I pulled myself back to his question. Was I drunk? No, not really. After all I drink for a living. But, even if I wasn’t, I could be. I drained my glass in one large, quite unladylike gulp.
‘I am now,’ I replied, flirtily, as my man handed me a cigarette.
We started talking and it was so easy. I discovered all about his job in design; I told him all about mine. His name was Joe McClaren, an incredibly sexy name. He was from Essex, but lived in north London. I told him a brief history of myself and proceeded to drink another four glasses of wine. I think he matched me glass for glass, although I noticed that he shuddered every time he took a sip. He smoked four cigarettes—one per glass—I smoked only the one. We stood away from the mob; we laughed. He called me ‘posh’, and was clearly mocking me. That proved to be a huge turn on.
Finally it was announced that the party was over, they switched off the lights, which made me giggle and say to Joe, ‘my father will be waiting outside to take me home’. He didn’t quite get my school disco meaning and asked me why my father was picking me up. I explained it to him and he laughed. Actually he was embarrassed, but that was because he told me that it took him longer to get my ‘posh jokes’.
Despite the fact that we did not get off to a particularly auspicious start, he asked for my phone number and I gave him my card. As he put me in a cab and told me he’d call me, I was radiator warm from the inside out.
Freddie, who works for me is also one of my best friends. He says that I only go out with ‘suits’. He would say that I will only go for men who look as if they can pay not only their own rent or mortgage but also take care of mine. He says that I am ‘classist’ as well as ‘walletist’. I only go out with middle-class men and that’s only because I am too common for upper-class men. It can sometimes be hard to understand why I love Freddie so much. When I ask him what personalities he presumes I go for, he replies that I am far too mercenary to care about personality. As long as they had the semblance of one, that would do.
So, Freddie would say that Joe isn’t my type. After all he has an Essex accent, he wasn’t wearing a suit, and he’s creative. I had no idea at that time if he was rich, or even solvent, but I didn’t care. I didn’t analyse my feelings; I was too busy enjoying them.
The day after the party I stormed into work and launched an attack on Freddie because I had a hangover. Hangovers were also part of my life. I was used to them, but I didn’t like them. I also didn’t like the fact that they seemed to get worse as I negotiated the ageing ladder. If they were that bad at twenty-nine I would be unable to get out of bed at forty. In fact, as I held my pounding head that morning, I wondered if I would make it that far.
‘Next time there’s a client party you are bloody well going,’ I shouted. I am not at my discreet best when I’m hungover.
‘Oh dear,’ he replied. ‘Was it pants?’
‘Utterly,’ I stormed.
‘No one interesting there?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Not even the designer chap. What was his name, John or Joe or something?’
‘The designer?’ How the hell did he know?
‘Yeah, I met him once, just thought he might be there.’
‘What and he’s interesting?’ My attack was ruined.
‘Very, but not your type.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a bit common, darling. Successful, yes, probably got an OK salary, but not posh enough.’
‘Freddie, stop. Anyway I didn’t meet him last night.’
‘Really? I wonder how he got your e-mail address then.’ Freddie laughed.
‘You’ve been checking my e-mails?’ Now I was really angry. My attack had been completely foiled.
‘No, of course not, Dixie told me.’
I scowled at Freddie, and went off to shout at my assistant. Dixie is brilliant. She’s the most efficient person I’ve ever met and she keeps the whole team in check. She also has access to my e-mails because I have been known to forget to check them. She has access to my entire life, and if it weren’t for the fact that she liked gossip then that would be fine. It didn’t matter though, because he had e-mailed me.
He told me he had enjoyed meeting me. He asked if I was quite recovered from my peanut attack and he suggested going out on Friday. I e-mailed him back and said that Friday would be great.
The other thing Freddie would tell you, about me and men, is that I don’t play hard to get, or even a little bit unavailable.
I never have believed in love at first sight. My relationship history would lead any sane person to think that I barely believe in love at all. But of course I do. I’m a Piscean, our whole being is founded on love. It’s just that my past relationships weren’t right, I wasn’t right. But when I met Joe I was.
