by Lisa Jewell
Spitting in the face of matrimonial tradition, Joy disappeared into the bedroom and slipped into the dress to give George a preview. She stood on the bed in an attempt to catch a full-length glimpse of herself in the small mirror on the opposite wall, but all she could see were her knees and shoulders.
‘Are you sure you want to see?’ she shouted from behind the living-room door.
‘Absolutely!’
‘Da-da!’ she said, making her entrance. ‘What do you think?’
‘Oh, wow,’ said George, getting up from the sofa. ‘Wow, wow, wow, wow’
‘Is it nice? I couldn’t really see in the mirror.’
‘Nice?’ he said, circling her appreciatively, ‘it’s absolutely stunning. You look like… God, I’m lost for words. You look spectacular. Utterly. Come here,’ he said, opening his arms to her. ‘I am the luckiest man in the whole world. Totally and utterly blessed.’ He kissed the top of her head and Joy hooped her arms around him and felt all the tension of the past week instantly leave her body. He’d forgiven her. He still loved her. He still wanted her. He still thought she was perfect and beautiful. She was still the girl of his dreams.
And she clung on to him for dear life in her beautiful new dress, a bare-footed princess in cream linen, not wondering for a second why it was so important to her that she remain the girl of George Pole’s dreams, not thinking one inch beyond the realms of his momentary approval.
Thirty-Seven
Vince paid more attention than usual to the weather forecast on the day before Christmas Eve.
Dry, cold and sunny.
Perfect, he thought, a perfect day for a wedding.
The forecast was proved 100 per cent accurate when he awoke the next morning to a brilliant blue sky blemished only by a solitary jet-engine trail. He attempted a lie-in, but something made him restless. He could hear Cass snoring in the room next door as he made his way to the bathroom, where Madeleine was asleep on the bathmat, a new favourite place. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he peed, her belly rising and falling with each breath. She extended her claws and scratched lazily at the turquoise loops of the towelling mat. And then she turned to gaze at him, suddenly and unnervingly.
‘What?’ he said, turning away to check his aim.
She opened her mouth and issued a plaintive ‘ow’.
And of course the cat wasn’t talking to him, of course the cat didn’t know what was going through his mind, but it was all the encouragement Vince needed to throw on some clothes, sort out his hair and get on the first Tube to Sloane Square.
The King’s Road on the day before Christmas was thick with teenagers. They cruised in groups of three or four, arms linked, back from boarding school for the holidays, reclaiming their territory. They weren’t here buying gifts for friends and family; they were choosing outfits for raucous teenage parties in rambling Chelsea town houses and voluminous Fulham mansion flats.
Vince didn’t peer through shop windows as he walked. He wasn’t tempted by the sharp suits and designer clothes hanging from rows of angular plastic men. He had only one destination in mind as he strode purposefully westwards, and that was Chelsea Town Hall.
Someone else was getting married as he stopped on the other side of the road, outside Habitat, shielding his eyes from the sun. A man shaped like a currant bun had just married a woman shaped like a pencil. She wore a hat made of brown feathers and a narrow dress in purple velvet. He wore tails, but no top hat. They looked joyously happy as elderly people in expensive-looking coats threw paper confetti at them.
Vince glanced at his watch. It was ten-thirty. He darted across the road, ducking to avoid appearing in the newly-weds’ photographs and followed the signs to the registrar.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘how can I find out what time someone’s getting married today?’
He was pointed towards a board under glass. The banns. Inside, cards were pinned to green felt listing every wedding registered in the borough. He skimmed the display with his finger, primed for the word ‘Joy’. And then he saw it:
Joy Mary Downer
George Edward Forbes Pole
24 December at 12.15
He found a coffee shop, where he consumed three cups of tea and a chocolate muffin, then at midday he paid his bill and returned to his post outside Habitat.
