Man of the Month Club

by Jackie Clune

  Traffic into town and out the other side was appalling. Crossing from East to West London was the absolute worst journey in the world at the best of times. Forget polar expeditions, forget desert trekking in arid conditions—Amy felt that if you hadn’t been forced to inch along the Embankment nose to nose with fellow psychotic, dehydrated travelers, watching lights turn from red to green and back again before a single vehicle had moved, you did not know the meaning of the word “suffering.” Attempting it on a Monday morning was tantamount to self-flagellation. In times of hardship, Amy always reverted to Catholic type by punishing herself like this.

  One hour and fourteen minutes after setting out, Amy walked purple-faced through the doors of Precious Little Darlings. The “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” shop bell sprang jauntily into life.

  “Fucking London! I hate London! If one more bloody coach carrying fifty fucking pensioners pulls out in front of me and blocks two lanes off to let them take pictures of fucking Big Ben, I’m going to climb aboard and ram their fucking pathetic plastic cameras up their crumbly arses!”

  “Morning, Amy,” chimed Sarah. “Erm, you’ve got visitors. . . .”

  Amy stopped mid-stomp and let out a dramatic sigh. Visitors? She hadn’t told them she was coming, so what were they doing booking appointments? Or worse still, had she forgotten a meeting? No, that never happened, although perhaps with all this baby nonsense, she’d lost her head a bit and developed baby brain.

  “Hello,” said a vaguely familiar voice from behind her.

  Turning slowly, Amy let it dawn on her that this was a not unwelcome visitor. There he was, the Good Doctor, standing just to one side of the till point, wearing a broad grin.

  And there they were—the shining twins, giggling and poking each other and eyeing her with renewed interest as the best swearer in the world.

  “Oh. Hello. Sorry about the—er, the language. . . .” said Amy, her head spinning with the possibilities. What was he doing here?

  “What are you doing here?” she blurted, before her mouth had a chance to catch up with her brain.

  “Half-term,” said Joe apologetically. “They’ve been on at me for ages to come here. It’s the baby thing. The obsession. There was a brief hiatus where I thought they’d moved on to dinosaurs after a trip to the Natural History Museum, but turns out it was just a temporary blip. Now we’re back on track with added verve.”

  “Oh, right. Well, hello, Francesca and Laura. Welcome to the shop!” said Amy, both relieved and disappointed that it was these brats and not their striking but married dad who had prompted the visit. The girls stared back without bothering to reply.

  “So—what do you think?” said Amy brightly, spreading her arms wide.

  “S’all right,” Cesca said testily.

  “S’nice,” said Laura with just the tiniest hint of enthusiasm.

  “That’s high praise from them,” said Joe.

  “Anyway, we’ve been here before,” said Cesca. She stopped abruptly, aware that she’d just let a small cat out of a bag. Laura giggled, and Cesca smiled guiltily up at her dad. Both girls now stared at him expectantly—what was he going to do next? They weren’t sure of the rules in this most adult of games.

  Joe cleared his throat and tried to look nonchalant.

  “Why don’t you two go and have a look at that princess bed? It’s got carriage wheels,” said Joe, obviously trying to divert his audience.

  The girls sloped off reluctantly but were soon involved in a pillow fight, instigated after a dispute over who should get to lie down first.

  “So,” said Amy, not really knowing what to say. This was most odd.

  “OK, confession time. I brought them here last weekend.”

  “And the one before that,” shouted Cesca, hardly missing a beat in her fight.

  “Thank you, Cesca. And the week before that,” said Joe, adding a flirtatious grin.

  What was he playing at? A married man bringing his twin daughters to try and catch a glimpse of someone he vaguely knows three weeks running? Amy was flattered but more than a little annoyed. Did he think she was affair material? Did she look stupid? Maybe he was used to bedding any number of naïve nurses impressed by his “come to bedside” manner, but she was above such gauche enthusiasm for a stethoscope. Pretty much.

  “Well, I’m flattered you like the shop so much,” said Amy pointedly, refusing to be drawn into his web. She could see he was quite an operator—he wasn’t in the slightest bit abashed.