*
My twentieth year saw my first major heartbreak. Some said that I was lucky to have waited that long. At the time, I didn’t see it because Harry was the man for me. Being twenty, any man is the man for you as long as he is around. I had been living in London for a year, and I’d met Harry almost straight away. I was sharing a flat with Lisa, the daughter of a friend of my mother’s. My mother thought that nineteen was very young to be fleeing to London in search of my fortune, so she entrusted me into Lisa’s care. Lisa was ill-equipped to look after a goldfish, let alone a person, so unbeknown to my mother I ran wild. Perhaps not wild, but I met Harry, who was a model and a colleague of Lisa’s, and he was a bit wayward.
Going out with a model at such a young age was a triumph. He was gorgeous and I only wanted a gorgeous man. I didn’t mind that he was vain and self-obsessed. That he barely knew how to use a telephone, or how to tell the time. It didn’t matter. I handed my heart to him on a platter and he in turn dropped the platter, making a clang that would end all clangs.
It was another woman of course, boring and predictable I know, but for a first heartbreak, it had all the ingredients I needed to be thrown into uncontrollable grief. At least for a little while.
I didn’t stay heartbroken for long. I had always held the belief that misery was too draining on one’s energy, so I went straight for the rebound relationship. The general rules in rebound relationships are that they are not built to last. Mine lasted for one and a half years.
Ewan was at university. I met him in a bar when I was trying to meet my Mr Rebound. He was posh, he was arrogant and he was a bore. But, and it is an enormous but, he had a car. By the time I reached twenty-one, I had decided that a man with a car was far more necessary than a man with looks, despite spending most of our relationship in London traffic jams.
That characterised our time together. Ewan plodded, his car sat in traffic. But the thing I loved about the traffic was sitting in the car next to him. I felt safe, I felt secure, because unlike Harry he seemed to really care about me. And I liked his wheels.
We broke up when Ewan failed his end-of-year exams and decided to go home with his tail between his legs. I was even more heartbroken than I was with Harry. I really loved that car.
I took a break from relationships at that time to concentrate on my career. I worked hard, got as much experience as I could, and I got myself a job as an account executive at a PR firm pre-Francesca Williams. It was there that I met Marcus. Marcus was sort of my boss. He was the account manager there, so he was absolutely my senior. It was about a year after Ewan’s car had deserted me that we started dating. You know the scene; boring story of drinking too much at the pub after work, flirting wildly over a bottle of white wine. Almost the entire office witnessed our getting together, so it was no surprise to anyone when we became a couple.
Marcus liked to boss me around at work and at home. I liked his flat. My main priority was dating someone with his own flat. I was going up in the world. Marcus’s flat was a small one-bedroomed basement abode in Fulham. At that time, Marcus and his flat were my ambitions. I felt like the woman of the house as I provided all sorts of food and even did his housework. I loved that flat.
>
We broke up when I changed jobs to become an account manager. On reflection, I think that him telling me what to do at work turned him on and when he could no longer do that there was no passion. I had never thought of him as kinky while we were together, but deep down I think he was. We didn’t break up straight away, but that was because I was too blind to see that he had lost interest in me. Eventually he spelled it out. So I said goodbye to Marcus and I cried buckets over that flat.
From then on my relationships and dates don’t even warrant cataloguing. As my friends watched on, they exclaimed my love life a disaster. Which it was, but I wasn’t unhappy about it. I had flings, little meaningless fun flings. I had one-night stands. As long as you’re safe I don’t think that admitting a need for sex is a problem. The trouble is that one-night stands are like buying sweets. You so want them until you’ve got them and then once you’ve devoured the last one they leave you feeling a bit sick. Or like when you’re in the sweetshop and there’s this big selection to choose from and then you get them home and find that you’ve picked out gobstoppers instead of aniseed balls.