The steps outside the town hall were empty and speckled with confetti. After a few moments a dark Mercedes dressed in white ribbon pulled up outside and a youngish-looking man got out. He was wearing a black suit with a brightly embroidered waistcoat and a satin tie. His hair was brown and on the frizzy side of curly, and he looked as if he took life very seriously. He smiled at the person left in the car, turned and straightened his tie. He looked softer when he smiled, like a vet or a children’s doctor. Vince could see him clearing his throat. He looked nervous but happy. He looked like a groom.
A smaller, youngish-looking man got out after him wearing a job interview suit and inappropriate rubber-soled shoes.
The two men climbed the stairs together, sharing a joke. The taller man, the groom, turned at the door to scan the street, before heading inside. If this was George, as Vince suspected it was, then Joy had done well for herself. He looked like he’d be good to her. He looked decent and intelligent and kind. He looked like he’d make a good husband. Vince felt a grudging approval.
Over the course of the next few minutes more guests arrived. Vince recognized the big woman and the poof from Wilberforce Road. She was bursting out of lime-green tweed and oversized pearls, and he looked sallow and uncomfortable in a sombre grey suit, with his hair scraped back into a ponytail.
And then, five minutes later, at exactly 12.15, another Mercedes arrived. This one was white and slightly bigger than the first. The driver leapt nimbly from the front to open the back door.
Vince caught his breath.
She looked like something from a dream. Her dark hair was cut into a sharp, geometric bob and held back on one side by a small cream rose. Her lips were painted a sherberty mauve and she wore a simple cream dress with three outsized fabric-covered buttons running down the front, which ended just above her knee. She clutched a small posy of mauve and cream roses tied with mauve paper ribbon between her breasts, and smiled at the driver. She was the bride that every man dreamed of. Young, pure, simple, untainted. If all brides looked like this, thought Vince, men wouldn’t be nearly as fearful of weddings.
She was followed from the car by Barbara, slightly slimmer than he remembered, but still perspiring lightly, in a pale blue skirt and jacket with a pillbox hat perched inelegantly on top of her head. She tugged at the hem of Joy’s skirt and straightened a pendant that hung from her neck. Vince watched the car, waiting for the abominable Alan to emerge, but the driver clicked the door closed, returned to his seat and drove the car away.
He stared across the road as Joy mounted the steps to the town hall. A passing car hooted its congratulations at her, and she turned and waved at the driver, embarrassed, slightly goofy. And that was the image that imprinted itself on to Vince’s memory for the next six years: a beautiful young woman in a plain linen dress, flushed with excitement, turning to smile at a stranger on her wedding day.
The doors to the town hall closed behind Joy and her mother, and Vince turned and headed into Habitat, thinking that, while he was here, he might as well pick up a set of shot glasses for Chris’s Christmas present.
Al & Emma’s Kitchen, 1.27 a.m.
‘So you didn’t say anything?!’ Natalie squealed in horror.
‘No. I bought the glasses and went home.’
‘You didn’t even wait to see them come out? To make sure they actually got married?’
‘No. I’d seen everything I needed to see. He looked like a nice bloke and she looked deliriously happy. I didn’t go there to stalk her. I just wanted to have a look, that was all.’
‘But did you still think she was “the one”? Did you still love her?’
Vince shr
ugged. ‘I don’t know. It was nice to see her. It was nice to know she was happy. I don’t think it really hit me how much she meant to me until the next time I saw her.’
‘You saw her again?’
‘Yes. Three years ago. The day Jess told me she was pregnant.’
‘No way!’
‘Yes way.’
May 1999
The Wrong Bus
Thirty-Eight
Vince hadn’t had sex for eleven months when he met Jess.
He hadn’t had a girlfriend for fifteen.
His last serious relationship had ended when he proposed to her.
‘Fuck,’ had been her panic-stricken response to his heartfelt request. ‘Jesus. Shit.’ She’d said she’d think about it, but when after three weeks she still hadn’t made up her mind they took it as a sign that they weren’t destined to grow old together and went their separate ways. Vince’s heart had been properly broken. Smashed to smithereens. He mended it temporarily with four back-to-back one-night stands, then decided to pull out of the whole relationship thing entirely.
