midnight-blue ink. A letter she’d read so many times since it had arrived on her Hammersmith doormat ten days ago that she’d almost committed it to memory. It was postmarked SW8 and was from man called George who liked big
dogs, cooking, Catherine Deneuve, Cheech and Chong, Bill Hicks and Julian Barnes, and claimed not be the type of man to usually place a personal advert in a classified paper. A man who’d thoroughly enjoyed Joy’s ‘charming’ letter and wanted to meet up with her, as soon as possible. He’d included his phone number – two phone numbers, in fact. One belonged to the ‘comfortable but somewhat unruly’ flat in a Stockwell mansion block where he lived alone and the other belonged to the ‘sterile and soul-destroyingly corporate’ office space he occupied in a firm of chartered accountants in deepest Mitcham. So far Joy had picked up the phone on at least ten occasions, even called the number of his flat during the day once, knowing that he’d be out at work, and listened to a warm, well-spoken, almost plummy voice tell her that he wasn’t at home right now. But that was as far as she’d taken it. She didn’t know quite what it was she was waiting for. But she would call him. Definitely. Tomorrow.

And at this thought she felt herself feel suddenly more positive about everything. She would sort out everything tomorrow – her mother, her job, this bathroom, her love life, her social life, all of it. Her life wasn’t such a disaster, she decided, just at a juncture, that was all, at a turning point. Everything would work out in the end, she knew that.

Everything would be peaches and cream.

Joy looked at her watch: 12.55 P.m. Early as usual. It didn’t matter how hard Joy tried to be fashionably late, she always got everywhere early. But under the circumstances it was probably a good thing.

She was standing outside a Thai restaurant on James Street, just behind Selfridges, waiting for the mysterious George to show up. She’d finally phoned him last week; they’d talked for half an hour and arranged a date. She’d suggested Sunday lunch, had thought it sounded unthreatening and gave them both some leeway to bail out if it turned out to be a disaster. He’d sounded nice. Very posh, but nice. He described himself as having a ‘mop’ of hair, glasses and a ‘rather unimpressive physique’ – ‘but I’ve been told I have a lovely face,’ he added when Joy had been unable to think of anything to say in reply. She’d described herself as small, mousy and kind of pointy. She hadn’t seen any point in talking herself up after George’s charming self-deprecation. He’d said she sounded absolutely delightful and that actually, he had a ‘particular fondness for pointy women’. He’d suggested this place as he’d never been here before but had read good things about it and now here she was, on a sunny October Sunday, in her least sexually provocative clothes, about to embark on her first blind date.

George’s description of himself had done nothing to
properly define her mental image of him and consequently every man who passed suddenly presented himself as a possibility. Maybe George wasn’t wearing his glasses today. Maybe he wasn’t quite as puny as he’d suggested. And what exactly
was
a ‘mop’ of hair, anyway? She had no idea if he was tall or short, or what colour the mop was, and he’d given no indication of the style of clothing she should except him to appear in. She could reasonably expect that as an accountant he wouldn’t be a fashion plate, but his interests suggested a man with a grasp of the alternative, a certain lack of convention.

And in spite of his less-than-promising self-description on the phone, Joy was still clinging to the very first word of his advert:
handsome.
Would an ugly man ever describe himself as handsome? It was highly unlikely. No – he would be unassumingly handsome, she mused, floppy-haired, cute, lambswool-jumpered maybe? A sort of English teacher type, maybe. Boyish. Bookish.
Cute.

A boyish, bookish, cute man in glasses appeared in the distance, and Joy caught her breath. The closer he got, the more boyishly, bookishly cute he became. By the time he was within touching distance, Joy had stopped breathing entirely and was primed and ready for him to make his approach. He walked straight past her, without even casting a glance in her direction.

Joy exhaled and reassured herself that this
wasn’t
a stupid thing to be doing. Replying to an advert in a classified paper and arranging to meet a strange man on a Sunday afternoon was adventurous, and unusual and… and…
proactive.
She set her chin in resolve and hoped for the best.

And then she saw a man scuttling towards her intently and all her resolve dissipated into a puddle of disappointment.

Not her type. Not in any way, nor in any detail, from his slightly elderly-looking Barbour jacket, to his Nordic design ski jumper, from his strangely combed hair that appeared to have been taped down flat against his head and glued into place, to his overly shiny Oxford shoes with plastic soles. His glasses were less sexy professor and more son-of-John Major, and framed a face that certainly couldn’t be described as ugly, but wasn’t even on
nodding
acquaintance terms with ‘handsome’.

‘You must be Joy,’ he said, beaming at her nervously.

‘I am!’ She beamed back, stoically preventing her disappointment from making an appearance on her face. ‘And you’re George.’

‘Correct!’ He forced his hands into the pockets of belted jeans and increased his smile. ‘Well, isn’t this surreal?’

She laughed, appreciating his frank and immediate summarization of their situation. ‘Bizarre,’ she agreed.