You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (14 page)

‘Tits and teeth,’ Chloe had kept chanting as Neve bared her lips in what she hoped was a warm and friendly smile.

Despite her grave misgivings, the dumbed-down profile and cleavage-tastic photo led to thirty responses the next morning. Rose and Chloe had whittled down the non-contenders and stood over Neve while she sent saccharine messages to the shortlist. Now it was Monday afternoon and she was getting ready to meet Tom, a software engineer who liked martial arts, Asian cinema and graphic novels.

Neve also had a long list of dos and don’ts from Chloe’s flatmate.

1. Don’t give out your last name, phone number or email address.

2. Do let Chloe know where you’re meeting him and send a text message when you’re on your way home so she knows you haven’t been Roofied and date-raped.

3. Don’t talk about diets, weight-loss or your crazy fitness regime.

4. Do ask lots of questions and try to look interested when he answers, even if he’s duller than mud.

5. Do offer to split the bill, but don’t be too forceful about it.

6. Don’t put out. A kiss on the mouth is acceptable but only use tongues if the second date is already locked down.

7. Check all exits on your way in, so you can make a speedy getaway while he’s having a wee.

8. Try to have some fun.

Neve didn’t think she’d ever been so terrified as she slowly walked along High Holborn to meet Tom outside the tube station. She could feel beads of perspiration popping out on her forehead, though it was the coldest February in thirty years, and she was sure that when she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t be able to speak. Even breathing was an ordeal.

‘It’s only a date,’ she kept telling herself as she reached the traffic-lights opposite the station and scanned the crowd for Tom. He’d looked quite cute in his photo – a boyish face smiling shyly out at the world – and his punctuation had been absolutely perfect in the two messages he’d sent her. But Neve couldn’t see anyone boyish and shy outside the station, just a stream of commuters dodging the hapless men brandishing free copies of the
Evening Standard
.

Somehow her feet carried her across the road so she could stand outside the station and peer anxiously at the sea of faces.

‘Are you Neve?’ said a voice behind her, and she turned to see an ageing goth who was neither boyish nor shy, to judge from the quick but comprehensive once-over he gave her.

Tom was nearer to forty than the thirty he’d claimed to be, and Neve suspected that the closest he’d ever got to martial arts and Asian cinema was watching Kung Fu movies.

Once they found a corner table in a pub that stank of stale chip fat, he crossly told Neve that she didn’t look anything like her profile picture, and while she was still thinking, Kettle meet pot, you’re black, Tom started talking about something called Linux for ages while staring at her breasts, until he got up to go to the bar and Neve slipped out of the side door without a second’s hesitation.

As she walked back to Gray’s Inn Road to collect her bike, Neve felt strangely exhilarated. She’d done it! She’d actually been on a date. Her first date. And yes, it had been horrible and scary, but nothing could be as bad as that first foray into the unknown. Now she knew what to expect – as little as possible – and maybe on the second or the third date, she might even get the opportunity to talk about herself for a few minutes. Right now, Neve couldn’t wait to get home and confess everything to Celia because she was beginning to understand what Chloe’s flatmate had meant when she’d said that the debrief was usually more entertaining than the actual date.

On Tuesday she had early-evening drinks with an ambient trance DJ, who made it pretty clear that Neve didn’t have one iota of cool (’You’ve never heard of David Toop? You have to be fucking kidding me!’).

Wednesday night was a date with an estate agent. Neve had had grave misgivings about it even though Chloe had insisted that there had to be some nice estate agents. It turned out that David wasn’t one of them. His hands had brushed the underside of Neve’s breasts when he’d gallantly helped her remove her coat, and she’d only had time to take one sip of her white-wine spritzer before he asked, ‘Are we going to fuck later? If we’re not, then this is really a waste of my time.’

By Thursday, Neve was seriously flagging and in no mood for her date with Adrian, but Philip had gone to great trouble to set it up, incurring the wrath of Clive who thought that his staff were his own personal property. With zero enthusiasm, she set off to meet Adrian outside Foyles on Charing Cross Road.

