Laura Wade, in short, was the perfect woman. She was forty years old too, which was the perfect age to attract a man who wanted to settle down.
‘You’re the perfect age,’ she told herself out loud, in the bathroom mirror, on her birthday. It was less intimidating for a man of the right age – which was forty-five – to ask her out. He didn’t need to worry about music and late nights. He knew she’d understand that he had responsibilities at work and friends he wanted to spend time with.
So why was the memory thudding so solidly in her mind of when she’d been looking at herself in this mirror and telling herself she was thirty now and needed to get a move on because if he didn’t turn up soon, she might as well call it a bust and shift to plan B.
Not that she actually had a plan B. She didn’t have time between all the different tentacles of her budding business empire.
‘I’m a content designer,’ she’d say on first dates. Normal men didn’t want to hear any more than that. They looked at her posh watch and her posh car and drew the conclusion that whatever content she designed, she did it well enough. She never talked about it again, unless they asked. And they never asked.
The truth was that she wrote greetings cards, two hundred quid a poem and fifty for a one-liner. Gal pals and wine was her speciality, but she could knock out an exhausted new parent or a second chance at love often enough to keep her options open. She’d stolen the idea of writing messages in sand from somewhere or other too and that was a sweet little sideline, but it took half a day and only when the weather was good. Selling phone cases online was her bread and butter. She designed them herself so she wasn’t lying, but it was retail. Not that she had anything against retail. She kept trying to move into dog accessories, where the big money was, but she’d been stung.
‘Sand to Arabs and snow to Eskimos,’ she told herself in the mirror each morning. She had offloaded the six boxes of dog coats to a market trader, cutting her losses, and rarely thought about them these days. At least she wasn’t doing carpets any more. She hadn’t got rid of her steam-cleaner. It sat there taped up in black plastic in the back corner of the garage, just in case. When she parked the S-Class she looked at it the way you’d look at the handrail in a hotel bathroom, thinking ‘never’ and hoping it was true.
All in all, Laura was the last person to go forking over her hard-earned and hoarded cash to buy services from anyone else. She washed her own car and her own windows. She cut her own fringe and did her own ironing. She’d designed her own website and made her own windscreen fliers.
But something had tipped her over the edge on this one. Match, eHarmony and Elite Singles between them hadn’t coughed up anything worth a second date in the six months since she’d offloaded Gareth.
He had seemed promising at first. Early on, she’d made sure to get a squint at his bank statement, and she’d seen the monthly total of his child support. If that was how fatherhood took him, she thought, then she could put up with his split fingernails and kayaking anecdotes. Then, on the way back from a Valentine’s weekend at a Highland hotel, he dropped the bombshell. No more kids. He was committed to the two that his marriage had produced and he didn’t want to be split between them and any more.
‘I’m guessing you’ll be OK with that,’ he’d said. He couldn’t look at her, not on that twisting country road in the near dark, but he must have picked up on her reaction somehow. ‘Laura?’ he said after a minute. ‘I mean, you’ve never mentioned kids and you’re so …’
‘So what?’ Laura said, the harshest words she’d ever spoken to him. No one likes a shrew.
‘So professional,’ he offered after a moment’s thought. ‘Slick. Not slick. Polished, though.’
Slick, she repeated to herself. Slick.
She broke up with him, by text, the next night. When that didn’t bring him to her entryphone promising to match the Waltons if she’d just buzz him up and let him apologize, she couriered his sad little collection of possessions round to him and blocked his number. There was no time to waste on no-hopers, she told herself, trying for upbeat. But the truth of it – the hourglass running out, and that little fold in the corner of her mouth that didn’t disappear these days even when she smiled – were like a dash of cold water.
