Unsuitable Men

by Pippa Wright

  So while the very existence of a Country House website was enough to have many of our readers clutching at their pearls in horror, our head of IT, Tim, explained to us that it had been specifically designed to appeal to a generation for whom the internet was still a troubling thing. There were no flashing gifs or unsettling use of terms such as ROFL or LOLZ; it was text-heavy, user-friendly and presented in a reassuring palette of cream and English racing green. Amanda beamed broadly, if slightly condescendingly, from the home page, welcoming the Country House reader with her dog at her side, a spotty Emma Bridgewater mug in her hand. See, her smile said, there is no need to be concerned. The internet is a safe and friendly place. Join us. Leading up to our soft launch, Tim had written a series of articles for the magazine about how to get online, and which websites we recommended – including our own, of course. I had never even thought of bringing these home for Auntie Lyd and her house guests, I realized. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that they might have an interest in getting online; in life beyond Elgin Square? Why had the ridiculous plumber had that realization before I had?

  Tim answered anxious questions – reassuring Lysander that his identity could not actually be stolen just by having his photograph and a smattering of his book reviews presented on the site; promising Catherine that the pieces she wrote under the name of her Irish wolfhound, Nora, would not be pirated (nor indeed read, but he didn’t say that bit); encouraging us all to think of additional content we could bring to the site – behind-the-scenes chats, photographs that didn’t make the final edit but were too good to be wasted.

  I nodded politely, as we all did, hoping he wasn’t going to go on for much longer. Not least because Luke kept making suggestive faces to me from the other side of the table; my spurning of his advances seemed merely to intensify his determination.

  Ignoring Luke, who was now mouthing something I didn’t want to translate, I focused pointedly on Tim, who was telling us how the website could help shape the direction of the magazine, going forward, by studying the page views to find out which features got the most traffic and therefore resonated most with our readers. He smiled back at me, rather nonplussed by my sudden interest.

  ‘As we’ve already seen, Rory, with your dating column,’ he said.

  I opened my eyes wide. Apart from the emails Tim had forwarded to me complaining about the fauxmosexual piece, I’d hardly heard a thing about a response to the column, either inside the office or outside. I strongly suspected Amanda hadn’t even read it.

  ‘How so?’ said Amanda, and for once I was totally in agreement with her. How so indeed?

  ‘The dating column has by far the most page views of anything on the site,’ said Tim. ‘And we’ve had more than twenty emails about the latest piece this week alone.’

  ‘You have? What – what do they say?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Mostly they’re women who want to know how they can contact your rich landowner.’ Tim smiled at me slightly apologetically, little realizing this had been exactly my hope in writing up the date with Teddy. ‘I’ll forward them on to you after the meeting.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Amanda, but I didn’t know if she was directing this at me or at Tim. ‘Thank you, Tim. Now, moving on.’

  As soon as I escaped from the meeting I flew back to my desk and opened up my inbox. As promised, there was a message from Tim collating all the emails they’d received about the piece. Fifteen of them offered their contact details to be forwarded on to Teddy, with gentle barbs about how a young filly in her twenties could not expect to appeal to a gentleman of mature years. Of these, seven claimed to be from women within a hundred-mile radius of the Scottish Highlands – two actually resident there. Three complained that a dating column was out of keeping with the Country House ethos, but I found it hard to care too much about these, since our readers had an extremely proprietary notion of what the magazine stood for, and a positive mania for pointing it out to us staffers. As they saw it, they were the true keepers of the Country House flame, and we the dangerous renegades who couldn’t be relied upon not to put out the fire with our incompetent ways. A golden two emails complimented my writing and said they looked forward to hearing about more unsuitable men. Neither appeared to be from anyone I knew, which made them all the more precious. I read them often enough that I could have repeated them, word for word, to anyone who asked; though of course no one did.

