by Stella Grey
Once Andrew had drunk down his coffee, he packed up his things and came across, saying he hadn’t realized how late it was. He was going to the gym. “Core strength, weights, they’re the thing at our age,” he said. In response to this I expressed invented enthusiasm for the prospect of using machinery to improve my fitness, and he said I should join, and I said I would. (I had absolutely no intention of joining.) I began to realize that he was a fitness-oriented person. He asked me what exercise I did, and I said swimming and cycling (though the truth is that most days it was limited to walking an undemanding dog around the park). He asked what kind of bike I had and I said it was a silver and red one. He asked which pool I went to and I named the one I’d been to twice. The conversation was disappointingly pedestrian after the life-ambition-disappointment one, in which I’d felt we were making strong headway.
I told him—truthfully—that what I wanted was a dance exercise class, and he told me about the zumba classes that were held at the same gym, and added that he went to salsa classes, and I said that I love salsa—which is true, though I’ve never done it. He asked me if I danced, and I said I did, but not very well, and he asked what kind of salsa I did. I had no idea what he meant (there are different kinds?), so I said “just the standard kind” hoping there was a standard kind, and apparently there was, so that was fine. “You must come along to the class,” he said, “to the same salsa club I go to; it’s really good.” My heart pitter-pattered, and I said I’d love to. He said that I should join the beginners, probably; he was an intermediate, and loved it. (Oh. He wasn’t actually asking me to dance with him. We wouldn’t even be there at the same time.) There wasn’t any need to take a partner, either, he added encouragingly, because people paired up at the classes. It was obvious that I needed to become an intermediate dancer of salsa as fast as was possible. I went home and spent the rest of the evening following online tutorials on YouTube.
After that, aware that I might be on the point of becoming absurd, I had to administer a reality check. Andrew had been given an opportunity to follow up, to email, to suggest we do things outside the coffee shop, and hadn’t. I needed to slow down, I told myself sternly. So I stayed away from the café until the following Saturday. I made myself stay away, though it wasn’t easy. On Saturday morning, there he was, and we had a conversation about being middle-aged, and what it might be like to live in a non-English-speaking country at sixty, and then, quite unexpectedly, he began to talk about love. He said that he’d been alone for most of his life, and had never married, but that he thought it was time to change. I asked him why he hadn’t married, and he said the answer was that he wasn’t a very nice person. What makes you say that? I asked him. I thought he was joking. He said, “Because it’s demonstrably true.”
“But why, what have you done? You say ‘demonstrably’: is it other people who’ve made this judgment about you?”
“No, no, they don’t need to make the judgment,” he said. “It’s my own.”
“Have you behaved badly in your life and made mistakes?” I asked him. “We’ve all done that. That’s normal life stuff.” He smiled, shaking his head. There was something, something he wasn’t admitting to, but he wouldn’t say any more.
A few days later I sent Andrew an email. It said: “Trying to work but appear to be distracted. Only pretending to be working. If you are similar, message back and we’ll play truant together. A walk by the river? A bike ride? A glass of fine ale? Here’s my mobile number.” There was no response. I had a clairvoyant vision of Andrew in a panic, Andrew saying, “Jesus, what have I done, giving this woman my email address?” Andrew drew in his horns. He went into emotional lockdown. On Saturday morning he came into the café at a purposeful stride, got his coffee and went to the soft chairs where I used to sit, down by the window. I was up in what was now our usual corner, at a table getting varicose veins. He sat in an armchair with his back to me, and drank his coffee, and then he left.
Twenty-five minutes later, an email pinged into my phone. It was from him. It said: “Sorry—missed this yesterday; just seen it, far too late. Hope you had a lovely walk and beer.” Ah yes, I thought, the somehow managed to overlook your message gambit. I know that one. It was a shame because I’d gone out and bought a new bicycle. It sat forlornly in the apartment block hall, looking shiny. I’d spent three hours trying to teach myself salsa in my sitting room. I’d gone swimming, hoping to see him. I’d looked at fitness classes at the gym he goes to. I’d started sitting on hard chairs that I hated at the coffee shop.
