by Wendy Holden
That was the easy bit. Then she had had to compose a pithy description in twenty-five words. She should be good at it after years of writing catalogue copy to length.
London girl looking for thoughtful guy. Into reading, music, country walks . . .
Nell paused after this first attempt. Did it make her sound boring? Would it attract men in bottle-bottomed specs obsessed with Wagner? And where had the country walk bit come from anyway? It had sort of just slipped in.
She tried again. Chic city chick seeks cool guy. I’m beautiful, clever and I like champagne.
That was the other extreme – too brassy and boastful. Would a compromise work? Chic city chick seeks cool guy. I’m into reading, music, country walks . . .
Picking the right image to post online took almost as long as the personal statement. Other women on the site had a black-and-white crop of just their lips, or a come-hither, much-mascara’d lowered eyelid.
Nell scrolled through her computer photo library and found one of herself in a white shirt, her make-up minimal and her pale hair drawn back into a ponytail. It gave her the faintly clinical look of an assistant at an Estee Lauder counter, but hopefully had a bit of restrained glamour about it as well.
Having joined Elite Connections, Nell resisted the temptation to log on for the whole of the first day. Fortunately she had an excuse to be out, a client meeting of real-life people for once. It was a school furniture supplier in Kennington, but Nell threw herself into the interaction all the same. She returned clutching armfuls of product information, her mind stuffed with the details of desks and adjustable chairs.
Armed with a stiff gin and tonic, she logged on to Elite Connections and gasped. The page was black with the bold type of unopened messages; more were pinging in even as she watched. She had received over sixty replies.
Her initial feelings of nervous, flattered relief faded as she realised that many responses were generic, from men who presumably mailed all the women on the site. Having removed these, and the ones from SexBeast and TightBuns, Nell was left with around fifteen with sufficiently inoffensive online tags and personal statements to qualify them – in greater or lesser degrees – for inclusion on the possibles spectrum. She then did a further edit, deleting all replies with emoticons. What self-respecting guy used winking smiley faces in a pick-up line?
This left only one contender. OutdoorsGuy.
His picture was tiny and blurry, but he seemed to have dark hair and a broad smile. Single, 30s, financially comfortable and bookish. Into music and walking at weekends, went his description. There was nothing else. After pondering every syllable, Nell decided he sounded just what she was looking for. A confident personality, comfortable in his own skin.
She emailed him, and was amazed when a reply came straight back. Hey there. Let’s meet.
Nell wasn’t sure about the Hey there. A bit glib? On the plus side, he didn’t waste time. Great, she replied.
How about Wednesday? immediately suggested OutdoorsGuy.
He was keen. Because he was desperate? Or because he had instantly spotted her own worth and value?
She messaged back. OK. Where?
Where do you suggest?
Nell pondered. Coffee was obviously safest. You could escape easily from a Costa or Starbucks if things went wrong. But wine always helped things along. Perhaps the champagne bar at St Pancras? It was where the original cyber dating idea had taken root. The spiritual home, as it were, of the whole enterprise.
She sent off the suggestion and waited. A reply came back.
How about Paddington, if you like stations? I’ll be working near there on Weds. The Apples and Pears at 6?
This relative tsunami of information sent Nell into a mental tailspin. Did he think she was a trainspotter? The Apples and Pears sounded a bit pubby, oh dear. And what was OutdoorsGuy doing near Paddington? Was he a ticket clerk? A newsagent? There was a hospital there, St Mary’s. Perhaps OutdoorsGuy was a doctor? Yes, that was possible. He had said he was financially comfortable.
Six it is, she replied. How will I recognise you? The Elite Connections picture wasn’t big. Perhaps he could wear his doctor’s coat, and a stethoscope.
I’ll be carrying a copy of All Smiles by Dylan Eliot. Why don’t you do the same?