Her heart was somewhere around her knees, but when Neve saw Adrian waiting for her with a sulky expression on his pretty face, it plummeted all the way down to her ankles.

‘I’m gay,’ he snapped, as soon as she was within earshot.

‘Oh! I kinda knew that,’ Neve said, and when she tried a tentative smile, Adrian smiled back. He really was very pretty. He wasn’t quite so pretty when he looked at her properly and his eyes bulged in their sockets.

‘Neve from Oxford?’ he queried. ‘Fucking hell! Have you had one of those gastric bands fitted?’

‘I did it the old-fashioned way,’ she said, failing to dial down the smug tone. ‘Diet, exercise, blood, sweat, tears. Still a way to go though.’

Adrian gave her an appraising look as if he was about to send her off to market. ‘You look fabulous.’ He paused and Neve could see him come to a decision. ‘Let’s go for a drink. You don’t mind if we go where there’s eye candy, do you?’

It was the most fun Neve had had all week. They spent a very enjoyable hour bitching about the vile, perfidious Clive and how Adrian had to pretend to be straight at work as it was the only way to fend off his lecherous advances.

‘Though he keeps telling me that once I have cock, I’ll never go back,’ he confessed to Neve, who squealed in horror.

Adrian even promised to think of single, straight friends to set her up with and the evening only came to an end when the barman that Adrian had been flirting with all evening finished his shift.

And on Friday there was Edward, who Neve had a really good feeling about. He’d sent her twelve messages in the last two days praising her intellect, prose style and beauty, and it was a huge relief to correspond with someone who knew who the Poet Laureate was.

Edward was shorter than she’d expected but, by this stage, Neve was adding five years to the age of all her dates and shortening them by five inches, and he was even more nervous than she was, which was a nice change. He was sweating profusely and once they were seated in a little pub by the Law Courts, he swayed from side to side but listened intently as Neve described her day’s transcribing.

‘And what about you?’ Neve asked, when she’d said all there was to say about the literary estate of a minor poet. ‘You said you were a writer?’

True, Edward had said he was a writer, but his writing largely consisted of blog posts about the Kennedy assassination. As he talked, he got more and more agitated until he finally admitted that he’d had a manic episode three months ago and was currently living with his parents and temping on the days he could actually get out of bed.

At least there was plenty to talk about, Neve thought, as she tried to steer the conversation away from Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and other famous suicides. Max, whom she’d been trying really hard not to think about, had asked her what she’d be bringing to her first relationship other than an exit strategy, but as she patiently answered Edward’s questions on Freudian analysis, Neve realised that if she went out with him, she might be able to effect some positive change in his life. Besides, he was looking at her with something approaching reverence as she described the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. No one had ever looked at her like that before.

He wasn’t so bad-looking, Neve reasoned, as Edward walked with her to Tesco Metro so she could buy some skimmed milk before she cycled home. Rose from work would call him ‘a fixer-upper’ and if he got rid of the ponytail of lank hair and stopped sweating so much, he could be quite attractive, and it wasn’t as if she was giving Angelina Jolie any sleepless nights. Besides, going out with Edward would mean that she never had to walk ‘the green mile’ with pounding heart and a flat metallic taste in her mouth to meet any more prospective dates.

‘So, Neve, I think you’re wonderful,’ Edward breathed as they stood outside Tesco’s. ‘Do you think you might want to see me again?’

‘That would be lovely,’ Neve said decisively, and she was just wondering if now the second date was locked down, it would be all right to give Edward her phone number, when he raised one hand to cup her cheek.

It was a prelude to a kiss that never happened, because one touch from Edward’s hot clammy hand
on her face
had Neve shuddering violently. It felt as if her skin was trying to crawl off her bones because even though her head had made a reasoned, rational decision and her heart was ambivalent, her body was absolutely, unequivocally repulsed.

