by Pippa Wright
His hypnotic eyes were so extravagantly lashed that I felt almost envious. I gazed into them for so long that eventually I forgot to speak at all.
‘Shall we go?’ whispered Malky, after we’d been staring at each other for what seemed like hours.
We got up together and moved towards the door; I wasn’t looking at Malky, but I was intensely aware that he was following me as closely as if we were tied together. As soon as we were outside, he dragged me round the corner of the pub to the dark alley and pushed me up against a wall. There was no question of me wanting to stop this unsuitable man, but we grabbed at each other almost as if we were fighting. He held my wrists above my head and kissed me until my head ground into the bricks behind me. He hadn’t shaved, and his stubble scratched at my chin. It wasn’t just like kissing a different man from Martin, it was like kissing a whole different species.
Suddenly I imagined what Martin would think if he saw me here, drunkenly snogging a stranger. Opening my eyes, I saw that Malky and I were grappling by a rather unromantic row of dustbins. It felt sordid and dirty; I wasn’t sure if that was exciting or frightening.
‘I should go,’ I whispered, pulling my coat around me.
‘Can’t I come back with you?’ Malky said, his curly hair brushing against my cheek as he kissed me again.
‘No!’ I laughed, wriggling out of his grasp. ‘I’ve got work tomorrow. And didn’t I tell you there’s a bunch of aged thesps at home waiting to hear how my date went?’
‘Next time,’ he said, pressing me against the wall for one more kiss. No excuses.’
‘Maybe,’ I laughed, escaping to run across the road towards home. But I didn’t mean it. I just thought it was probably a bit uncool to say, ‘Definitely next time, I am warm for your form, please please call me tomorrow.’
Next time, Rory!’ Malky bellowed across the street, illuminated by the pub lights as if under a spotlight. Next time!’
I skipped home with my heart pounding. It had all felt so wrong, so dirty and passionate, instead of the safe routine that was my relationship with Martin. I couldn’t imagine Martin grabbing me like that; he’d have been far too concerned about germs and dirt from the bins. He’d have said, ‘Why fool around outside a pub when we’ve got a perfectly good bed at home?’ But why was I thinking of Martin when I might have met a man who’d help me to get over him? As confused as I felt in my head, my body had a far more primitive reaction to my unsuitable man. It had been months since I’d felt myself like this, my knees properly weak with the certain knowledge that Malky wanted me and wasn’t afraid to show it. Whatever my head felt about Martin, my body wanted Malky too. There was definitely going to be a next time.
15
So certain was I that the entire office would be waiting to hear about my date with Teddy – and so certain too that I would stun them with news of another unsuitable date within forty-eight hours – that I walked across Covent Garden Piazza with a sense of keen anticipation that I hadn’t felt since I very first started at Country House. It was funny how working in the heart of London blinkered you to all of its charms. Instead of seeing the neo-classical Covent Garden market as beautiful, most days I just cursed how its design caused packs of French schoolchildren to cluster in the narrow walkways, making it impossible to pass. Rather than finding the cobbles a charming link to the past, I deplored how many pairs of shoes they had ruined by trapping my heels between them. It was ironic that while my job was about the beauty of historical architecture, I rarely noticed that I was surrounded by it even on the walk from the tube.
This morning, I noticed everything afresh. It probably helped that the market was free of tourists since it was too early for the shops to be open, and it certainly helped that none of those annoying people who paint themselves silver and stand still all day had yet to emerge. Instead of looking down to avoid catching anyone’s eye – it could take ten minutes to cross Inigo Jones’s Italian-inspired piazza once people started asking you directions – I looked up. On the top of each light around the market was a stone pineapple; on my first day at Country House I had been thrilled to see this centuries-old emblem of wealth and hospitality, a direct link to the fruit and vegetable market that once stood here. These days most people thought they had something to do with the Pineapple Dance Studio round the corner. I’d walked past them hundreds of times without even seeing them, let alone remembering the excitable new girl I’d once been.
