‘It’s kind of great we’re getting to know each other like this before we meet,’ he said. ‘Shelley Winters said: “Whenever you want to marry someone, go have lunch with his ex-wife.” ’
‘Are you suggesting I have lunch with your ex-wife before I have lunch with you?’
‘No, I just think people give such an edited sales pitch of themselves on a first date, you don’t really get to see any of who that person really is.’
‘Yes, I suppose it will be too late for a sales pitch by the time we meet.’
Another week passed, thousands of messages, dozens of calls. He became increasingly fascinating to me and I wanted to know his thoughts on everything. There was no detail that was spared; I was seduced by the hair-splitting of our dialogue. On the subject of anything I was interested in, he had something new to say. Having the light of this man’s interest shine on me made me feel energized and new. There weren’t enough hours in the day to talk to David. I needed more, more, more.
Soon, texts and calls weren’t enough. We sent each other all our work. He sent me unpublished chapters of his new book; I sent him drafts of articles and screenplays. We told each other the things we wouldn’t know from talking and googling for pictures – that my nails were always bitten down from my anxious disposition, that his fingertips were hard from playing guitar. I watched short films he had appeared in with singular concentration; I thought he was a genius and told him so, writing down lines that stuck with me and shots that I loved and calling him afterwards to talk about them.
‘Go look at the moon,’ he said late one night as we were talking on the phone. I slipped my feet into my trainers and pulled a coat over my T-shirt and knickers. I walked to the end of my road and into Hampstead Heath. He told me about a wild-haired woman he’d once dated who lived in Highgate who gave him a thirty-second start on running into the Heath at night and then chased after him. They’d had sex in the woods, up against an oak tree. I sat on a bench on a viewpoint overlooking the city skyline, stretched my bare legs out under the light of the moon and told him about another bench I’d seen here that had made me cry when I read the tribute carved into it. It was on the meadow next to the Ladies’ Pond, where I swam all summer, in remembrance of Wynn Cornwell – a woman who swam there right up into her nineties.
‘It says: “In memory of Wynn Cornwell, who swam here for over fifty years, and Vic Cornwell, who waited for her.” He must have stood by the gate while she swam every day. Isn’t that beautiful?’
‘You know …’ he began to speak.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘No, go on, tell me.’
‘You’re just such a fascinating girl. You’re this wide-open book in so many ways. Why do you do all this petulant “I’m an island” stuff?’ he asked.
‘I don’t realize I do it, it’s not a conscious affectation.’
‘You might not feel like you can have that, but you can. It can all be yours if you want it.’
‘I can be moved by something and not know if I want it for myself,’ I said. ‘And I’m just a sap anyway. It’s like every year a cleaner comes in to hoover the channel between my heart and my tear ducts. One day it will be just one huge clear passage of disgusting, gushing feelings and by the time I’m your age I will probably cry at the sight of a leaf in the breeze.’
‘If you’re lucky.’
‘Sometimes the gap between the little faith you have compared to the unwavering faith of others is a very moving thing.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe you just have an unfillable void,’ he said with a gentle sigh. ‘Maybe no man will ever be able to fill it.’ I looked above me at the same side of the moon we both gazed at and wished on a star that I would go to bed that night and forget what he had said.
I was aware that I was investing huge amounts of time and energy in a perfect stranger, but I had every reason to trust him. I counted down the days until there was just air between us and in the meantime enjoyed this place of our own making; he was like a portal at the side entrance of boring, daily life that allowed me to slip into a magical technicolour world. If I had a problem, I asked him for advice. If I found myself searching for the end of a sentence when I was writing, I would ask his opinion.
‘Thank you for being more open with me,’ he messaged me one afternoon. ‘It’s sexy.’
Obviously, I would continue to do just about anything if a man I liked told me he thought it was sexy.
We regularly talked about how strange the intensity of our communication had been; for him it was completely new and entirely peculiar. I had never formed such an intense bond with someone I’d never met, but I was more used to the idea of chatting with strangers, what with my formative training on MSN and the subsequent adult years of online dating.
