Blind Date (7 page)

It was a long bar in the Critics Club, the last resort of late-night drinkers. Above the bar was a mirror, into which Rob glanced, constantly, tweaking his hair, squinting at himself, as if the key to good fortune lay in the foppish brown lock which flopped across his forehead. New man he was not.

“Where the hell have you been?” Rob shouted as Joe came in. Then he looked Joe up and down, critically, grinned, slapped him on the back and almost fell from the uncomfortable bar stool.

“Nowhere
special, I bet. You wouldn't, would you? Not dressed like that. Jesus, Joe, where do you get your clothes? Oxfam?”

Rob and John always dressed as if they were selling something. Rob, because he was a salesman and knew no other uniform than a suit, although he abandoned the tie, John Jones because he copied Rob. If you take such a man as your role model, Joe had often thought, you are bound to fail, but Owl was a sweet guy, earnest, full of good intentions. Mike had mastered the art of casual dress, but then he was a boss, high on the company payroll for the best distributor of camera equipment. He wasn't quite Armani, Joe thought, but almost. They all earned far more money than he did. He was slightly their mascot. They all thought of him as a bit of a loser. No car, no expense account: a roving photographer, taker of snaps, mechanic if necessary, odd job man, with a ponytail but without a mortage. Weird.

“You've not missed anything here,” Rob added, signalling for drinks, nodding at the others, who nodded back, apart from Mike, who shook his head. “Nothing going on here at all. In fact we were going to pack it in and go home. But then we thought we'd wait for you, you bastard. Maybe have a council of war. ‘Cos I'm sick of wasting money.”

“Oh,
I don't know, Rob, honestly. I'm not sure about this … There's got to be a better way than that…” The Owl looked owlish.

“Better way than what?” Joe asked.

“Better way than what he's thinking…”

“Who?”

“Michael. He suggested it.” Suddenly he was Michael, an authority. They all turned expectantly on Mike, who stood more than usually aloof.

“Suggested what?” Joe asked, exasperated. This time they all stared at Michael, fixedly.

There was one thing about Mike which always impressed Joe, one of those features he suspected women noticed sooner than men. His voice, which was unfailingly pleasant, with a depth to it; an accentless voice which a girl on the other end of a phone might find sexy and a man, faced with a sales pitch, would find himself heeding without quite knowing why he was being hypnotized. You had to listen to Michael, not simply because he was good to look at, but because of that voice. Mike spread his hands, shrugged elegantly.

“I was simply suggesting that rather than spend our time, and rather large quantities of money in the pursuit of women, we should let them come to us. I mean, arrange for them to come to us.”

“They'll flock, won't they?” Joe said. “Just like always.” He found his heart was beating strangely.

“Well Mike suggested the lonely hearts columns a few weeks back,” Rob said crossly. “This is only one stage worse. Or better. Cheaper in the long run. Less wearing.”

“What is?” Joe asked.

“Going to an introduction agency,” the Owl said. “It's the fact of thing Jack would have done.”

“SHUT UP,” Rob bellowed. “Just SHUT UP! Don't bring Jack into this. Don't even mention Jack.”

Owl opened
his mouth and closed it again. There was a full minute of silence.

“The most successful men I've ever met,” Michael was saying smoothly, “have their social lives, love lives even, organized by someone else. Usually a woman. We don't meet women through work. We don't live close to brothers and sisters etc., we've all of us moved here, not born here. So we go round the bars looking for women, like sailors coming into a port and what do we get? Divorced women, married girls out for a good time, girls who don't want to be picked up, girls in groups, which defeats the whole object.”

“Which is?” Joe asked quietly.

He thought about that. “To find someone who listens. Who wants to know you. Needs you,” he said. “Loves you, I suppose,” he added.

Blimey. That was a long speech for Mike, even if it was spoken in cliches, Joe noticed; as if Mike had a script.

Rob snorted. “Love? I don't want that. I just want—”

“Shut up,” the Owl commanded. “We all bloody know what you bloody want …”

“It's an admission of failure, that's what it is,” Rob continued, perversely. “It's puerile, it's awful … Go to an agency. Pay someone to find you a shag … God if anyone knew…”

“I think it's quite a good idea,” Joe volunteered. Again that unaccountable thumping of his heart. He put his arm round the Owl. “Come on, John, it'll be a laugh.” Then he turned to Michael.

