Vince and Joy Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Vince and Joy

  Praise for Lisa Jewell’s previous bestsellers:

  ‘She is remarkably assured and her dialogue is cracking. It is terrific stuff: touching, funny and sentient’ Sunday Times

  ‘Do we sneer? We do not. Jewell writes with lashings of what the shrinks might call emotional intelligence – pop fiction at its proudest’ Independent

  ‘Deliciously enjoyable… although there have been many books trying to decipher the new rule of engagement, Jewell’s is one of the most refreshing: addictively readable without being irritating or glib’ The Times

  ‘A party worth gatecrashing! Lisa Jewell pulls off a rare trick which even the likes of Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby couldn’t quite manage. She has written a book about relationships which appeals to men and women… It’s a spicy lamb kofta in a sea of bland chicken masala’ Daily Mirror

  ‘Jewell’s exceptional skill is for story-telling and her insight into the twenty-something psyche is easy to relate to her characters as they stumble through adulthood. Very entertaining and very funny’ Heat

  ‘A subtle dissection of the modern world… the perfect summer read’ MarieClaire

  ‘This is a gem’ Mirror

  ‘Bubbly and addictive, it’s the best romantic comedy we’ve read in ages’ Company

  ‘Proving once more that she’s far more than a run-of-the-mill chick lit writer… Λ Friend of the Family is more full of warmth than a duck-feather duvet and just as gentle’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Poignant and humorous’ Now

  ‘An absorbing read’ She

  ‘It has all the essential ingredients of a captivating read – a great story, a mystery to solve and a touch of romance’ Real

  ‘It’s an infuriatingly enjoyable feel-good read’ The List

  ‘A breath of fresh air’ Tom Paulin, Late Review

  ‘This is a lovely book… it is informed throughout with a wholesome desire to please and entertain’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Lisa Jewell’s second novel stands out from the mass of chick-fic like a poppy in a cornfield’ Nova

  ‘A lovely, modern urban tale of interconnecting relationships, desires and disasters. Quite the nicest in this vein for some time’ Bookseller

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lisa Jewell is in her thirties and was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and their baby girl, Amélie Mae. She worked as a secretary before redundancy, a bet and a book deal took her away from all that. She is the author of four huge bestsellers: Ralph’s Party, Thirtynothing, One-Hit Wonder and, most recently, Friend of the Family.

  Vince and Joy

  The Love Story of a Lifetime

  LISA JEWEL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  11

  Copyright © Lisa Jewell, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01218-6

  For Jascha and Amelie, my happy ending.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you, as ever, to Judith and Sarah. My books would all be unfinished and unpublished if you two didn’t have a hand in the early stages. Please don’t; ever emigrate, die or go blind.

  Thanks to Siobhán, who really had her work cut out for her trying to smooth out my wayward timelines. Thank you for ensuring that everyone was gestating, menstruating, marrying, divorcing and ageing at roughly the appropriate times. No one deserves to be pregnant for twelve months.

  Thanks to Oh Paxton for the beautiful cover, to Rob for the brilliant words and to Louise for being the Best Editor in the World™. Thanks also to Mel, without whom there would, literally, have been no book. And lastly thank you to Amelie, whose presence in my life has transformed me into a lean, mean, disciplined writing machine who can now throw out 5,000 words before lunchtime. Thank you for being such a good little girl and for all those afternoon naps when I managed to squeeze out another 1,000 words. You are my angel.

  Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it’s a piece of humbug. Max Frisch

  If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile. Lynda Barry

  Al & Emma’s Kitchen, Saturday, 19 September 2003, 12.35 a.m.

  Vince glanced around the table at his friends. They were all roughly the same age as him – thirty-five, thirty-six. This conversation, or one very like it, was probably going on around a thousand London dinner tables at this very moment. But this was special because it was one they hadn’t shared for so long and because it was being brought out, like the best china, for a very special guest. For him.

  This was the first group gathering since he and Jess had split up, and everyone seemed extra-sparkly, like guests at a pretend TV dinner party. He’d seen them do it before, with new girlfriends and old friends, who arrived suddenly from overseas, out of the blue, like characters in a soap opera.

  They wanted him to know that he was still one of them, whatever his status. Look, they were saying, you’ve got fantastic friends and life is going to be just great. And in showing themselves to him afresh, they were reairing their shared history. Remember when, they said. Remember that time in Amsterdam – Simon’s stag night, remember – on the ferry on the way back and Simon projectile-vomited all over the food counter. And remember that weekend in Cornwall; remember Al standing on that rock in the middle of the sea at five in the morning fucked out of his brain on speed and how that wave crashed over him and we all thought he was dead. Remember that?