Which was where ‘Fairytale Endings’ came in. She’d stumbled on the website late one Saturday night when she’d watched herself awake again on a whole painfully slow series of Swedish murders. At two o’clock, with a dull headache and gritty eyes, she’d searched dating, introductions, matchmaking and singles, clicking through the early pages she knew so well until she was back in the weeds, hating herself for even looking, despising the clunky prose and ill-advised fonts of these home-made little websites. It hadn’t been that long since she’d caught a virus from one of these crappy-looking sites, such a bad one she couldn’t get rid of it herself and had to cough up to a professional to do it for her. Laura hated being defeated and having to pay an expert to take over.
Fairytale Endings was different. She knew a decent photograph when she saw one and the picture on the home page, of an elegant room with little tables laid for supper, candles and crystal both twinkling, had not been snapped on an iPhone.
We are not a dating service, the blurb began. We are not a singles service or an introduction portal. We are matchmakers as matchmakers used to be. Our clients are gentlemen between the ages of twenty-five and sixty who desire to meet financially independent, educated, interesting ladies with a view to marriage.
‘In other words, you’re a dating service,’ Laura said, but she closed the other windows on her laptop and got herself a refill of wine to read some more.
We host monthly dinner dances in an exclusive, private and safe location, the blurb went on. The sidebar photograph, black and white, was of a woman in a Hitchcock-era evening dress perched on a stool powdering her face in an ornate mirror. She held the powder puff in a hand wearing a long white evening glove and Laura wished she hadn’t thought of Hitchcock’s heroines. The smear of face powder on the white glove was an anonymous dark grey, like Janet Leigh’s blood in the shower.
‘You’re drunk,’ she told herself. She snapped shut the laptop, poured away the wine and swallowed half a pint of water and two ibuprofen before she went to bed.
Maybe she dreamed about it. (Laura rarely remembered her dreams.) In any case, she found herself looking for the site again the next day. They had a menu posted – scallops, pigeon, rhubarb fool – and a list of dances they ‘suggested’ an acquaintance with. Laura googled ‘social foxtrot, easy waltz, minuet’. It was the minuet that undid her. Too many six-part miniseries with men in breeches and women in muslin.
She kept clicking and found the testimonials. They were discreet – no faces, no second names – but two of them were wedding photos. In one a slim bride in a sheath of cream satin was walking under an honour guard with a tall groom whose bald spot shone as if the photographer had focused his lens on it deliberately. Laura felt her pulse quicken. That had to be real. If they’d been models they’d have picked a man with a full head of hair. The other wedding photograph was from the neck down, two hands in brand-new rings clasped over a white lace pregnancy bump. And the caption ‘Only human!’ Laura laughed and scrolled on.
The enrolment questions were generic enough. They wanted to know her age, salary range, marital status, and aspirations. ‘Marriage to a bachelor, divorcé or widower,’ she wrote. ‘Must want children.’ She looked for another page where weight and height ranges might be hiding, where she could specify a flat stomach and a non-smoker, but there was nothing.
‘Meat market,’ Laura told herself. ‘Or a cover for something.’ Maybe it was a swingers’ club and she was too green to decipher the code. But the two wedding photographs – bald, pregnant – wouldn’t leave her. The next night, sitting with another glass of wine, she refilled the boxes and this time submitted the information.
In the morning, there was an email in her inbox telling her, with regr
et, that they had a full complement of ladies for the next two monthly dances, but would she like them to keep her name on file for later in the spring?
Laura bristled, wondering what troglodytes they were shoving at these gentleman clients, if there was nowhere to describe your looks on the submission form. She didn’t reply.
Another day passed and then an email came warning her that her data would be disposed of in twenty-four hours unless they received instructions to the contrary.
‘Please keep my information on file,’ she wrote back. She couldn’t help adding an attachment, a photograph of herself standing outside a German Schloss, crisp and sunny in white trousers and ballet flats, with huge sunglasses and a scarf tied over her hair. Her bag, from the angle in the photo, looked just like a Birkin. Gareth had snapped that and she knew it was tacky to use it but they weren’t to know, were they?
