The Last Year Of Being Single

I tell him that I’ve heard he is a womaniser. That I am not to trust him. That he is amoral and that he will probably make a pass at me and try to seduce me. But that he is also well thought of professionally and has a good mind.

He smiles. It scares me. It looks very unnatural. Like when Wednesday smiled for the first time in Addams Family Values. I ask him to stop smiling and look mean and brooding again. He laughs, which looks more natural than the smile, but the laugh still looks out of place on his face.

We order.

John has a pizza. No fuss. With everything on it.

I order salade niçoise. With dressing on the side. No potatoes. No anchovies. No dough balls. Extra tuna.

John says he will have my dough balls.

I say I will have the dough balls after all, but can we have them on a separate plate?

I order Diet Coke.

No, they don’t do English beer. Only the foreign muck.

He orders Diet Coke too.

I ask him why he has a fetish for English beer. He says he always has. He says he lives in Surrey in a yellow cottage by a railway line and is surrounded by five pubs within walking distance which all do good English beer. It makes him salivate just thinking about it. At which point he starts to salivate just thinking about it. Methinks this is unsexy, so I ask him what else makes him salivate.

‘Cats and women’s legs. I can’t see your legs, so I don’t know if you would make me salivate,’ he says straight-faced, ‘but I have two cats. Hannah and Jessica.’

I try to flirt. I tell him I have nice legs because I used to be a dancer and that I would like to have a cat. He says that he can’t tell me if my legs are good because I’m wearing a disgusting pair of culottes. He also says he will report me to the animal cruelty society if I get a cat, because as I am working full time I won’t be able to look after it properly. He is not joking. Or at least I think he is not joking. He doesn’t smile while he is saying this, which is some relief.

I interview him about customer focus. I fantasise about him drinking beer in a pub in Surrey. It’s the summer. There’s him and me. I’m wearing a short white dress. Hannah and Jessica are there, rubbing their bodies round my ankles and his ankles. And I start to run my fingers through his hair. Very slowly. Then I revert back to reality. Get real, Giles. I’m talking to a guy who works for a regional part of a regional part of the railways called John Wayne.

2nd September

7 a.m. Flatmate Karen is still not up yet. Completely scatty, she makes me feel and look organised. I love her for it. It’s some feat to do that. She is nanny to a four-year-old who is being hot-housed by his financial advisor parents. He can speak two other languages fluently. French and pocket money. She gets a taxi to pick her up every morning at six forty-five a.m. The taxi driver knocks on the door. He usually bangs it a few times. She is always asleep. She gets changed, washed, brushed in five minutes. Between the change and wash I tell her I’ve met a man called John Wayne. She laughs very loudly.

‘Does he ride well?’

‘Er, no. He has a girlfriend. And, Karen, I have a boyfriend.’

Door slams. Boyfriend Paul is two years younger than me. Very sensible. Good with money. Attractive. Charming. Everyone likes him. Everyone thinks he is sensible, good with money. Including me. Been going out with him for five years. Not all good, but know I love him, been through a lot with him, and he is a ‘good catch’. Everyone likes him. Except Karen, who thinks he is too straight for me and has something missing and has a dark side. Her most affectionate nickname for him is Flatliner.

‘You need someone with some va-va-voom, Sarah. He’s a non-starter. He’s insecure and controlling. And a potential bully. And you don’t want that.’

My friends also don’t like him much. They thought he was OK in the early years but as he did better at work gradually became an arrogant, boorish, self-serving prat. But I don’t see much of them these days.

My insecure, sensible control-freak Flatliner lives in a two-up, two-down in Chelmsford. I have a two-bedroom flat in an old Victorian house in Brentwood. Largest commuter town in the country. Full of back-office suits wanting to be front-office Ferrari-drivers. I have a flatmate who pays her rent on time and is fun as well as funny and sensitive and has a boyfriend who doesn’t understand her and lives up the road and is in awe of her and threatened by her and treats her badly. And I have a job at the railways as Situation Manager (I recover situations, or cover over situations—whatever is more pertinent to the issue).During the six months I’ve been there, the company has sponsored me to go on three positive thinking, power and assertiveness training courses in wonderful country hotels in the Lake District and New Forest. And I still can’t say no.