  “Oh, it’s a lovely shop. One of the best—and believe me, I’m something of an expert in the field.” Again that smile.

  “Thank you,” said Amy tightly.

  “But it wasn’t the shop I was coming to see.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was hoping to run into you again.”

  “Right.” What to say now? He was totally brazen.

  “Well,” she started, not sure where she would end. “That’s very nice of you, but I’m sure your wife must wonder where you are every Saturday afternoon,” she continued, being sure to hit the word “wife” very hard.

  “Not really,” said Joe casually.

  “Don’t tell me—which is it? She ‘doesn’t understand you’? You have an ‘arrangement’? Or you’re virtually brother and sister these days?” Amy couldn’t help the ironic edge in her voice just touching the wrong side of anger.

  “None of the above,” said Joe softly. Amy had obviously hit something on the head. “I just wondered if you’d like to have dinner with me.”

  “Hang on—let me get this straight—we meet in quite extraordinary circumstances, granted; we then run into each other in Harrods, where your children are rude to me; you then stalk me at my shop for several weeks; and when you finally track me down, you ask me out to dinner! Well, perhaps you ought to have a little chat with your wife first—make sure she’s available to babysit!”

  “She’s dead,” chorused the girls. They had stopped what they were doing and were standing on the bed, pillows in hand, ready to resume their own version of this adult fight.

  The whole shop seemed to be staring at Amy now. Mrs. Cummings, newly arrived with a clutch of color swatches to return, stood aghast in the doorway. Sarah was slack-jawed at the counter, and a deliveryman had frozen in his tracks by the rear entrance.

  “Fuck,” said Amy. “Sorry. I had no idea.”

  “It’s OK,” said Joe, almost smiling at her uncomfortableness. “I didn’t mean to tell you like that—bit of a conversation stopper. Difficult to know where to slip it in—you know, ‘Hello, I’m Joe, my wife’s dead.’ It’s been three years. I’m over the worst of it.”

  “God. Blimey. How?”

  “The Big C. Breast. Bummer. Big bummer,” said Joe calmly. “So. Now that you know that yes I am married but only to a memory, is it a yes or a no? I’m a big boy. You can tell it to me straight.”

  “Of course. I mean yes. That would be nice. Thank you.”

  “OK, great. Tonight?”

  “Erm, yeah sure. Why not? Monday night—not a lot doing.”

  “I’ll meet you at the trattoria on the corner at—what? Seven thirty?”

  Amy did some quick math—home, shower, hair, makeup, shoe decision.

  “Can we make it eight? I hate seven thirty—bad vibes.”

  “Fine. Eight o’clock then. Don’t be late.”

  “I won’t.”

  Joe shepherded the girls to the front door, his business done. Any pretence of the visit being for their benefit was now gone.

  “And try not to bring any waifen strays along with you this time. . . .” he added as “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” sang him out of the shop. Strange, but it was no longer irritating when merely a musical accompaniment to one of the nicest asses in Christendom.

  “Well!” gushed Sarah, who had been trying to busy herself with the stapler for the last part of the meeting. “Who’s got an admirer? And here was muggings thinking it was me he was after! He’s been in here every week fo
r a month! Never buys anything, just loafs around a bit while the girls run riot, then leaves. He kept giving me these quizzical looks—I thought my luck was in! We were calling him the Italian stallion. Fancy!”

  “Yes. Fancy . . .” said Amy, already calculating her next ovulation cycle. A July conception. An April baby. Taurus. Like Amy. Neat.

  . 17 .