Good idea, Nell replied. All Smiles was on her bookshelf, as it was on most people’s. It was one of those books that everyone had read, like One Day a couple of years before. She’d loved it. The author’s comic struggle to adapt, post-university, to life in London and launch himself as a writer had struck a chord with her, as it had with her entire generation of migrants to the metropolis.
So OutdoorsGuy was not only – almost certainly – a doctor, but a Dylan Eliot fan. He definitely sounded promising.
CHAPTER 4
Julian’s new club had a lot of terrible art in it, Dylan thought. Shapeless glass sculptures were dotted throughout the dining room, and Dylan and Julian sat beneath a vast gold canvas covered in thick oil-paint smears. It wasn’t clear what it represented.
On the wall opposite was a painting of a monumentally slaggish woman clad in a black PVC lace-up bodice, thigh-high, spike-heeled leather boots and dangling a whip. It reminded Dylan of Beatrice, who, at that exact moment, was stocking up on just this sort of wardrobe in Soho.
The thought filled him with fear rather than excitement. Since her latest return, Beatrice had become even more insatiable; she dominated – in every sense – his every moment during the day. Only when she was asleep was he free. And even then she contrived to have her legs draped over him, as if trying to prevent him getting away. He would lie there, trapped under the naked thighs of a stunning beauty.
All of which would have been fine, had the deadline for Charm Itself not been looming. And so Dylan had hit on the idea of writing at night. Having waited for her breathing to become regular – even asleep it had a rasping, rapacious quality – he would inch out from beneath Beatrice and creep downstairs. He would switch on his laptop and pound away.
The funny thing was, writing in these conditions worked better than during the day. Being half asleep made it easier, for some reason. By the time he had fully woken up, he had several thousand words under his belt. And so he would write without pause until pink and purple ribbons twisted in the pearly dawn sky. Only then, as the sun rose, did he switch off his laptop and creep back upstairs to where Beatrice – and her libido – would be stirring.
He was, as a result, permanently exhausted, but also making rapid progress. Charm Itself was now almost finished and one advantage of the London trip was that, unhindered, he might be able to get the final chapters done on the night train from Penzance. Then he could hand the whole thing in to Julian when they met.
These hopes had foundered late Tuesday afternoon when Beatrice – evidently suspecting him of going to the capital to meet another woman – announced she was coming too. She had found in the sleeper cabin’s space restrictions a whole new source of noisy stimulation and Dylan had emerged the next morning not only exhausted but unable to meet anyone’s eye.
Beatrice had come with him in the taxi to the club’s very door and Dylan had feared she might insist on coming to lunch as well. He felt he would be powerless to object if she did.
But fortunately Beatrice seemed satisfied when the girl at the front desk said Julian was waiting for him in the restaurant. She had kissed him a long, lingering goodbye (people had stopped on the street to stare); hailed a cab to Soho – about six skidded to an immediate halt – and arranged to see him later, at the station.
Now, Dylan suppressed a yawn and the urge to rub his eyes. The wine that Julian had ordered was shutting down his systems even as he sat there.
His agent was chatting to a table-hopper of which there had been a constant stream since they had come in. Some actress, Dylan gathered, staring down at h
is amuse-gueules so as not to be drawn in to the conversation.
Bruton Street was the type of place where lots of little bits and pieces preceded the actual meal. So far Dylan had had a parsnip crisp anointed with three dots of cauliflower foam and now he was biting into a tiny ice-cream cone filled with foie gras mousse. It was delicious, but odd. He would have been just as happy with a plate of spaghetti. But Julian would not have been seen dead in a mere bog-standard Italian.
The actress had gone but someone else was at their table now. ‘I loved All Smiles,’ a deep-cleavaged television blonde was gushing. ‘When’s the next book out?’
‘All in hand, my dear,’ Julian assured her from behind his glass of Puligny-Montrachet. He’d said the same to someone from Radio Four who’d gasped and said they’d like to put a marker down for Book of the Week.
The blonde sashayed off and Julian poked his teaspoon into his reduction of eel risotto. ‘You know, dear boy, you really should let me see the first three chapters of Charm Itself.’
