Vince
Vince wakes on a grey Wednesday morning and glances at the space in the bed where Kate should be. It used to be a regular king-sized bed. Now it feels huge, as if the mattress has been extended by at least three metres on her side.
Kate’s always here beside him. That’s the thing. Since they’ve been together she’s never been one for nipping off on girls’ holidays, the way some of his friends’ partners still do. She seemed to flush all of that out of her system in her early twenties, on all those jaunts she went on with Tash. He’s heard about them getting drunk and stoned and dancing all night, tottering back to crummy hotels in the breaking dawn. Kate was actually wilder than he was. But that’s all way in the past, and he honestly thought she was perfectly happy with the way things have turned out.
Clearly, though, she’s not. He replays her reaction yesterday to his offer of a half-day spa visit – with a hot stone treatment! – and wonders what he said wrong. Aren’t women supposed to adore being slathered in oils and mud? Vince feels like he doesn’t know anything anymore.
Aware of a hollowness in his belly, he lurches out of bed with uncharacteristic decisiveness. Naked, he snatches his dressing gown from the hook and pulls it on, registering the ragged hole at the front.
Jarvis greets him in the hallway in a blur of panting and tail wagging. This display of unbridled joy feels inappropriate, considering that Kate’s had some kind of hormonal meltdown. But then, a spaniel can’t be expected to understand marital difficulties. He can’t even be relied upon to distinguish a pane of glass from an open space, the silly mutt. On more than one occasion he’s made a dash for the garden and thwacked his head against the patio door.
In the kitchen now, Vince looks around in dismay at the party debris that’s still littering the table and worktops. A seed of irritation fizzles inside him, as if a horde of gatecrashers had broken in and caroused in his home while he was sleeping like a pure, sweet baby. They didn’t even bother to clear up! Of course, Vince has to accept that there were no gatecrashers apart from Sue Stone of the unfeasibly large radishes, whom he didn’t remember inviting. More shamefully still, the mess has sat here for three days.
Well, of course it has, he thinks irritably. Kate’s not here and Vince has had his book to finish and the dog to look after and God knows what else. Meanwhile, thinking positively, End of Play came and went yesterday and no lightning bolt struck the house. Zoe hasn’t even emailed again. Maybe she’s off sick? It seems wrong, hoping that she’s come down with something. But he’s thinking a heavy cold or food poisoning. ‘Not bacterial pneumonia or anything like that,’ he tells Jarvis, who gazes quizzically at him.
Thus reassured that he hasn’t wished death upon his editor, Vince scoffs a withered sausage roll that’s been sitting out on the worktop since Sunday and lets Jarvis out into the garden. Grass is grass, right? Garden or park; it’s all the same to a dog. As Jarvis tinkles against the double-orb water feature, Vince checks his emails on his phone.Stillnothing from Zoe. Yeah, she’s definitely sick, he decides. He calls Jarvis back in and heads through to the kitchen, where he peers into the fridge for a tray of that incredibly expensive Rover’s Kitchen dog food that the Shugbury vet insisted he has.
There isn’t any. The food actually comes frozen, and defrosting it is – orwas– Kate’s job. Of course Vince hasn’t done this with everything that’s been going on. But it’s fine, he reassures himself. He boils the kettle and dumps the tray of rock-solid meat in the sink on top of a pile of dirty dishes. ‘Well, my wifedidleave me,’ he announces out loud, as if a council inspector has burst in to grill him about why he hasn’t washed up.
He sloshes the entire kettle of boiling water over the meaty slab. This seems to have zero effect. He considers hacking it to bits, using a hammer or an ice pick or whatever the heck’s in the toolbox. He tries to picture what Kate used, when she built thatPinntorptable andMalmchest of drawers, then remembers that he doesn’t know where the toolbox is hidden. First thing he must do, when she comes home, is ask where things are!
Briefly, Vince considers serving Jarvis the meat in its frozen state. It’d be like a savoury ice lolly, right? It seems like a brilliant idea, actually – and if Kate were here he’d ask her to look into marketing it as a concept. A meaty brick that your dog can lick indefinitely! Genius, Vince reckons. But then he worries that ingesting frozen meat might damage Jarvis’s insides, and he couldn’t live with himself if anything bad happened. So he knocks that idea on the head.