He lived in Enfield now. He’d spent nearly six months looking for a job in London after he was made redundant by Coalford Swann, but, strangely, nobody wanted to employ someone whose only experience involved finding words to describe porcelain dolls. Eventually his redundancy money had run out and he’d been forced to hand his notice in on the flat in Finsbury Park and move back to Enfield. And then one day, he’d been leafing through the local paper and chanced upon a recruitment advert for BSM.
A free car. No admin. Decent money, if he was prepared to put in the hours. And even though teaching people to drive wasn’t exactly the worthy career path that Vince had fantasized about pursuing all his life, it was still better than stringing together words to make people buy things they didn’t need.
So here he was, almost thirty-two years old, sharing a poky flat in Enfield Town with a fifty-year-old mature student called Clive, teaching people to drive for a living, and he’d already started losing his hair. Not so that anyone else would notice, but it was definitely going. It seemed to be departing his skull in ever decreasing circles, from the outside in, leaving him to conclude that at some stage he would be left with just a tuft in the centre of his head, like a troll.
He felt as if he was on the cusp of middle age and about to lose his looks for ever. No one had fancied him for ages; girls no longer held his gaze for that split second longer than necessary. He was just the ‘driving instructor’] and he felt like a driving instructor. He’d even started to dress like a driving instructor. He’d had ‘it’ and now he was in the process of losing ‘it’. And without ‘it’, Vince didn’t really know how he was supposed to find a girlfriend.
So when Jess had folded herself into the passenger seat of his Vauxhall Corsa one sunny Tuesday afternoon and fluttered, literally fluttered, her eyelashes at him, he’d experienced a jolt of sexual energy he hadn’t thought his body was still capable of producing.
‘Hi,’ she’d said. ‘Vincent Mellon?’ She appraised him briefly, like she was measuring him up for curtains. ‘Great name,’ she said eventually, letting his hand drop.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘thanks. It’s, er… my dad’s.’
‘Yes,’ she said, tucking a golden tendril behind her ear, ‘surnames usually are.’ And then she laughed, a thick, rich, wholesome soup of a laugh, and Vince thought it was the most incredible noise he’d ever heard.
Jess didn’t have the slightly quavery edge that first-time drivers usually had. She handled the gear stick like a pro and chatted away as they drove with all the confidence of a black-cab driver.
She was tall, about five foot ten. She had brown shoulder-length hair streaked with gold that she wore clipped back with a plastic claw. Her skin had a natural olive glow, which, Vince would later learn, she accentuated using a brush and some multicoloured metallic beads in a pot.
She wasn’t his usual type. Physically she wasn’t as quirky or girlie as any of his exes. She wasn’t into fashion and mostly dressed in drawstring jersey trousers that sat below her hipbones, or faded jeans, which she wore with tight T-shirts and flip-flops. She didn’t appear to own any shoes with heels, and the only jewellery she wore was a small silver heart around her neck. She went to a tanning salon once a week and wore white G-strings, which emerged like bleached wishbones from the backs of her trousers.
She was harder than the girls he’d fallen for in the past. She’d had two abortions in her early twenties and there was some kind of history of drugs and Ibiza and clubs and unsavoury sexual liaisons, but she’d been through a sea change when she turned thirty and now lived a life of yoga, Pilates, steamed fish and celibacy. She referred to herself as a ‘reformed hedonist’.
Her explanation for the fact that she’d only just decided to learn to drive at the age of thirty-one was typically Jess. ‘There was no point in me driving before. I was always fucked.’
She was a producer for the hospital radio station at Chase Farm, and was paid next to nothing. She lived over a pet shop in Enfield, in a one-bedroom flat which was infused with a slight tang of urine-soaked straw. She had a black cat called Pasha and two stripy fish called Es and Whizz, and all her houseplants lived in a permanent state of semi-dehydration.