  The conversation turned to a time before Vince had known half these people, to a time they shared at university before he’d come into their lives. Stories of snakebite and acid and STDs. Stories of grim fridges and disastrous casseroles, of sleepwalking and incontinence.

  He rested his chin on his clasped hands and absorbed the atmosphere while he listened to his friends reminisce. The clock on the microwave said 12.38 a.m. He’d usually be home by now, he mused, paying the baby-sitter, looking in on Lara. Instead he was still here. Nowhere to go; no one to get back to. He was a married man who wasn’t married, a father who didn’t live with his child. He was all wrong. Everything in his life felt upended, unbalance
d. But here in the genial, familiar warmth of Al and Emma’s kitchen, red wine and whisky basking in his bloodstream, the world was righted once more.

  The conversation regressed further. They were talking about schooldays now, days before even the oldest of the friends had known each other. They were talking about crazes and crushes and snogging-then Natalie asked an open question.

  ‘So,’ she said, smiling mischievously over her fingertips, ‘how old was everyone when they lost their virginity? And who to? You first, Al.’

  Al groaned, but went on to tell everyone that it was to a girl called Karen on a school trip to Paris when he was sixteen years old. They’d had sex in the bottom bed of the hostel bunks, while his friend Joe farted audibly, odorously and deliberately overhead.

  Emma lost hers when she was seventeen, to a married man who promised he’d leave his wife for her, then never contacted her again.

  Natalie was more traditional, losing her virginity at the age of fourteen to a guy called Darren who looked like Steve Norman from Spandau Ballet. It was all over in thirty seconds and he cried when she didn’t bleed because he thought it meant she wasn’t really a virgin.

  Steve had lost his at fifteen at his parents’ Β & Β, to an Austrian guest who lured him into her bedroom while he was on his way to the toilet in the middle of the night. She was forty-five with the worst stretchmarks you could possibly imagine and a scar from her ribcage to her groin from some kind of life-saving surgery. She grabbed his (at the time) long hair so hard while she rode him that she actually pulled a clump of it out. Afterwards, she waved it in the air like a trophy.

  Claire shocked everyone by announcing that she’d lost it to her seventeen-year-old cousin on a Hoseasons boating holiday when she was only thirteen. They had sex under a bush on the banks of the Coventry Canal while their parents got drunk and shouted at each other inside the boat. Claire found out five years later that her older sister had lost her virginity to the same cousin and that he ended up being gay and living with a seventy-year-old man.

  Tom lost his at sixteen in the back of a transit van being driven by his friend who’d just taken two tabs of acid and thought that they were a pair of giant writhing lizards. He’d pulled over to the side of the road, grabbed handfuls of grass out of the verge and thrown them all over the newly consummated couple because he thought maybe the lizards were hungry. Tom couldn’t remember the name of the girl.

  And then it was Vince’s turn. His friends turned and smiled at him encouragingly.

  ‘Go on, Mr Mellon,’ said Al, rubbing his hands together, ‘hit us with it. What kind of depraved, repellent, deviant experience did you have?

  Vince smiled and half-toyed with the idea of lying, just to gratify his friends, but then he looked at Natalie’s soft face, glowing in the candlelight, one arm draped lovingly around her drunken husband, and decided he’d tell the truth.

  ‘The night I lost my virginity,’ he began, ‘was the most brilliant night of my life.’

  There was a second’s silence broken by Tom. ‘Oh, give over,’ he said. ‘No one enjoys losing their virginity.’

  ‘But I did,’ said Vince, simply. It was perfect. Just – perfect.’

  The group fell silent as they absorbed this unconventional statement. The men looked slightly disappointed, while the women around the table looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Claire. ‘Tell us. Who was it?’

  ‘It was a girl I met in Norfolk. When I was nineteen. Her name was Joy.’

  July 1986

  Late Bloomers

  One

  Vince threw his bag on to the bottom level of the stale-smelling bunks, pulled apart the papery curtains painted with ugly brushstroke daisies, and saw her for the first time.

  She sat in a deck chair, her knees brought up to her chin, holding a magazine in her right hand while she picked absent-mindedly at black-painted toenails with the other. Her hair was dark brown and to her jaw, with a slight curl that kicked it across her cheeks like wood shavings. She wore all black – a sleeveless vest, oversized army surplus shorts, a frayed canvas ribbon in her hair.

  ‘Vince – give me a hand with the gas, mate.’ Chris popped his head around the cream melamine door and winked at him.

  ‘Yeah. In a minute.’ Vince turned back to the window and lifted the curtain again.

  She was turning a page and rearranging her neat limbs. She fiddled with a small silver cross on a leather thong that hung around her neck and curled her toes around the frame of the deck chair.

  Bangy, bang, bang.

  A hairy fist thumping at the window disturbed his reverie.

