by Jackie Clune
Oh, well, he thought, wandering over to the sad buffet table (MENSA members had clearly been bypassed by the whole food revolution). Might be fun, anyway.
Just as he was idly chewing on a cold sausage roll, in walked the next love of his life. Or at least that’s the way it always seemed to Stephen in that moment. Neither age nor experience had dampened his Labrador-like optimism. He watched as she teetered uncertainly on the edge of the room. This was more like it. She was about forty but had not yet succumbed to the dowdy gene so common in her contemporaries. She was wearing a satin pencil skirt that sat teasingly just on the knee, teamed with a black, almost-see-through blouse. Even at this distance, he could see the leopard print of her bra. The whole ensemble was tied together by an exquisite pair of diamanté-encrusted stilettos. In short, the look was just the wrong side of tarty to Stephen’s eyes, and it was all he could do to stop staring.
He sat on the urge to run over and fall at her feet, and his patience was rewarded. She glanced quickly round the room and seemed to make as unfavorable an appraisal as Stephen had. Good. Already they were of the same mind. Deciding on her next vantage point, she stuck out her chin and headed straight for the buffet. Stephen noticed the slight arrogance of her posture, the way every step she took in the glittering shoes seemed to tap out a rhythmic “I’m better than you, I’m better than you.” He felt himself smiling as he lost sight of her behind a portly, boorish-looking man in a car coat who was busy piling his paper plate high with miniature scotch eggs and withered cocktail sausages. He’d have to work his way round to her and strike up a conversation. She looked as though she would soon tire of the assembled company, so he would have to move fast. With studied casualness, he body-swerved the car-coat man and came to rest a few paces away from where she stood, picking at a dry chicken leg. She was taller close-up, and she smelled expensive. What was she doing at this dweeb convention? Stephen came only because despite himself it flattered his vanity to be part of an intellectual elite. He knew it was incredibly naff these days, MENSA, but he felt at home among the oddballs. But her? Why was she here? She had walked across the room with such purpose, and he thought he could detect that alluring chippiness he found so inexplicably attractive. He had to find out.
“So what’s a nice place like this doing to a girl like you?” he offered, gently scooping a corn chip into a bowl of green gloop.
“What?” She turned crossly, trying to locate the person who’d delivered the line.
“Hello. I’m Stephen Marchont. IQ of one hundred sixty-seven, but don’t know a single fact.”
“Oh, hello, sorry, didn’t see you there.”
Now that he was right up next to her, it was clear she was a good three inches taller than him.
He straightened up.
“I’m Amy.”
“Amying high, eh?”
Shit. What a pathetic pun. He thought he’d learned to resist those. How to make ground? “It’s true. I can’t retain factual information for longer than a week. Highly embarrassing.”
“Really? I thought MENSA was for eggheads,” she said, coolly looking over his shoulder.
“Yes, but is intelligence information-based, or is it not the power to think, to reason?”
“So they say. I can remember loads of stuff. All useless, mind you. Does that make me thick?”
“For example . . . ?”
“Well, for instance, did you know that all polar bears are left-handed?”
“Are they? How on earth did they find that out?”
“Don’t know—heard it somewhere and it stayed with me.”
“Extraordinary. More, please.”
They were standing side by side now, surveying the sad little disco that was just starting up. They watched for a few moments in silence as a small woman in brown tights took to the empty dance floor and began flinging herself around like a five-year-old at a wedding.
“Well, let me see. If you took all of the water out of an average one-hundred-sixty-seven-pound man, there’d only be about sixtyfive pounds of corpse left.”
“Crikey. Go on.”
“The Royal Goat Society was set up in 1879.”
“No, you see, that’s not so good, that one.”
“OK, erm, did you know that there is a secret train station underneath Buckingham Palace which goes directly to Heathrow Airport in case of a revolution?”
“Now that sounds more like an urban myth to me. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. Bloody Kraut yellow-bellies, the Windsors.”
Amy was enjoying this now. It had seemed like such a good idea last week, but on arrival, it had looked like a deeply unpromising evening. She’d decided to go for the intellectuals first. If she was going to do this baby thing alone, she might at least have the benefit of cherry-picking from the boffin gene pool. She’d Googled the words “intelligence quota” and “baby,” and her search yielded the unlikely existence of a social group for MENSA members looking for “intellectual compatibility.” Despite the Aryan undertones of the idea, she hadn’t been able to resist. She hadn’t really anticipated that the old hackneyed cliché of clever people being dull and unattractive would prove to be so true. Honestly, hadn’t these people watched TV or read a style magazine in their lives? It was almost impossible for someone as design-conscious as Amy to comprehend. How could people really not care about the way they looked—especially at a social function like this, where everyone was presumably on the make? So far, all the men she’d seen on the short walk from the car park to the hotel bar had looked like adult Harry Potter fans—the sort of nerds who cared whether the Lord of the Rings films accurately reflected the books. But here she was now in the company of a charming corduroy and tweed man with the twinkliest eyes she’d ever seen. He wasn’t what you’d call conventionally good-looking—he was shorter than her (but then, she was wearing her “Fuck me, I’m ovulating” shoes, so she’d have to cut him some slack there), balding but shaven-headed with the sort of rounded, smooth face favored by overfed babies, but he was curiously attractive. Something about his quiet confidence, the way everything he said sounded conspiratorial, lending to their conversation an air of unearned intimacy. Amy colored slightly at the realization that if he hadn’t approached her and engaged her in some chat, then she would have dismissed him along with the others.