The next day he turned up, looking solemn, and sat solemnly typing away at his laptop for a while, and then, his rucksack already in place on his back, he came and chatted to me, standing at my table. He’d just bought a book about working fewer more efficient hours. He’d just read another one on how to stave off aging, how to live a long time. “Course, it’s not always worth living a long time,” he added, laughing. “I think the key thing for me will be to leave the country and start again.”
The following day he found me sitting reading and—for once—not actually looking out for him. He was wearing a dark suit and looked good. “How’s it going with you?” he asked unenthusiastically, looking rather melancholy. I told him I was having trouble; my mind kept wandering from the book. (It was him that preoccupied me, though I couldn’t say or hint at that.) I asked him how his day was going. “Ask me later,” he said. He took his coffee and laptop bag to the other end of the room.
I had to stop what I was doing and breathe deeply. I was having the usual physical reaction. My heart bumped and raced. My cheeks grew hot. Either I’m deeply infatuated, I thought, or else I’m allergic to him. The idea took hold that I could probably make myself allergic. All I had to do was to push him into showing less friendly colors. What I needed, I decided, wasn’t to avoid him but to crowd him a little, in the hopes of panic and disdain. I needed to find the trigger to my own disdain. I needed to puncture the whole bubble.
On the way out I stopped to speak to him; his laptop was still closed on the table and he was reading a paper. I had a pretext for my visit: I had news. The friends had sold the French house he’d asked about, at a knockdown price. Apparently the market’s flat, I told him; there are serious bargains out there if you’re still interested in France. He nodded and we conversed in a stilted fashion for a few minutes. He made little eye contact and looked absolutely miserable. Eventually I was dismissed with the words, “Well, I must get back to my newspaper.” The message wasn’t a subtle one.
Jack thought it was even less subtle than I did. “The man thinks you’re stalking him,” he said.
Back in the Fray
AUTUMN, YEAR TWO
Next, I had a dating site message from someone called Bill. He was pictured on the site with his spaniel, and they had a similar kind of look—wild auburn hair, brown puppy eyes. “I know I’m not obviously a catch,” Bill wrote, “but I like the look and sound of you, and I’d like to have a conversation. You will note that I live 200 miles away, but distance is probably all in the mind. No, I know, it isn’t when train timetables are involved, but let’s have a conversation, at least.”
On Saturday, avoiding Andrew, I had coffee at another café with a girlfriend, and told her about Bill, who wanted us to meet halfway, after a hundred-mile journey each, and have a date that started with jumper-buying in Marks & Spencer. (An ice-breaking activity can work well, the gurus tell us.) I hadn’t yet replied to him because I couldn’t decide. “Go,” the friend instructed. “Why not? You could do with a break, and you always need a new jumper.” Cycling home, I realized that I could see Andrew walking toward me along the pavement, so I swerved to the left and screeched to a halt to say hello. He told me the bike looked new, and I told him it was, that I’d treated myself. He looked particularly alluring in the cool sunshine, in good jeans, a white shirt, a tawny tweed jacket. He’d caught a light tan and his eyes looked bluer.
“Nice jacket,” I said. “I do like tweed on
a chap.”
He raised his wrist and smoothed his cuff with the other hand. “Meeting someone, a woman, so I’m dressed up a bit.” My heart sank. He hadn’t wanted a date with me but he was having a date with someone else. It wasn’t that he wasn’t dating.
“Hope it’s fun,” I said, pulling my bike straight and preparing to ride off again. “Got to go, there’s a newspaper waiting for me at home,” I told him, riding off with a merry wave. I told Jack about this small incidence of payback, and he high-fived me by text message.