They both pretended that it hadn’t happened. Edward gave Neve his phone number, she promised that she’d call, and even though she had a tiny moment of shame when she got home and discovered that Edward had already sent her three messages to say that she was gorgeous and that he couldn’t wait to see her again, her body shuddered again at the line,
Have a wonderful weekend, honey
. How could you date someone when you went into spasms of disgust just because they’d typed a casual endearment? You couldn’t.

There were no dates on Saturday because Celia, Rose, Chloe and Chloe’s flatmate had all decreed that anyone who went on an internet date on a Saturday night was a sad, desperate loser, making Neve a sad, desperate loser by association. Besides, Rose was hellbent on dragging Neve to a salsa club on the Charing Cross Road.

Rose was something of an enigma to Neve. She was in her forties, had worked at the Archive since she was eighteen and had never married, because she’d spent most of her adult life looking after her mother who had MS. Her mother had died five years ago and now Rose’s social life, which rivalled Celia’s, centred around meeting and ensnaring young men from South America, then discarding them a few weeks later when she got bored.

It was odd, because Rose looked exactly like a woman in her mid-forties who’d spent the best years of her life caring for an elderly parent. She was tall and buxom with a determined set to her face, which came in handy when Mr Freemont was being absolutely unbearable, and at work she favoured tailored separates and sensible shoes.

But on Saturday night she was transformed into a middle-aged sex kitten in a red sparkly dress that showed more cleavage than Neve thought fitting for a woman of Rose’s age. Her mousy-brown hair had been swept up into a mass of ringlets and she was wearing skyscraper heels and a feral smile. Neve was wearing a black wrap dress, black cardigan and flats, though Rose forced her to remove her cardigan before the salsa lesson.

‘You’ve got to show a bit of flesh,’ she enthused, looking down at her own chest with satisfaction. ‘I’ve got some body glitter in my bag. Really draws the eye to the breasts.’

Neve didn’t want anyone’s eyes on her breasts, which were heaving after an hour’s salsa lesson – an experience which had confirmed all her worst suspicions that she had no sense of rhythm. While everyone went left, she went right, and she could only move her hips from side to side, rather than swivelling, circling and thrusting them like everyone else.

‘You’re doing great,’ Rose called as she mamboed past Neve in the arms of a Chilean dishwasher called Esteban who looked like a young Antonio Banderas. Neve was left to tread on the toes of Jorge, who was very sweet about it, but as soon as the lesson ended and the more experienced dancers began to arrive, he kissed Neve’s hand, made his excuses and left.

After a couple more dances, Neve was left on the sidelines – word had got out that she was a toe-stepper. She was relieved to rest her aching feet and slowly sip a lime and soda as she watched office workers from Croydon and minicab drivers from Edmonton sashay across the floor as if they had Latin blood flowing through their veins. Everyone was having a good time because it was Saturday night and for a few short hours, the trials and disappointments of the past week were forgotten. Saturday night was about drinking and dancing and flirting and shucking off whoever you had to be Monday to Friday.

Neve sat there in her basic black and wondered what was wrong with her. It was as if, once the pounds began to disappear, they’d taken her sense of fun with them. She’d been happy going to nightclubs with her friends when she was at Oxford and she could concentrate on having a good time (and minding everyone’s coats and bags while they were dancing) because she didn’t have to worry about trying to pull. Now she was desperate to be pulled, but she was still minding Rose’s leopard-print fun-fur and matching bag while she did an energetic mambo. These were the wrong kind of thoughts to have at eleven thirty on a Saturday night sat in a dark corner of a heaving club as everyone else gyrated and whooped around you. Neve waited another five minutes for her sense of fun to make its presence felt, then she went to find Rose to tell her that she was going to catch the last tube.

As the tube pulled out of the station, Neve had to tense her facial muscles in an effort to stop glaring and grinding down on her back molars because the woman sitting opposite her was looking quite concerned. But really, the mores of modern dating were horrific and completely unjust.