Dylan shook his head. He was reluctant to reveal anything he wasn’t happy with. When the book was finished – and the time was imminent – Julian could see all the chapters then.
‘Yes, but you don’t want to lose it all at this stage,’ Julian warned. ‘Hit the wrong button or leave it all on the top of a bus. Authors do, you know. Emailing it to me is quite a good way of keeping it safe.’
But Dylan wasn’t going to fall for such an obvious ruse. ‘Sorry.’
‘Well if you insist. Just make sure you keep saving it on a USB stick.’
‘Of course I will,’ Dylan assured him. ‘Relax, Julian. It’s almost there, OK?’
Later, Dylan sat in the taxi on his way back to the station. Lunch had gone on for longer than he had expected. There had been various contracts to sign and even more interruptions from the media great and good. Then, after the coffee, his agent had produced a new cover for All Smiles. ‘Eve’s decided to re-jacket it to keep sales up,’ he explained. ‘Just in case you don’t deliver Charm on time, although I’ve reassured her it’s all in hand.’
The traffic outside the taxi window was not moving. They had hit some major roadworks, which was a bore rather than a worry. The night train didn’t leave until ten. Dylan cursed himself for suggesting to Beatrice that they meet back at the station. He hadn’t been thinking. If they met at six thirty, as arranged, they would have three hours to kill before they could board. Had they met in the West End, they could at least have gone to the first half of a show. Or seen a movie. Still, he could always go and sit somewhere and read the news on his Smartphone.
The other side of the glass screen, the taxi driver was muttering into his hands-free. The radio was on; two blokes talking, as they always were in London taxis, about Arsenal. Dylan had no interest in football; something he had explored at length in All Smiles, which was, in its way, the anti-Fever Pitch, describing the author’s efforts to avoid going to the Emirates on Saturdays with his Gunners-obsessed friends. He had imagined this would doom the book from the start but it seemed to have struck a chord.
The green-lit figures on the fare display were the only thing moving in the stationary car. The enormous amount would have given him a heart attack once, Dylan knew. He would have got out and walked, and wondered now if he should do so. But it was hot outside and the pavement was a maze of barriers, rubble and people trying to pick their way around it all.
From inside the taxi Dylan watched and wondered how he had ever lived in this city. Everyone looked so grim and exhausted; everything was so dusty and bright, with the sun blazing pitilessly off the same hard surfaces that amplified the drills and clangs of the endless construction works. London, Dylan felt, was never finished. But he had definitely finished with London.
He pulled the re-jacketed book out of his bag to look at it again. The new cover had been slipped over the old one to give an idea, but Dylan wasn’t sure he liked it. The original All Smiles jacket had featured a large, Rolling Stones-type grinning mouth which had stood out a mile in the bookshops. The new version was bold orange and white stripes, which was evidently expected to do the same job, although it was, Dylan felt, less specific.
He looked at the photograph of himself on the rear flap. Eve was still using the old one, the one with the beard. He’d shaved it off after moving to Cornwall; beards and surfboards hadn’t really gone together. It wasn’t just the aerodynamics; salt water had turned his chin into a mass of dry frizz that no amount of fashionable beard oil could tackle.
Now, looking at the unflattering great bush beneath his lips in the photograph, Dylan wondered what on earth had possessed him. Peer pressure, he supposed. Every young man in the capital had sported a beard at the time and there were fashion imperatives that even a literary iconoclast was not capable of resisting. But he’d managed to throw it off now. Shave it off, too. When a man was tired of London, he was tired of excessive facial hair.
In the back of the taxi Dylan rubbed his chin, on which the five o’clock stubble was coming through right on cue. Life without a beard was much easier. He wouldn’t be growing one again. Charm Itself would need a new, updated author portrait.
Dylan yawned. It was warm in the taxi and he was so, so tired. His lack of sleep overwhelmed him and he slipped into blessed unconsciousness. The next thing he knew, a Cockney voice was cutting into his dreams. ‘We’re ’ere, guv. Paddin’ton.’