  I forwarded the emails to Lysander – not to show off about my two complimentary readers, I deleted those first – but to suggest that he might want to send the contact details on to Teddy. I wasn’t sure how Lysander would explain away the fact that I’d written about my date for public consumption – although I’d been careful to write it in a way that wouldn’t offend Teddy – but it seemed that if there was a silver lining to the date at Wilton’s, it might be that Teddy unexpectedly found love as a result. I hoped he would.

  Martha swung by my office unexpectedly, claiming to have read my latest column and declaring it ‘not bad’, which, given her opposition to its very existence, I felt to be high praise. She even went to the trouble of reading, over my shoulder, all of the emails from readers, which was a level of interest that I hadn’t anticipated. I wondered if she might be beginning to see the benefits of working with Amanda instead of against her. Of course I’d rather be writing Behind the Rope than Unsuitable Men, but the point was to get Amanda’s confidence in me established, and then use it to work the things I was really interested in. I was playing the long game, and Martha would do well to try it, I thought, if only to make her own life easier.

  Although I still hadn’t heard from Malky, I wasn’t going to be able to wait for his promised ‘next time’ before writing up our date. I’d found it easier to tackle the column about Luke, even though he seemed to think our romantic adventure was far from over; it wouldn’t be published until later in the month, but the fortnightly schedule meant I needed to crack on with the write-ups while also finding new men to date. I’d have to end the Malky piece, for publication in early April, by the pub dustbins, just as it had ended in reality. Still, I told myself, that just made him better material for the column: The Man Who Didn’t Call. Thinking of him as mere material made me feel a little less despondent. I had been so sure he would call; so sure that I would see him again. Had I really mistaken the look in his eyes that night? It had actually made me feel hopeful for the first time in weeks; like he was a real prospect. I guessed this was what Auntie Lyd meant when she said that dating was a battleground. I fiddled with the text a bit more, but the piece wasn’t coming together. The quiet fizzle into nothingness was a lot less satisfactory than Teddy’s gentlemanly rejection, on the page as in life.

  On my way home that evening, I walked through the market towards the tube station at Leicester Square. As any Londoner knows, only tourists and teenagers use Covent Garden tube, with its slow and crowded lifts and queues of confused out-of-towners. It is always infinitely quicker, if you know the way, to weave your way via Garrick Street and escape the slow-moving hordes. Like everyone who works in the centre of town I was used to regarding tourists as little more than the people who wear terrible trainers, ask for directions and need to be reminded that you stand on the right side of the escalator; I hardly even saw them except as an obstacle to be negotiated with my eyes fixed on my path beyond them. But tonight, looking at them all swarming around the market, leaning over the railings to listen to the Royal Opera student singing in the atrium, laughing outside pubs, wrapped up against the cold, I felt unaccountably envious. Not of the tourists as individuals – no, that wasn’t it at all, I still didn’t want to walk a mile in those ugly trainers – but of their group identity. It wasn’t one of those cheesy ‘Although I am in the midst of many, I am so alone’ moments at all, though I suppose that was part of it. I had thought I, the Londoner, was the one who fitted in here, while they just got in the way. Now I wished with all my heart that I was part of such a group, jostling each other good-naturedly, sh
aring jokes, so willing to be pleased and entertained. I was lonely, I realized. Properly lonely. Not just for Martin, but for our friends, our life together. For fitting in.

  I could feel that I was in danger of letting myself drop into a spiral of negative thoughts, so I picked up the Evening Standard instead and distracted myself in its headlines until the tube reached Clapham Common. When I emerged from the station, I had to pull my hat down against a biting wind that whipped across the bare expanse of grass. Striding down the pavement, head bowed, I heard shouting from the direction of the children’s paddling pool, which stood empty and abandoned each winter. I ignored it – there were usually teenagers messing about there with skateboards and I had no interest in what they might be yelling at me. Tonight, though, the shouting was very persistent, and it seemed to be coming closer towards me.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’

  I kept walking, looking at the pavement so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone, my face composed into the professional blankness adopted by any Londoner who fears they might be approached by a stranger, especially a stranger who is probably going to ask them for money, or try to take it from them by force.