Most attractive of all was the fact that he was clearly out of her class. Sure, she could probably outearn him, outstyle him, and probably outwit him, but there was one area in which she’d always come second—he was posh and she was not. And he was proper posh. He looked as though he’d been born into inherited family seat debt, and had toddled up ancient stately corridors with an Elizabethan antique christening rattle dangling from one sticky hand. He’d never had to earn anything, because everything was already his. She could always tell if someone was proper posh or just pretending, and despite all her working-class irritation with the unfairness of the class system, Amy had always got on with such people. It was not just a case of opposites attracting but also something about being on the outside of things. The proper posh and the working class, it seemed to Amy, were the thin wedges at each end of the social spectrum, the bourgeoisie occupying the dull middle ground.
The only thing concerning Amy about him at all was what he was doing here among all these saddos. When she’d decided to come, she’d hoped to find a room full of fascinating people with Noble Prize-winning sperm. Stephen was the only one here who’d looked even remotely interesting, and if he was a MENSA member, surely he knew how dull these functions were?
“Do you come here often?” Amy asked with a nod to the cliché.
“I’ve never come here. I wait ’til I get home. It’s less messy.”
Amy looked directly at Stephen to check if she had heard him right. He looked coolly back at her and twinkled. Yes, he was definitely flirting. Result. He had obviously decided to up the stakes right away. Not surprising for a public-school boy. She remembered that what she also liked about the aristocracy
was the absolute filth of them. None of this petit bourgeois prudishness, none of your middle-class wine-and-dine—straight in there, like a stud bullock. She couldn’t have asked for anyone better, considering she had come here with the express aim of finding a mate to make a baby with. Stephen was bound to be sophisticated enough to not ask for her phone number afterward—she didn’t see the point of getting involved with another ultimately useless man. Just wham, bam, and thank you, sir, was all she wanted.
“Shall we get out of here before they bring the Twister mat out?”
“Now . . . what would Nanny do . . . ?” said Stephen, only half ironically.
Bang on cue, Amy burst out laughing. Bingo.
. 2 .
Surprisingly, Stephen’s flat was everything she’d come to expect from your average bachelor in his early forties. Here was the hallway, littered with discarded pizza delivery menus, the woodchip wallpaper peeling and scuffed, the bare lightbulb covered in decades of dust. The interior was homely but unfussy—the kitchen a masculine blue, the units cheap and dated. But there were a few telltale signs of a winking class-consciousness—a National Trust tea towel bearing the inscription “His Lordship” was spread out to dry over the hob, a pot of good marmalade lay open on the small table, and a general sense of shabbiness hung about the place. It looked like it had never had a good clean, as if cleanliness itself were a mark of proletarian neurosis.
“Welcome to the manor! Well, Manor Park anyway,” said Stephen, making a show of filling the kettle. As if coffee was really what they both had in mind.
“Tea? Or something stronger?”
“Something stronger always sounds good.”
“I think I’ve got some dodgy sherry somewhere, and a drop of port left over from Christmas—yum!”
“Ooh, not sherry—always reminds me of funerals.”
“Port then. A lovely glass of port—how cozy!”
She watched as he twittered on around the kitchen, rummaging through cupboards full of packets and tins, pouring boiling water into a chipped china teapot and breathing onto two tiny sherry schooners. The fridge, she noticed, was full of little ready meals and microwavable steam puddings. She pictured him sitting propped up in bed, eating custard out of the tin, guffawing at a cartoon in Punch. He had the air of an actor caught backstage, aware that the behind-the-scenes reality was a far cry from the front-of-curtain razzle-dazzle he put on. She liked him all the same. He yawned ostentatiously as he poured the port into the glasses. Eleven p.m. She’d have to make her move soon—he looked like he might declare it way past his bedtime any moment now.
She stood and took the chipped decanter from his hands and swigged it suggestively, maintaining eye contact all the while. It didn’t have quite the effect she was hoping for. Stephen blushed and began fussing with the teapot.
Oh, dear, thought Amy. Might have blown it by being too brazen. I always forget to let the guys do the chasing. Stupid!
