Vince and Joy

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘So, if Jon had come back six months ago, before I met you, what do you think might have happened?’

  Jess made a noise that suggested that she was much more interested in sleeping than discussing what-ifs.

  ‘You see,’ Vince persisted, ‘there’s no bad history between you, is there. You’re best friends; he’s a really good-looking bloke; you used to be in love. What would have stopped you?’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’ Jess turned over on to her side. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t see him like that any more. He’s a mate. He’s just… Jon.’

  Exactly, thought Vince, exactly. That was the whole point. Jon was just Jon, and Jon was total and utter perfection.

  Forty-Four

  Joy slid her Switch card back into her purse and pulled the carrier bag off the end of the counter.

  It had started to rain, suddenly and heavily. A crescent of people stood in the entrance to the supermarket, peering at the sky through the glass doors, while their shopping sat in flaccid bags at their feet.

  Joy, having expected rain, pulled her umbrella out of her handbag and unfurled it. Car tyres fizzed over the wet tarmac and people walked with an added urgency. A man ran past Joy, bumping her with his elbow.

  There’s no point in running, she wanted to shout after him, they’ve done tests and you only stay 5 per cent drier if you run through a rain shower than if you walk.

  Joy’s bag was full of food for dinner. It was her turn to cook. That was how it worked. George cooked on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Joy cooked on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and on Sundays they went out for dinner. Tonight she was making something from The Naked Chef – a big bowl of soup with chicken and noodles. George was recovering from a cold and it had sounded nice and medicinal.

  It was amazing to Joy how quickly they’d slipped back into their old routines.

  For the first couple of days George had been on best behaviour. He’d agreed with her that things needed to change; he’d promised he’d do something about his mood swings; he’d gone so far as to suggest having her mother over for Sunday lunch. They cleaned the house and talked about holidays and made plans for the future. They even had sex on a Tuesday. The relationship felt fresh and clean – it felt like it had felt back in the early days when George had adored her, before he’d decided that she was the cause of all his woes.

  But then, as the days drifted by, everything settled down. The house returned to its state of squalor. The plans came to nothing. George retreated back into himself. And life continued as if Joy had never packed a bag and left him alone in this suburban prison.

  They lived in Esher now. They’d moved here three years ago when George decided to give up working to write his Great British Novel. It was a tiny two-up-two-down cottage off the high street and had cost half as much as he’d sold his three-bedroom flat in Stockwell for. The rest of the money was sitting in a high-interest account paying for George’s extended sabbatical. It was supposed to have been for only a year. George had moved here full of hope, bristling with excitement as he plugged in his laptop and flexed his fingers. He’d been convinced that by the time the New Year arrived he’d be sitting on a big fat manuscript and a publishing deal. But by the following January he was eleven pages into his fourth attempt, three previous books aborted halfway through and sitting in cold storage.

  His money had started to run out a few months earlier, and he’d been forced to take on some accounting work to keep himself out of debt – his clients ranged from a local florist to a piano teacher and a mobile hairdresser. He hated every minute of it, resenting the intrusion of these random elements of the outside world into his writing time and his domestic cocoon.

  George and Joy never had guests to their house. Joy’s mother pretended to understand, but was patently baffled by the fact that the man she’d so happily watched her daughter marrying six years earlier had never so much as rustled up a bowl of pasta for her and only ever came to see her in her own home for fleeting, impatient visits, usually en route to somewhere else. When Barbara did manage to pin them down for the occasional Sunday lunch, George would start glancing at clocks and watches the moment he’d swallowed his last mouthful of apple crumble, making no attempt to hide his uneasiness at being so far outside of his comfort zone.

  For one allegedly so well brought up, George could be incredibly ill mannered.

  Julia and Bella had turned up one Friday night a few weeks earlier. It was transparently a rescue mission masquerading as an impromptu ‘we were just passing’ visit. Joy and George had just finished dinner and were about to watch a video. The doorbell rang and George twitched the front curtains, his body bristling with irritation and dread.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he said, letting the curtain fall, ‘it’s your dreadful friends. That vile little man and the loud woman with the chest.’

  ‘Julia and Bella? You’re kidding.’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  Joy gulped. She hadn’t seen Julia and Bella for nearly two years. They spoke on the phone from time to time, but both of them had grown bored with trying to get her to come out with them. Joy had given up her social life a long time ago. It wasn’t worth the long silences and the sulking and the grief. It was easier just to make her excuses and stay at home with George. It had been better when she was still working in town, at ColourPro. She’d been able to see people in her lunch hour. Now she was based in Surrey, even that tiny little social avenue had been blocked off and she saw no one but George.

  In any other circumstances, in a relationship with a normal man, she would have felt surprised but pleased by the unexpected arrival of two of her oldest friends on her doorstep. As it was, the news of their uninvited presence sent a shockwave of dread through every bone in her body.

  ‘Did you invite them?’

  ‘No,’ she exclaimed, ‘of course I didn’t.’

