Vince and Joy (22 page)

Barbara was a single woman again at the age of sixty-five.

‘Mum,’ said Joy, a sudden need for confidences and answers overwhelming her, ‘why did you choose Dad?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, what was it about him? Why did you fancy him? Fall in love with him?’

‘Fancy him?!’ she laughed.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, your father was the most handsome man I’d ever set eyes on. You’d be better asking
him
why he chose
me?’

‘Mum! That’s awful. How can you say that?’

‘Well, it’s true. I was thirty-five years old. Practically middle-aged in those days. Naive. Inexperienced. And not exactly the prettiest thing you’d ever seen. And your father – well, he swept me off my feet.’

‘He did?’ Joy’s mind boggled at the very thought.

‘Yes. Flowers. Gifts. Compliments. I’d never known anything like it.’

‘Wow’

‘Yes. He was a true romantic back then. He wasn’t always such a … well, you know,’ she sighed, and turned to face Joy. ‘And then we got married and we got posted out in Singapore and… well, he changed. We both changed, I suppose.’ She got a faraway look in her eye.

‘Why?’

She shrugged, picking absent-mindedly at the slubs in her tweed skirt. ‘Very competitive place Singapore back in those days, the 1960s. Very stressful. He worked twelve hours, fourteen hours a day sometimes. So much money. And then there was drink, drugs – all the beautiful people. Everyone wanting to be in on the action all the time. Anything you wanted in Singapore was there for the taking, on a plate. I think it turned his head, to be honest.’

‘And was he having affairs there? In Singapore?’

Barbara suddenly looked wistful, got a pinched look about her cheeks. ‘Oh,’ she said lightly, ‘I don’t know. Probably. I’m sure he was. All those beautiful women. The stress at work. All the problems we were having, you know, conceiving. I’m sure he was.’

‘Didn’t you ever think about leaving him? Didn’t you ever think you deserved better?’

Barbara turned on her seat and stared at Joy for a while, a terrible haunted look suddenly overcoming her. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘plenty of times. But I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

She turned back to the window, stared into the darkness. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to hurt him.’

Joy looked at her in surprise. ‘Hurt him? After all the affairs. After what happened in Hunstanton. After he treated you like shit all your life.’

‘It wasn’t that simple.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘No. Your father… he had his reasons. I wasn’t perfect.

‘Yes you were. You
are!

‘No, love. I wasn’t. Nobody is. There are two sides to everything.’

Joy flinched slightly. She could feel something beyond this conversation, something she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.

‘What are you trying to say, Mum? Is there something you’re not telling me?’

‘No,’ her mother smiled, rubbing the back of Joy’s hand. ‘No. Of course there isn’t. I just don’t want you blaming your father for everything, that’s all.’ Barbara stood up. ‘More sherry?’

Joy nodded and looked at the back of her mother’s head, at the curler-rolled sausages of Wella Warm Mahogany hair that had deflated slightly over the course of a long, hard day, and felt a surge of love overcome her.

‘You know I love you, don’t you, Mum?’

Barbara turned to her and smiled wanly. ‘Of course I do, love. I just hope you always do. Whatever happens…’

The following morning, while her mother sat in the kitchen peeling the last of the summer windfall for apple sauce, Joy pulled on her jacket and headed over the road to Number 18. Toni Moran answered the
door. She was wearing a plum-coloured polo neck and beige trousers, and her hair was cut short and sleek. Black kohl ringed her turquoise eyes and gold chains circled her elegant wrists. She smelled of Poison. She was tall and lean. She was fifty-one. She was everything Joy’s mum wasn’t.

‘Joy!’ she said, as her ruby-hued lips stretched themselves into a smile of genuine pleasure. ‘How lovely to see you. And looking so beautiful. Come in. Come in.’

She ushered Joy into a hallway that smelled of cigarettes, damp dog and clean laundry. A leggy red setter ambled towards her, wagging its tail lazily. Joy put out a hand to pet it, then snatched it back. She couldn’t go back to her mother’s house smelling of Toni Moran’s dog.

‘Is he here?’ she said, woodenly.

‘Yes. Of course.’ Toni threw her a look of sympathy, as if this whole rotten scenario had absolutely nothing to do with her. ‘Ι,’ she called up the stairs, ‘Joy’s here.’

She showed Joy through to the living room. Her house was exactly the same shape as Joy’s parents’, but felt completely different. Instead of damp wisps of nylon net hanging across her windows, she had folds and flounces of thick oatmeal jacquard. Instead of fields of ancient, patterned carpeting covering her floor she had shiny beech-effect parquet. And instead of a solitary hanging light bulb housed under a dusty paper shade she had rows of twinkling halogen lamps embedded in her ceiling.

Joy sat down on a plump sofa in green and white stripes and listened to her father’s footsteps, heavy on the stairs behind her. She could hear him whispering with
Toni in the hallway, and took a deep breath. She knew what she’d come here to say. Now she just wanted to say it and leave.

‘Joy’ Her father stood in the doorway. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with some kind of logo on it. She’d never seen him in a T-shirt before.

‘Dad.’ She got to her feet.

‘I hope you haven’t come here to cause any trouble. His face looked tight and defensive.

‘No,’ she snapped, ‘I haven’t come to cause
trouble.
I’ve come here to say something – then I’m going.

‘Fine.’ He folded his arms across his chest and stared at the floor.

‘Mum is in there,’ she pointed across the road, ‘with a broken heart. She’s done nothing but love you and care for you and look after you, and you’ve done nothing but treat her like shit.’

Alan opened his mouth to say something, but Joy was on a roll.

