The Two of Us - Softcover

Andy Jones lives in London with his wife and two little girls. During the day he works in an advertising agency; at weekends and horribly early in the mornings, he writes fiction. Follow Andy on twitter: @andyjonesauthor

The Two of Us PROLOGUE

PEOPLE ASK: How long have you been together? How did you meet?

You’re sitting at a table, fizzing with the defiant ostentation of new love (Is that what it is? Is it love already?), laughing too loud and kissing more enthusiastically than is de rigueur in a quiet country pub, and someone will say, Put her down! Get a room! You make a lovely couple, or some variation on the theme.

You’re surreptitiously nibbling your new girlfriend’s earlobe when a voice says, They serve crisps at the bar, you know. If you’re hungry. You turn and apologize to the large middle-aged lady at the adjacent table. She laughs good-naturedly, then shuffles her chair sideways so she is now sitting at your table. And here it comes . . .

So, she says, how did you two lovebirds meet?

In the last week, we must have been questioned about the particulars of our romance on half a dozen separate occasions. On other nights and afternoons we have told increasingly pale shades of the truth: We work together; Blind date; I cut his hair; Book club. But now, emboldened by wine and routine, Ivy leans forward and says in a conspiratorial voice: It’s awful; I’m best friends with his wife. But—she places her hand on top of mine—you’re a woman of the world, you know what it’s like. When you have to have something?

The woman—ruddy-faced and emanating a warm aroma of cheese and onion—she nods, says, Aye, well, yes, you have a nice . . . you know . . . night, and shuffles back to her own table.

Because the truth is, the truth is too long a story to tell a stranger in a country pub when all you want to do is finish your drink and get upstairs to your room. And anyway, how we met is academic—you don’t ask how the rain began, you simply appreciate the rainbow.

People talk about chemistry, and perhaps it was—something molecular, something transmitted, something genetic. Whatever the mechanism, there was something about Ivy that immediately made me want to not sleep with her. And what higher compliment can a scoundrel pay a lady? Not that it matters, but at the time I was going through a phase where I wasn’t looking for any kind of commitment beyond those to personal hygiene and discretion. I had broken up with my girlfriend six months earlier, I was young, I was free, I was . . . well, let’s just say I was being generous with my affections. Then along came Ivy with her handsome, uncontrived beauty, trailing pheromones, nonchalance, and easy humor.

Not that any of that matters. What matters is that we met. And what matters most is what happens next.|The Two of Us CHAPTER 1

IT’S THE last week in August and my sunburn prickles as Ivy steers the car into the street I grew up in, towards the house I came home to the day I was born.

When the radio is on Ivy sings; when it’s off she whistles, and she whistles badly. I almost recognize the tune, but can’t quite grasp it. The left side of her face is scarred from a childhood accident—the lines are white now, but the grooves and misalignments are stark—and when she whistles the scars pinch and deepen. Whether this affects her whistling or not, I don’t know, but if her singing is any indication, she’s simply tone deaf and entirely oblivious of the fact. We’ve been together less than three weeks so it’s a little too early to be drawing up a list of “things I like most about my new girlfriend,” but if I were so inclined, Ivy’s careless tuneless whistling would be up there in the top eleven. And whilst we’re on the subject of sequencing, it’s also a bit premature for meet the family. But here we are, about one minute from lift-off.

“Brace yourself,” I say.

Ivy turns to me: “Hnn?”

“The family,” I say. “They’re a bit . . . you know.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ve done this before. Loads of times, hundreds of times.” And she smiles to herself.

“Funny. Anyway, it’s not you I’m worried about.”

We round a corner and Dad’s house comes into view.

I’ve never paid attention to the way my childhood home looks; it’s been there as long as I’ve been alive and I scrutinize it no more than I do my feet—probably less. But today, with Ivy beside me, I’m aware of its ordinariness, banality, of everything it isn’t. Victorian houses—like the one I live in in London—age improves them, bestows character and integrity; but houses like this, built in the sixties and seventies, they age like old factory workers made ugly with time and effort and smoke and disappointment. Maybe it’s not my sunburn prickling; perhaps it’s my inner snob. I look at Ivy, and she glances back, raises her eyebrows as she pulls up in front of number 9 Rose Park.

And forget the house, wait till she gets a load of the family.