Today, though, I had more than a hint of the excitable new girl about me. Maybe it was the unseasonably sunny day that was infusing everything with a sense of optimism. Or maybe, let’s be honest, it was the memory of snogging Malky last night. The first new man I had kissed in eleven years. Eleven years! Of course he was wildly unsuitable – tempestuous, moody, unemployed; that was the point – but I was beginning to see why so many girls went running after bad boys. Whenever I thought of how insistent he’d been, how passionate, I found I couldn’t stop smiling.
When I got to the office, however, Ticky was already muttering into the phone about some weekend disaster involving her boyfriend, Pongo. It was strange to find myself actively wanting Ticky’s emotional draining and to be denied it – like trying and failing to be flattened by a bus. I kept attempting to catch her eye but she was too intent on her conversation to notice until Lysander appeared in the doorway, smirking in a way that suggested he had already spoken to Teddy.
‘Auroooooooora,’ he said, stretching out my name to extraordinary lengths, and infusing it with layers of meaning and innuendo.
‘Lysander,’ I said warily. He bounded into the office, checked the armchair for errant fascinators, and threw himself into it.
‘Ethelred said he had a delightful evening. You were charming company, I hear, not that I would have expected anything less.’
Ticky, still on the phone, spun her chair around and mimed ‘Oh my Goouurd,’ trying to keep half an ear on our conversation.
‘He was really nice, Lysander, thanks for suggesting it,’ I said, still unsure how much of the evening Teddy would have relayed back to his cousin.
‘And I hear you were verrrrrrry nice to him, Aurora,’ Lysander said, raising one eyebrow.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘He said you made a pass at him, but he had to turn you down.’
Ticky put the phone down instantly, halfway through a sentence. ‘You made a pass at Lysander’s gopping cousin?!’
‘Oh God, no, it wasn’t really like that,’ I insisted.
‘Oh my Goouurd,’ said Ticky, ‘how revolting. You are, like, practically a necrophiliac, Roars. Yack.’
Lysander stiffened. ‘Ethelred is not that much older than me, Victoria. He is hardly a corpse yet.’
‘I did not try to make a pass at Teddy!’ I shouted. Heads whipped round with interest outside our office door.
‘Oh, Teddy, is it?’ sniggered Ticky. ‘Your cuddly old teddy bear.’
‘Look, Lysander,’ I said, thinking that I would be more likely to get a fair hearing from him than from Ticky, ‘I think Teddy must have got the wrong end of the stick. I didn’t make a pass at him, but he seemed to think I wanted to. And he, er, he told me that he couldn’t do it.’
‘No Viagra?’ said Ticky, suddenly sympathetic. ‘My godmother says that happens a lot.’
‘That wasn’t it at all,’ I protested. ‘It was all a mis-understanding.’
Ticky and Lysander exchanged amused glances; clearly neither of them believed me. Seemingly, given the choice between my version of events and the version in which I threw myself, panting, on a senior citizen, they preferred the latter.
‘Anyway, I went on another date last night,’ I announced.
‘Another date with Teddy?’ asked Ticky. ‘Gooourd, there’s no stopping you, Roars. One night of pensioner passion wasn’t enough, eh?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘A totally different unsuitable man, actually.’
‘Roars, you are, like, on a roll,’ said Tic
ky admiringly. ‘Was this one from Help the Aged too?’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said, feeling smug. If they were going to persist in believing that I’d been spurned by Teddy, I was going to keep my Malky story to myself and leave them in suspense. And now that I thought about it, was an anecdote in which I found myself snogging a busker by a row of wheelie bins the best way to salvage my reputation?
Although I ignored them, Ticky and Lysander entertained themselves for a further twenty minutes by loudly discussing how best to sign me up to a Grab a Grandad dating website. Since I’d split up with Martin and proposed the Unsuitable Men column, it seemed that everyone at Country House was a little more aware of my existence than they had been. Mostly, admittedly, because they were enjoying a laugh at my expense, but there was still something oddly gratifying about it. I saw how I’d previously been excluded from much of the office banter, not because my colleagues ignored me, but because, stuck within the protective shell of my relationship, I’d held myself apart from them. Without Martin I’d felt new, exposed, raw; and yet somehow that had allowed my colleagues to come closer. Which wasn’t something, frankly, I’d ever hoped for, so I was surprised how much I welcomed it. Although there were limits, and if Ticky and Lysander didn’t shut up, I might reach them fairly soon.