She decided to hold back now and let him make the first move. Fatal mistake in the seduction game to come on too strong to a man who liked to think of himself as a great seducer. She’d misread him, obviously. She was sure that he wanted her but she had it all wrong when she’d decided he liked to be jumped on. Of course, he was of the “men do the asking” school. It was probably as dear to him as his old school tie. She generally hated men like that—she’d encountered enough of them in the last few years to make her vow to run a mile if she ever found herself with another. The sort of man who appears to be all reconstructed—giggles when you call him for a date, lets you drive, lets you buy dinner, but the minute you put your hand on his knee during the ride home he stiffens in all the wrong places, and therein treats you like you’ve just taken your knickers off and run up and down the High Street yelling, “I’m a great big slut! All comers welcome!”
But Stephen wasn’t like that. The beauty of him was that he obviously hadn’t gone in for all that new-man stuff. He wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what he was—an old-fashioned boy fumbling around in a newfangled world. It was refreshing—and even more of a challenge. Ignoring the instinctive adrenaline rush any such challenge flooded her with, Amy sat down casually, as if she swigged from strangers’ decanters all the time.
“Shall we?” said Stephen, recovering himself as he carried the tray into the lounge.
A dusty but expensive-looking armchair sat right in front of the TV. Amy admired the large selection of DVDs. They covered an entire wall—comedy, classic films, drama series, all filed alphabetically. Stephen clearly spent a lot of time watching them. The room was comfortable but musty smelling.
Eau de Bloke, thought Amy.
A strange mixture of interesting inherited bits and bobs and cheap IKEA furniture filled the space—a beautiful mahogany bureau jostled with a wood-veneered CD rack. Stephen pushed his feet into a pair of grubby old slippers and patted a cushion into shape. He suddenly looked a lot older than she’d first assumed. He was probably pushing forty. His larkiness had made him seem about a decade younger in the hotel bar. Amy wondered if he was as good a candidate as he first appeared to be. All the reports she’d read had suggested that it’s not just women’s fertility that took a nosedive later on in life—the modern lifestyle, with all its tight underwear, bad diets, and alcohol dependence had rendered an alarming number of men almost sterile. Not that they weren’t shooting—far from it. Most men of her generation could boast a dozen partners or more (about ninety-nine percent up on their fathers’ score), but they were often shooting blanks. She didn’t want to waste her month’s egg in a duff frying pan. Too late now, though. She’d cracked open the first ovulation test kit this morning, and, after peeing all over her hands, the twin blue lines had confirmed that she was indeed ripe for fertilization. If it was going to happen this month, then it would be tonight.
And anyway, it wasn’t just about age—if creepy old geezers like Michael Douglas were fathering children left, right, and center, then why not this guy? He was from good breeding stock, surely. The aristocracy always prided itself on a certain earthy ability to produce fit heirs. No choice now but to hang on in there and wait for Stephen to make his move.
Midnight. They’d had tea, Amy had polished off two glasses of port, and Stephen was still filling her in on the history of radio comedy. It was very interesting—the genesis of the sketch show, the appeal of recording in front of a live audience, the transition from radio to television and how some slipped through the net—and all peppered with some great gags and excellent impersonations, but no suggestion of any intimacy whatsoever. Plenty of innuendo, a few shy smiles, and an electric silence after he’d complimented her on her hair, but nothing else. He was obviously a slow burner. It would be fatal to make another ill-timed lunge at him now. Patience. He would go for it in his own time.
Two a.m. They’d finished the port. Stephen had played her his two favorite CDs of the moment—Classical Chill Out (he thought it “amusing”) and The Darkness (ditto). She was beginning to wonder if she should just call a cab, but he seemed so keen. It was confusing—on the one hand here they were, single adults who’d just met at a single adults’ evening in the early part of the twenty-first century, slightly the worse for wear due to rapid alcohol intake, expecting to do what single adults alone late at night in a North London bachelor flat would normally do. Yet here he was, behaving like an emotionally stunted twelve-year-old showing her his football cards. Amy began to root around in her handbag for her mobile phone. He read her thoughts.
“Don’t go,” he said, almost urgently. And dropping to his knees, he took her hands in his and kissed her full on the mouth.
Better, thought Amy.
It was a nice kiss. He had soft skin and he didn’t shove his tongue right in the way single men who watch too much porn tend to do. She placed her arm under his jacket and felt his side—soft and doughy, girlish. Never mind—she’d never really gone for muscles and hardness. They separated and he pretended to straighten his tie
in mock propriety. She laughed nervously—sophisticate though she had become, there was always the trace of the convent schoolgirl in her who found it thrillingly forbidden to be so close to a man she wasn’t married to. It was nice to be kissed. She tried to work out how long it had been—two months? Three? When was that drunken night out with Jules? They’d gone to a club in Leicester Square and had fallen in with a crowd of drunken lads. She’d ended up snogging in a corner with a twenty-year-old from Birmingham, but that’s tequila slammers for you. This was different. Much more her cup of tea. But as she tried to pull him to her for a second go, he stood up just as abruptly as he’d knelt and pulled a DVD from the shelf.