  ‘Hey! Hey! Rory, hey!’

  I lifted up my eyes and there, running towards me, was Malky, his guitar on his back and Gordon skirting his heels.

  ‘Jesus, Rory,’ he panted. ‘I’ve been calling you for ages, didn’t you hear me?’ He stopped in front of me and bent to rest his hands on his knees, wheezing.

  ‘Sorry, I thought it was the boys from over there,’ I said, nodding over to the pool. It was too cold to take my hands out of my pockets, even though they were gloved. Also I felt distinctly frosty towards Malky after nearly two weeks of no contact at all.

  ‘I had to run,’ Malky said, straightening up with one hand on his chest. I’d forgotten how much taller than me he was. He grinned down. ‘Nearly killed me. Not built for speed, me. Now, where have you been, Rory?’

  ‘Where have I been?’ I asked, in a voice as chilly as the wind. I dropped my chin down to my chest and looked at my shoes. I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to look directly at his distracting eyes.

  ‘I lost your number, didn’t I?’ said Malky, lifting my chin and looking at me imploringly. I felt my insides begin to melt under his practised gaze. ‘All the contacts on my phone got wiped. And since you so cruelly rejected me the other night I didn’t know where you lived – I didn’t have any other way of contacting you. I’ve been desperate for you to call. Desperate.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, instantly disarmed. Goddamn Ticky, I thought, telling me not to contact him under any circumstances. Leaving me feeling all vulnerable and rejected, when all along he’d lost my number. I knew there must have been an explanation; I knew I hadn’t mistaken his interest in me.

  ‘I’ve been hanging out by the Common day and night trying to catch a glimpse of you,’ Malky said, stepping closer to me. The corners of his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘I’m so glad to see you. I was beginning to give up hope of seeing you again.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘I felt like we had some unfinished business,’ he grinned, moving closer, seeing me beginning to thaw. ‘Didn’t you? Shall we go for a drink now?’

  ‘Now?’ Ticky had lectured me firmly on the necessity of never accepting a spontaneous invitation from a man; she decreed all dates had to be arranged in advance to show commitment, even if the man was unsuitable. But she had been wrong about not calling Malky, so I wavered.

  ‘Come on, Rory,’ Malky pleaded, linking his arm in mine. ‘Haven’t I been freezing my arse off out here in pursuit of my lady love? Playing sad songs in the dark like a lovesick troubadour? Are you really going to spurn me now?’

  I felt a little shiver run through me at his green eyes close to mine; this was a man who knew the knee-buckling power of an intense stare. But that wasn’t the reason I said yes. No, I told myself, I needed a better ending to my new Unsuitable Men column. I wasn’t desperate to see him under any circumstances. No. Narrative resolution, I thought. This is just about narrative resolution.

  Narrative resolution and more snogging by the dustbins outside the Duke of Wellington, as it turned out. I couldn’t honestly tell you how we ended up there again – of course if it had been a planned date I would have tried to steer Malky towards somewhere a bit more romantic, but this was spontaneous and unsuitable and I had decided to go along with it. The evening had passed in a blur of ridiculousness that I struggled to remember clearly the next day – to write down one of Malky’s long, rambling stories would be to flatten it into two dimensions. They depended on expansive hand gestures, leaping around the room, constructing mise-en-scène on the table out of crisp packets and horse brasses to illustrate a point. And a lot of alcohol. Martin had never been much of a drinker, confining himself to a few glasses of wine with a meal, so Malky’s reckless Guinness-fuelled behaviour was entirely new to me. As was my own, powered by red wine and desire. I floated on a plump cushion of alcohol and attention, both of them equally intoxicating, despite revisiting the tawdry wheelie-bin setting of our first date.

  ‘I’m coming back with you this time,’ said Malky gruffly, pulling himself away from kissing me, ‘and I’m not taking no for an answer.’

  I giggled as he slipped his cold hand under my jumper, but I didn’t say yes. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to come back to Auntie Lyd’s – not that she would still be up, I supposed. The horrendously early rising in our house was matched by an average bedtime of about 10 p.m.

