by Isabel Wolff
“Oh no, I find it rather stimulating, actually.” And in any case we can’t all be English language teachers, can we? God this was awful—it was bad enough being abandoned by Piers without running into ghastly Pamela Roach in the ladies’ loo.
“Still in Stoke Newington?” she asked as she removed her huge, pink preppy glasses and reapplied her trademark blue eyeshadow.
“No, I’ve moved to Islington actually.”
“Oh. Doing very well for yourself then,” she said resentfully. And suddenly I remembered exactly why I had never liked her. This constant resentment, and the gatecrashing—not to mention the time I had accidentally left my beloved cashmere cardigan at her flat and it had come back two months later, stuffed in a carrier bag, worn to bits, and stained with black ink from the topless felt tip she had been carrying about in one of the pockets. I never forgave her for that. But persistent and pachydermatous, it took her seven years to get the message.
“Are you enjoying this evening?” she inquired carefully. By which I knew she really meant, “Are you having a better time than me?”
“Oh yes—yes,” I said. “It’s quite good fun. I’ve met some rather nice people actually. How about you?”
“Well, there are so few attractive men,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve met some very nice-looking ones,” I replied. Though unfortunately the one I liked the most has just deserted me for a gorgeous brunette.
“Well, I haven’t spotted any,” she insisted. “And I’m really not going to compromise. I don’t see why I should.”
I looked at her: spaghetti straps over Herculean shoulders; a strategically placed feather boa only half disguising the apparent lack of neck; the perpendicular line of her wide, square body uninterrupted by perceptible breasts or a waist; the large, pudgy hands and platelike feet, and I thought, as I always thought when we were at college, just who are you trying to kid? It’s strange how it’s always the least attractive women who express the most reluctance to compromise. And then I think of someone like Sally, and she says things like, “Who on earth would want me?” But the fact is, Sally is beautiful. And as for me, well my ambitions extend no further than Mr. OK-looking-bordering-on-the-almost-acceptable. God, I hope I find him.
“If you see any good-looking men, put them my way,” Pamela instructed me as she applied another layer of black eyeliner.
“Er, sure,” I said. “Anyway, it’s nice to bump into you,” I carried on mendaciously, “but I’d better get back to my table—I’m here with a friend.”
“Have you got a card?” she asked as she replaced her glasses. “I don’t have your new address.”
“Er—no, um—I’ll pop one in the post,” I lied.
“Keep in touch,” she called after me.
“Yes. Yes.” I won’t.
Phew. Phew. Damn. That’s the problem with these kinds of events, I reflected as I found my way back to my table. It’s such a small world—and that’s the pitfall—you could easily bump into someone you knew and that would be so embarrassing, so dispiriting, especially if you were feeling vulnerable anyway, being seen by someone you didn’t even like and it was ghastly . . .
“Tiffany?” Aaaahhh! What is this? What’s going on? Oh my God, I’ve been spotted again. Who the hell was this?
“It is Tiffany, isn’t it?” said this tall, handsome chap with gray hair and blue eyes whom I vaguely recognized.
“I’ve been trying to catch your eye all evening,” he said. “Jonathan de Beauvoir. Do you remember?” Of course. Jonathan de Beauvoir. We’d met at that drinks party in Drayton Gardens four years ago. He was terribly nice. He had a very pretty girlfriend then—what on earth was he doing here?
“I remember you very well,” I said. “We met at that party in Kensington. You were with . . . er . . . Sarah then, weren’t you?”
“Yes. And you were going out with that architect who was dead keen on golf.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I assume that’s over or you wouldn’t be here. I must say I didn’t think you looked terribly happy.”
“I wasn’t. In fact,” I said with sudden candor, encouraged by his kind expression, “I was miserable. He was unfaithful. And controlling. And chronically selfish, too. Luckily he dumped me—ha ha ha ha! What about you?”
“Well,” he sighed. “It’s a long story. I won’t bore you with it. But I’d just love to know how you are. Will you take a turn about the gardens with me?”
“Yes,” I said, jumping up and hoping that Piers would see me leaving the dining room with this tall, drop-dead gorgeous bloke. “Yes, let’s go for a little wander. That would be nice. It’s terribly hot in here.”
