Getting Over Mr. Right (2 page)

“That’s it,” I said to my best friend, Becky. “I am giving up on men.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Becky said.

“Believe it, Becks. This time I’m serious.”

The following day I went to a thirtieth birthday party at a flat over a nail bar in Balham and met my Mr. Right.

It had to be fate. I had finally, after almost two decades spent dating for Great Britain, announced I was giving up on my manhunt. At long last, I had decided to try taking the one piece of advice I always found so hard to swallow: “Love will only come when you’re not looking for it.”

How many times had I heard that irritating maxim (usually from someone who, six months earlier, had been every bit as desperate to pair up as me)? And how many times had I protested that it simply wasn’t true? Well, I had announced that I was no longer looking for love and just twenty-four hours later I found myself in the kitchen at that thirtieth birthday party, discussing the merits of the latest government budget with the most attractive man I had ever seen in my life!

Okay, so I didn’t actually find him all that attractive at first …

Romantic that I was, I had always imagined that when love came to me—when it was real, proper, true love—I would know the second I laid eyes on him. I had experienced so many thunderbolts that turned out to herald nothing but emotional drizzle that, surely, when real love walked into my life, the entire earth would shake with the magnitude of the moment. The heavens would open. Long-dead volcanoes would erupt. My personal choir of angels would stop filing their nails and start singing the Hallelujah Chorus with a guest solo from Elvis. But it wasn’t like that at all.

When Michael—Michael Parker, the man who would turn my world upside down—walked into the kitchen at that party in Balham, he barely registered on my radar. I was busy looking for a clean glass among the jumble of plastic cups and dirty mugs on the draining board. To attract my attention, Michael swilled out the wineglass he had been drinking from and handed it to me.

“It’s safe,” he said. “I don’t have anything contagious.”

(That was his first lie.)

I thanked him for the glass and helped myself to some wine from the bottle I had brought with me. Though it was only nine in the evening, Helen’s birthday party was already shaping up to be the kind of affair where you couldn’t be certain that the yellowish liquid in the bottle on the counter really was Chardonnay. Glass refilled, I was planning to head back into the sitting room, where Becky and her brand-new boyfriend, Henry, had bagged a sofa, but just as I was about to sashay out of the kitchen and out of trouble, Michael attempted to strike up a conversation.

“How do you know Helen?” he asked. Not a very original opening gambit, but better than “I bet you look good with no clothes on,” which was how the NY-Lon disaster had started.

“Helen and I were at college together,” I explained.

“Oh. That’s great. Durham, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“We work in the same office,” said Michael. “Me and Helen.”

Which must mean he’s an accountant
, I said to myself, switching off.

“Which means I’m an accountant,” he said. “But we’re not all boring!”

He took the words right out of my head.

“I don’t think accountants are boring,” I lied.

At that moment Helen, the birthday girl, lurched into the
kitchen. She was certainly doing her best to show her guests that accountants really can be fun. Outrageous, wacky, “dial 999!” amounts of fun. She was wearing a pair of red crotchless knickers to prove it.

Thank goodness she was wearing them
over
her jeans.

“Aren’t these just ker-razy?” she said, pinging the elastic waistband. “They’re a present from Kevin. He said that now I’m officially over the hill I’m going to need help to get the guys going!”

I made a mental note
not
to ask if I could be introduced to Kevin. He sounded a perfect charmer.

“Kevin is one of our coworkers,” Michael explained. “He’s always playing practical jokes.”

“What a lot of fun it must be to work in your office,” I said.

“Oh, I see you’ve met Michael,” said Helen, throwing her arm around his shoulders. “He’s such a great guy.” She tickled him under the chin, and he squirmed playfully. “Really sexy,” she added in a stage whisper to me.

Sexy? Was she joking? I took in the way Michael was dressed. He was at least two inches shorter than I was in my heels and was wearing the kind of clothes more commonly seen on a member of a contemporary mime group. His faded black turtleneck sweater emphasized the soft contours of his torso, and the high waistband of his black jeans was kidding no one about the real length of his legs. I glanced down at his feet. Tasseled loafers. Brown. I was reminded of my first boyfriend, Malcolm, who had to wear his school shoes on the weekend. Michael looked about as sexy as the pope.

But he was also funny. And funny is my weakness. Trapped as I was by an increasing number of Helen’s coworkers pouring into the kitchen in search of booze, I had no choice but to get to know Michael better. Half a bottle of wine later, I was finding him very amusing indeed. Hilarious, in fact. His take on the comings and goings at his accountancy firm was as humorous
as an episode of
The Office
. Before I could say,
I’m afraid I’m on a man-break
, I had given him my phone number and said that I would be very happy to have dinner with him the following week. On Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Or Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday if the other days didn’t work for him. When he joked that he would rearrange the following evening’s folk dancing practice just for me, I was smitten.

