The Woman Who Met Her Match

by Fiona Gibson

  I hover, staring at my phone like a fixated teenager. Perhaps Cecily was right, and Antoine is newly single and working his way through the list of all the women who’ve been in any way significant to him. Who would I have, if I was playing that game? Without David, there is literally no one. There have been others, of course – a few forgettables before I met him, then more recently Pete Parkin from the electricals department at work, with whom I had a brief thing about three years ago, until he left to take up a deputy manager’s position at Holland and Barrett. But he’d hardly feature on any list; in fact, I suspected we’d only got together because we were both lonely and ended up chatting at a work leaving do. We had absolutely nothing in common, and the sex, which happened just a handful of times – accompanied by the shrill squawks of his parrot in the living room – was a rather dismal affair.

  I moved a few months ago, Antoine replies. I’m still sorting through papers and photos, trying to throw things away. Do you find it hard to let go of things?

  Oh, yes. Our loft is stuffed with boxes and bags containing David’s possessions. His books, paperwork, numerous shirts with frayed collars that he refused to throw away: they’re all there, waiting for decisions to be made about their destiny.

  Once, I got as far as packing up a dozen or so shirts for charity. I was halfway to the shop when I glimpsed a faded blue one poking out of the bag – the one David always took on holiday and threw on over a T-shirt when the beach turned cool. I pulled it out of the bag and briefly buried my face in it, certain I could smell his sun-warmed skin and not caring whether passers-by thought I was crazy. Then I hurried home and bundled the bag of shirts back into the loft.

  That, Antoine types, is when I found pictures of us!

  I stare at my phone. Pictures of us? I don’t remember many being taken, and the only one I have from that trip is of Valérie and me, sitting rather unhappily on the edge of her bed. I am smiling tensely and Valérie is pulling off one of her socks.

  Really? I type. I am amazed you have any from that long ago.

  Yes, he replies instantly, it was lovely to see them. You know, I couldn’t believe you had travelled alone, all the way from Yorkshire, with that piece of paper your mother typed. You were brave. Anything could have happened to you …

  Something did happen to me.

  I thought you were clever, brave and beautiful …

  My heart seems to slam against my ribs.

  Look, here’s one of the pictures …

  My breath catches as a photo appears. It’s a little fuzzy, and at first it’s hard to believe it’s really us. He’s probably photographed the old print with his phone. But I remember it being taken now, by one of Valérie’s friends on a blisteringly hot day. Antoine and I are standing on the old stone bridge in the village, squinting a little – or at least I am – at the camera. He is looking at me, and his slim brown arm is slung around my shoulders, pulling me close. I have dreadful hair – yellowy highlights clashing against my natural brunette, the style verging perilously close to mullet – but I look so happy. Both of us do. You can see it clearly, shining out of our faces, even from a thirty- year-old faded print.

  Wow, I type.

  It’s lovely, he replies.

  Apart from my highlights!

  Highlights?

  Those yellow stripes in my hair …

  I swallow hard, poised to walk back into the store, wanting to remind him that his letters became rather blunt (‘Valérie learns karate but broke shoulder!’) before petering out altogether. I could tell him about my prowlings in the hallway at home, waiting for the postman, or the fact that I lied to Gail Cuthbertson, the mean girl at school, when she asked if I still had ‘that French boyfriend’.

  ‘Yes, if it’s any of your business.’

  ‘Let’s see a photo of him then.’

  ‘Don’t have any.’

  ‘Yeah, ’cause you made him up!’

  Of course I don’t hold grudges: not like my mother, who’s still prone to muttering about my father’s unwillingness to fix a dodgy plug – ‘It’s like he was waging a campaign to electrocute me, Lorrie. Like he wanted to shoot thousands of volts through my body!’ And they broke up thirty-six years ago.

  ‘Can’t you just let it go, Mum?’ I implored her the last time she dredged it up. ‘It’s a very long time ago and he’s safely on the other side of the world. No one’s going to get electrocuted now.’