“Do you have anywhere in mind?” he asked. “I mean, I wouldn't know where to start.”

“I've been looking into it,” Michael said. “And yes I do. Recommended by an old girlfriend of mine. She's married now, of course. She said the only problem with this agency is that they had too many women on the books, not enough men.”

Rob looked
more interested. “We'd be in a minority, eh?”

“Exactly.”

Rob looked round the circular bar. Another dozen or so men. A pair of overdressed women sat at a table, not looking left or right, engrossed in their own conversation.

“They'll come running, will they?” he said. “That'll make a change.”

W
hen Patsy walked across the bridge at seven in the morning, the mist lying on the river was beginning to disperse into nothing with the magic of a spell. The sun struggled for ascendancy in a pink and grey sky, stiking gold on the distant palace of Westminster where the clock stood to attention like a soldier, in a shroud of scaffolding. The river's high tide, running fast and deep, covered the banks. There was nothing as calming as that savage water seen from the high safety of the bridge. The river was the sea drawn close. Patsy loved the sea.

Benign sunlight, the splendour of the view and the hum of a city yawning awake, created a frisson of happiness. Halfway across, she leaned over the parapet, and with the efficiency of an organized woman, scolding herself briefly for her lack of gratitude, told herself she was all right really and congratulated herself on a new crop of resolutions. To be able to see water was both luck and luxury. To be alive and well on a morning such as this in a big fat metropolis heaving with beauty, dirt, grace, energy, idleness and a rampant lack of shame made her own existence comfortably small and her problems smaller still. She could take that ugly black dog of depression for a walk over another bridge and hurl the beast into the foam.

Onwards
and upwards to the seventeenth floor. The rise of the lift reminded her of her own achievements, but she had lost in the process. Nonsense: she had lost nothing in the climb to the almost top of her world. She had gained plenty, including privileges like this, of walking down a wide corridor full of women. This range of magazines, consumed by girl teenagers on the one hand, cookery freaks on the other, was owned by men, created, and marketed by women. At any given time, half of those whom Patsy would meet en route to her own room would be pregnant. How other women, undoubtedly with mixed ambitions, found men and turned them into fathers with such apparent ease was one of life's great mysteries. Somewhere in her life, she had lost a decade.

“Right,” she said, after Angela and Hazel had closed the door behind them and the coffee machine grumbled. “Have you been thinking about this?”

They nodded, like obedient schoolchildren. They knew what
this
was, and it had nothing to do with work; although it did, at one remove, have plenty to do with the cut-throat but cosy, all-female atmosphere in which they lived by day and often well into the night. Even though Hazel, with her square frame and careless clothes, was an expert on articles about how to please your man in bed with an insight far from theoretical, while Angela, with that halo of hair, wore pastel pinks and a look of innocence which was all too real.

“So, what news on the research, Ange?”

She was flushed. “Well I'm still not sure this is all a good idea … I don't know…”

“Of course you know,” Hazel interrupted. “We had this argument a week ago, after the last disastrous night out, and you agreed then, and what with you in advertising and all, well you'd know best, so come on, give.” She did not add, you silly little virgin: the words merely hung unsaid, although tinged with an irritation which was also affectionate. Hazel had seen Angela's silly little house: she had also met Angie's mum: she understood how Ange lived in cotton wool.

“Well,”
Ange began in that small, hesitant voice which so charmed people on the other end of the phone and made them so reluctant to be nasty to her. “Most introduction agencies don't last long. Plenty of people think it's a good idea, and then go out of business, ‘cos it's harder than they think. Apart from the very, very expensive marriage places. Somehow they last. I suppose it's like charging a dowry. We don't want one of those, do we?”

“Shit, no … Marriage? Jesus! I don't want that, I just want—”

“We know what you want, Hazel,” Patsy said frostily.