I was doomed.

So much for my man-break. And so much for playing by
The Rules
, which was something else I had promised I would do if I ever found myself in the unlikely position of going on a date again. Having broken half a dozen commandments from that terribly useful book by acting pathetically keen to see Michael once more, I continued my amateur strategy. That’s right. You’ve guessed it. I went to bed with Michael right after our first date.

The date took place at Bertorelli in Covent Garden. It was certainly a step up from Pizza Hut with the chap from Supa Clean. The evening went beautifully. The conversation flowed. I managed not to spill anything on my dress (Karen Millen, bought in a rush that afternoon), and afterward, though we lived on different Tube lines, Michael insisted on accompanying me home to my Clapham flat. We were having such a lovely conversation that it seemed a shame to part, so I invited him in, I made him a coffee, and he didn’t leave until the following morning.

Our physical connection was a revelation. And it pretty much sealed my fate. If you had told me that someone who had the watery eyes of a basset hound in a face like a moldy potato would kiss like you imagine Brad Pitt kisses Angelina, I would never have believed it possible. But it was wonderful. My whole body fizzed with excitement from the moment he laid his hand on mine. At the touch of Michael’s lips I crumbled like a chocaholic
locked in a room containing nothing but a box of melting Kit Kats. I couldn’t take my hands off the man. I caught his nasty cold as a result.

But I didn’t care. Kissing Michael was well worth a bout of the sniffles. When I saw Becky the following day for a first-date postmortem, she sighed and rolled her eyes in despair. She had heard it all before. The kiss. The thunderbolt. The beginning of an obsession that could only end in disaster … But when, between Lemsips, I described Michael to her in more detail, she couldn’t help but nod approvingly. He was an accountant, just like her boyfriend; therefore she couldn’t complain that he was a flaky creative type. (I had a penchant for flaky creative types.) And he wasn’t devastatingly good looking. (Becky thought his frankly average looks a plus, since it meant that he wouldn’t be as arrogant as some of the better-looking guys I had loved.) Then I let her know that Michael had told me he’d had a live-in relationship that lasted five years. That, Becky decided, was the clincher. It was proof that he wasn’t afraid of commitment, but it came without the complications of a starter marriage and subsequent divorce.

“Perfect. I like the sound of him,” said Becky. “From what you’ve told me, I would say he’s mature. He’s got a proper job. He’s already tried out commitment. He sounds to me like a man about to ripen and when he does …” She grinned.

Ripening. This was Becky’s favorite theory. Men don’t look for Miss Right in the way that we girls spend our time looking for the perfect man. Instead men get “ripe.” They reach a stage in their life when all their mates are getting married or their hair starts to fall out and they decide it’s time to settle down before no one decent will have them. They marry the next girl who smiles at them in passing. All we girls have to do is be in the right place at the right time to catch a ripe one before he hits the ground and starts to go rotten.

“Yep,” said Becky, nodding wisely. “It sounds to me as though you have finally found your one.”

Could it be true? I so wanted to believe it.

When Michael texted moments later to ask if I was free on Friday night, Becky’s judgment was confirmed.

“It’s only Monday and he already wants to know what you’re doing on Friday night. That is an excellent sign,” she said. “Just don’t screw it up.”

Well, thank God for that, I thought. After years of dating men who were about as ripe as a “perfectly ripe” avocado from the supermarket (the ones that go from rock-hard to rotting without passing edible), I had found my ready man. My Mr. Ripe.

Though once again I had thrown strategy out of the window (who needs strategy when you’ve found true love?), I soon noticed that Michael did everything
The Rules
girls said a serious man ought to. I was used to guys who called at the last minute to ask if I would meet them in their part of town for a quickie after the pub closed. In contrast Michael always made an effort. He called me early in the week to make plans for the weekend. He would always make sure I got home safely. He considered my likes and dislikes when choosing activities. He was unfailingly chivalrous. He didn’t seem to have anything to hide.

So, naturally, I fell for him. I fell as hard as a penny from the top of the Empire State Building that cracks the pavement for miles around. And he seemed to be falling for me, too. When I cooked for him (I’m a great cook; baking cakes is my hobby), he would sigh in ecstasy at whatever I put in front of him and tell me that I would make someone a wonderful wife. And, as Becky pointed out, men never use the word “wife” in front of someone they consider to be fling material. They would rather boil their own testicles.

“It means he’s taking you seriously,” she told me sagely.

I dared to dream of the wedding I had imagined for myself since I was four years old, when I had watched Diana marry Charles in the ultimate fairy-tale dress on the black-and-white TV set in my grandmother’s house. Never mind how that particular marriage turned out.

So, months passed. Became a year. And I felt as though I was finally, truly living the dream.