‘Isn’t it weird?’ he messaged me. ‘You and I have never met and yet – the places we’ve been! The realms of intimacy and tenderness and Sundays and laughter and music.’
‘I know!’
‘And we’ve woven it all out of invisible energy. Only using pixels.’
‘We’re magicians.’
‘Look what we are doing with these pixels,’ he wrote. ‘Bouncing each other off satellites.’
I barely slept the night before David landed back in England. He was going to drop his kids off at their mother’s house, drive to London and sleep at a mate’s house, then the next day we had our perfect date planned. The weather was set to be good; I was going to meet him on Hampstead Heath in the early afternoon with a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. India and Belle helped me pick an outfit – a blue tea dress and white plimsolls. I cleaned my flat. I got some good bread in for the inevitable morning after.
‘She means business,’ India observed as she watched me carefully remove the books from my shelf, clean the ledges and rearrange the books in an order of titles that I imagined he’d find most impressive (Dworkin, Larkin, Eat, Pray, Love).
But the night before our hot afternoon date, I had to go on a date. It was a blind set-up by a matchmaking agency who wanted me to write about them in my dating column. It was organized weeks before David and I had started our virtual relationship and at the time had made total sense – they needed the exposure, I needed a date and copy. I didn’t want to blow the poor guy off, so we arranged a very early evening drink somewhere central. I knew I could be home by nine.
‘Call me later, heartbreaker,’ were David’s parting words to me.
I didn’t turn out to be a heartbreaker at all – quite the opposite. Just as I’ve found with most set-ups, neither of us wanted to be there. He was still in love with his ex-girlfriend with whom he’d regrettably messed things up, while I was besotted with a man I’d never met. We told each other our respective stories. I told him to go to his ex’s house with flowers and tell her he’d never stopped loving her; he told me to go home and get an early night because tomorrow I was going to meet the man I was quite clearly going to marry. We left after one cocktail, got on the same tube home and parted with a hug.
‘GOOD LUCK!’ he shouted at me as the tube doors closed between us.
‘You too!’ I mouthed through the glass.
When I got home, I rang David and told him about the date. He had driven down to London earlier than planned and was sleeping on his mate’s sofa in a flat that was about two miles west of my flat.
‘Come round and stay here,’ I said.
‘What about tomorrow’s perfect date?’ he asked.
‘I know, I know, it just seems so silly, you being a ten-minute drive from me.’
We agreed to stick to the original plan, then five minutes later I looked at my phone and saw a message from him.
‘I’m coming round.’
I tiptoed out of the flat and down the iron outdoor stairs and there he stood on my silent street, with only the moonlight making out his tall, broad silhouette and the curls of his dark hair. I paused on the steps for just a moment to take him in, feeling like I h
ad jumped off a cliff and was about to hit the still water’s surface. I ran up to him, flung my arms round his neck and we kissed.
‘Let me look at this girl,’ he said, holding my face with his eyes intently darting around my features, as if memorizing me for an exam.
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s nice to meet you too.’ We carried on kissing, in the middle of my road in the middle of the night, as I stood on my bare toes on the tarmac, the twit-twoo of a suburban owl in a nearby tree. He pulled me into him and I pressed my face against his navy shirt, as rumpled as his curls.
‘You’re not six foot,’ he whispered into my forehead.
‘Yes I am,’ I replied, standing up straighter.
‘No you’re not and I knew you weren’t, you fucking liar.’
I took his hand and we crept up the stairs to my flat.
The next few hours passed exactly how I had imagined they would. We drank, we talked, we listened to music, we lay next to each other and kissed. I breathed in his naked, tattooed skin – walnut-brown and dusty from the French sun – and the smell of tobacco and the earth. I studied his mannerisms that a phone and a photo couldn’t catch; the fold of his eyelids, the way an ‘s’ slid through his teeth. He listened to me closely, he talked to me directly; I was open and trusting and marvelled at my ability to feel such intimacy with someone I barely knew.
