Vince and Joy (47 page)

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 time 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.

‘I have got
the
most incredible news!’ she opened, and Vince knew immediately that it would be something that he would find exactly the opposite.

‘Jon Gavin’s been booked for Amnesia. In July.’

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s a club, right?’

‘Uh-huh – it’s the biggest club in Ibiza. And they’re giving him this big fuck-off villa in the hills. It’s got a
pool, a gym, a chef. He gets a convertible fucking Lexus, this, like, millionaire gangsta-mobile, a chauffeur if he wants it. The works. For a whole month.’ Jess was bouncing up and down on the sofa with excitement as she spoke.

‘Wow,’ said Vince again. ‘That sounds really cool.’

‘It is,’ she said, ‘it’s
so
cool. And what’s even cooler is that he’s invited me to stay with him…’

‘Oh,’ said Vince, feeling the bottom of his belly lurching upwards.

‘And obviously I wouldn’t stay for the whole month. Although, shit, I’d love to. But I definitely want to go for a week. That’s OK, isn’t it? You don’t mind?’

‘Er…’

‘And he did say that it would be cool for all of us to come, you know, the three of us, but I just don’t think that’s a very suitable environment for Lara, you know, with the pool and the drugs and everything. Way too dangerous.’

Vince nodded his agreement.

‘So I’d probably go the second week of July – Puss and Dex are going then, too, so it’ll be even more of a laugh…’

Vince didn’t know what to say. He knew what he
wanted
to say. He wanted to say:
For fuck
’
s sake, Jess, you
’
re a fucking thirty-three-year-old wife and mother, not a twenty-something beach bimbo.
And actually, he wanted to add, isn’t Ibiza a bit passé, isn’t taking pills and dancing until the sun comes up just a little bit
last millennium,
aren’t you and Jon and your stupid friends with their stupid names just a little bit
old
to be carrying on like this?

Because it wasn’t the fact that Jess wanted to go away without him for a week that rankled. If she was going on a hen weekend, for example, or on a city break with some girlfriends, he’d be all for it. It was the nature of the time she wanted to spend apart from him that bothered him. It was the people she wanted to go with and the way she was going to behave. It was the sheer breadth of the disparity between what he thought constituted a good time and what she thought constituted a good time.

But he didn’t say any of this because a) he didn’t want to spoil Jess’s fun and b) it was pointless because Jess had already made up her mind that she was going, and there was nothing he could say to stop her.

‘So,’ said Charlene Okumbo, at the end of her forty-second lesson, ‘how’s married life?’

Vince turned to her and smiled wanly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s good.’

‘Does it feel any different?’

He shrugged. ‘Not really.’

‘You don’t sound that excited about it, considering,’ she complained as she manhandled the gear stick into neutral.

‘Considering what?’

‘I dunno. All that eloping stuff. Sounded really romantic to me.’

‘Yeah, well, you know. Weddings and marriages – two completely different things, aren’t they?’ He turned to Charlene and sighed. ‘Supposing your boyfriend… what’s his name again?’

‘Tarif.’

Tarif. Right. Supposing you and he were married…’

‘Yeah, right, in his dreams…’

‘Yeah, anyway. Just supposing. And supposing you had a baby.’

Charlene snorted disdainfully.

‘How would you feel if Tarif said that his ex-girlfriend, who looked like…’ – he scoured his memories of the latest edition of
heat
magazine, trying to find a suitable comparison – ‘… who looked like Beyoncé, was hiring a villa in Ibiza and she invited him and a load of their mates over for a holiday and they’d be clubbing every night and taking shitloads of drugs and stuff. And supposing Tarif said he was going and you weren’t invited – what would you do?’

Charlene’s eyes were bulging out of her head with the improbability of the imagined scenario. ‘Dump him,’ she squeaked, emphatically.

‘Really?’

‘Er,
yeah.
I mean, that, like, just
so
isn’t acceptable behaviour.’

‘Well, what am I going to do?’

‘Shit. I don’t know. It’s a toughie. But if you’re asking
me
what I would do, me personally, I wouldn’t put up with that shit. Seriously.’

Vince nodded slowly.

‘But, you know. It’s different for you. You’ve got a kid and shit. You’re married. You’re
old.
Maybe you’re gonna have to swallow it. Put up with it. The main thing is – do you trust her?’

Vince stopped for a second to consider the question. It was deeply fundamental, but failed to elicit an immediate
answer. Did he trust Jess? Despite her tendency to keep the various elements of her life firmly separate, she was always up-front with him, gave him honest answers to open questions. He knew without a doubt that if he were to ask her if she’d ever been unfaithful to him, she would respond with the truth. She was secretive, but she wasn’t a liar. But, he pondered, most people were put off following their natural adulterous instincts by the knowledge that they wouldn’t be able to live with the guilt and the lies, that the aftermath would make it untenable. But Jess was different. She
would
be able to carry on living her normal existence with Vince and Lara at the same time as conducting an affair; she
would
be able to maintain her composure, to juggle two separate lives. And that was what scared him.

It’s not that I don’t
trust
her,’ he answered finally. ‘It’s that I don’t really
know
her.’

Charlene’s eyes boggled again. ‘This is your
wife
we’re talking about?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And the mother of your
child?
’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Jes-sus,’ she said, rolling her eyes, ‘that is
sad.
’

‘I know,’ said Vince, ‘I know.’

‘You know what it is?’ she said, looking him directly in the eye. ‘You’re too nice, that’s what it is with you. Too nice for your own good. You need to toughen up a bit.’

He shrugged. ‘Not going to happen,’ he said. ‘This is me. This is the way I am. I don’t do tough.’

‘Well, then,’ she sniffed and went to open her door,
‘you’re going to have to get yourself a nice girl, then. Because that one you’re married to – if you don’t stand up to her, then she’s just going to chew you up and spit you out. And I tell you something, come next week, I’ll be tearing up those L plates for good and you won’t ever see me again, so you’d better hurry up and get this shit sorted out before I go.’