Vince and Joy (34 page)

They shared a bath, and Jess washed Vince’s hair, massaging his skull tenderly with smooth fingertips. They had lunch at a café across the road and played with each other’s feet beneath the table. And when, after they’d eaten, Vince suggested that maybe he should be getting back, Jess looked at him and asked, simply, ‘Why?’

So he didn’t go back and they spent the rest of the day together, and the rest of the night, and by the time Vince finally made it back to his gloomy flat to collect some clean underwear three days later, he was fully, totally completely and rampantly in love.

Vince knew for sure that Jess was going to be the mother of his children the first time she met his little brother and sister.

Previous girlfriends had been sweet to Kyle and Ashleigh. They’d patted them, held them, run around the garden with them, bought them presents, talked nonsense to them on the phone. There’d even been favourite girlfriends. The last one, the Rejected Proposal, had been a big hit with Ashleigh in particular, as she knew how to do complicated things with Ashleigh’s hair and make her look like the girls in Steps. And the one two back from Rejected Proposal had been Kyle’s favourite because she could make up great stories about dragons from off the top of her head.

But the minute Jess set eyes on Ashleigh and Kyle some chemical reaction occurred that transcended everything. She turned into a magic person. Her eyes lit up and she lost her outer crust of hardness, and Ashleigh and Kyle were sort of pulled magnetically towards her. She didn’t actually have to
do
anything to win their affection; it was instantaneous.

‘Are you going to marry my brother?’ said Ashleigh, climbing on to Jess’s lap and playing with a strand of her hair.

Jess smiled sagely. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that depends. I’ve only known him for a few days. Do you think I should?’

‘Yes,’ said Kyle, ‘you should. Because otherwise he’ll be old and lonely.’

Jess stifled another smile. ‘Do you think he’d be a good husband, then?’

Kyle and Ashleigh both nodded vigorously. ‘Yes,’ said Ashleigh, ‘definitely. He’s really clever and he’s really kind and he likes animals and small children.’

‘And do you think maybe I’d make a good wife?’

‘Yeah,’ Kyle shrugged, ‘you’d be perfect.’ And as he said it a red flush crept up his cheeks and swallowed him whole. He turned away abruptly, and Jess and Vince smiled at each other across Ashleigh’s shoulder.

‘Vincent nearly got married before,’ said Ashleigh. ‘He asked her and she said no.’

‘Yes. He told me about that. What a cow, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ashleigh, eyes opened wide with surprise at someone finally telling it as it was. ‘I used to really like her, too, but now I hate her.’

‘Too right,’ said Jess. ‘You should always be loyal to your family. Particularly your big brother.’

‘Yeah. She was horrible. I never really liked her anyway – I just
pretended
to like her because she was good at hair. But that doesn’t matter any more because now he’s got you and, if he asks you to marry him, you’ll say yes.’

‘Well,’ said Jess, ‘people really need time to get to know each other properly before they do something as serious as getting married. But maybe one day when your brother and I have spent some more time together we might get married.’ She looked up at Vince and winked at him, and he winked back at her and, even though it should have been terrifying listening to this conversation only eleven
days into their relationship, it wasn’t. It was amazing and incredible because it was exactly what he wanted.

‘She’s great,’ said Kirsty, loading the dishwasher after a raucous lunch.

Jess had been dragged up to Ashleigh’s room to play with her Barbie mansion, and Kyle was in the front room watching Nickelodeon.

‘Fucking knockout,’ said Chris, rubbing his belly lightly. Chris had expanded slowly but substantially over the years. He still had his long, slim legs and broad shoulders, but his six-pack was a long-distant memory, cowering somewhere beneath a comfortably settled layer of fat.

Kirsty was still as trim as ever though, looking remarkably youthful at forty-nine in neat size 10 jeans and a pale blue knitted top with three-quarter-length sleeves. She said it was the kids that kept her young, but it was an obvious case of good genes.

‘How come she’s learning to drive so late?’