We picked up our drinks and headed off across the lawn. What a turn-up for the books, I thought to myself. Here I am with Jonathan de Beauvoir, the handsome auctioneer, and we’re walking along arm-in-arm under a star-filled sky in the grounds of a prestigious venue at a singles event. I already had a soft spot for Jonathan the size of a Louisiana swamp. He was completely divine! As we skirted the tennis courts and headed off toward the rose garden I could feel my spirits lift. The evening was turning out well after all. In the distance I thought I could hear someone shouting “Tiffanneeee . . . Tiffanneeee,” but perhaps it was only the wind in the trees.
“You see, I’m still incredibly fond of Sarah,” said Jonathan. He had his head in his hands and he was sighing heavily. “But I’m not at all sure I want to marry her, and so I don’t know what to do now. I just want to go on as we were.”
“Well, you can’t blame her for laying it on the line,” I said brightly, trying to mask my disappointment that the only reason he had wanted to talk to me was to get womanly advice about his girlfriend. “I mean, eleven years is a long time. Sarah’s thirty-five. So if you don’t want to marry her, don’t tie her up—it’s not fair.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to marry someone because there’s a gun to my head—it’s so unromantic.”
“But it’s unromantic for women to feel they’re with a man who won’t commit. You’ve got to try and see it from her point of view.”
“She gave me this ultimatum,” he explained. “And then she just—went off. Just like that. Didn’t even say where she was going. And I didn’t like it, so I decided to come to this singles party to see if I might perhaps fall for someone else. Of course I’m not going to,” he added. “It’s mad. I mean there’s absolutely no one here I even remotely fancy. Anyway, thanks for listening, Tiffany. You’re a brick. Now, what about you?” he added. “Did you go out with anyone nice after Phillip?”
“Yes, I did. He was an interior designer called Alex. He was very nice.”
“So what was the problem?”
“Well, the main problem was that he was a commitophobic infantaphobe, though obviously I didn’t know that at the time. And the other problem was that the only thing he wanted to do in bed was play Scrabble.”
“Oh. Oh I see,” he said delicately. “Didn’t that make things rather, you know, difficult?”
“Not really. We used a travel set with magnetic letters. It was fine.”
“Tiffanee—Tiffanee . . .” Suddenly the rose bushes parted and Kate appeared, a little distrait and slightly out of breath. “God, Tiffany, there you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Are you . . . ?” She glanced suspiciously at Jonathan. “All right?”
“Yes, of course I am. Kate, this is Jonathan. Jonathan, meet Kate. Shall we go back inside? Golly it’s one o’clock! No wonder I’m yawning.”
“Tiffany, I was so worried about you,” Kate whispered as we strolled back across the lawns. “You just disappeared—I thought you were being ravished in the bushes.”
“Unfortunately not,” I replied. “Shall we go now? It’s terribly late.” I waved at Piers, who was still wrapped around the elegant brunette on the dance floor, and then said goodbye to Jonathan.
“I will think about what you said, Tiffany,” he said earnestly as we collected
our coats. Then Kate and I drove back across London.
“It was rather fun, wasn’t it?” she said.
“Yes, it was. I wonder whether any of them will want to see us again.”
“Eat ’n’ Greet will call us if they do.”
At nine-thirty the next morning, I called Eat ’n’ Greet. “Hello. This is Tiffany Trott. Have any of the eleven men I met last night asked for my telephone number?” I inquired.
“Er. No. No, they haven’t,” said an assistant. “But you’re a bit quick off the mark. Don’t worry. We’ll let you know if they do.”
In the meantime I had a date with the stockbroker who had answered my personal ad. Out of 114 replies, I had decided to meet only three men—and he was the first. He was thirty-eight, single, did not play golf, and had no perceptible facial hair. Brilliant. He might do nicely! I liked his amusing letter—three pages long. It was very funny, all about his passion for backgammon (“though, as a stockbroker, of course I don’t believe in gambling”) and his detestation of golf (“as Mark Twain said, a damn fine way to ruin a good walk”). I liked his sense of humor and his photo was reasonably attractive, so we arranged a seven o’clock rendezvous at a West End wine bar. I got there first and sat doing the crossword. At seven-fifteen a man came up to my table and said, “Tiffany?”