So life is sweet. Ish. Boring but sweet. Until I meet John Wayne.

3rd September

I disagree with Karen. My boyfriend is not boring. I met him at his twenty-first birthday party. He was going out with someone called Gillian. I was going out with someone called David. I thought he was cute, had a smooth dark brown voice and had the most amazing long eyelashes. He told me later he also thought I was cute but that I wouldn’t stop talking about David.

I then met him two years later. At Liverpool Street Station. He liked my legs. He saw me from the back. He told his friend he knew me. His friend bet him fifty pounds he didn’t. He came up to me. Introduced himself and won the bet. He also got a date with me.

The date went well. In a local pub, called the Dead Duck, beamed, mid-eighteenth-century, lighting so low you couldn’t see what you were eating or drinking. And it had an unfortunate sewer problem. Despite the stench of sulphur in the pretty beer garden outside, we managed to make each other feel good. He had lovely eyes. The sort you get lost in. An open, honest face. And a wonderful smile. No pretension or artifice other than he worked in the City in a bank and was aware he was surrounded by people who were full of both.

He invited me back to his two-up, two-down in Chelmsford, which he’d just bought with a heavily subsidised mortgage. He asked if I wanted to see his etchings. The charm of it is that he genuinely did want me to see his etchings. Fabulous and imaginative drawings of dragons and horses and knives and outstretched hands, and swords and leopards and weird and wired shapes and images. Some quite disturbing, others quite delicate and poignant. He had a wide and diverse interest in music. A passion for everything from heavy metal to gentle classics. He played the electric guitar very badly. His rendition of Status Quo’s ‘Whatever You Want’ was diabolical but I said he played OK. He spoke eloquently and with sincerity. He made me laugh. He intrigued me. He loved to cook (although not to wash and dry). He was sensitive and interesting and was interested in me as a person. He asked insightful questions. He gave open answers. He didn’t try to impress and smiled knowingly when I did. He didn’t try to kiss me, and I said I would call him some time next week.

He called the next day. I said I was going to Monte Carlo and would he like to come down for the weekend? Other men had asked if they could join me, but I’d said no. But I asked Paul. Instinctively I knew he was the one. The one you know you are going to love. I suggested we have lunch before I left. On the day I was due to fly out. I took the train to London and met him for a lunch. Neither of us touched the food. We just looked at each other. I told him I had to rush home to get my suitcase so I could then come back into London and get on a flight from Heathrow. The madness somehow seemed logical then, and in keeping with the surreal nature of our relationship.

I went. I didn’t hear from him for a week and thought he’d changed his mind. I then received a call.

‘Hi, it’s Paul.’

I had forgotten who Paul was.

‘Er, Paul who?’

‘Have you forgotten me already? Paul O’Brian. Etchings. Brilliant guitar player.’

‘Er, ah, yes. Etchings.’

I remembered. But lots can happen in seven days. Monte Carlo had turned my head in a week. I’d forgotten this unpretentious doe-eyed boy for the bright lights and fast cars of the principality. When I heard his voice I felt he was coming to save me from myself. Almost heaven-sent.

‘I’m driving down tomorrow and should arrive tomorrow evening. Where are you staying?’

I was staying with a ‘friend’. Andreas Banyan. Fifty-five. Wrinkled, rich and worldly. Half-Egyptian. Half-American. Sounds so sleazy, and perhaps it was. I’d met him when I was in Monaco before and he had introduced me to some of the stars who waft in and out of Monte Carlo like feathers at the Pro Am Celebrity Tennis and Golf Tournaments held there annually. He was old enough to be my grandfather and I kept him at arm’s distance because I knew he wanted more than just a smiling companion.