  ‘Maybe Jill will,’ she muttered, with a trace of gleefulness.

  So, no – of course I’m not bitter about a teenage romance that fizzled out.

  I thought you had lovely hair, Antoine replies now.

  A busker starts playing a harmonica incredibly badly as another picture appears on my phone: the two of us again, this time lying on our backs in some grassy place – the goat farm perhaps – photographed from above. I guess his friend must have taken it. Of course, it was long before the days of selfies. My T-shirt is rumpled and slipping off one shoulder, and I am smiling broadly; that pouty photo face, the one all the girls do now, hadn’t been invented then. Even if it had, I’d have been too filled with happiness to remember to pull it.

  I stare at the picture, no longer registering the throngs of people all around because I’m just seeing me, a young girl madly in love for the very first time. My vision fuzzes as Antoine’s message appears:

  I have to tell you, Lorrie, it was the summer I came alive.

  Chapter Seven

  There’s no time to reply and, anyway, I haven’t the first idea how to respond. The summer he came alive? What does that mean? I hurry back into the store and find Nuala hovering at our counter.

  ‘Ah, here you are, Lorrie.’ She smiles tightly.

  ‘Oh, sorry, were you looking for me?’

  ‘No, it’s okay, you’re here now. Just wondering how things are going?’

  Helena, who’s helping a customer to select a blusher, throws me a quizzical look.

  ‘Great,’ I reply. ‘We’re all hitting targets, the day cream and serum are going especially well …’ Nuala knows all this because our sales are carefully recorded and monitored. In her late thirties, authoritative but approachable and chatty with the team, she usually just drops by to ensure everything is tidy and just so. She might share some gossip from one of the other stores, and one of us will touch up her lipstick. Today, she doesn’t seem interested in any of that.

  ‘Just wanted to let you know,’ she starts, pushing back her sleek black hair, ‘we’re having a bit of a company meeting on Friday and it’s really important everyone attends.’

  ‘Oh, okay. What’s it all about?’

  ‘Just a little thing for all the counter teams in the south-east. There’s a hotel booked for it. You’ll receive an email but I wanted to see you personally …’ She clears her throat and glances around anxiously. Although she’s my boss, we have known each other for long enough to have developed a sort of friendship. However, today she is emitting definite don’t-quiz-me vibes.

  ‘Is it a training session?’ I ask.

  ‘Um, no, it’s not training. Well, not exactly.’

  ‘Come on, Nuala. Don’t leave us all hanging like this.’

  She smiles tersely and her neck flushes pink. ‘Sorry, I can’t say anything else. It’s an early start, I’m afraid – 8 a.m. – and breakfast will be served. You’ll be back here by noon.’

  I glance at Helena, and then back at Nuala. ‘You mean we’ll all be there? But what about the counter?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says briskly. ‘I’m bringing in a team to cover things here. It’s only a few hours …’

  ‘A team? What d’you mean?’

  ‘Trainees. They’ll manage,’ she adds with uncharacteristic sharpness.

  ‘The counter will be manned by trainees?’

  ‘It’ll be fine, Lorrie. Trust me, please – oh, and you should all be in uniform for the meeting, that goes without saying …’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I murmur, glancing
down at my black La Beauté tunic with its white logo on the breast pocket. As if we’d turn up in T-shirts and jeans.

  Nuala swipes her trilling phone from her shoulder bag and purses her lips at it. ‘Sorry, got to take this.’ She steps away, hair half-covering her face, already murmuring into her phone.

  I look at Andi, an eager school-leaver and our newest recruit. She pulls a ‘what the hell?’ face, but there’s no chance to speculate, not with Nuala loitering nearby. Anyway, if something’s afoot, we won’t help matters by standing about gossiping.

  I approach a customer, inviting her to try our new, ultra-light foundation, and fall into easy chit-chat as normal. ‘You’ll find it’s as light as a BB cream, while smoothing out imperfections …’

  ‘Oh, I’d like to try that …’

  ‘Could you hop on the stool for me and we’ll see which colour gives the best match?’

