by Lisa Jewell
‘Could he speak good English, then?’
‘Oh, yes. He was a student, business studies. He was pretty much fluent.’
‘So,’ Joy urged, clasping her champagne glass between her hands, ‘what happened next?’
‘Well,’ Barbara blanched slightly, ‘I suppose it was around the time I found out about your father’s affair with the Clarke woman.’
‘Which Clarke woman?’
Barbara shuddered. ‘Ginny Clarke,’ she spat out the name as if it tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘Your father’s first affair. Her husband was a senior sales manager at Jaguar and gone to seed… very fat, very florid, too much gin, I suspect. I also suspect that he may have been homosexual. But for whatever reasons, she made it very plain from the moment we arrived in Singapore that she wanted Alan and stopped at nothing to get him. It was a terrible time for me. Failing to conceive, feeling lonely, the heat, being so far from home. And when I found out that your father had succumbed to that horrible skinny woman – she had a lisp, you know, like an annoying little girl – ooh, I just got so angry. And there was Charles, smiling at me, giving me hibiscus blossoms, calling me his English rose. It was inevitable, I suppose…’
‘So, did you invite him in? Did it happen your apartment? What happened?’
‘Well, there was a downpour one afternoon and I came upon him taking shelter in the car park. He was all bedraggled. So I took a deep breath and I invited him in, to dry off,’ she laughed wryly. ‘We both knew what it meant. And that was that.’
‘Was it lovely?’
Barbara blushed furiously and fiddled with the hem of her skirt. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose. But it was such a terrible thing to do.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Joy. ‘It was totally understandable.’
‘No, you see, it wasn’t. Because it wasn’t just to get revenge. I didn’t do it just to make myself feel better and I didn’t just do it because I was lonely. The main reason why I did it…’ she paused and took a deep breath, ‘was to get pregnant.’
Joy stopped breathing for a second as she felt her romantic fantasies start to lose a little momentum.
‘I had no idea whether it was me or your father who had the physical… shortcoming that was preventing us from getting pregnant. Your father refused to visit a specialist; it would have been too much for his ego to bear if he’d been told it was his fault. And I wanted a baby so so much, more than anything. I was thirty-nine years old and I knew my days were numbered. And this boy, this Charles – he was so young and vital. And I’m afraid I rather used him,’ she bit her lip and looked at Joy for reassurance.
Joy gulped and blinked, not knowing what to say.
‘We slept together at least three or four times a week for the next year.’
Joy nodded slowly, trying to make a mental correlation between the look of open adoration on the face of the boy in the photo and her mother’s primal and clinical need to be impregnated. ‘Didn’t you love him, even a tiny bit?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said forcefully, ‘I was ever so fond of him. He was the kindest, sweetest most charming boy, the sort you’d be proud to call your son. We had a very gentle, affectionate relationship. Please don’t think it was purely about what I could get out of him…’
‘And then, once you got pregnant, what happened then?’
‘Well, I told him immediately. And your father. And as chance would have it, it was a month during which either one of them might have been the father. Your father wouldn’t have suspected a thing…’
‘But did Charles think it was his?’
‘He knew it might be his.’
‘And he didn’t mind?’
‘No. Not at all. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He was so young, had so much he wanted to do. He was perfectly happy for Alan to raise his child. He felt it was his gift to us.’
Joy swallowed another mouthful of nameless disappointment.
‘I’d been hoping to come back to England before you were born, but I suffered from pre-eclampsia in the last few weeks, had to have total bed rest. So you were born in Changi General Hospital. Alan knew immediately. The minute he saw you, he knew you weren’t his. It was the eyes, you see.’ She cupped Joy’s face with her hand. ‘Your eyes. And you had all this thick, black hair. He – ’ she stopped as her voice caught on the words and put her hand over her mouth. ‘He took one look at you and left the room.’ A tear fell from her left eye and ran down her cheek. She wiped it away. ‘I have never seen a man look so… destroyed as your father did at that moment. It was as if he shrank in front of my very eyes, like a little wax man slowly melting in the sun – ’ She choked again on more tears. ‘And he never said a word. Never mentioned it. Not once.’