‘Women should be treated like fabulous works of art. They should be put on display and appreciated, and if you can’t appreciate them any more they should be passed on to a collector who knows how to appreciate them.’

He considered himself a collector and his logic made me sick. I wondered how many ingenues had been seduced by the money people. Andreas was surrounded by many other ‘collectors’ who made me aware they would be happy to appreciate me should Andreas ever fail to do so.

Into this den of iniquity arrived Paul in his blue Golf GTI and his Quicksilver shorts. I wasn’t there to greet him, but arrived the next morning and told him I was so pleased to see him. He didn’t know how pleased.

We ate at the same restaurants I’d visited with Andreas, but with Paul they were somehow so much more romantic. Most of the couples who were eating there weren’t looking at each other. They were looking at other couples. What they were wearing—their jewellery, the labels—but never who they were with. We only had eyes for each other. We only talked to each other. We held hands. We kissed in public. We made love in private. We slept very little. Ate very little. Drank very little. Danced a lot.

On Day Two, we both made the decision to leave early. I introduced Andreas to Paul.

Andreas pulled me aside and whispered in my ear, ‘Sarah, he’s only a boy.’

I whispered back, ‘He may look like one, but he’s a man and I love him.’

I didn’t say what I thought, which was, Anyone would look a boy to you. I thought this too cruel. And honest.

We drove back slowly through France. We’d planned to stay in Monaco for a week, so hadn’t booked anything en route, but somehow every hotel we stopped at and asked had a room—only one—left. Admittedly usually at the top of the hotel. And there was never a lift. I spoke the French. Paul carried the suitcases. That was the deal. I got the better end of it, methinks.

In Avignon we stayed for two nights. I danced along the river and we ate breakfast overlooking the medieval city. Mealtimes were spent gazing into each other’s eyes and talking and talking and talking. Complimenting and in turn being complimented. Needing to touch one another—even if it was only by the fingertips. The electricity was there. In Vienne, our hotel was near to the Cathedral. Perhaps too close for some, as the bells rang out on the hour every hour. But it didn’t matter. We didn’t sleep much anyway. In Versailles I danced down the steps of the palace and practised my best Singing in the Rain skit when it poured on us when we took a picnic in the gardens. It didn’t matter. Paul told me he used to row at school and rowed on the lakes in the Versailles grounds. He almost fell in while pushing the boat away from the side. Somehow he didn’t, but it was funny and we both smiled and I was so very happy and in love and he was so very happy and felt loved.

By the time we arrived home we were totally smitten. In love as in not needing food or drink or sleep. Just needing each other. Nauseating bucket stuff. We ate at his favourite restaurant. Well, we didn’t eat. We just stared at each other for five hours. We emptied the restaurant, despite having been the first customers to arrive that day. The waiters got concerned that we didn’t like the food but we said it was fine. So he ate half the steak and I ate two potatoes. New. After our non-lunch, we meandered to the nearby cricket green, sat on the grass, and watched the local teams play abysmally on the sort of day that only exists in Miss Marple films. Sunny, balmy, no dog turds on the grass. Bees that don’t sting but just buzz happily. No mosquitoes to distract from the pleasure of furtive fumblings. No background noise of car radios or road-rage drivers wishing each other dead. Just hours of kissing and being held and holding and being wanted and wanting and being smug and happy, somehow both knowing we’d met the right person, and weren’t we very lucky, and Room with a View was right and I knew how Helena Bonham Carter felt in the last scene.

Most weekends we would spend all Sunday in bed. Antisocial and not good for the back. Occasionally we would venture to our favourite restaurant by the cricket green. Remembering and creating new memories to tell our children. Making love and sleeping and making love. He was a wonderful, caring, considerate, sexy lover. He taught me ways to please and how to please myself and I became consumed in ways of how to please and tease him. Each Sunday we would get up at five p.m. and I would accompany him to his local Catholic church. We would sing hymns and pray for forgiveness for an hour, then return and make love again. Until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.