“But there's one which has been going for years and years. Even if it does run on a shoestring. Perhaps that's why. I backtracked on her ads, from ten years or more. A woman runs it. Prides herself on personal judgement, no computer rubbish. I mean, if she's gone on that long, she must be successful, right?”

Hazel grinned. Patsy expected her to lick her lips. She crossed her arms.

“When do we start then? Appointments?”

“Next week? I've made them for you. If you want.”

Angela was such a reliable little gem. She stood up and placed the particulars on Patsy's desk, determined now. They had nothing in common apart from the place they worked. They were the remainders of a larger gang, that was all, formed around flats and offices. They were an accident.

“I thought we might wait until your friend Elisabeth gets back,” Angela said hesitantly. “She might want to join in.”

“No,”
said Hazel. “We're fetching her back tomorrow. She's a bit of a cripple.”

“Only I'm not quite ready for this yet,” Angela said flatly. “You two can try it first.”

There were times when she was hopelessly stubborn and beyond persuasion. Moments when obstinacy seemed her only strength.

“Fine,” said Patsy.

“What if we get the same man?” Hazel demanded.

“It's all done on personal histories, profiles and an in-depth interview,” Angela supplied as if reading from a bulletin. “Taking into account personal preferences. So you won't ever get the same man, will you?”

They watched her leave. Miss Pretty Froth. Over-protective dad. Not hungry enough yet. Silly, even after all they'd done.

A
ngela tapped down the corridor, looking busy. She could have died and gone to heaven, watching their faces! Little Angela, telling them what to do and where to go, when all along she had already done it. You've spent the last year dragging me round places, she wanted to say; no, be honest, I went willing. Only I was shocked, I tell you, shocked to bits. I can't help being shy; I can't help being frightened of my mother, even though she approves of me being friends with both of you, and I love you both, I really do, but it was time I did something on my own, so I got in there first, I did, I did.

Slowing down, sidling into the corner of the open-plan offices from which she had not made the crucial phone call, Angela felt a sense of enormous triumph. They'd be giving her an Oscar next. There, there girls, she would say; it wasn't so bad was it, admitting that your social life lacks a certain
je ne sais quoi
, such as men? She made herself forget the courage it had taken to get so far; how dreadful she had felt. Got there first, got there first, she found herself chanting. She was sick of being patronized.

She had nearly
turned back twice. Sitting in the cafe, she had watched the higher windows of the agency on the other side of the road and found them unimpressive, despite a West End address blocked on a piece of paper so thick she could have eaten it. She wanted to chew it out of sheer anxiety, but Angela was thin, untempted by pastries, let alone paper. Up the stairs she had gone, pretending to drift like a blossom, closing her eyes to the scruffiness. And there was a lady, behind an unimposing desk in a small room, heavy with the scent of flowers. Now, tell me about yourself, the woman had said. Tell me about yourself and what you are looking for, and Angela had told her everything. About the bullying from her father and her school. About her over-protective mother and how she had been fat as a child. About the triumph of her independence at twenty-five and how it did not stop her blushing. About her little house, less than a mile from mother, secured with grilles at every window, her fear of bugs, germs and stray dogs. Her whole heart's yearning, not simply for a man, but for an ultra-conventional large, protective man in a suit, who would look after her and want her to wear white at the wedding.

Everything.

And the woman had said, trust me. I know exactly what you mean.

“G
emstones,”
her father told her, “are only at their most interesting when pure.”

Elisabeth, smoking her endless cigarettes, stood by the kitchen window which looked onto the most prosaic part of the garden, divided from the rest by a wooden fence covered with clematis. She could not tolerate the sight of the sea. It had the challenging brightness of a brilliant, cut zircon. Instead, she was watching the washing line, where a tiny, spring-reared Blue Tit played. He swung from one peg to the next, examined each; let the momentum of his weight and the grasp on the peg tilt him upside down so fast she felt she could hear him laugh. Her mouth was open to laugh, but she could not; as if, like he, she had either lost the knack of making a sudden noise, or never learned it. There was a healthy, sweet smell of pure garden rubbish burning next door. You will not get that at home, her mother would say. You'll get dampness and darkness up that tower.