They must have been lying in wait because before Ivy has a chance to kill the engine, my father, sister, brother-in-law, and twin nieces pour out of the front door. I wave, grin, mouth “Hiya” through the windscreen, but no one is looking in my direction. They line up in the middle of the road, faces lit with excitement as Dad opens Ivy’s door as if she’s some kind of dignitary. The twins, Imogen and Rosalind, are only ten years old, so I can forgive them dancing impatiently on the spot and jostling to get a better look at my girlfriend (it does feel good to say: girlfriend), but my sister and Dad have a combined age of almost one hundred, and they’re behaving like imbeciles. And then it comes to me what Ivy was whistling: “It Must Be Love.” She climbs out of the car and straight into a bear hug from my dad. I grimace an apology as he lifts her off her feet, and Ivy either winks or winces in return—but with her face squashed against my old man’s neck, it’s hard to tell which.

As I slip unnoticed from the car, it occurs to me that I may have misidentified Ivy’s whistling. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced it was “House of Fun” or possibly even “Embarrassment.” Whatever it was, it’s definitely Madness.

By the time the welcoming party gets off the road and into the house, I’ve hauled the bags out of the boot and upstairs, taken a pee, boiled a kettle, and made a pot of tea.

“Tea’s in the pot,” I say as everyone troops into the kitchen.

“Have we got any wine?” asks Maria.

“I assume champagne will be okay?” says Dad, opening the fridge with an excruciating flourish.

“Wow,” says Ivy.

“Well,” says Dad, “special occasion, isn’t it. Get the glasses, son.” And he steers Ivy into the living room.

Maria hangs back to help me rinse the dust from five champagne glasses. “Seems nice,” she says, smirking.

“She is. No Hermione?” I say, heading off the inevitable (What does she see in you?) sarcasm from my big sister.

Maria wasn’t quite sixteen when she gave birth to my eldest niece. Mum had been dead less than a year, and baby Herms played a big part in our collective healing. For the first six years of her life (until Maria met and married Hector) I was, I suppose, more like a father than an uncle to Hermione. And more than a decade later, I continue to think of her more as a daughter than a niece.

“Hot date,” Maria says.

“You’re kidding! What’s he like?”

Maria shrugs. “Better than the last shit bag.”

“That’s not hard. I was hoping she’d be here.”

“You’re no match for new love,” Maria says.

“Some might beg to differ,” I say. “Come on, let’s save Ivy from Dad.”

When we get through to the living room, Dad has already got the family albums out. This is the first time I have ever brought a girl—let alone a woman—home, and I guess everyone has been waiting too long to do all the things you do in these situations. So I sip my champagne and take my humiliation like a man as they laugh at my hair, clothes, and bare backside through the ages. My girlfriend of nineteen days tilts her glass in my direction, smiles a coy smile, and winks.

Both Ivy and I work in film production (commercials in my case, everything you can think of in hers), which means we are essentially freelance. For our first four days together we didn’t leave Ivy’s flat. Nothing was explicitly said, but we seemed to arrive at a psychic agreement not to venture outdoors until it became unavoidable. Because we understood (and understood that each other understood) that after the bubble bursts there’s no returning to the intimate stupid collusion of the First Days. When provisions ran low we drank our coffee black, picked mold from the last of the bread, and ate toast with holes. We dined on eggs and biscuits, eggplant and mayonnaise sandwiches, and pasta in chicken-soup sauce. Ivy read while I watched American detective shows on her crappy portable TV; we played Monopoly, Scrabble, and Snap, and got drunk on wine, then vodka, and finally a bottle of semicrystallized booze of unknown origin. We resisted anything more practical than ordering pizza, instinctively knowing that deliverymen fit the romantic script only if they drive mopeds and not supermarket lorries. The pin came in the form of a job, with Ivy booked to work on a pop promo all day Friday. On her way to the shoot she dropped me—and a bagful of her clothes—at my flat, and we kissed good-bye with the kind of fervor normally reserved for airports. Work took up most of the following week, but we spent every night together, sometimes meeting in a restaurant, other times in bed. On our second Saturday we packed my Fiat 126 and drove with no specific agenda or destination, spending nights in the New Forest, Cotswolds, Yorkshire Dales, and Peak District. We walked, ate, drove, drank, and missed breakfast every morning. Yesterday I realized we were less than a two-hour drive from my dad’s house and I was in too good a mood not to visit. Ivy and I must have driven more than five hundred miles in the last week—singing to the radio, Ivy feeding me M&M’s from the passenger seat, me feeding her Skittles when we switched—but there was something different on the drive here today. I can even identify the point at which the atmosphere changed.