‘She’s a reformed hedonist,’ quoted Vince, scraping congealed gravy off a plate and into a bin. ‘She spent her twenties off her face.’

Chris laughed. ‘Figures,’ he said, ‘she’s got that sort of edge to her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. She’s just got that twinkle in her eye, you know, a bit wild, like she might be trouble.’

‘Do you think?’

‘Yeah. But in a good way. Not a bad way. And she’s great with the kids.’

‘She is, isn’t she?’ Vince smiled.

‘Oh, look at you’ teased Kirsty. ‘You’ve gone all dreamy’

‘Oh, yes,’ Chris joined in, ‘look at that. Vincent’s
broody!’

‘Oh, fuck off!’ Vince threw a screwed-up paper napkin at him and smiled.

Jess walked back in, Ashleigh clutching her hand.

‘Jess has been teaching me yoga. Look.’ She slid one foot slowly up the opposite calf and balanced on one leg while pressing the palms of her hands together. ‘It’s called the Tree.’

‘Oh, the Tree, is it?’ said Chris. ‘You’ll be wanting macro-bloody-biotic sandwiches for your lunch next.’ He grinned at Ashleigh, who stuck her tongue out at him and dragged Jess out into the garden to learn some more positions.

Vince stood at the window and watched them for a while. Kyle emerged a minute later and asked what they were doing. Within seconds he was joining in, too, contorting his body into strange shapes, mimicking Jess’s languid movements.

The sun was just starting its descent overhead, throwing vibrant shadows through the tendrils of a small weeping willow in the middle of the garden. Next door’s cat sat on the interconnecting wall, playing with a tiny green butterfly. It was the second warm weekend of the year, warm enough for short sleeves, but not quite warm enough for bare feet, the soil beneath the grass still holding its wintry chill.

Vince watched Ashleigh arranging her limbs into the Lotus position. She was at that foal-like stage of her development, all lanky limbs and knobbly knees, the
woman she was going to become hovering shyly in the wings, not quite ready to take centre stage. Vince felt a moment of sadness as it occurred to him that in a few short years Kyle and Ashleigh would be adolescents, their childhoods a distant memory, and when that happened there’d be no children in his life at all. None of his friends had reached that stage yet. They were all still enjoying their middle youth, spending their money on fancy holidays, meals out and cabs home. Children were just a topic of conversation, a vague concept, something inevitable but safely distant. ‘We’re going to start trying next year, once we’ve bought a bigger place/been promoted/got married/given up smoking.’

But watching Jess now, gently rearranging Kyle’s legs, tall and strong, healthy and vital, Vince could already tell she wasn’t like his friends. She wasn’t clinging on to anything, scared of losing anything. He could envisage her eight months’ pregnant, stroking her bump, glowing with health and hormones. She wouldn’t bemoan her imminent loss of freedom, her inability to get drunk on cocktails, the physical changes in her body. She would thrive as a mother. She would
bloom.
And suddenly, the thought of planting a baby in that long, strong body, of making her a mother, struck Vince as the sexiest, most exciting thing imaginable.

A seed of broodiness had been sown in Vince’s belly the moment he first set eyes on Kyle. That seed had started sprouting roots when he watched Ashleigh arrive in the world three years later. But here, in his mother’s kitchen, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, for the very first time in his life he felt genuinely ready to be a father.

*

‘They’re gorgeous,’ said Jess, as they drove home an hour later. ‘Absolute angels.’

‘I know,’ Vince smiled, proudly. ‘Mum and Chris have done a great job. They’re great kids.’

‘Such a responsibility, isn’t it? Bringing kids into the world. So many different ways you can fuck up.’

‘Yes. It’s the greatest challenge of them all.’

She turned and looked at him. ‘Do you ever wonder if you’d be up to it? You know, if you’ve got what it takes?’

Vince shrugged. ‘Yeah. I think about it. But I reckon I’d be good at it. I’ve had a bit of practice.’