Joy stared at the floor. Suddenly this wasn’t just about her mother being exciting, having affairs, living up to her own sophomoric fantasies. It was about her father being cuckolded in the most hurtful way imaginable. It was about years of buried resentment and humiliation. It was about raising someone else’s child for twenty-five years without complaint, and, for a man like her father, a man brought up to believe that man was king, a man whose ego was as fragile as a glass bauble, Joy could barely think of a more painful state of affairs.
Everything began to fall into place as the truth filtered through her consciousness drop by drop. Everything began to make sense. Her father’s resentful attitude towards her, his manipulative control of his wife, the affairs, the deep-seated anger, her mother’s subservience and refusal to stand up to Alan.
Joy was somebody else’s child and he’d chosen to shut his mouth, grit his teeth and get on with the job of raising her. No wonder he was angry. No wonder he’d left. No wonder he’d married Toni Moran on a cliff top in Cornwall this very morning.
Joy drained her glass of champagne and topped it up. ‘More?’ she asked her mother. Barbara nodded stiffly, and Joy filled her glass. They sat and sipped their champagne in silence for a while. Joy had so many questions she wanted to ask and so many conflicting emotions swirling around inside her that she didn’t know what to say first.
‘Say something,’ said Barbara, smiling wanly.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she mumbled. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Are you angry?…’
‘No. I’m not angry. In some ways I’m pleased. In some ways everything makes so much more sense this way. But… I feel bad about Dad. I feel bad for hating him all these years, for not understanding what he was going through.’
Barbara nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I tried my hardest to soften you up on him. But, obviously, I couldn’t ever really make you understand.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before? Would you ever have told me?’
‘No,’ she said sadly, ‘I’d decided a long time ago that you would never know. I couldn’t do that to your father…’
‘Not even after he left you?’
‘No, not even then. He sacrificed so much for us. And however poor a father he was, I couldn’t bear for him to suffer the double humiliation of his daughter finding out that he wasn’t man enough to sire his own child, that he’d had to raise somebody else’s.’
‘But what about me? What about how I felt, knowing that my father hated me, that I was the greatest disappointment of his life. Wouldn’t it have been better for me to have known?’
Barbara sighed. ‘Oh, Joy. I don’t know. I really don’t know. Either way I was going to let one of you down, either way we’d all have been miserable. I just thought it was for the best to let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘And my father. Charles. Did he meet me? Does he know about me?’
‘Yes. He met you. Once. The day before we left for England. The day he gave me that photo. He thought you were beautiful. He chose your name.’
Joy threw her a look of surprise.
‘Yes. He said you should be called Joy because you would bring me so much happiness through the years. But that was it. We didn’t stay in touch. We
didn’t swap addresses. He left the apartment that day and that was the last I saw of him.’
‘And what was he? Was he Chinese? Malay? He looks …’ She picked up the photo and examined it. ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t look like anyone else I’ve ever seen.’
‘He was half-Tibetan, half-English. His father was a captain in the Royal Navy. His mother was a seamstress. He was brought up in Singapore by a Chinese couple who adopted him after his mother died when he was five.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Joy stood up slowly and walked to the mirror over the mantelpiece. She examined her face with her fingers, looking for the nuances of her newly discovered eclectic genetic make-up.
Tibet, she thought to herself. She didn’t even know where it was.
‘What was his surname?’ she asked.
‘Yung. Charles Yung. At least, that was his adopted surname. I don’t know what his original surname was.’
‘Charles Yung,’ she repeated. ‘Gosh. So. He’d be about, what… fifty-one now?’
Yes, I suppose he would. It’s hard to imagine… I always see him as a young man…’
‘I wonder where he is. I wonder what he’s doing. God, he’s probably got other kids by now – maybe even grand-kids.’
