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