My friends had stopped saying, ‘You’re so young to be a stepmum!’ because they could see how happy the three of us were. Vince was nudging his way up on the comedy circuit, and I’d accepted my lot as an office worker – until fate led me in a new direction.
As Vince was often away doing gigs, Edie and I would head to our local museum where there were activities for parents and kids. We did brass rubbings and made Viking hats with papier-mâché horns, becoming such regulars that we got to know the staff. I was tipped off about a job vacancy on the front desk. After landing that, I worked my way up to be an assistant curator – ‘ass-cure’ as Vince delighted in calling it – of the childhood section: the historical toys, doll’s houses and the like.
‘She’s a world expert on skipping ropes,’ Vince would announce at parties.
I didn’t mind the teasing because I loved my work, and I was proud of getting where I was, without a degree or any training apart from what I’d learnt on the job. I really believed I had a charmed life.
When Vince proposed I was over the moon. We crammed a community hall with our friends and families, and I couldn’t help noticing how queasy his parents looked, and that they made no attempt to hide it. I just wasn’t posh enough for them. However, my mum glowed with pride. ‘You’resucha lucky girl,’ she kept telling me.
I was delighted that he’d charmed her, saying things like, ‘Honestly, Joyce, you and Kate could pass for sisters!’ She’d blush and giggle. (I hadn’t even known Mum was capable of giggling until then.) Meanwhile his parents had left our wedding reception early, seemingly ‘in a hurry to get back’.
‘D’you think you’ll ever want to move back to Shugbury?’ I asked him on our Cornish honeymoon. Really, I wanted reassurance that nothing would change now we were married.
‘God, no,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d rather die.’
‘Why?’ I asked, relieved.
‘’Cause it’s full of posh wankers,’ he said.
It wasn’t that he’d lied. But people change, I discovered. As the years roll by, they change more than you could have ever imagined.
Or maybe they weren’t who you thought they were after all.
We became more distant from one another. When he wasn’t away gigging, Vince would be installed at his desk, working on material, locked in a world of his own. He was still a good dad, in that he celebrated Edie’s every achievement and was always affectionate and sweet with her. I mean, he loves her. That’s never been in doubt. However, he became less inclined to involve himself in the practicalities of our lives. If I felt put upon and resentful sometimes, I reckoned that was just part of being together when the sparkle had dimmed.
Meanwhile Edie grew up, went off to Manchester University and returned to live with friends in Brixton. She’d landed a job doing social media for an animal charity, and announced that she had adopted Jarvis, a nervous spaniel, when it hadn’t worked out with his adoptive family. A dog in a young people’s house share? I wasn’t sure it was the best idea but she insisted it would be fine. She’d always loved animals and nature. Her favourite part of the museum had been the natural history section. Then last year she announced that she’d been offered a paid internship at a marine research centre on the north-east coast of the United Sates, and would be living in Maine for six months. We hadn’t even known she’d applied.
She was thrilled and we were delighted for her, although we missed her terribly. Meanwhile, as Edie’s young life was opening up in thrilling ways, mine had hit a kind of dead end. I still loved my job and my colleagues; they weren’t the problem. The issue was at home. With Edie gone, there was no diluting of the Vince effect. It was just me and him and the glaring fact that he now did virtually nothing around the flat.
Working full-time, I’d come home to plunge into cooking, cleaning and picking things up off the floor. I wasn’t a pushover. I’d try to discuss it and reason with him, and sometimes I’d boil over with rage.
How had this happened? I’d been brought up by a single mum who’d had the guts to leave a violent man, and tolerated no crap from anyone. Something had to change, I decided – or I’d combust. And then it did. And after decades of slogging away in crummy clubs, being heckled and pelted with boiled sweets on occasion, my husband’s fortune changed.
Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Vince became famous.
CHAPTER THREE
Being Shugbury Book Festival’s main attraction, Vince’s author talk is the last event of the day. The marquee is packed, the audience poised in rapt attention. While he’s up there on stage, being interviewed by Deborah, I man the book stand, ready to take care of sales.
‘I know you were amazingly successful before,’ she gushes, ‘but things really took off for you with the Scotland series, didn’t they?’
‘Well, kind of.’ Vince smiles self-deprecatingly. ‘It was an amazing experience, facing the elements with the guys. I’d always fancied doing something like that.’
Hmm, that’s notquitethe true picture. Along with a bunch of fellow jobbing comedians, Vince had been invited to take part in a week-long Highland hike.
‘Fuck, no,’ he said initially, even though it would be filmed for TV. Scotland was freezing, he moaned to me. ‘And they want us to stay in these little shepherds’ huts. They don’t have any heating! Or places to plug things in! I’ll be found frozen to death, savaged by – what do they have up there?’
Mainly rabbits, deer and squirrels, I told him. (Having spent my early childhood in Glasgow, I’d been taken by Mum on several camping trips to the wilds of Perthshire.) And what would he need to plug in? Hair straighteners? ‘A phone charger might come in handy,’ he muttered.
Vince grudgingly agreed to take part, and the show turned out to be a surprise hit.
‘Did your life change after that?’ Deborah asks now.
‘Not at all,’ Vince says firmly. ‘For me, everything revolves around my family. And no way would they let me get above myself...’ They both chuckle, while I wonder if I’ve heard correctly.
‘So you’re very much hands on?’ she prompts him.
‘God, yeah. Ask my wife...’ There’s a collective ripple of laughter and a few people glance round and beam at me, unaware of how things really panned out after the show. There were more TV appearances and gigs in bigger, grander venues. Vince’s ‘thing’ on the Scottish trek had been his endearing inability to read a map, light a fire or in fact do anything useful at all. Pretty soon he’d gained a publishing deal and dashed out a book about the things he can’t do that men are supposed to excel at. Stuff like changing a tyre, using power tools without suffering personal injury, and investigating scary noises in the night. ‘Being crap at manly stuff’ had become Vince’s brand. Not only that, but as something of a celebrity now, he was not only avoidingalldomestic matters at home – but also expecting me to wait on him, like a maid.
