And driving lessons – hours, days, even, of his life that he would never get back, teaching both his wife and daughter to drive. Sitting in the passenger seat of his own car with one of them in the driving seat, neither of whom could tell left from right or even backwards from forwards. And then suddenly Ashley was in the back of a tuk-tuk and Wendy had a Honda with a UKIP sticker on the back that she zipped around in, looking for the new Mr Right now that Vince was suddenly Mr Wrong. Craig, the lifeboatman, had been jettisoned apparently in favour of the smorgasbord of Tinder. According to his wife, Vince could have had a whole Mr Men series of his own – Mr Boring, Mr Overweight, Mr Exhausted. And to add insult to injury, Wendy had gone back to her maiden name, as if he was to be erased entirely from existence.
‘Thisldo,’ he snorted to himself. Now it didn’t do at all and even Sparky treated him like a stranger. Sparky was an indeterminate kind of lurcher that had chosen Wendy as its alpha male even though Vince was inordinately fond of it and was the one who had usually taken it for walks or cleaned up its crap or fed it its expensive food – which in retrospect seemed of a higher quality than the tins of supermarket-own-brand stew he had been reduced to buying nowadays for himself when he wasn’t dining on fish and chips. He should probably just buy dog food for himself instead of the stew, it couldn’t be any worse. He missed the dog more than he missed Wendy. In fact, he was surprised to find that he hardly missed Wendy at all, just the home comforts she had taken away from him. A man bereft of his home comforts was just a sad and lonely bastard.
Vince had still been in the Signals when he met Wendy, at an Army mate’s wedding down South. He’d had a Balkans suntan and newly promoted sergeant’s stripes and she had giggled and said, ‘Oh, I do like a man in uniform,’ and two years later they were at their own wedding and he was on civvy street, working for a telecoms firm, first as an engineer, running the IT, before moving into the suit-and-tie end of the business, in management, ten years ago. He thought of Craig, the lifeboatman, and wondered now if it had been the uniform all along that she had liked about Vince and not the man inside it.
‘My mother warned me not to marry you,’ she had laughed as, exhausted and drunk, they had stripped themselves of their wedding finery in the bedroom of the hotel where they had their reception – a lacklustre venue on the outskirts of Wendy’s home town of Croyden. As a seductive prelude to their first night as a married couple the words didn’t augur well. Her mother – a mean-spirited, lazy widow – had indulged in a disproportionate amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Wendy’s choice of husband. Sitting in the front pew in an appalling hat, she may as well have been at a funeral from her aspect of grief. In subsequent years she had strived hard for the award for ‘Most Critical Mother-in-Law in the World’. ‘Yeah, competition’s stiff for that one,’ Tommy said, although he had managed two marriages with no mother-in-law in sight. It was a huge relief for Vince when she died a couple of years ago from a lingering cancer that transformed her into a martyr in Wendy’s eyes.
‘If only I’d listened to my poor mother,’ Wendy said as she itemized the belongings he was allowed to take with him. Wendy who was getting so much money in the settlement that Vince barely had enough left for his golf-club fees.
‘Best I can do, Vince,’ Steve Mellors said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Matrimonial law, it’s a minefield.’ Steve was handling Vince’s divorce for him for free, as a favour, for which Vince was more than grateful. Steve was a corporate lawyer over in Leeds, and didn’t usually ‘dabble in divorce’. Neither do I, Vince thought, neither do I.
Vince shared history with Steve Mellors – they had gone to the same school, in Dewsbury, home of the coarse recycled-wool industry known as shoddy. Appropriate, Vince thought, considering how his life was turning out. After school their paths had diverged markedly. Steve’s took him to Leeds to do Law while Vince went straight into the Army, at his father’s behest, ‘to get a decent trade’. His father owned a plumbing business, he was the business, he’d never even taken on an apprentice. His father was a nice man, a patient man, who never raised his voice to Vince or his mother, did the football pools every Friday and came home with a box of cakes every Saturday from the baker’s next to his shop. Lemon squares and sponge drops. Never grumbled. It was in the genes.
His father hadn’t encouraged Vince to follow him into the plumbing business. ‘You’ll spend half your life up to your elbows in other people’s shit, son.’ And Vince had indeed got a trade, the Signals was good for that. He had rarely been deployed to the heart of a conflict. Ulster, the Gulf, Bosnia – Vince had been behind the lines in a support unit, fiddling with technical equipment or trying to resuscitate ailing software. It was only in his last deployment in Kosovo that he had gone in with the front-line troops and come under fire. He had tasted conflict and he hadn’t liked it. Hadn’t liked the fallout from war either – the women, the children, even the dogs, who constituted ‘collateral damage’. After Kosovo he decided to get out of the Army. Unlike a lot of the other guys, he had never regretted leaving.
Steve Mellors had always been the clever, popular one. It had been enough for Vince to be his sidekick and let some of Steve’s self-assured aura rub off on him. Watson to Steve’s Holmes, Tenzing to his Hillary. In Vince’s animal lexicon, Steve would have been a young lion in those days.
They used to ride their bikes home from school together along the canal towpath, a lot of larking around, until one day Steve hit a bump, went head over handlebars, banged his head on the dried-mud towpath and toppled into the water. Slipped under. ‘Just like that,’ Vince said later in the retelling of the incident, doing his best Tommy Cooper impression. He used to be the class jester. Something that was hard to believe now.
Vince waited for Steve to resurface, to swim to the bank – he was a good swimmer – but there was nothing, just a few bubbles rising to the surface as if it was a fish down there, not a person.
Vince jumped in the canal and pulled his friend out. He laid him down on the bank and after a couple of seconds half the canal gushed back out of his mouth and he sat up and said, ‘Fuck.’ He had a bruise the size of a duck egg on his forehead from where he had knocked himself unconscious, but apart from that he seemed fine.
It hadn’t seemed a particularly heroic act to Vince at the time, he’d done a life-saving class at the local swimming pool so he was hardly going to stand there and watch his friend drown. It made a bond between them (saving someone’s life would do that, he supposed) because they had stayed in touch, however tangentially – sporadic Christmas cards mostly. They both, in their different ways, shared the trait of loyalty – not always a good thing, as far as Vince could see. He had been loyal to Wendy, he had been loyal to Sparky. Had they been loyal to him in return? No. And, sadly, he had no doubt that Ashley would take her mother’s side in the divorce. They were two peas in a pod.
He had reconnected in person with Steve at a school reunion a couple of years ago, a hellish event that confirmed Wendy’s belief that men didn’t grow up, they just got bigger. And balder. And fatter. Not Steve though, he had the look of a thoroughbred who groomed himself every morning, nothing shoddy about Steve. ‘Are you keeping your portrait in the attic then, Steve?’ someone said at the school reunion. He laughed the comment off (‘Tennis and the love of a good woman’) but Vince could see that he preened himself a little at the compliment. Girls and money – those had always been the twin targets that Steve had aimed for, Vince supposed, and it seemed he had hit bullseyes in both.