On Sunday morning at the café I ignored Andrew and sat elsewhere. I wasn’t in a great mood, and didn’t care whether he talked to me or not, so I took possession of a small sofa, got comfortable and began reading. I didn’t glance towards where he was sitting. A friend had advised me to appear to be passive in my pursuit. This works like catching a reluctant horse does: sit in the middle of the field with a rustly bag, and eventually it will come to you. Half an hour later, Andrew got a second coffee and came and sat at my table and asked me how I was today. I didn’t seem myself; was anything up? (He’d diagnosed the absence of my usual manic-squirrel manner as something wrong with me.) He touched my arm as he asked if I was all right.
We got talking about people who pretend they take exercise, and I admitted to being one of them. In terms of the nervous reaction, I seemed to be right back at square one. I got over-excited and gestured wildly. I could feel my cheeks burning. I could feel sweat forming on my upper lip, and mascara settling under my eyes. Water began to drip off the ends of my hair (this was how I got when excited, now that the menopause was with me). He took this in his stride, as usual, and said that he had to go; he was supposed to be somewhere. “Let’s have a proper catch-up next week some time,” he said.
How was his date? I asked him. Oh, he said . . . it was fine. It wasn’t going to be repeated, though, because they hadn’t found anything to talk about. Nothing to talk about? No marathon conversations, then, that spanned several top-up coffees and glasses of water, and took three hours, while laptops and deadlines cooled their heels? No lengthy conversations that covered a dozen topics and seemed to collapse time and space? I wanted to leap to my feet and shout. Could he see me, the woman he’d spent hours talking to, who’d told him she was online dating and had given him her mobile number? Could he see me at all? Was I visible? Was I not in the reckoning, not even there in the field from which women were chosen? Apparently not. We’d talked and talked—we’d probably talked for a dozen fervent hours, and we’d formed a real connection (I thought), and yet he couldn’t join that form of intimacy up to his search for a woman to share his life. It wasn’t the same order of connection, it seemed. I wasn’t a woman he could envisage being naked with. Andrew thought of me as a buddy, and that was that.
As I write this I’m casting my mind back to the few really stand-out conversations that I’ve had in my life with men, and I can’t recall a single instance in which that intellectual fit hasn’t led to attraction. For me, it’s the mental fit that’s sexiest. (Sapiosexual. Turned on by an intellectual connection. Apparently it’s a thing.) I was becoming steadily quite offended that Andrew made it so obvious he wasn’t interested. And no, I’m not saying that he had some kind of a duty to want to date me, and that he was a bad person for not wanting to. Obviously not. People are attracted to the people they’re attracted to, and there isn’t any point trying to massage the situation into something else. But when he’d complained several times about not being able to find a woman who’d also be a soulmate and friend and co-conspirator . . . it was hugely disappointing that my physical self seemed to be such a deal-breaker.
Having nothing to lose, it was time to push him a little. I asked him about his guilt; what was it that he felt guilty about? All sorts of things, he said; I haven’t treated people very well. In what way? I persisted. Just not very well, he said. It was clear that there were experiences he wasn’t ever going to talk about. Our conversation had been wide-ranging and it had also had depth, but there were nonetheless walled-off sections that were no-go zones. I went home wondering whether he thought me straightforwardly unattractive, and when I looked at myself in the mirror found I had a huge smear of newspaper print across my cheek, makeup that had sweated off and lipstick on my teeth.
Meanwhile, I’d had another email from Bill. “Let’s do this jumper-buying trip,” he wrote. “And let’s have lunch afterwards. It’ll be fun. Let’s both look at train times and figure it out. Maybe next weekend? The one after this? I’ve got football this Saturday.” Football, I queried—do you play? “I watch it,” Bill said. “I’m a live sports fan. I travel to see certain tournaments. Golf. Cricket in the summer. Wimbledon always. But don’t get me wrong. I like BBC4 science docs, and French films, and read history and other proper books. I’m not a goon or a jock. I’m an Oxford graduate and not an idiot. But I find going to sports events relaxing.” Bill was ten years younger than me, and thought my age was a plus point. He’d more or less given up going out with younger women, he said, because he kept finding that they were looking for sperm donors. “I know I live far away, and distance relationships are even more challenging than usual, but I’d like to buy a jumper with you, at the least,” he wrote.