  ‘Come on, where do you live?’

  ‘Malky,’ I laughed, ‘I hardly know you.’

  ‘You’re never going to get to know me if you keep saying no,’ he urged, pushing his hand up higher. ‘I thought you were more fun than this.’

  ‘Stop it, it’s cold,’ I said, pulling my jumper down. I suddenly thought of Luke. What was stopping me? Was I afraid of my sexuality after all? Was I really making excuses to avoid taking any of this seriously?

  Malky hit me with another one of his deep, longing stares. Unbidden, Martin popped into my head again; he hadn’t looked at me like that for months. Years, maybe. The bastard. He was probably looking at his new girlfriend like that all the time. I pushed myself away from the wall and kissed Malky fiercely. He looked astonished at my rapid change of heart. I grabbed his hand.

  I was, bizarrely enough, going to take the sexual advice of a fiercely priapic teenager.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said, and led him and Gordon across the road.

  20

  When I was at university, my flatmate Abigail had appropriated a cricketing term to describe the sudden doubt that can hit a woman taking a man back to her house for the first time: the Corridor of Uncertainty. I had only experienced it once, long ago with Martin, but in truth I had had so little doubt that he was the right man for me that Abi said it didn’t count. From her lofty position of significantly greater experience, she claimed that the Corridor of Uncertainty was always followed by the Kitchen of Truth: the lurking doubts one had in the hallway were either blasted away by the bright strip lighting of our student kitchen (cue snogging and imminent retreat to bedroom) or magnified in its glare (cue sudden backtrack and finding of excuses to kick him out of the house). On one never-forgotten occasion Abi had waved a knife at a particularly persistent suitor after the Kitchen of Truth had spoken strongly against him, and the poor man had run away into the night in terror.

  I didn’t expect I’d have to chase Malky out of the house with a knife (though remembering Abi made me mentally note the location of Auntie Lyd’s cutlery drawer just in case), but I couldn’t help a surge of panic that made my hands shake stupidly when I tried to open the door. Was I really going to sleep with someone new? With an unsuitable man I had met only once before, and randomly encountered on the street tonight? It was less than a month since I’d split up with Martin – it felt far too soon, but at the same time it felt like something I needed to do; a sign that I was moving on. Also, wh
at underwear was I wearing? And when did I last shave my legs? These are the common fears of the Corridor of Uncertainty.

  It was safe to say that of the many possible scenarios that were running through my mind when turning the key, not one concerned Mr Bits. And yet it was only a matter of seconds until he took centre stage. As the door opened Malky’s arm shot around me with such speed that I lurched forward into the hallway, my hand still attached to the key in the lock. Jesus, I thought, what had got into him all of a sudden? But rather than grabbing me in the passionate embrace I’d anticipated, Malky flew past me, entirely horizontal as he sailed over the doorstep to land heavily on the hall carpet, his outstretched hand clinging desperately to his dog’s straining lead. Gordon howled and snapped at Mr Bits, who regarded him with disgust from the safety of the stairs.

  Malky stumbled to his feet, grasping at the lead, but as he did so Gordon made another frantic lunge. His lead whipped out of Malky’s hand and he flew up the stairs so fast that I thought for one insane moment Malky had actually thrown him up there. Mr Bits assessed the situation with lightning speed, allowing Gordon to approach him at full pelt before stepping delicately aside. Gordon’s momentum propelled him up several more stairs before he was able to stop. He spun around, snarling, realizing he had been outmanoeuvred. But it was too late.

  Mr Bits, who had leapt on to the banister as Gordon passed, dropped with deadly accuracy onto the dog’s back, claws sunk deeply in, his orange fur standing on end as if an electric current had passed between the two of them. Gordon shot, howling, up the stairs again and disappeared past the landing, but there was no dislodging Mr Bits, who was still grimly attached when Gordon reappeared, running down the stairs, pursued by Auntie Lyd in a pair of paisley pyjamas.