  The suggestion was ridiculous. Her home was hermetically sealed against the world. The only people who crossed its threshold were plumbers and gasfitters. Their Friday nights had a rhythm, a shape borne out of ritual. Joy suspected that most couples sharing a home had similar shapes and routines, but with a sort of in-built flexibility, like tall buildings designed to withstand high winds. Their routines, however, were so rigid and unyielding that the slightest hint of change could send the whole thing toppling over into a mass of shards and splinters.

  The doorbell rang again. Joy opened her mouth to say something. ‘Shhh.’ George put his finger to his lips. ‘Quiet,’ he whispered. Joy closed her mouth.

  Everything she said and did now was designed to keep George happy. Even her style of dressing was informed by his opinions. When miniskirts had come back into fashion a couple of years earlier George had expressed discomfort at the amount of leg that Joy had started displaying, so she’d immediately gone back to trousers. She could have stood her ground and taken an ‘I’ll wear what the damn hell I like’ kind of attitude, but she knew exactly where that would have led, and she didn’t have the energy or the conviction to go there.

  She was compliant in every aspect of her life with George. She no longer saw her friends, used swearwords, watched trashy TV, wore short skirts, referred to toilets as toilets, dropped her aitches, dyed her hair, referred to her past, discussed her family, held her knife like a pen or gave him oral sex. She had systematically and surgically removed every source of potential displeasure and irritation from his life, and under these extreme circumstances they had somehow salvaged a good marriage from what remained. Left to their own devices, following their own routine and without any incursion from the outside world, they lived a pleasant and amiable life. They watched videos every night, ate good food, read good books and talked for hours over excellent wine about politics and philosophy and things that really mattered. They never argued and life ticked along pleasantly, so much so that Joy had come to resent attempts by friends to lure her away from this domestic stranglehold.

  Most of them had stopped trying years ago, but Jul
ia still plugged away at it. ‘We’re going to see Take That at Wembley – you must come, darling. I’ll buy you a ticket.’ ‘Bella and I are off to Stratford for the weekend – staying at a lovely Β & Β. Please, say you’ll come.’ ‘Come and meet us in town – we’re going to a new bar on Rupert Street.’ And every time Joy was forced to find some way of saying no that didn’t involve admitting that George wouldn’t let her.

  In the past Julia had occasionally been able to bully Joy into saying yes. Her acceptance would be immediately followed by a couple of anxious days, gearing herself up to break the news to George that she was going out. Once she’d decided that the time was right to make her dreadful announcement, there would be at least five minutes of deep breaths and mental arrangements of the exact words she intended to use before finally spitting them out in what she hoped was a nonchalant fashion, usually accompanied by promises not be late. A dark mood would then ensue which would last for hours or sometimes days, reaching a crescendo on the actual day of her engagement and lifting the moment they awoke the following morning and life returned to normal. This pattern had become so painful to Joy that she no longer saw social invitations as a pleasant part of adult life, but as a poisonous and insidious disruption of her hard-earned domestic harmony.

  As far as Bella and Julia were concerned, when they turned up unannounced that night, they were coming to see a friend whose husband didn’t let her come out to play. There was no way they could be expected to understand the implications and ramifications of their actions and, even if Joy tried to explain, they still wouldn’t have the first notion of what she was going through. She could explain about George’s long, drawn-out silences, but they could just bat that away with a flippant, ‘Oh, just ignore him. He’s a grown man. He’ll survive.’ She could try to explain the way these silences made her feel – excluded, abandoned, imprisoned, oppressed – and the atmosphere that his moods lent to her environment – bleak, gothic, ponderous, endless – but they would never really understand why she let him make such a huge impact on her psyche.

  And the truth was that Joy didn’t understand either, not really. She’d worked out a long time ago that George was an inherently unhappy man and that all that stood between him and this ever-looming state of unhappiness was her. She was the key to everything and, without her compliance, George, through no fault of his own, started sailing close to a place where there was nothing to live for and no reason to exist, a place that Joy knew better than most, a place where suicide lurked. She made excuses for him because she recognized the way in which he viewed the world, and she stayed with him because if she left there’d be no one to stop him falling.

  Joy stared at the blurred outlines of Julia and Bella through the opaque glass of the front door and felt blood pumping through her body. ‘Christ,’ she muttered, ‘I don’t understand what they’re doing here.’

  ‘I’m not letting them in,’ he whispered, sitting on the arm of the sofa and folding his arms.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it’s gone nine o’clock and I just think it’s really very rude to turn up uninvited.’

  ‘But they’ve come all this way…’

  ‘That’s not my problem.’ He glanced at the front door.

  ‘They should have given us some warning.’

  The doorbell rang again and the flap of the letterbox lifted. Four fingertips appeared inside the door.

  ‘We know you’re in there,’ trilled Bella’s voice. ‘We can see you.’

  George glanced at the door in horror, and Joy shrugged at him before arranging her face into an expression of surprised delight and opening the front door. ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped. What are you two doing here?’