Having avoided the usual café for a week, my return found me standing right behind Andrew in the queue. Nothing had changed. I felt the old unsolicited flipping over of the heart. “Hello!” he said, turning to me and beaming. “How are you? I’m only here for a takeaway coffee today, but let’s catch up soon.” He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting in twenty minutes. Good to see you though . . . er . . .” And then it happened. “I’m really sorry; I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Don’t worry about it a bit, Adrian,” I said.
This man I had so obsessed over: he didn’t even know my name.
Things got weirder. Four days later, an email arrived. “Finding work dreary. There’s a lot of sighing and internet distraction. Coffee! Soon?”
“Name the day and the time and I’ll be there,” I said. Andrew didn’t reply. I messaged him again. “That catch-up coffee: let’s have it today. Let’s have it right now if you’re free.”
So we met. He told me he’d been suffering a bad case of the blues. He’d been Googling cheap houses in the hills in southern Spain. He’d decided that he was going to do it: he was going to up sticks and relocate overseas, country of residence to be determined. He could work from anywhere there was internet provision. Perhaps he’d find someone, a woman, in the town he relocated to, he said. It might turn out to be fate. I told him about people I know who live abroad, and my own period of living overseas, and how homesickness had been a huge, unanticipated problem. “I could communicate with people,” I said, “but only like a child would, and even when I got better, when I spoke the same language as my neighbors, we didn’t really speak the same language.” I jokingly listed all the things I thought he’d miss. “You’ll like the lack of high street sameness at first, you’ll be smug about it. But then it will bug you that there isn’t a Marks & Spencer, that there isn’t anywhere obvious to buy underwear, or woolens. You’ll miss Boots the chemist; you’ll miss British newspapers, the color supplements at the weekends; some things have no equivalents in Europe.” He said that sounded good to him: all these problems were just what he needed, so as to feel more alive. “So, are you still planning to vamoosh?” I asked, in a jolly tone, making zigzag motions with my arm.
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Oh no, when?” (Could I BE any more obvious?)
“Just for the winters, I think. November through till March. Otherwise I’ll be here. But I can’t stand the winters anymore.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. “I might be doing the same in two years or so.” Not the tiniest stirring of interest in having the same life-plan was evident. Not the faintest.
“I bought that book you recommended, by the way,” he said.
“How did you like it?”
“I
couldn’t get to chapter two. Do you think it might be more of a book for women?”
I went home and began tidying old files off my laptop. There was a folder in which I’d copied and saved the profiles of men I’d messaged, so that I’d know what they said about themselves and what their interests were, if we began talking, without having to return to their online profiles. Dating sites chalk up each visit, and such returns can become, on occasion, political. It’s disconcerting when someone starts looking at your site profile again, after you’ve agreed to part, or have agreed not to meet or take things further. If someone you’re seeing suddenly consults it again, that too can be tricky: what are they thinking, what are they checking, what are they comparing it to? The profiles I’d put in the file were all out of date, from the year before, and had led definitively nowhere, and so it was time to bin them. As I was putting one of these into the trash, I realized that it was the profile of a man who looked rather like Andrew.
I scanned the page. The man who looked like Andrew was six foot four, ex-military, silver-haired, self-employed, single. He wrote that he was generous and considerate. He said he was looking for a woman he couldn’t help falling in love with. She would be optimistic, individualistic, good at conversation, perceptive and kind. He wanted someone to flirt with, to travel with, to have adventures with. He invited women to be bold and email him. He didn’t mention anything about her age, her size, her looks. No wonder I’d contacted him—he was exactly what I was looking for, and lived nearby, and I must have thought I had a real chance. If he’d asked me on a coffee shop date, we’d have talked for hours, we’d have got along like a house on fire. I would have assumed so much, after that, walking home. I’d have walked on pillows on marshmallows on air. But then, I think, there would have been a kindly worded knock-back. (The truth is, I have a certain physical type . . .)