My Fair Man

It was at this moment, almost as she had reached the checkout in Sainsbury’s with her imaginary trolley, that she remembered the bet. Had Jon really meant it or had he been joking? Grabbing her robe from the chair by her bedside she got up and made her way down the flight of stairs and through to the kitchen, the only closed-off part downstairs of her otherwise open-plan loft apartment.

And there, at the very top of her Samsonite briefcase, tucked alongside that copy of the Big Issue was Jon’s hand-written wager.

‘Do you think he was serious?’ she asked Toby as he joined her.

‘The terrible tragedy is that even when Jon’s joking he’s serious,’ commented Toby, ‘and he’s always been a gambler. He’ll bet on anything. Years ago he had a bet with Chris and me on the number of orgasms he could achieve in one night with a dreadful slapper we all knew. She had to swear an affidavit before we gave him the money …’

Hattie looked at Toby and realised that after six years together they barely knew one another. It genuinely surprised her that the word ‘slapper’ was one he was – well – familiar with.

‘Toby, you know I really want to do this. It would be like the ultimate sociological experiment for me. I might even write a paper on it. Profit professionally as well as getting considerable satisfaction proving that dreadful fool wrong,’ she said as she made her way through to her minimalist bathroom.

Minimalism appealed to Hattie because she had grown up in a dusty, cluttered, overdecorated stately home which was a virtual shrine to hereditary possessions. Every nook and cranny of her childhood home had been filled with rare antiques, paintings and objets d’art, most of which – despite her father’s assertion that they were ‘priceless’ – were all about money and the ostentatious presentation of their family wealth. The fact that her own choice of living space – almost entirely empty of possessions – was now fashionable was not important to her. What she loved most about her bare white surroundings was the way in which it contrasted so totally with her ancestral home. It fitted perfectly with her general philosophy on life – which had caused such grief in her teenage years – property is theft. Jon’s favourite joke at Hattie’s expense involved him saying that when it came to her own apartment that ridiculous phrase was true – the 3000-square-foot loft-style property, he would say, had been absolute daylight robbery when she bought it three years previously.

Sitting on the edge of her sandstone bath Hattie picked up her portable phone and rang Claire, who agreed that she thought Jon had been serious.

‘Toby tells me Jon always wins his bets,’ Hattie said carefully to Claire who had, after all, once lived with the man.

‘Not this one he won’t,’ said Claire confidently, ‘although I think that we will have our work cut out. For a start we have got to find that man again. And then we’ll probably need Rentokil and an intepreter when we do,’ she finished with a giggle.

It wasn’t going to be as easy as Hattie had thought. The woman at the customer service desk inside the Halifax had been most unhelpful. They had absolutely no idea who – or what – lay in their doorway after closing hours, unless, that was, they happened to know his account number. Why didn’t madam try the Salvation Army?

Hattie was disconsolate.

‘For Christ’s sake, Hattie, it doesn’t have to be that homeless man. It could be any old vagrant. Let’s go down to cardboard city and find another one,’ said Claire.

‘No, Claire, it’s got to be that young man. Jon specifically said that man. And anyway I believe it was somehow fated. I’ve just got to find him …’

‘But you probably wouldn’t recognise him if you did stumble across him. It was dark and I certainly only remember the smell of him.’

Hattie didn’t say anything but she knew that she would instantly recognise the man. His eyes, even in that dingy doorway, had a quality about them she knew she would never forget. And however much Claire might sneer she felt increasingly there was some, well, some cosmic link between him and herself.

‘We have two options open to us. We either come back here tonight and hope that he turns up or we could go down to the mission and see if he’s there.’

But he wasn’t at the mission either and they had so few clues as to his identity that there was precious little more they could do. An earnest young man on duty suggested they try a couple of haunts that were frequented by the homeless young.

‘Otherwise you could try the offices of the Big Issue on Monday. If he sold you a copy he must be registered with them,’ he said.

Claire was all for this latter course but Hattie wouldn’t think of it. And when Hattie made up her mind about something they were both generally carried along by it.

It was, Hattie said later, a depressing day on a number of levels. They trudged around soulless cafés and drop-in centres encountering, along the way, a new awareness of the meanness of the city they lived in.