Vince learned all of this within ten days of her first driving lesson, first through the steady stream of chatter she fired his way while they inched around the back streets of Enfield and secondly when he awoke in her flat on a Sunday morning after a night of truly life-altering sex.
Their shared celibacy had been both a meeting point and an incitement to break the deadlock. They talked about sex like two dieters circling a pile of profiteroles, mutually respectful of each other’s self-control while silently awaiting permission to cave in.
‘Christ,’ said Jess, flinging herself backwards against her pillow afterwards, ‘remind me again why I haven’t done that for two years?’
Vince couldn’t think of one good reason. He had no recollection of sex ever having been this good before and was sure that, if it had been, there was no way he’d have abstained for nearly a year.
Jess was the sort of girl who knew tricks, who had props, who used swearwords during sex. It was the first time in his life that Vince hadn’t felt even partly in control of the process, and he’d loved it.
He’d been half-expecting her to kick him out the next morning, for her to be standing over him with his shoes dangling from her fingertips and his coat draped over her arm, but instead she’d made him breakfast – perfectly poached eggs on wholemeal toast with sour cream and a splash of sweet chilli sauce.
‘Kind of huevos rancheros, Jessie-style,’ she said, sliding back into bed with him. ‘Can I watch you break the yolk?’
Her bedroom was painted white and was only just big enough for the superking-sized bed wedged behind the door. There was a blown-up canvas print of an arum lily over her bed and a view of a William Hill betting shop through the window opposite. The kitchen was tiny and white, and full of towering bottles of oil and vinegar and the sort of very expensive pasta that comes in boxes. The bathroom was equally tiny and white, and came to life with a thunderous hum when the string for the light switch was pulled on. There was a small ash dining table in the living room, bearing chrome candlesticks with a kink in the middle, and two small, cushion-strewn yellow sofas huddled around a TV housed in an ethnic-looking cabinet.
She was renting the flat from a friend who was living in Sydney, and it was impossible to tell where her friend’s tastes ended and Jess’s began, but Jess’s style of living definitely veered towards the chaotic. Clothes were hanging to dry from radiators and the backs of chairs. Last week’s Sunday papers sat in a rifled splat on the coffee table, and a dinner plate smeared with something greasy and orange sat on top of the TV.
‘Where did you get those scars?’ she said, running her finger along his jawline.
‘I didn’t think they still showed,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘they’re faint, but they’re there.’
‘Plastic surgery,’ he said. ‘I had an underbite, like this –’ He pushed his jaw out, as he’d done so many times before. ‘They took some bone out there.’
Jess winced. ‘Ow,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been squeamish, judging by those,’ said Vince, pointing at tattoos on her upper arm and hip.
‘Those are just pricks,’ she said, ‘not cuts. There’s a big difference between pricking and cutting. So what did you look like before? Were you really ugly?’
‘Yeah. It wasn’t a good look. Didn’t exactly get the girls chasing after me.’
‘Oh, bless,’ she said as she chucked him under the chin. ‘Well, at least it gave you a chance to develop a personality. If you’d been this good-looking all your life you’d have been shallow and boring.’
And Vince almost wanted to say, ‘But I am shallow and boring. I’ve got no interests, no hobbies, no ambitions. I don’t know anything about politics or sports or world affairs. I just watch TV and teach people to drive,’ but decided that it would be better to preserve the flawless perfection of her compliment by saying nothing at all.
‘I always thought I’d lose my virginity to a woman like you,’ he said.
Jess looked suddenly aghast. ‘What? You mean… ?’
‘No! No. I mean, before I lost my virginity. I imagined I’d lose it to someone like you, someone experienced and… and… into it. You know.’
‘Ooh,’ her eyes lit up, ‘I wish you had. It’s a little fantasy of mine. Deflowering an inexperienced young man. Who was the lucky girl?’
‘Joy,’ he said, abruptly.
‘Joy? What was she – seventy-five?’
‘No. She just had an old-fashioned name. She was the same age as me.’