  ‘Great,’ the woman says. ‘The thing is, foundation always looks orange on me …’

  Antoine flickers into my mind as I dab at her face with a cosmetic sponge. Antoine, with his orange-for-a-face profile picture, who reckons he ‘came alive’ in the summer of ’86.

  ‘Oh, that does look good,’ she exclaims, examining her reflection. ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘Great, would you like me to cleanse it off for you?’

  ‘What, and look like my knackered old self?’ She laughs, oblivious to Nuala who’s still lurking close by, barking into her mobile now: ‘Yes, they’ll all be there. Of course I’ve said it’s compulsory …’

  My customer trots away with her purchase, and I busy myself with tidying up my counter area, while trying to ignore a niggle of unease about all of us attending this meeting. The company is strict about holiday leave; many of our customers are fiercely loyal and expect to see a familiar face at the counter. In fact, I can’t remember a time when we have all been off at once.

  Looking severely rattled now, Nuala finishes her call and turns to address us again. ‘I meant to say, one or two counter staff might be asked to stand up and do a little talk at this, er, thing. It’s nothing to panic about—’

  ‘Really? What kind of talk?’ I try to keep my voice level.

  ‘Oh, you know, just a quick, spontaneous thing. The essence of what La Beauté is all about …’

  I study her face. Her pale blue eyes look tired, and her lipstick has worn away.

  ‘Any idea who’ll have to do this?’ Helena asks.

  ‘Honestly, I have no idea. But I think we should all be prepared, okay?’

  ‘So we should prepare, even though it’s meant to be spontaneous?’ I smile to show I’m fine with this, but Nuala’s mouth remains set in a tight line.

  ‘Really, it’s nothing to worry about. All they want to see is a real passion for the brand …’

  ‘Who’s they?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, just the head honchos, you know …’

  I frown, confused by her vagueness; I know most of senior management by name. Her phone trills again, and she waves quickly, her glossy heels clacking as she marches away from our counter, past clusters of perplexed-looking assistants from the other counters, towards the revolving front door.

  Andi widens her eyes at me. ‘That sounds scary. I hate public speaking. I always feel like I might actually throw up.’

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ I say, affecting a breeziness I don’t feel, ‘and it’ll probably be good for us, whatever it is. Just a little team get-together to keep us all on our toes.’

  *

  The upstairs room in the pub that Helena reserved for her birthday gathering has been double-booked. So we’ve been bundled in with a crowd of incredibly loud twenty- somethings who seem surprisingly inebriated, considering it’s only 7.30 p.m. Crammed around a too-small table, we all ooh and ahh as Helena opens her presents, enthusing over each one in turn. However, the larger group dominates, their choice of music pumping relentlessly from a speaker above my head.

  ‘He says it was all moving too fast,’ shouts a girl from the other party, inches from my ear. ‘And now I hear he’s moved in with that woman. You know the fat one who’s, like, thirty?’

  I glance around, and she casts me a look of disdain as if I have no business being here at all.

  ‘Oh my God,’ gasps her friend, flicking her tussled blonde hair. ‘The one with skirt up her arse, cellulite on display?’

  Helena’s sister Sophie catches my eye across the table and grimaces.

  ‘Yeah, don’t know how he can stand seeing her naked.’

  Our nondescript meals are brought by a glum waitress, and bear all the hallmarks of having hopped straight from freezer to microwave. I poke at my bland Thai curry, wondering when thirty was deemed ancient and whether I can get away with slipping off home pretty soon.

  The two girls are still positioned right beside our table where they are continuing their annihilation of this unnamed woman. ‘She must be at least a size fourteen,’ the blonde one remarks.

  ‘Yeah! God, it’s disgusting. It always amazes me how some women allow themselves to get to that size.’ I look down at my bowl, my appetite having waned, my curry watery and tepid. After our initial sterling efforts, our group seems to have given up on making ourselves heard above the din. Even Helena looks as if her spirits are sagging.