  She had gotten him so wrong, cast him as Latin Lothario, the hot doc with an eye for any bit of skirt he could charm into bed. Although looking back now, it was easy to see that he was nothing of the sort. Was it hindsight or wishful thinking that made Amy now realize that they had had quite a striking attraction to each other from the outset, and that something about him had given off an air of wounded shyness? She had stereotyped him as a play-around, good-for-nothing European philanderer in order to protect herself from her attraction to him, when all the time it was clear she was capable of having him for breakfast. He was in actual fact a single parent, valiantly bringing up two girls and holding down a difficult job in a beleaguered NHS hospital. He was no shag-happy medic; he was a hero, and she had wasted three months of her precious fatalistic experiment on losers who either couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job. But why the wedding ring? It had been that, she now remembered, which had diverted her at the outset. OK, so he was married, but surely most people take off their wedding rings if they are widowed—especially at such a young age. Alarm bells started to ring. There was no question that he was telling the truth about his wife—the girls had told her, and he had displayed the matter-of-factness of the truly bereaved. But surely the fact that he still wore his ring, and the fact that he still referred to himself as “married to a memory,” was a bit suspect?

  Friends had warned Amy over the years about getting involved with anyone whose partner had died. Who was that printer she used to use—Kath?—who’d suffered horribly by comparison to a Dead Saintly Wife. There was always the danger, Kath said, that at any minute you would do something that the DSW would have done better, or want to go somewhere he’d been with the DSW. Whole continents had been forbidden territory to Kath and her man because he couldn’t bear to revisit the joyous memories. In the end Kath had finished it, and the worst thing was that he’d seemed not heartbroken but relieved, as if he could now get back to the business of morbidly fixating on his dead wife’s perfection. Amy didn’t want to go through all that. She was not a natural second-fiddle player. She would be no one’s sloppy seconds, no one’s begrudging second best.

  “Stop,” she said out loud.

  “This is not what this is about. You are not planning a wedding, Amy Stokes, you are planning a baby. Remember? A baby. You do not—repeat, do not—want to get emotionally involved with anyone right now. Especially while this project is on. There is no time for feelings. They get in the way. You especially do not want to get involved with a man who already has two horrible children of his own. You would not only be second-best woman but, even worse, you would be second-best mum. No, no, no, and, repeat, no! Got that? Good.”

  She felt better now. For a minute she had quite lost touch with reality. It was a dreadful habit, this daydreaming about the future, propelling into the distant future whatever embryonic situation she found herself in. It was a kind of misguided optimism. Her mum had always told her to be more “cute,” more canny, less eager to see the good in every situation, for despite her outwardly cynical nature, she had always really been a disappointed romantic. If she wasn’t on her guard, she was prone to the most ridiculously spew-making romantic fantasies, and this thing with the doctor was just another example. She could hardly blame herself, though. He was gorgeous, caring, and wore a uniform for a living—that wasn’t playing fair. The hardest of women would melt. Amy quickly pulled herself together just in time to realize that the taxi had flashed past the restaurant.

  “Stop! We’ve just passed it!”

  “Sorry, love—I’ll go round the block.”

  A minute to eight. Surely he wouldn’t be bang on time?

  The next sixty seconds seemed to take an age as they lurched round corners back to the restaurant, and just as they pulled up to the curb, she spotted him. He was taller than she remembered, his hair dark and longer at the back. Amy suppressed an excited grin as she stuffed twenty pounds into the cabbie’s hand and leapt out.

  “Hi! I made it!” she shouted. He was waiting outside.

  “Hello.” He smiled. He looked incredibly nervous. The relaxed, professional manner he had radiated was completely gone. Was it her imagination or had he just stubbed out a cigarette?

  “Shall we?” she said, taking charge after a moment’s pause.

  “Yes, yes, sorry,” said Joe, following her inside.

  The restaurant was busy, filled with tourists and the less-well-heeled locals. Bottles of dusty Chianti hung from the ceiling, and waiters in tight black trousers sped back and forth past the dreadful mural of the Bay of Naples that claimed one end of the room.

  “Buona sera, signore, signora,” said a portly man in a stained white shirt. “ ’ave you booked?”

  “Sì, Joe Nencini, per favore,” said Joe.

  The waiter launched into a long and furious-paced monologue in Italian as he led them to their table while Joe smiled, nodded, and added the occasional “Sì.”

  “Impressive,” said Amy once the waiter had handed them their laminated menus and left them to choose.

  “Well, you know . . .” said Joe, burying his head in his menu.

  “What was all that about?”

  “To be honest, I haven’t got the faintest idea. I only know how to order food these days.”