‘Do you know what’s funny?’ he said, kissing my head.
‘What?’
‘You’re just like I thought you’d be. Like the kid in the playground who covers her eyes with her hands and thinks no one can see her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can’t hide from me,’ he said. I knew already that this was someone I would never be able to lie to. I knew I was fucked.
‘Are you annoyed we didn’t do the perfect date first?’ I asked as I transitioned into the dreamy, mumbling fallow field between consciousness and sleep.
‘No,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘Not at all. What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Meeting with an editor at one,’ I said.
‘I could come meet you afterwards?’ he suggested.
I closed my eyes and fell into an instant, peaceful sleep.
A few hours later, I was woken by a sound. David was standing at the end of my bed, getting dressed.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked sleepily.
‘I’m fine,’ he bristled.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a drive.’
I looked at my clock – five a.m.
‘What – now?’
‘Yes, I fancy a drive.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to give you my keys so you can get back in?’
‘No,’ he said. He leant down to the bed and kissed along my arm; from my elbow to my shoulder. ‘Go back to sleep.’
He closed the door. I heard him leave the flat, get in his car and drive off.
I stared at the white ceiling of my bedroom, trying to piece together what had happened. I was filled with a sour feeling of violent rejection. I felt it from my stomach to my throat: self-disgust, self-loathing, self-pity, squared. It’s how I felt all those years ago when I got that call from Harry.
At seven a.m., I crawled into India’s bed and told her everything that had happened.
‘It sounds like he had a freak-out,’ India said.
‘What about?’
‘Maybe it was suddenly too real. Too intimate.’
‘I mean, the man is an intimacy coach,’ I said. ‘That’s quite literally his job.’
‘Well, it might be a case of “Those who can, do …” ’
‘I still can’t believe this has happened,’ I said.
‘Whatever his reason is, he has a fuck-load of explaining to do today.’
‘But maybe he’ll never speak to me again.’
‘Surely not,’ she said. ‘He’s a father of four, surely he has more compassion than that.’
‘If I didn’t have the texts on my phone saying he was coming over, I would honestly think I just dreamt last night,’ I said. ‘I’ve been lying awake, torturing myself with these fragments of him; his eyes and his freckles and the tattoo on his chest –’
‘Oh, of course he has a tattoo on his chest,’ India said, rolling her eyes. ‘What is it?’
‘I can’t. The irony is too awful.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Some symbol thing that means respect to womankind.’
‘Jesus wept.’
‘He should get it amended with a footnote,’ I said. ‘An asterisk next to it. “Apart from Dolly Alderton.” ’
‘Are you OK?’ India asked, stroking my arm. ‘This must be a big shock.’
‘I’m just confused,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’
A couple of hours later, I received a riddle-like message from David.
‘Hey,’ it read. ‘Sorry if that was weird, a bit of an odd exit. It was so beautiful to see you, touch you – it sent me very inner, felt this chasm between the amazing intimacy we’ve created in the last days and also the opposite, not “knowing” each other.’ I watched him type and refused to reply until I got something that made a morsel of sense. ‘It sent me into some big questions. Fuck. I hope you’re not in pain, maybe you’re just “Whatever”. But maybe you’re weirded out.’ I stared at my phone, still unsure of what to respond. ‘I hope you didn’t wake up sad,’ he wrote.
‘I did wake up sad,’ I replied. ‘It’s not often I let people close to me.’
‘I know. I’m really sorry. It wasn’t an abandonment of you.’
I thought about the last call I ever had with Harry. How I begged him to love me; how I persuaded him through tears that I was good enough for him. How I listened to any wavering in his voice that would lead me to believe I could cling on to him desperately, my fingers turning purple from the grip. That wasn’t my story any more. That wasn’t who I wanted to be.