But Joe changed all that. He changed my relationship history, for ever, simply because I knew I didn’t want him to become part of it. I wanted a future with him, and I realised it on the day when we had our first row.
The day of the row dawned ordinarily enough. I was at work, arguing with Freddie.
‘“Stand By Your Man”,’ Freddie said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘“Stand By Your Man”, Tammy Wynette?’
‘I hardly think that gives across a strong feminist message.’
‘Yes, but we are talking about new feminism aren’t we. No longer the dungarees and lesbian brigade, the new feminist isn’t afraid to wear nail varnish.’ Freddie smiled as if he had discovered the meaning of life. I sighed. Our brief was to come up with a promotion for Zoom, the new deodorant for women who wanted to be in control of their lives. The advertising agency was producing ads for a new girl band who would be sponsored by Zoom, and we were publicising the competition. We were trying desperately to come up with the perfect song to front the campaign. I was trying but Freddie was, as usual, taking the mickey.
‘Although you might have a valid point about new feminism being different, I still think that standing by your man is pushing it a bit too far.’
‘I thought you might appreciate the sentiment,’ Freddie teased.
‘Freddie, this is about Zoom, not about me and if you want to use this whole exercise as another excuse to take the piss, then go ahead, but I am warning you that if you do, I will pitch for a foot odour campaign and make you run it.’
‘Point taken.’ We smiled at each other and went back to our brainstorming.
Freddie had already won. The more I tried to think, the worse it got. All I could find in my head was a wobbly rendition of ‘Stand By Your Man’. And as I only knew the first few lines, it was a repetitive rendition. By association, it led me to think of Joe.
Joe and I had, at that point, been together for three months. The beginning of December heralded not only incredibly cold weather but also the fact that Joe and I had come through the precarious early days. I hadn’t spent too much time analysing my feelings, but when I thought about him (which was a considerable amount), I would warm up, fluff up and my insides would do a funny little dance.
‘So,’ Freddie interrupted. ‘What are we wearing tonight?’ He clapped his hands together.
‘OK, we have fifteen minutes to go get a coffee and discuss my wardrobe, after which we will come back and you will finish that proposal before I let you out of here.’ I was such a commanding figure as a boss.
‘Whatever,’ Freddie replied in deference to my authority. I rolled my eyes, grabbed my purse and set off for Coffee Republic.
We sipped lattes and talked through my wardrobe.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked, finally remembering that I wasn’t as selfish as I made out.
‘I’m seeing Hannah.’
‘Hannah?’ Yet another girl I hadn’t heard of.
‘She’s just some girl, nothing for you to worry about.’
I laughed. Freddie liked to think that I was jealous of all the other women in his life. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. I liked having him as a friend, and I enjoyed working with him, but I certainly didn’t fancy him. Freddie’s views of women were just a touch cynical. ‘So, how come you never ask for wardrobe advice?’
‘From you?’
‘What’s wrong with my dress sense?’
‘Your dress sense is great for you, but you always try to make me look gay.’
‘That’s because you act gay.’
‘Oh, here we go. Ten reasons why Freddie is really a closet case...’
‘You have impeccable taste, you love gossip, you always wave your arms around, you are incredibly pretty, you work in PR, you are afraid of spiders. I can’t think of any more at the moment.’ I used to be able to come up with a longer list, just to annoy him but the novelty had faded. The whole Freddie ‘gay thing’ had become a bit tedious.
‘You just want to be a fag-hag, and because, despite all your attempts of stereotypical accusations, I am straight. I love women. Generally I want to sleep with all women—you excepted. But, Holly darling, if you want to continue this crusade of yours to try to convert me, go ahead. I am far too secure in my heterosexuality to be even remotely upset.’
‘Fine, let’s go back to work then.’ I laughed, despite his protestations, it still riled him.