‘More than likely.’
‘And I wonder if he got his business degree in the end. I wonder if he’s successful.’ Joy’s head was starting to buzz with the myriad, infinite possibilities thrown up by the existence of this new person in her life.
‘Oh, I’m sure he is. He was very ambitious. Very bright.’
‘I want to meet him,’ she said abruptly.
‘Good,’ said Barbara, ‘that’s fine.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Of course I don’t mind. Just as long as you’re aware of the pitfalls. He might be dead, you know. Or impossible to track down. He might not want to know you…’
‘I know,’ said Joy, distractedly, ‘I know all that. But I at least want to try.’
Joy took the photo of Charles Yung to bed with her that night. She propped it up against her table lamp and stared at it until she felt her eyelids begin to sag under the weight of a long and emotional day.
She tried to imagine what Charles Yung would be doing now. She imagined a slim, fit man in a luxurious apartment, maybe in Singapore, maybe in Hong Kong, maybe even in San Francisco or New York. She imagined his wife, maybe Asian, maybe blonde, but definitely reed-thin and beautiful. And she imagined three children, a few years younger than her, studying at Ivy League colleges in the States, practising law and medicine in Europe, professional, beautiful, successful people – her brothers and sisters.
And then she thought about her father. An elderly, unhappy man, living a lie for twenty-five years, finally finding happiness with a pretty, fun-loving woman who made him feel like a man again. She imagined her father and Toni Moran snuggled up together under the canopy of their four-poster bed in their twee Cornwall honeymoon suite and for the very first time in her life she felt happy for him. Good for him, she thought, to snatch a few years’ happiness at the tail end of his existence. Good for him.
And with that novel and comforting thought, Joy let herself sink gently into a dream-filled slumber.
Fifty-Five
Jess and Vince got married at the Heavenly Bliss wedding chapel in Las Vegas on the anniversary of their first meeting. Chris was there as Vince’s best man and Jon Gavin was there as Jess’s. They all stayed at the Bellagio for three nights and didn’t tell anyone they were getting married until they got back.
Kirsty was livid with Chris when he got home.
‘Yοu bastard,’ she ranted, ‘I can’t believe you went away, left me to look after the kids and watched my own son getting married.’
Chris just shrugged defeatedly and grinned. ‘What could I do?’ he said. ‘He invited me.’
Kirsty wasn’t the only person to need appeasing. Jess’s mother cried for half an hour when they arrived to collect Lara, flashing their wedding bands at her.
‘But you’re my only daughter,’ she wailed, ‘my only girl. I spent my whole life fantasizing about this moment…’
‘Oh, get a grip, mother,’ Jess teased. ‘You got to see me pushing out your first grandchild, what more do you want?’
Their friends had been gutted, too, feeling robbed of yet another all-expenses-paid Saturday in a castle or stately home drinking free champagne in Karen Millen.
Jess had looked stunning in a long cream chiffon skirt, cerise halterneck and glittery flip-flops, with a camellia in her hair, while Vince wore a cream linen suit from Paul Smith and a cerise Ted Baker shirt to match. And as much as the day had been everything a Las Vegas wedding should be, Vince couldn’t help but feel a little cheated, too. Jon Gavin had managed to appropriate a gram of coke by some nefarious means or other, then managed to persuade both Vince and Chris to join in, even though neither of them particularly wanted to. Chris on coke was not something that Vince had ever seen before and, in retrospect, was not something he ever wished to see again.
They drank champagne from ten o’clock in the morning until three o’clock the following morning, and most of the day was a blur. They looked cool and the wedding was rock and roll, but there was something hollow at the very core of it that left Vince feeling like they hadn’t really got married at all.
It felt to Vince as if Jess had viewed the whole event as an excuse to get away from Lara and get wasted for four days and, although he thoroughly approved of the sentiment – parenting may well have been its own reward, but you still deserved time off for good behaviour – he just wished that the party element hadn’t overshadowed the actual wedding quite so heavily.