Jess nodded, her lips pursed. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘I’ve never really had anything to do with kids. None of my friends have got any and when I got pregnant, you know,
before,
I was nowhere near ready for it. The thought of giving up my independence, of having some screaming, shitting kid attached to my ankles all day, just freaked me out. But lately… ’

Vince threw her a look.

She smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s nice, isn’t it? Having kids. Being a family. It’s real…’

‘I think it’s what we’re all here for,’ he teased.

‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully ‘It is, isn’t it?’

She turned to stare out of the window, and they continued the journey in a contemplative silence.

They started trying for a baby two months later. It was still early in their relationship, but once they’d discovered their mutual desire to become parents they decided that there was no point in hanging around. They didn’t tell anyone they were doing it. Vince’s friends were still at that teasing stage about proposals and weddings – it hadn’t occurred to any of them that Vince and Jess might bypass that formality entirely and go straight to the main event. And they didn’t look at ovulation charts or take temperatures. They just followed Jess’s mother’s advice to have ‘as much sex as possible’.

It had felt strangely liberating the first time they’d had unprotected sex, an overwhelming sense of doing precisely what nature intended, of being in tune with the universe. Both of them had been utterly incredulous when Jess’s period arrived the following month.

‘God,’ Jess had sighed, ripping open a box of SuperPlus tampons, ‘you spend your whole sexual life trying so hard not to get pregnant – it just seems unthinkable that you can have sex
fifty times
without a condom and not make a baby’

But they hadn’t felt sad that first time. It would have been too soon. It still felt experimental.

When Jess’s period arrived the following month, they were less bewildered.

‘It’s hardly surprising,’ said Jess. ‘You know, two abortions, all those drugs – I’m probably not as fertile as I could be.’

By the third month, they philosophically settled themselves in for a long wait. ‘Even if it takes another year, I’ll only be thirty-three by the time the baby comes. That’s still relatively young.’ So they carried on having as much sex as possible and stopped imagining that every single symptom Jess displayed in the run-up to her period was a sign that she might be pregnant.

They weren’t even officially living together yet. Vince spent most of his time at Jess’s flat, because it was ten times nicer than his and Clive didn’t live there, but he was still paying rent on his flat share and spent the occasional night there, when Jess wasn’t around. He didn’t have keys to her place and he didn’t stay there when she was away. He didn’t even keep a toothbrush there; he used Jess’s.

It was as if they were both subconsciously waiting for the thin pink line on the plastic stick before they made any kind of formal commitment to each other. The suggestion implicit in this arrangement was that if they failed to make a baby then they would drift apart as easily as they had drifted together. And even though this should have given Vince pause for thought, should have caused a shaft of disquiet to pass across his consciousness, it didn’t – because he was so in love that it hurt.

Jess had a smattering of male friends in her life. Most of them were exes of one form or another. Kevin was her teenage sweetheart (and the father of one of her
aborted babies). He was married now and lived in Brighton with his wife and two children. They talked on the phone from time to time and got together for a drink whenever Kevin found himself in London without his family. Vince had met him once. He was tall and ginger with a slightly flabby paunch and represented no threat to him whatsoever.

Carl was one of her Ibiza exes. He lived on the island permanently and phoned occasionally when he was off his face to tell her that he loved her. Jess always smiled when she put the phone down to Carl and shook her head despairingly. ‘Mad,’ she’d say fondly, ‘completely mad. I pity his girlfriend, I really do.’ Vince had seen a picture of a youthful Carl, all long, shaggy hair and oversized shorts. He was good-looking but vacant. He was also 500 miles away and living with a model. Vince didn’t lose any sleep worrying about Carl.

Nor did he concern himself much over Bobby. Bobby was the man who turned Jess celibate. He was forty-five and had just married the woman he’d refused to leave for Jess. He’d messed with Jess’s head so badly that she’d spent three months in therapy after they finished. Part of that therapy involved going for dinner with him every now and then and talking about ‘neutral’ things. ‘Don’t know what I ever saw in him,’ Jess said when she came back from one of these occasional meetings. ‘He looks more and more like a toad with every day that passes.’