‘I ended up on a psychiatric ward because of you and that woman. You swore to Mum that you’d never see her again, and now it turns out that you were lying the whole time. And then there was Hunstanton. You humiliated me and made me lose the only person who’d ever made me happy and I’ve tried my hardest to forgive you for that, but I can’t. Mum deserves a better husband than you and I deserve a better father. I never want to see you again. I don’t want you to phone me, write to me or visit me. As far as I am concerned you no longer exist. As far as I’m concerned I no longer have a father.’

Joy stopped and caught her breath. Adrenalin fizzed
through her veins and she could feel her left eyelid twitching. She stared at Alan and waited for his response.

He nodded slowly and lifted his gaze from the floor. Tine,’ he said again, ‘I understand. Now go.’

‘What?’

‘I said – go.’

‘Is that it? Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘You heard me.’

Joy glanced uncertainly at the door, sure that at any moment her father would say something else, display some emotion, beg her forgiveness. But he didn’t. Instead he held the door open for her.

‘You say you don’t want me,’ he said stiffly as she walked past him into the hall. ‘Well, that’s fine because I don’t want you, either. I never wanted you in the first place. Have a good life.’

Joy turned at these words and stared at her father looking for a sign that they had caused him any kind of pain, but his eyes were dead. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came close to expressing what she was feeling, so she closed it again.

And then she turned to leave Toni Moran’s house and walk out of her father’s life for ever.

Joy stood on a stepladder wearing an old tracksuit of George’s that was twice the size of her, with a paint roller in one hand and a tray in the other.

George was squeezing tea bags in the kitchen and about to do something quite extraordinary. He knew he was going to do it. He’d known he was going to from the moment he first set eyes on her. He’d meant to do it the previous night, but had lost his bottle at the last minute. He’d thought maybe he shouldn’t do it at all, but just now when he’d asked her if she wanted a cup of tea and she’d beamed at him from the top of her stepladder and said, ‘Ooh. Yes, please,’ and she had mint-green paint splattered across her cheek and she was painting
his
flat in
his
tracksuit on a Saturday afternoon, he knew more than ever that he was going to do it.

Joy knew he was going to do it, too. She could feel burning particles of his intent floating round the flat, like tiny fireflies. Everything had been building towards it, all weekend.

He’d met her from work on Friday night in his car and stared at her for a full minute before starting the engine.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he’d said. ‘I just want to look at you for a while.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘feel free.’

He’d looked as if he was going to say something then, but eventually he’d started the car and driven away.

They went for dinner at a tiny French restaurant behind the opera house in Covent Garden, where they ate fat snails curled up in pools of garlicky butter, teaspoons of salty cod roe and soft, flaky duck legs with golden slivers of almond. They talked about the unsatisfactory mess of their past relationships.

‘You know,’ Joy had said, ‘if this doesn’t work out, then I truly think I’ll become a nun.’

‘Do you mean that?’ he said.

‘Yes. This is the best relationship I’ve ever been in.’

And it was. George wasn’t the love of her life, but then she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant anyway. She did know that she enjoyed every moment in his company, that he phoned when he said he’d phone, that he treated her with a respect bordering on reverence and that she knew exactly where she stood with him. She’d also discovered that a lack of aesthetic appeal was no obstacle to an enjoyable sex life, proved indisputably by the fact that George had treated her to her first purely penetrative orgasm the previous night.

‘I can’t believe it’s taken me seven years to do that,’ she’d said breathlessly afterwards. ‘They make it look so easy in the films.’

‘To be honest,’ George had said sheepishly, ‘I was rather under the impression that you’d been having them all along.’

‘Oh, no,’ she’d said, ‘that was definitely the first. Couldn’t you tell the difference?’

‘Not really, no,’ he’d admitted. ‘You’re always rather, er… noisy.’

‘Am I?’

‘Well, yes, but not in a bad way. In a very good way.’

‘Oh, no – do I sound like a porn star?’

‘No,’ George laughed, ‘not at all. Just very enthusiastic. Which is good. Which is lovely. And yet another thing that I love about you.’

It was one of a few oblique mentions of the ‘L’ word that weekend, mentions which made her feel happy because, although Joy definitely wasn’t
in love
with George, she most certainly wasn’t
not
in love with him. She loved being with him. She loved the way he looked at her. She loved the way he felt about her. She loved the way he treated her. And, more pertinently, she felt that one day, if everything about him were to shift a degree or two in another direction, she could learn to love
him.

George was teaching her how to be grown-up at a time in her life when she really needed to be an adult. It was as if he hadn’t noticed that Joy was still a child, had seen some inherent maturity in her and had welcomed her into his adult world without any doubt that she’d be able to conduct herself properly. They had a grown-up life together; they drove around in a big grown-up car doing big grown-up things. They talked about politics, philosophy, feelings, life. They cooked for each other from recipe books – two-course meals with prawns and crab claws and complicated sauces that they ate by candlelight with music playing in the background. They spent twenty minutes in Oddbins, choosing wines based on the weather patterns that had brought the grapes to fruition
rather than on how much change they’d get from a tenner. They drove into the countryside on Sunday afternoons and took photos of the landscape with George’s massive Nikon.

George had grown-up friends, friends with children and mortgages, friends who got married in the Home Counties and had huge receptions in marquees in their parents’ gardens.

He even managed to make his spliff-smoking habit seem grown-up. A skinny forty-year-old woman called Marian came to his flat every couple of weeks with a little lump of resin for him. She wore her hair in a bun and talked about her kids and her holidays while she made a spliff to share. After half an hour she folded George’s £20 note carefully into a purse she wore around her waist, got into a shiny Toyota Corolla and drove back to her terraced house in Catford.

Joy didn’t feel like an overgrown teenager any more. She was ready to leave that phase of her life behind her. She wanted to read big, intense books written by dead Russians, make her own pâté, learn to play chess, stay in National Trust properties, read broadsheets and use long words in passing conversation.