Nothing changed when they got back, either.
Vince knew he was probably being a little naive to imagine that being Mrs Jessica Mellon would really have any impact on her attitude or behaviour, but if anything it seemed to make her worse.
Ever since the day she’d gone AWOL and proposed to him, it had become unofficially written into the rule book of their relationship that she went out every Saturday night. It had also, by extension, become written into the rule book of their relationship that, because she ended up staying out all night on Saturday night, Vince would remove Lara fully from her sphere of consciousness until late the following afternoon, while she recovered from whatever hangover or drug-induced comedown she’d inflicted upon herself the previous night.
Vince had no idea who she was with on these nights out, although they usually involved Jon Gavin and a random selection of people with names he recognized from her past – people called Simone, Rio, Dexy, Todd and Puss, for example, who sounded to Vince like members of a 1970s glam rock band and who he consequently always tended to envisage in skin-tight catsuits and thigh-high Lurex boots. They went out to clubs, the newer the better, and danced on podiums, then found people with flats where they could head on to afterwards to smoke spliffs, listen to chill-out music and phone taxis.
‘I love being married,’ she said one day, glancing fondly at her wedding ring. ‘It’s the perfect fob-off for creeps in clubs.’
This unwanted insight into Jess’s mysterious social existence did nothing to alleviate Vince’s discomfort about her nights out. As well as thinking about her writhing around on podiums in low-slung jeans, he could now envisage fat-tongued uglies following her around all night making lewd propositions.
Vince of course was never invited along on these nights out. They were tightly packaged in a compartment far away from his own ‘husband and baby’ compartment and, besides, he wouldn’t have wanted to go even if he was invited. Vince hated clubs, drugs and people who liked clubs and drugs in equal measure. And Vince didn’t resent Jess’s nights out. She worked hard all week and still did the bulk of the childcare when she collected Lara from her mother’s at the end of the day. On her days off, she cooked Lara wonderful nutritious meals full of organic ingredients and took her to educational playgroups and petting zoos. She deserved her ti
me off. Vince just wished she would do something different with it.
She came out to his friends’ ‘boring little dinner parties’ under sufferance, claiming that she much preferred to see them during the day when they could all compare children and discuss teething and tantrums, then be home in time for a glass of wine and an early night. And Vince had the occasional night out with his mates, tame affairs involving a pub, a curry and being in bed by eleven.
But what really bugged him was that despite the fact that both Jess’s mother and Vince’s mother had made full and genuine offers to baby-sit at a moment’s notice whenever they fancied a night out together, they never took them up on it. Jess was always too knackered.
‘Oh, God, no,’ she’d say in response to a gentle suggestion of an Italian round the corner or a trip to the local cinema. ‘I really can’t face it. Let’s just get a takeaway, eh?’
Vince could appreciate that she was tired. She had a tiring existence. But it galled him that however tough a week she’d had she still managed to find the energy to swan off into a narcotic oblivion every Saturday night. It galled him that, if someone was having leaving drinks on a Friday night, she managed to stay out drinking until closing time. It galled him that on the night before her thirty-third birthday, she went out partying with Jon and the gang, but on the day itself stayed in drinking champagne and eating king prawns in front of a DVD with Vince. It galled him that Jess chose to do all her socializing with other people and all her staying in with him. It galled him that he wasn’t her friend…
But Vince could cope with all this because, even though it unsettled him and even though it upset him, it had become a part of the rhythm of their lives and he’d learned to accept it. If his wife wanted to go out clubbing with strangers every Saturday night, take drugs and drink gallons of Cristal paid for by dubious acquaintances, then spend the following day in bed looking wan and ignoring her daughter then that was fine because that was what she did. But when she’d come to him yesterday afternoon with a look on her face that suggested that she was about to up the ante and fluttered her eyelashes at him in that special way of hers, Vince knew he was in trouble.