  “I would have thought you were bilingual.”

  “I was. Until I was about ten. But if you don’t use it, you lose it,” said Joe with a shrug. “Wine?”

  “Ooh, yes, I think so, don’t you? Chianti?”

  “I could do with a stiff one first,” said Joe, signaling the waiter. “Mi da un whiskey, per favore. Grande.”

  “Sì, certo, ma il vino?” asked the waiter, confused. No one orders whiskey first.

  “Sì, ma prima . . . whiskey,” fumbled Joe.

  “Subito. La signora?”

  “I’ll have the same.” Amy smiled. “When in Rome.”

  “I just want to say for the record that I wouldn’t normally be knocking back hard liquor before dinner on a first date,” said Joe.

  “Right. Fine,” said Amy. “I would.”

  “Oh, really? You do it all the time, do you?”

  “Yes, I’m really quite racy.” Amy laughed. “But I get the impression it’s a big deal for you?”

  “No, no, not at all. Well, yes, actually.”

  “What, is it a cultural thing, or have you got a thing about alcohol? Don’t start giving me the units-per-week lecture—I know you doctors are always hitting the bottle.”

  “No, I’m not a booze fascist; I’ll drink anything, even perfume. No, I meant the first-date thing. It’s not something I do all the time.”

  “Oh, me neither!” said Amy.

  “Really?” said Joe, visibly relaxing.

  “Oh, no, I usually just cut straight to the first shag.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Joe, beginning to study his menu overearnestly.

  Amy laughed in delight.

  “Your face!”

  “What?”

  “You looked terrified!”

  “I was! I mean, I am!” Joe laughed, pleased to be able to admit it.

  “Why? It was a joke! Mostly.”

  “Mostly? That just makes it worse! Now I feel like you’re saying first dates are an inconvenience and that mostly you’d rather be shagging!”

  “No, not at all!” Amy laughed.

  “Oh, right, that’s worse still! I’m so unappealing, am I?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Oh, God, this is going really well, isn’t it?”

  “Just shut up and order your food, then we can get out of here and you can go find some poor hapless man to devour,” sa
id Joe as the waiter hovered.

  Amy had no idea what she wanted to eat. Food was the last thing on her mind. Her stomach lurched every time she looked at him, and she couldn’t stop herself from imagining what their baby would look like. It was like a sickness she had developed—no man was safe. Every half-decent passerby had, in recent weeks, become subject to the same fantasy game whereby she transplanted the best of her features—hair, eyes, legs—with the best of his to create the perfect baby. This evening’s baby, it had to be admitted, surpassed them all. Amy leaned on her hands dreamily as Joe ordered. He might even be worth a second try if it didn’t happen the first time. It was her adventure, so she was free to rewrite the rules if need be. . . .

  “Signora?”

  Both the waiter and Joe were staring at her now.

  “Oh, erm, I’ll have the linguine,” she stuttered.

  “With de vongole or de ham?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Ham?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The waiter scuttled off, tutting.

  “So this is a first date, is it?” asked Amy, ready to turn up the heat.

  “Well, yes, if that’s what they still call it nowadays,” said Joe, fiddling with a packet of bread sticks.

  “So that implies it’s the first of many.”

  “Or at least two. Technically. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead, doctor. But what if we don’t like each other and never see each other again—what will this be, then?”

  “I see. Good point. Well, then this will become known as the slightly disastrous meal out with a glamorous but tricky arty type from Chelsea. You?”

  “Oh, well, I’ll probably refer to it as the night I nearly made my mother a happy woman by bagging myself a doctor.”

  “Jewish?”

  “No. Worse. Irish Catholic.”

  “Ah. That’s the naughty spark accounted for.”

  “You noticed. And a point of information. I’m not from Chelsea. I’m from Essex. And yes, it’s all true what they say about Essex girls,” she added, hoping he’d take the hint. OK, so she wasn’t ovulating yet, but a practice run wouldn’t hurt, would it? Not with such a great candidate. And two nights of passion didn’t constitute “getting involved.” She would be careful to stay aloof.