“Yes. Are you Ian?” He nodded. It’s funny what your eye picks out when you meet a total stranger. He was wearing a rather cheap, baggy suit, which I disliked. And his tie was a garish shade of green. He just looked . . . undistinguished, I suppose. Medium height. Medium build. Medium brown hair. Medium brown eyes. Freckles and—horrors—a small nose, positively retroussé. The photo had been a very flattering one. What a dud, I thought. And he looked so young and inexperienced—like a little boy. Probably hadn’t had that many girlfriends. But if I was disappointed with him, his body language suggested that he was not impressed with me. Bloody cheek, I thought. Oh well. Better sit it out. At least have a drink. Rude not to. He ordered some wine and we started to chat. I told him about my work, he told me about his—working for private clients on the stockbroking side of a small merchant bank. I had a few pre-prepared questions about the FTSE and the Hang-Seng, so the conversation wasn’t entirely unsuccessful. But I was pretty bored and was just wondering how to exit in a diplomatic way when something really bizarre happened. I mentioned the name of my street and he suddenly said, “Oh, my nanny lives round the corner from you.”
“Your nanny? Oh, I didn’t know you had children,” I said. “Your letter didn’t say that.”
“Yes. I’ve got two, both under five.”
“Oh. You didn’t say you were married.”
“I’m not,” he said. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Divorced?”
“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “Widowed. My wife died.” Ah. Sharp intake of breath.
“How dreadful. I’m very sorry,” I said. “When did she . . . when did it happen?”
“Five weeks ago,” he replied. Five weeks!
“Oh. How awful for you, but isn’t it a bit . . . you know . . . soon to be . . . ?” My voice trailed away.
“Oh, no it’s fine, because she took eighteen months to die—she had leukemia—so we had lots of time to say goodbye. We were at school together, she was my childhood sweetheart actually. We were married for fifteen years. We married young.”
How could I just get up and leave after he’d told me that? I couldn’t. So I sat there for another two hours while he talked about his wife and her illness and what it had been like discovering that she was ill, and knowing that she was going to die, and the whole process taking so long, and his struggle to look after the children. And then, at ten p.m., he said he thought he ought to go. And so we said goodbye, both knowing that we had no wish to meet each other ever again. And then I went home and I cried. It was so depressing. So dreadfully, dreadfully depressing. Other people’s lives. Poor bloke, I thought. How terrible. What a tragedy. Poor, poor man. But then, as I dried my eyes, I thought, five weeks? What a bastard.
August Continued
“Five weeks!” I said to Lizzie. We were sitting in my kitchen the Saturday after my dismal date with the widowed stockbroker. “If I’d known he was so recently bereaved I would never have agreed to meet him. He should have said in his letter. Five weeks! How could he start looking for someone else so soon?”
“ ‘Thrift, thrift, Tiffany, the funeral baked meats etc. etc.,’ ” said Lizzie, drawing on another Marlboro Light. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so surprised. Men are heartless beasts when it comes to the Grim Reaper. Remember Jim Brown?” Oh yes. Jim Brown, our housemaster, who was publicly chasing wife number two while wife number one slowly shuffled off this mortal coil in a local hospice. Within a month of her death he had married again, his engagement announcement tastefully appearing in the same edition of the school magazine as his first wife’s obituary.
“Men have an entirely different attitude to death,” said Lizzie expansively. “As soon as wife number one has popped her clogs they pop down to the dating agency—that is if there was no one they fancied at her funeral. Whereas we women pine for years.”
“Decades,” I said. “Mind you, your mother married again quite soon, didn’t she?” Lizzie shot me a poisonous look so I quickly changed the subject. There are various things I know I mustn’t mention to Lizzie, and her mother’s second marriage is one of them. I’ve met her stepfather a few times—he’s rather nice, rather mild, rather, well, put-upon actually, a bit like . . .