‘Microwave!’ Vince shouts, as if he’s just discovered penicillin. He can defrost it that way. ‘Who needs Kate?’ he asks Jarvis, aware that he’s already started to act in a way that he wouldn’t want others to witness. Even the dog seems wary around him, as if he’s not entirely happy about being here without Kate.
He’s not the only one,Vince thinks darkly. He thrusts the tray of meat into the microwave, sets the timer and launches into the task of clearing up the party mess. Bottles and cans and food debris – including the couscous garnished with perfumed leaves – are lobbed into a bin liner. Should that have been a warning sign? Kate’s sudden urge to sprinkle potpourri over food? After pausing for breath Vince deliberately loads the dishwasher in a way that Kate would hate, with everything shoved in any old how.
Next, having built himself up to the final task, Vince scrapes the dog sick off the hall carpet with Jarvis watching keenly like some mean-eyed supervisor on a factory floor.That’s better, he decides. He is getting on with stuff now, seizing the day. ‘Carpe diem!’ he shouts, startling the dog. ‘Or is itcarpetdiem, the deodorising shampoo for all your rug-cleaning needs?’ He didn’t really use carpet shampoo because he couldn’t find any. He just squirted it with the hideously expensive lavender handwash he bought Kate for Christmas, which she seemed somewhat underwhelmed by. Whatdowomen want these days? Not handwash or even a half-day spa package, it seems.
Ping!goes the microwave. That’s Jarvis’s breakfast defrosted. However, something has gone badly wrong because the thin plastic tray has melted and warped. ‘Fuck,’ Vince mutters. Rather than risk his safety with the frankly substandard oven glove, he manages to lift it from the microwave by means of two spatulas, and transports it gingerly to the table.
It hasn’t merely defrosted. It’s cooked like a fat rectangular burger from a fast food joint in hell. Jarvis ate a dressing gown so surely he won’t turn up his nose at this. But what if chemicals from the melted plastic have leached into the meat? The last thing Vince wants is to poison his daughter’s dog. ‘The middle bit’s probably okay,’ he tells himself. Thus reassured, he finds a small casserole dish and forks the ‘safe’ parts – i.e. the interior parts – into it, and bins the melted tray. It’s a tactic he used to employ with mouldy cheese back in the day. With scant regard for health and safety, he’d slice off the fuzzy bits and happily scoff the rest, confident that it wouldn’t kill him and might even do his immune system some good.
Of course that stopped when Edie moved in. Kate, who took to her stepmother role with enthusiasm and ease, announced, ‘We’renotpretending that mouldy food is okay to eat.’
Already, with the kitchen reasonably tidy now, Vince feels a lot better. He forks half of the casserole dish’s contents into Jarvis’s bowl and watches as the dog sniffs it before consuming it in small, sporadic bites.
He seems to know it’s not right. That’s ridiculous, Vince decides. He’s a dog, not a Michelin restaurant inspector. Back in his study, he tries to settle into writing. Another hour spins by, with Vince doing little more than rubbing at his face, until a sharp rap on the front door – and then the sound of it opening – ejects him from his swivel chair and he scrambles towards it.
Kate has come home! And noweverythingis going to be all right—
‘Hi, Vince.’
‘Oh! Deborah. Hi.’
Already in his hallway, she steps back and gives him a curious look. ‘Hope I’m not interrupting anything?’
‘Er, no. No, not at all,’ he blusters, raking at his hair. ‘It’s fine. I was just, um... working.’
‘Oh, right.’ She’s wearing a Breton top and jeans, and her russet hair is coiled neatly on top of her head, with tendrils flowing down at her cheeks. It’s the first time in his life that Vince has been disappointed to see her. ‘It’s just, I have a day off and I’m in organising mode,’ she clarifies as he makes them coffee in the kitchen.
Thank Christ he cleared up. The sound of the dishwasher, rumbling away on its cycle, seems to say, ‘Nothing untoward has happened here. Everything is normal.’ Apart from the casserole dish of dog meat, and a jam jar of cutlery that Kate had set out for the party, everything else has been put away.
‘Is Kate working today?’ Deborah asks.
‘Yeah, yeah, she has a shift, yeah.’ He can’t face going into what’s really happened, and Deborah being all concerned andinvolved, in the way he knows she would be. Much as Vince likes her, he’s aware that she loves a gossip, and that the news would whip around The Glade like a freak hurricane:Have you heard, Kate walked out on Vince? Well, she was acting weird at their party...
Deborah’s nostrils quiver. ‘Mmm, something smells good in here!’