By late afternoon Claire was ready to give up.

‘Look, Hattie, I’m going to some dinner tonight. I’m going to have to get back to get ready.’

‘Someone special?’ said Hattie, who was always rather intrigued by Claire’s relationships.

‘No, only some friend of mine – another PR – who has lined up this man she just knows is right for me. As if I haven’t heard that a million times before. His CV sounds hopeful though – good-looking, intelligent, divorced, successful …’ she said wistfully.

‘Sounds like the prototype of every man I’ve ever known you get involved with,’ said Hattie. ‘Take care, won’t you, and er, take it slowly …’

‘If I took it slowly, Hattie, I’d never take it at all,’ answered Claire, kissing her friend on both cheeks as she prepared to leave her. ‘You going home to cook dinner for Toby?’

‘No actually, he’s got some squash thing tonight. I think I’ll carry on looking for a while. I’m not ready to give up quite yet,’ she said.

‘Well, be careful. The streets are no place for a nice girl like you,’ warned Claire as she climbed into a cab, wondering, not for the first time that day, if this whole business of the bet hadn’t been a terrible mistake.

There were ten of them at dinner. Three couples and four ‘singles’ as Antonia insultingly called anyone without a live-in lover and a joint mortgage. Claire was rather hopeful about the man who had been placed beside her at Antonia’s long, bleached wood table. But then when it came to men she was a hopeless optimist.

‘Hi,’ she said as they took their seats, ‘I’m Claire Martin.’

‘Chris White,’ he replied.

He was tall enough, she reckoned, and if not quite as good-looking as Antonia had promised, he wasn’t unattractive. He had mid-brown hair and grey-blue eyes and very good cheekbones so that when he smiled, as now, he looked really rather fanciable.

The only vaguely worrying thing about him was his goatee beard. Claire wasn’t very keen on facial hair. But, hey, she reminded herself, you can’t have everything.

‘Antonia talks about you a lot,’ Chris said.

‘She does?’ Claire looked across at Antonia with surprise; they were not exactly close friends.

‘Yes, she’s always saying how you would be perfect for me.’ Chris was also looking across the table at Antonia.

‘She mentioned something similar to me,’ Claire replied.

He poured her a glass of wine, and then another of fizzy mineral water.

‘Are you a friend of Steve’s?’ she said, unsure of Chris’s connection with Antonia.

‘I was best man at their wedding. Known him since I was a child.’ he said.

He was very attentive, filling her glass – just that little bit too often really – and virtually ignoring the woman on his other side. He wasn’t particularly witty or overly fascinating (he was, after all, an accountant) but he seemed pleasant enough.

And when the meal was finished he sat next to her on one of the sofas in Antonia’s living room, one hand, very casually, slipped behind her. Signalling, she thought, some kind of intent.

It was going well, Claire decided. He was successful and established – he had one of those lovely little Georgian cottages in that network of streets between Notting Hill Gate and High Street Kensington – and he had been divorced for just about the time a man should be before he considered remarriage.

At the end of the evening, as the other couples tumbled out into their cars, Claire asked Antonia, within earshot of Chris, for the number of a local cab company. Antonia looked at Chris meaningfully.

‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. ‘It’s not far out of my way.’

She smiled, thanked him, and nipped into the loo on her way out to retouch her lipstick and check that she looked OK. In the car they talked a bit about the other guests and when he drew up outside her mews house he stopped the car and turned off the ignition (another sign of intent, she thought).

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

She remembered Hattie’s advice, earlier that evening, about taking it slowly. But Claire had reached an age – and if she were honest a state of desperation about ever finding a man she could really love – when caution was pointless. If she said ‘no’ she would probably never hear from him again. And if she said (as she probably would later) ‘yes, yes, yesss’ she would probably never hear from him again. There was nothing to be gained, and nothing to be lost, in being coy.

He didn’t waste any time. Within seconds he was passionately kissing her. Telling her, whenever he surfaced to take in a gulp of air, that she was beautiful, hot, wild, the best – the usual gamut of meaningless compliments induced by male sexual arousal.