“Martin’s being such a drag,” said Lizzie. “I’ve asked him to paint the shed and he just hasn’t done it. Keeps saying he doesn’t feel like it. That he’s too tired. But I said, ‘Well darling, I’m exhausted too, looking after two children and this house all day.’ And then he said, ‘But the girls are at school and Mrs. Burton comes every day. You can’t be that tired.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s not even as though you’re working.’ And I thought that was really below the belt, Tiffany, because of course I’m not working, I’m an actress, and he knows how devastated I was at not getting that part in Casualty.”
“But it was nonspeaking,” I said. “You told me you were going to be a corpse.”
“Yes, but it’s all work, you know. And I was going to be in shot and everything, and of course it might well have led to other things. Anyway, I said to him, ‘Don’t be so bloody unreasonable, Martin. You’re totally unfair.’ God, men are beasts, Tiffany—I really don’t know why you’re so keen to find one.”
Now I’ve always liked Martin a lot. He’s not that exciting or anything, but he’s just, well, terribly calm, and nice, and kind. Lizzie’s so lucky. He saw her in A Woman of No Importance when she was in rep at Worthing ten years ago, and he sent flowers to her backstage. I suppose he couldn’t help acting on impulse. Just like Seriously Successful, just like . . . where was I? Oh yes. Lizzie, at Worthing. Anyway, she was thrilled, he was loaded, and of course he had a lot more hair then. But I really hate it when she goes on about him, which she does rather a lot these days. But of course I never say anything about it, I just try and change the subject.
“No one from Eat ’n’ Greet has called me,” I said. “It’s been three days since the Sensational Singles party and not a peep. Big fat zero. I obviously went down like a lead balloon.” Then, strangely enough, the phone rang.
“Hello Tiffany, this is Mary Ann from Eat ’n’ Greet. One of the guys has asked for your number.” Hurrah! Social success. Who could it be? Perfect Piers? Doubtful, after his defection to the elegant brunette. Tipsy Terry? God I hoped not.
“Who is it?” I asked. “Tell me.”
“It’s Paul,” she said.
“Who?”
“Paul, the property developer. He was on your table during the main course.”
“He was?”
I had vivid memories of the poached salmon and puy lentils, but I couldn’t remember anyone called Paul to save my life. I cast my mind back to the Dul
wich Country Club. Nope. Paul in property rang absolutely no bells. But what the hell! A bloke’s a bloke, so I told Mary Ann he could have my number anyway and, later that afternoon, he called.
“Now, tell me, Paul, did we actually talk?” I inquired.
“Yes,” he said, a little stiffly, I thought. “We talked.” And then he said, “We also danced.”
“We did?”
“Three times.” Oh.
“That’s funny,” I said, “because I have absolutely no recollection of you whatsoever. I hope you don’t think that’s rude,” I added.
“Well, there were a lot of people there,” he said diplomatically.
“Yes, I know, and I remember talking to lots of different blokes, but my mind’s a complete blank when it comes to you,” I insisted. “I must have early on-set Alzheimer’s—what did you say your name was?!”
Much to my amazement, he asked me whether I’d like to have dinner with him later that week. I agreed.
“It’ll be a bit like a blind date for me,” I pointed out.
“Well, partially sighted,” he replied. “But bring your white stick, just in case, and please write it down in your diary so that you don’t forget to turn up.” Touché.
He suggested meeting in Shepherd Market at Le Boudin Blanc—one of my favorite restaurants. This got things off to a good start. And when I was shown to his table, upstairs, he did look vaguely familiar—tall and well built, with hazel eyes and large, sinewy hands. Now to me, hands are very important. They’re the first thing I notice after hair and eyes. They can make or break it for me. Seriously Successful had very nice hands—large, masculine and square. Phillip’s were quite attractive, strong-looking hands, but Alex’s were awful, very narrow, with exceptionally long palms, like a monkey’s, and attenuated, feminine fingers which he had professionally manicured every week. I didn’t like them. In fact they were a turnoff. But I did like Paul’s, so that was a good sign. And now I remembered who he was—he was the chap on my right who had been chatting to the pretty redhead in personnel while I was talking to Piers. And later, when Piers had deserted me, and before I met Jonathan de Beauvoir, Paul had asked me to dance. But my mind had been elsewhere.