  As our plates are cleared, I reflect that, at some point, Mum stopped mentioning my ‘puppy fat’, declaring instead, ‘You’re lucky, you can carry off your size because of your height.’ Which made me feel like some vast ocean liner: strong, sturdy, reliable in high seas.

  More people are crowding into the room now, jostling our table and shouting over our heads. The waitress seems to have forgotten that we’ve ordered another round of drinks, and I find myself yearning to be spirited home to Stu and the kids.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Helena says in frustration.

  ‘Good idea,’ remarks Sophie as the bill is plonked on our table, without the extra round of drinks. As we divvy it up, I make my excuses for a quick exit and hug Helena and Andi goodbye. That’s one bonus of growing older; there’s no shame to be had in ducking out early.

  Liberated into the humid July night, I make my way towards the tube, finally getting a moment to consider Antoine’s ‘the summer I came alive’ declaration. How am I supposed to respond to that, and why is he telling me now? Perhaps he was just hit by a wave of nostalgia, as I am occasionally. Only mine tend to feature David and the children, the four of us together, on a holiday or at Christmas, or just lazing around the house on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, I miss him so much it causes an actual ache.

  As light rain starts to fall, I step into Tesco Metro where I select packets of chilli and lime rice crackers to satisfy Cam’s copious late-night snacking. Amy favours cheese – the pricier varieties, naturally – and it’s as I approach the dairy section that my mobile rings.

  ‘Hello?’ I reach for a wedge of Brie.

  ‘Hi, Lorrie. It’s Ralph—’

  ‘Oh! How are you?’

  ‘Great. Look, I hope this isn’t a bad time …’

  ‘Um, I’m just shopping actually …’ And didn’t I explain last Sunday that we wouldn’t be meeting again? I drop the cheese into my basket, confused as to why he’s calling at all.

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘Ralph, you did get my text, didn’t you? After our date, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he blusters. ‘Yes. Sorry. I’m just calling because, uhh …’ There’s some anxious throat-clearing. ‘I think I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Really? What for?’ The cake thing, he must mean.

  Feeling generous, I select the smoked cheese Amy likes, the one with the terracotta-coloured skin.

  ‘Oh … everything really,’ he says with an awkward laugh. ‘Mentioning Belinda, for one thing. I’m not sure what I was thinking. That’s not what one does on a date, is it?’

  ‘It’s okay to talk about your ex,’ I say lightly, ‘and I did ask. Don’t worry about it.�
� It’s slightly less okay to infer that I’m a cake-scoffing heifer, not that I care about that now …

  ‘… And going on about the art,’ Ralph continues. ‘Obviously, they weren’t your cup of tea, those wound paintings, the Thomas Trotter installations …’

  ‘Well, they were interesting.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. You must have found me a colossal bore …’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I say, firmly, making my way down the aisle.

  ‘You’re very kind, Lorrie. Anyway, what I wanted to say is, I was terribly nervous on our date. Does that sound pathetic?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s nerve-racking, this online dating business, strangers thrown together like that. But look, Ralph, I’m in Tesco, I really must get on and—’

  ‘The thing is,’ he interrupts, ‘I was pretty taken aback when I saw you.’

  I stop and frown. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really not like you appear in your photo …’

  ‘Aren’t I?’ Neither are you, Mr-dig-out-a-pic-from-the-90s!

  ‘No. I mean, your photo’s lovely, of course – that’s why I contacted you in the first place. But in real life you’re much more, er …’

  Oh, God, what now?

  ‘… You’re beautiful!’ he exclaims.

  I blink, wondering whether I’ve heard him correctly. ‘Erm … that’s very kind of you, Ralph …’

  ‘No, I mean it. I think I was rather bowled over, and when I’m nervous I sort of … oh God, this is awful, I am sorry, but I wanted to impress you, I suppose.’

  Something in me softens, and then I realise I’m doing it again. At the gallery it was poor, bereaved Ralph. Now it’s poor, nervous Ralph. I must get a grip before I find myself agreeing to another date just because I feel sorry for him. ‘Well, thanks for explaining,’ I murmur.