Freddie was indisputably straight, he wasn’t even camp. But when Francesca interviewed me for my job she told me that Freddie was gay. She told me that he would be my deputy, and then she leaned across her desk and whispered, ‘You do realise he’s gay’, into my ear. I didn’t; I hadn’t met him but I didn’t tell her that. When we became friends, I soon discovered that if Freddie was gay, he was doing a wonderful impression of a womanising cad.
Freddie explained to me that Francesca believed that only women and gay men should be allowed to work in PR. He hadn’t told her he was gay, she had just assumed, and he left it at that. The first office party we had the Christmas after I joined, Freddie engaged in some very public saliva-swapping with Francesca’s PA and the boss discovered, much to her disdain, that she couldn’t sack someone for being straight. They had since developed a healthy working relationship, and I had since developed a need to tease him about it. Although we behaved like schoolchildren most of the time, we were very good at our jobs.
Francesca Williams PR is a growing company, so the roles that Freddie and I had were advancing with it. Being a big believer in delegation, Francesca left the day-to-day running of accounts with me, while she concentrated on new business and marketing. I, in turn, ran the accounts with dictatorial control and Freddie as my right-hand man. We both worked hard, and although Freddie was supposed to defer to me, I regarded and treated him as more of an equal.
At six-thirty, I approved all the work that needed my authorisation and left the office.
I paced the flat and waited for the doorbell to ring. It was almost painful. I had arrived home from work at quarter past seven, which left me forty-five minutes until Joe was due. But I was ready early, which annoyed me because being early was uncool. I had bathed, changed and applied my make-up. I even painted my fingernails and I still had ten minutes to spare. I sat on the sofa and inspected my nails, fighting a strange urge to bite them. I felt unsettled but had no idea why. I was sure that it couldn’t be the fact I was ready early.
When Joe and I first started dating we met in bars or restaurants, but soon we had progressed to the stage where he could meet me at my flat, we could go for dinner around the corner, we could get home without hassle. No pretence. We had cleared the pretence hurdle. The pretence hurdle is when you don’t want to assume you are going to end up sleeping together although you know you will. So you arrange to meet somewhere equidistant between both flats
—Joe in Camden, me in Clapham—and then at the end of the evening, you wait until he utters the classic line, ‘My place or yours?’ Sometimes we met in Clapham, sometimes Camden. And if we did go out to the West End, for example, we always discussed whose flat we’d be staying in that night. It was a relationship landmark. It was a relationship.
It was quarter past eight and he was late. The buzzer hadn’t buzzed. The phone hadn’t rung. I would have called his mobile, but I figured that fifteen minutes was probably too soon and if I did call I would come across as being neurotic and I definitely wasn’t. Maybe I was, but there was no way I was going to admit it.
I had just emptied my second glass of wine when finally he arrived. The first thing I noticed after I let him in and he kissed me, was that he had been drinking. The smell of beer and the fact he was late annoyed me.
‘You’ve been drinking.’ I sounded like a fishwife.
‘Only a couple. Sorry I’m late but I had to see a mate about something.’ Ugh, that is such a male thing to say.
‘About what?’
‘Shall we go to dinner? I’m starving, I’ll tell you on the way.’ I should have known then, or even before then, that the evening would go wrong.
‘I forgot about this stag do I have to go on this weekend,’ Joe said as we walked to the restaurant.
‘This weekend?’ I repeated.
‘Yeah, this weekend. It’s a mate I knew from college, haven’t seen him in ages but when he told me he was getting married, I promised to go on his stag weekend.’
‘Where is it?’ I could feel my indignation rising.
‘Amsterdam.’ Joe was smiling.
‘Amsterdam?’
‘That’s why I was late. I had to meet him to make the travel arrangements.’
‘But Amsterdam is full of whores.’ It was all I could think of. At this point we arrived at the restaurant.
‘Are we going in?’ Joe asked. ‘Holly, come on, I’m sorry I forgot to tell you, but I promise I won’t sleep with any whores.’ He had a smile on his beautiful lips. His eyes glistened the way they always did when he’d had a drink. He looked so sexy.
Deranged Marriage Page 2