We stopped at a small village for a snack and a walk around the shops; Ivy went to Boots for “toothpaste and stuff” while I paid a visit to the local Tesco. We met back at the car, Ivy with a bagful of toiletries, me with a bagful of ingredients and clinking bottles. And from that point forward something was . . . off. Nothing glaringly obvious, but Ivy was definitely more subdued. She sang with less gusto, didn’t play I spy, didn’t squeeze my knee with the absentminded affection I have come to crave. Maybe she was apprehensive about meeting the family. And, witnessing the current inquisition, who could blame her?

Dad wants to know where Ivy’s parents live, what their names are, do they go to church; Hector asks if makeup artists earn a lot of money, does she have an accountant, does she have a Web site, has she ever met Madonna; the twins want to know does she have any sisters, any brothers, any pets, does she prefer cats or dogs, would she rather be a mermaid, a fairy, or a princess; Maria wants to know where Ivy bought her cuff links, where she has her hair cut, has she always worn it long, what does she see in me?

“Make yourself useful,” Maria says, waving an empty glass in the air.

I throw my head back and sigh. “I just sat down.”

“You’ve been sitting down for three hours,” Dad says. “Go on, stretch your legs.”

I make a big show of hauling myself to my feet and out of the room, huffing and muttering under my breath. It’s not that I begrudge my family another drink or an audience with my girlfriend, but the truth is I know very little about the woman I’m very much in love with and I’m as eager for answers as the rest of my family. I know she prefers cider to beer, her favorite pie is chicken and leek, and she snores when she drinks too much; I know her hair smells of coconuts, and her breath smells like hell in the morning; I know she fell through a glass coffee table when she was eight years old and her favorite sweets are Skittles. But there is so much I don’t know—her favorite Beatle; the name of her first pet, boyfriend, or record; I don’t even know her middle name, for God’s sake. And for some reason, I’m particularly interested in where she stands (so to speak) on fairies versus mermaids.

When I return with a bottle of wine, everyone (Dad and Hector included) is listening with rapt attention as Ivy describes the best way to shape the tip of an eyeliner pencil.

“What time we eating?” asks Maria.

“I’m starved,” says Hector.

“What we having?” ask the twins.

Everyone turns to me, and I shuffle again from the room, grumbling about slavery, presumption, and ingratitude.

I’ve chopped four chicken breasts, three onions, two chilies, six red peppers, half a bulb of garlic, and have eaten at least a third of a smoked chorizo when Dad walks into the kitchen.

“Need any help?”

“I’m nearly done,” I tell him.

“So,” Dad says from the fridge doorway, “this is unexpected.”

“I’ll say.”

“Here,” he says, placing a glass of wine beside the chopping board.

“Cheers.” I take a sip, and then nod in the direction of the living room. “And?”

“You could have done worse,” he says, smiling.

“Oh, I have,” I say. “Christ, have I.”

Dad rolls his eyes with resigned, long-suffering affection. He teaches religious education in the school I went to almost twenty years ago, and attends Mass anywhere between two and five times a week—he’s the next worst thing to a priest.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Do it again and I’ll pray for you.”



We’re elbow to elbow around the small dining table, but it’s a cozy, intimate squash as we cycle through the old anecdotes and make our way through several bottles of wine. I’ve been separated from Ivy, who is now flanked by Dad and my sister. And whilst I would rather have Ivy at my side than across the table, it does give me the opportunity to observe her as she entertains and indulges my family—laughing at their jokes, listening to their stories, and jumping firmly aboard the let’s-take-the-piss-out-of-William bandwagon. And my family is giddy with doting affection, competing for Ivy’s attention, attempting to trump each other’s gags, boasts, and revelations. I extend my leg beneath the table and run it up the inside of what I assume is Ivy’s shin. Maria flinches, striking the underside of the table with her knee and making the cutlery jump.

“What the hell are you playing at!”

“Cramp,” I say, and Maria looks at me like I’ve come unhinged.

“What are you up to?” Ivy says.

“Nothing. Stretching.”

Ivy narrows her eyes at me. “Were you”—she turns to Maria—“was he playing . . . footsie?”

Reflexively I glance in my dad’s direction, but he is apparently fascinated by the pattern on his plate.

“What’s footsie?” asks Imogen, the elder of the twins by twenty minutes and always the most inquisitive.

“Never you mind,” says Maria.

“Something naughty boys do,” says Ivy, earning a chuckle from the twins.

“I was stretching!”

“Stretching credibility,” Ivy says, and Hector all but claps at this display of Wildean wit.

I keep my feet to myself for the remainder of the meal. And I come within a forkful of making it through to coffee without further incident.

We’re eating dessert (the room is silent for a rare moment as everyone savors their cheesecake) when Dad announces: “By the ways, William, I’...