‘I don’t really understand what the above means but I’m fine to leave it here if it’s something you don’t feel comfortable continuing,’ I wrote.
‘I need to press pause and get my head straight when it comes to you,’ he replied. ‘I’m not saying it should be the end.’
‘I am,’ I wrote. ‘I have to press stop now.’
‘Shit, I’ve hurt you. I can feel it.’
‘It’s OK,’ I replied. ‘We’re both in weird times in our lives. You’ve just come out of a relationship, I’m going through all this analysis. But I have to self-protect.’
‘OK,’ he responded.
I deleted our conversations and call history, then I deleted David’s number.
As the days passed, I felt a combination of loneliness, embarrassment, grief and anger. I felt like an idiot; like a sort of frumpy female character on The Archers who gets wooed by a dastardly, beautiful stranger before he leaves, taking all her money. Friends exchanged similarly embarrassing stories to make me feel better, tales of being tricked into false intimacy with strangers. One of the editors of my dating column sent me an article called ‘Virtual Love’ published in a 1997 issue of the New Yorker about the curious new phenomenon of falling in love online; a first-person piece from a female journalist who began a phone and email relationship with a stranger. ‘I may not have known my suitor,’ she wrote. ‘But, for the first time in my life, I knew the deal: I was a desired person, the object of a blind man’s gaze … if we met on the street, we wouldn’t recognize each other, our particular version of intimacy now obscured by the branches and bodies and falling debris that make up the physical world.’
Two days after David left me in the middle of the night, the magazine came out with the piece that had originally led me to him. I had completely forgotten about it; but seeing it on the shelves of newsagents felt like everything had come full circle. I didn’t text him to let him know it was out, as I had initially promised in the message that started this disaster. I never spoke to David again.
My friends reeled in the aftermath of the encounter, the whole thing becoming even more absurd the further away in time it drifted. Sometimes, weeks and weeks after it all happened, we’d sit in the pub and India would suddenly put down her glass of wine and bark: ‘Can you BELIEVE that David guy?’ Belle contemplated reporting him for abusing his position of trust.
‘But who could you even report him to?’ I asked.
‘There must be some guru council, some sort of Equity thing where they qualify,’ India said.
‘Maybe we just call Haringey Council,’ Belle suggested. ‘Tell them there is a guru at large who is a danger to impressionable young women.’
Some friends thought he was just a misogynist who saw the challenge of a woman with trust issues, got what he wanted and left; a wolf in Glastonbury stall-owner’s clothing. Others, more generously, thought that he was less comfortable with the reality of virtual seduction than a millennial. I was quite used to chatting to people I hadn’t met and creating a rapport with them. Meeting them in the flesh for the first time was always jarring, but getting to know someone was just the art of closing that gap; that ‘chasm’ he referred to. That’s the entire premise of online dating.
Helen devised another theory: that he was going through a midlife crisis off the back of his break-up and I was nothing more than an impulse buy for his ego. I was a leather jacket or a fast car that he liked the idea of, but knew after purchasing that it would never work for him or fit into his life.
But mourning the loss of David would be like a child mourning the loss of an invisible friend. None of it was real. It was hypothetical; it was fiction. We played intensity chicken with each other, sluts for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves. It was words and spaces. It was pixels. A game of The Sims; a game of dress-up love. It was bouncing off satellites in a tightly choreographed dance.
Only now, after hours of dissection, do I realize who David was. He was neither a trickster, nor a walking mid-life crisis, nor a caddish Don Juan disguised in Birkenstocks and linen. He was the little boy in the playground who covered his eyes and thought no one could see him. But finally I could see him – because we were two of a kind; kids as bad as each other. He was lost and looking for a lifeboat. He was sad and he needed a distraction. We were two lonely people who needed a fantasy to escape ourselves. Perhaps, having twenty years on me, he should have known better – but he didn’t. I hope to never be complicit in a game like that again. And I hope he finds what he’s looking for.
Everything I Know About Love Page 21