  ‘Come on, mate.’ Chris’s face loomed into view.

  ‘Yeah. OK.’ Vince let the curtain drop, and straightened up.

  Shit.

  There was a beautiful girl. In the caravan next door. Where for the previous four years there had been three boys, two Staffordshire bull terriers and a couple called Geoff and Diane from Lincolnshire. He stared at his reflection for a minute in the mirror above the gas fire in the living area. He was thrown. He hadn’t factored the possibility of a beautiful girl into the prospect of two-weeks-on-a-caravan-site-in-Hunstanton. There’d never been a beautiful girl here before. Just an ugly girl. An ugly girl called Carol with an even uglier mate called Theresa who threw poorly phrased insults at him, then tried to get off with the sinewy guys who strode across the moving platforms of the Waltzers on Hunstanton pier, pretending to fancy ugly girls as they spun them masochistically in painted cups.

  When Vince first came to Hunstanton with Chris and his mum, there’d been other kids of his age to hang out with. They’d gang together and mooch around the fairground, even went to a nightclub once. But as the years passed, they stopped coming. They stayed at home to hang out with their mates or their girlfriends, or they went on holiday with friends to places you needed a passport to get to. Even ugly Carol and Theresa seemed to have something better to do with their summer this year, evidenced by the drawn curtains of their caravan across the way.

  Outside, Vince could hear Chris making friendly conversation with the mysterious girl. Fearing that he was missing out on something or, worse still, that Chris was embarrassing him in some way, he pulled his hands through his James Dean hair, ran a fingertip across the angry red scars beneath his jaw line and headed outside.

  ‘Just outside London,’ Chris was saying, ‘Enfield. What about you?’

  ‘Colchester,’ she said, sliding the silver cross back and forth across the leather thong. ‘You know, in Essex?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Chris, ‘I know Colchester. Oh, look who it is.’ He turned to look at Vince. ‘Vince,’ he said, ‘come and meet our new neighbour. This is Joy’

  She was even more beautiful close up. Her skin was alabaster white, but there was something about her features that suggested something far-flung. Her nose was small and chiselled, and her cheekbones were set high in her face, but it was her eyes that held clues to the uncommon. Compact and wide-set, flat-lidded and framed with dense, dark lashes – the eyes of a painted china doll.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, smiling his new, stiff smile.

  ‘Hiya,’ she said, resting her magazine on her lap and sitting on her hands.

  He noticed her eyes stray to the scars on his jaw, and turned his hands into fists to stop them wandering protectively towards his face.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘are you two mates?’

  Vince looked at Chris in mock horror. ‘God, no,’ he said, ‘Chris is my stepdad.’

  ‘Really? How come?’

  ‘Well, he married my mum.’ He and Chris exchanged a look and laughed.

  ‘Oh, right. Of course. Just you look kind of the same age.’

  ‘Yeah – everyone says that. Chris is ten years older than me, though. He’s twenty-nine. I’m nearly nineteen.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, looking from one to the other, almost as if doubting their story. ‘And where’s your wife? Your mum?’

&nbs
p; ‘She’s at the Spar,’ said Chris, hauling the gas canister out of the little wooden cupboard and blowing some cobwebs off it. ‘Getting us some tea. Should be back in a minute. Oh, talk of the devil, here she is.’

  Kirsty’s green Mini pulled up alongside the caravan and came to a halt with a crunch of gravel under rubber.

  ‘Give us a hand, you two,’ she said, heading for the boot.

  Chris instantly dropped the canister and went to his wife’s assistance. Vince nodded at Joy and rubbed at his scars.

  ‘God, is that your mum?’ said Joy.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous.’

  Vince turned, expecting to see Beatrice Dalle or someone standing there, but, no, it was just his mother.

  ‘How old is she? She doesn’t look old enough to have a son your age.’

  ‘Thirty-seven, I think. Thirty-eight. Something like that.’

  ‘Bloody hell. She’s younger than my mum was when she had me.’

  They both stared at Vince’s mum for a while, and Vince tried to think of something to say. This was officially the longest dialogue he’d ever exchanged with a girl who wasn’t either in his class or going out with one of his mates, and the conversation felt like a flighty shuttle-cock he was trying to keep in the air with the force of his will alone. He wanted to ask her something interesting. Something about music maybe, or her intriguing slanted eyes. Or what a beautiful girl like her was doing on a shitty caravan site like this. A dozen potential conversational openers formed in his head and were discounted in a nano-second – too personal, too naff, too boring, too much.

  The silence drew out like a held breath.

  Vince looked from Joy to his mum’s car and back again while he tried to think of the next thing to say. You staying long?’ he managed eventually, with a rush of blood to his head.

  ‘Another fortnight,’ she said, ‘worse luck.’