  ‘We were at Waterloo station seeing Julia’s sister off, and we saw this platform display and it said Esher, and it was leaving in ten minutes so we thought, fuck it, let’s go and see our lovely little Joy. Ooh – I love your little house,’ he said as he looked around. ‘It’s really cute.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Julia, coming up behind him, bringing with her an aroma of cold air and warm pubs. ‘Very nice. Very homely.’

  George sat where he was, staring mutely at the TV screen, which displayed a paused image of the video they’d been about to watch.

  ‘Oh!’ said Julia. ‘You’re watching Dumb and Dumber. I love Dumb and Dumber.

  ‘No,’ said George slowly, ‘that’s a trailer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Julia spun round to address George, having only just noticed him in the corner. ‘George! Hello there! How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ he muttered.

  There was a microsecond of silence as Julia waited, in vain, for him to say something further. We’re not interrupting anything, are we?’

  George said nothing.

  ‘Er, no,’ said Joy. ‘Not really. Just a video.’

  Julia and Bella both nodded and looked around. ‘Here,’ said Joy, finally snapping out of her shocked reverie and realizing that they had guests. ‘Sit down.’ She moved last week’s papers off the sofa and took the dinner plates off the coffee table.

  They both sat down, squashed together on the tiny sofa, and Joy could see their high spirits deflating like punctured space hoppers as they absorbed the palpable tension in the air. George moved and sat down cross-legged on the floor, where he picked up a stray magazine and started flicking through it.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  Julia and Bella both nodded. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Wine. Beer. Water.’

  ‘I’d love a glass of wine.’

  ‘We haven’t got any wine,’ said George.

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘No,’ he said. We haven’t.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Joy tried not to look flustered. ‘No. I forgot.’

  ‘Don’t worry’ soothed Julia. ‘A beer will be fine.’

  She brought them each a bottle of Hoegaarden and sat on the floor.

  ‘So,’ said Julia, ‘you look well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Joy, ‘so do you.’

  ‘And you, George. I haven’t seen you since your wedding day. I must say, married life seems to agree with you. You look very well.’

  George glanced up from his magazine and smiled tightly at her before letting his head drop again.

  The expression of friendly interest froze on Julia’s face and a small silence descended. It dawned upon Joy that George was going to deal with this invasion of his Friday-night routine by pretending that it wasn’t happening. He’d obviously decided that if he extended no hospitality to these people that not only would they leave sooner, but also that they were less likely to ever visit again.

  The conversation was stilted and uncomfortable. It was impossible to chat normally while George sat seething in the corner of the room, ostentatiously turning the pages of his magazine, and the visit had so obviously been engineered to check up on Joy, to see what sort of life she was living, that once their guests ascertained that, yes, George was as controlling and antisocial as they’d suspected and that, yes, Joy was as brow-beaten and submissive as they’d feared, there hardly seemed to be any point in them being there. But the charade of the ‘impromptu visit’ needed to be played out until the bitter end, and so the three of them hung on stoically until the last dregs of beer had been drunk from the bottles and the last train was about to became a viable excuse to leave.

  Joy saw them to the door.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  For… that. For everything. You know. It’s just….’

  ‘Don’t you worry about a thing,’ said Julia, hugging her tight. ‘Just remember, we’re here. We’re always here. Whenever you’re ready for us. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joy nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Sorry to turn up unannounced,’ said Bella, leaning in for his customary cheek pecks. ‘We just really wanted to see you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Joy, ‘it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s
my thirtieth next week,’ he said. ‘I’ve booked a table at Mezzo. Wednesday night. D’you want to come?’

  Joy smiled tightly, feeling tears prickling at her nose. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I’ll see. I’ll let you know’

  He smiled at her with a hint of disappointed resignation. ‘Cool,’ he said.

  And then they went, Bella with his arm looped through Julia’s, headed towards the train station and back to reality. Back to a world full of thirtieth birthday parties and friends and spontaneity. Back to a world that Joy had left a long time ago. And for a split second Joy wanted to run after them, shouting, ‘Take me with you! I want to come, too!’ Instead she turned and went back inside, steeling herself for another long and painful silence.

  George didn’t talk to her that night. He didn’t talk to her until around five o’clock the following day, but by the time he finally came out of his sulk and started being civil again it was too late – Joy had already decided to leave. On Wednesday night she’d sat in front of the TV and envisaged a table full of happy people in Mezzo, people who’d written ‘Bella’s birthday’ on their calendars and caught the tube to Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square in their best clothes ready for a night of drinking, eating and laughing. She imagined someone making a toast to Bella and Julia making a speech and someone else popping a bottle of champagne. She’d conjured up this vignette from thin air and it probably bore no relation to reality, but it was enough to convince her that she didn’t want to turn down another invitation as long as she lived.

  But more than that, the dreadful evening with Julia and Bella had made her acknowledge that she could no longer live with a man who was so terrified of the outside world that he would refuse to offer wine to guests. There seemed to Joy something so fundamental about the sharing of wine with friends, so innate and primal, so natural and joyful, and the thought of never being able to do it again was more than she could bear.