Still, the saving grace of the unsuitable-men project, I began to realize, was that, no matter how much my colleagues wound me up, I would always get the last word on each date. Ticky and Lysander could tease all they liked; my version of every date was the one that was published. And since everything was anonymous, there was no reason not to embellish just a little. The things I wished I’d said: in my version, I’d say them. The way I wished I’d behaved: in my version, I would. It would be my life, edited by me as it should have been, rather than as it was.
Despite Teddy’s rather ungallant behaviour in telling Lysander that he’d had to fend off my advances, I didn’t want to stitch him up, even under an assumed name. He had been good company, and I felt sad that he didn’t feel he was worthy of romance. So I started work on the piece immediately, amending our undignified fumble into a less embarrassing kiss on the hand from Teddy, and a declaration from him that our love could never be because of my relative youth. It felt like the kindest way to spare both my blushes and his. My five hundred words concluded:
My second date with a supposedly unsuitable man taught me that I’m not the only one with a set of rules. A man who I found more than suitable turned out to find me wanting. I hope there’s a suitable lady out there for Mr X, but sadly it is not me.
I knew it was rather over-egging the pudding, but I also knew Lysander had been right. The very idea of a lonely and immensely wealthy Scottish landowner tortured by the memory of a lost love was straight out of a romance novel. And to discover that he rejected a woman for being too young, that he was that mythical beast, the rich bachelor who actually prefers an older woman – well, I couldn’t have invented a story more likely to appeal to the traditional readers of Country House. Of course it did make me seem rather pathetic, and it offered my colleagues a lot of ammunition against me, which they would need no encouragement to use, but it seemed a price worth paying for some positive reader feedback that I could wave under Amanda’s nose.
At least Ticky had finally given up on the constant grandad jokes. In fact she was nowhere to be seen. I tried not to be annoyed by her regular disappearances – it only annoyed me if I paid attention to how little work she did. But it soon became evident that, far from being idle, she’d been working on something else altogether.
‘Yah, so, I hear you’re, like, looking for a toyboy,’ drawled a voice from the office door.
I looked up from my desk to see a scrawny young boy leaning against the door frame with extremely self-conscious nonchalance, as if he had learned how to be cool out of a book from the school library. I vaguely recognized him as the intern who had been helping Flickers over the last few weeks; I hadn’t paid much attention to him since our office was always full of gap-yah or university students getting work experience by doing our most boring tasks for nothing. They stayed for a few weeks, only to be immediately replaced by yet another Jack Wills-wearing doppelganger whose Mummy had begged a favour from Amanda. I found it impossible to keep track of them all, and must admit I’d stopped trying years ago.
‘Sorry?’ I asked, looking at him more closely. Although he was almost certainly not yet twenty, he seemed, like all the men in our office, to be somehow beyond either age or fashion. He wore light-beige trousers, shiny brogues and a pale-pink shirt, open at the neck. I was certain I had seen him arriving in the office in a sort of sports jacket. If it weren’t for an artfully styled fringe, brushed forward across one eye, and the last shreds of a wristband from a music festival, on clothing alone it could have been anyone from Lysander to Old Mr Betterton standing there.
‘Like, yah, Ticks said that you were looking for a toyboy for this Unsuitable Men thing?’ said the young man, flicking his long fringe out of his eyes. ‘So, right, reporting for duty and all that?’
What was Ticky thinking? A toyboy was one thing but I couldn’t even look at this boy without imagining him in school uniform. And not in a good way. It made me feel like a paedophile. ‘Ticky sent you to me?’
‘No,’ he said, but his public-school voice made it sound more like ‘Neeoohhww’. ‘No, Ticks just, like, told me about your mission and I, like, already thought you were totally a MILF anyway, so—’
‘A MILF?’