He scrambled to collect himself, grabbing, just as he left the taxi, the copy of All Smiles that had slipped on to the floor. He paid and entered the station, clamping his book under his arm. Only once the taxi had driven away did Dylan realise that he had left the book’s new jacket in there.
CHAPTER 5
It was so easy if you were a bloke, Nell thought, standing before the mirror on her wardrobe door. You just chucked on a T-shirt, jeans, trainers, ran your fingers through your hair and off you went. She had tried so many combinations that the floor of her bedroom was a sea of scattered clothes. In the end, the only thing that felt right was what she had been wearing in the first place, the white shirt and jeans she sported to her bedroom ‘office’ every day.
The tube was crammed with tourists and commuters and was hotter even than usual. The train kept grinding to a halt. Hanging on to a sticky pole by the door, Nell felt her heart thump in her ears. She couldn’t be late!
Finally at Paddington, it took her a while to spot the old-fashioned station pub tucked unobtrusively at the back of the concourse. She walked towards it slowly, trying to persuade herself that the dirty decorative ironwork of its exterior had some sort of particular London character. But in reality she was wondering who on earth would arrange to meet here on a first date. Unless, of course, it was some sort of test.
Yes, that was it. OutdoorsGuy, being, most probably, a doctor, would be an altruistic type. If she was the kind of woman who cared only about expensive treats and outward show, a place like the Apples and Pears would soon reveal it. Well, Nell thought, pushing open the pub’s battered saloon doors, she would surprise him.
Dylan had chosen the tiny, dingy pub at the back of the station because he had at least three hours to kill before the train and it was the place most likely to be free of noisy people. He wanted to read the BBC news website in peace and quiet.
He liked the Apples and Pears. For one thing, it was a world away from the concourse coffee shops with their flat whites and extra shots. For another, it had definite atmosphere. It was a pocket-sized Victorian drinking hole, a piece of history which Dylan guessed had been built at the same time as the station for railway workers to refresh themselves in. The brass plates on the entrance doors had the soft, worn look of a century’s polishing, although no one seemed to have polished them recently.
Inside, dust motes danced in the soft light of the opaque windows. A padded bench of burgundy leather ran round the painted wooden wall. At the lit
tle bar, a drooping landlord was serving pints of lager to a row of skinny barflies on high stools. Dylan looked at the beer pumps and rejoiced at the lack of craft ales with witty names. That the Apples and Pears was a style-free zone was a relief after the Bruton Street club.
The barflies were friendly enough. They acknowledged him with unsteady gazes and slurred salutations. They might have been any age from twenty to sixty and, like the pub itself, seemed to have been left behind by the rest of the world. Dylan sensed that it would not be long before the Apples and Pears was swept away, refurbished to within an inch of its life and turned into an oyster bar or maybe another café full of baristas and laptops. He felt that would be a pity.
Having got his half-pint, Dylan went to the corner and sat down behind a small round table supported by a heavy wrought-iron stand. He placed on it the copy of All Smiles that he had been holding since emerging from the taxi. Then he got out his phone and sent a message to Beatrice, telling her where he was. Then he logged on to BBC News.
As the saloon bar doors swung shut behind her, Nell took in the brass rails and old-fashioned paintwork. Three drinkers at the bar were fixing unsteady, reddened gazes on her. She pushed aside the initial, ghastly possibility that one of them was OutdoorsGuy.
There was someone else, in the corner. Someone dark-haired looking intently into a Smartphone. With, yes, a copy of All Smiles beside him on the table.
OutdoorsGuy! She felt a rush of pure fear, mingled with pure excitement.
He was much better-looking than his picture on the Elite Connections website. His dark head was bent but his face, from here, seemed all cheekbones. He was wide-shouldered, evidently tall, and had well-defined muscles. His white T-shirt contrasted with his deep, healthy tan; he looked as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. Could there be any doubt that this was OutdoorsGuy?