‘Umm, you know,’ he stammered, flushing deep crimson. ‘Mother I’d Like to – you know.’
‘I know what it stands for,’ I snapped, ‘but I don’t have any children.’
‘It’s just, like, an expression for a hot older bird, yah?’ he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and kicking at the floor. ‘Look, like, this is sahhriously embarrassing. Ticks said you’d totally be up for it. I wasn’t, like, expecting to have to beg or anything.’
‘Oh right,’ I snapped. ‘So Ticky said I was a sure thing, did she?’
The boy had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Look, I just thought we might go out for a drink or something,’ he said.
I felt a little sorry for him, having been coerced by the emotional steamroller that was Ticky into asking out an older woman who he had probably assumed would be grateful for his attentions. ‘Look, um, Luke? Is your name Luke?’ I asked.
‘Yah,’ he said, his face brightening at the realization I had remembered his name.
I wasn’t about to admit I’d remembered it purely because I’d seen on the phone list that he was called Luke Home, which sounded like a song by the Proclaimers. Not least because I suspected Luke was far too young even to have heard of them.
‘Luke, it’s very kind of you, and very brave of you, to ask me out. But I’m not sure we’d have an awful lot to say to each other, given the age difference. So thanks for asking, but I think probably not.’
Luke stopped leaning on the door frame and stood up straight. He took two steps into the office and squared himself in front of my desk. Close up he didn’t seem as slight and scrawny. In fact he was quite intimidating.
‘Look, Ticks told me that you are meant to be dating unsuitable men, so I think it’s, like, pretty rude of you to try to get out of going out with me because you think I’m too young. Too young is, like, the whole point actually.’ He crossed his arms and stared at me.
It was true that I had put a toyboy on my list of unsuitable men but I had imagined that this meant a hot twenty-four-year-old. Not a mildly acned boy, whose voice still occasionally betrayed him with a rogue high note. If Teddy had been the extreme end of the older-man spectrum, Luke was about as young a toyboy as I could date without being arrested.
‘I’m just not sure we’d have much to say to each other, Luke,’ I said.
‘I think you might be surprised,’ he said, uncrossing his arms and leaning forward to rest his hands on my desk, blatantly staring straight down the fron
t of my dress. ‘I think you might be very surprised at what we might have to say to each other. Or do. To each other.’
I was horrified to discover that it was my turn to blush; how had he moved from young boy into sexual predator quite so quickly? Discomfited, I put a hand over my chest to cover up – not that I was wearing anything particularly revealing, but under his lascivious gaze I felt like I was sitting there in my underwear. Luke realized his advantage with a skill that belied his years.
‘So we’re agreed, yah?’ he said, straightening up confidently.
‘Are we?’ I asked weakly. He stood in front of my desk with his legs wide apart, looking like the hearty captain of games at a boys’ school. Which he probably had been only a few short months ago.
‘Yah, lunch, Friday. Let’s do it.’ Luke walked to the door with a new-found swagger and turned to grin at me, back to a young boy again. ‘Laters.’
When Ticky finally graced our office with her presence, two large carrier bags in hand, she was utterly unapologetic.
‘Thought you might need a little privacy, Roars,’ she winked. ‘Just absented myself for a while for, like, the greater good.’
Ticky, you are unbelievable. Did you tell that – that infant to come and ask me out?’
‘Luke Home you mean?’
It turned out his name wasn’t a Proclaimers song at all – who’d have guessed that you pronounced his last name ‘Hume’?
‘Yes, Luke – he’s a child. How can I possibly go out with him? Even just for lunch. He’ll want to talk about pop music and iPhone apps and, I don’t know, things I don’t understand.’
‘Roars, if we are going to exclude dates on the basis of men talking about things you don’t understand, we’d have to rule out, like, three-quarters of the male population of England,’ said Ticky. ‘You are entirely clueless and these dates are meant to help you with that. No one’s asking you to marry him, just have your date and write about it. End of.’