Then she forgot about it. She was trying to decide whether to add earbuds and stands to her phone-case line or whether that would cheapen her brand. Her brand was all she had and she would protect it like a mother bear with her cubs. When the day came that she had a little shop in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh, a little concession here and there in the foyers of the best hotels, when she was thinking about London, one cheap set of earbuds with her name on them could drive off an entrepreneurial sponsor like a dose of anthrax.
When the email came two months later, there was no spark of recognition in Laura. She swept it away to spam and carried on with her costings. It was only at lunchtime, standing in her kitchen, waiting for one of her tubs of frozen soup to finish thawing, that her mind wandered to men, dates, dancing and then, as the microwave pinged, Laura’s brain pinged with it. She pulled her phone close and fished the email back to her inbox.
‘Our May event is rose-themed,’ it began. ‘Please let us know your favourite colour of rose when you accept this invitation. Allergy sufferers please alert us and we will make every attempt to ensure your comfort.’
It wasn’t very informative but as she stood puzzling at the lack of details, another email arrived. ‘Dear Laura, I’m delighted to announce that we have several gentlemen attending next month who are keen to meet a woman just like you. One in particular has been disappointed by the company at his monthly dances so far, and we have taken the liberty of forwarding your photograph to him in advance. He has requested your presence at his table for the third rotation.’
Laura narrowed her eyes at that. ‘Third’ sounded a bit indifferent. On the other hand, her experience with speed-dating had shown her that the last of the night was often the one you pursued, from sheer exhaustion. You were sitting opposite some guy when they finally stopped hitting that damn buzzer and so you gave him a shot, because it was either that or stand up again.
Maybe ‘third rotation’ was to give this gentleman who’d seen her photo a decent chance.
So she accepted. She composed a terse email saying she was free and would attend but needed more information, for her own peace of mind. The response came in twenty minutes, completely different in tone – gushing, she might have said.
‘We can furnish you with any information you need on our gentlemen, except surnames. If you would be happier with a phone call, let me know when you are free and someone will ring you. For now, let me say that seven of our fifteen gentlemen attending in May are new to Fairytale Endings. The other eight are returning gentlemen who have not yet found that special someone. You will dine with three, moving between courses, and then are free to dance with anyone who asks. We have found that ladies prefer not to take responsibility for approaching dance partners and our gentlemen know that dancing is expected of them.’
Nicely put, Laura thought. Reassuring.
‘Your three dining companions are as follows,’ the email went on. ‘Piers is forty years old, a businessman from Glasgow, he is divorced without children, and is looking for a companion who will cope well with his frequent long absences from home due to overseas travel.’
That was a possibility she hadn’t considered yet: a man she could stay married to, avoiding all the hassle of a divorce, but who didn’t get under her feet. He’d probably be guilty enough to invest in her business too and he wouldn’t resent her putting in the hours because he wouldn’t be there.
‘For the main course, you will join Robert. Robert moved to Scotland from his native Ghana as a postgraduate student, and is now working in the tech industry. He is thirty-five years old and is a never-married singleton. His intention is to remain here indefinitely.’
In other words, he needed residency and thought a wife was the way to get it. That didn’t necessarily put her off. There was money in tech and weren’t Ghanaians all ten feet tall with perfect teeth and those sexy breathy voices? She could learn to cope with a tall, gorgeous husband whose English wasn’t good enough for arguments.
‘Over dessert and coffee, and on into the evening if you choose to remain together, your companion will be Grant. Grant has attended four Fairytale Evenings in the last year and has enjoyed each one. He is an enthusiastic dancer and a true conversationalist, but he has not yet met the girl of his dreams. Grant is looking for a woman in her late thirties, who is ready to settle down and is keen on a small family, but who is independent enough to steer her own ship while he concentrates on the expansion of his growing business. We showed Grant your photograph as an incentive for him to attend a further event, after the recent disappointments, and he was favourably impressed.’
Grant, Laura said to herself. She was standing at her breakfast bar charging her laptop before she took it to her study for a sprint. This was one of Laura’s most productive little life hacks. She ran her laptop battery down while completing a task, demanding of herself that she finish it before recharging.
Grant, she said, leaving the kitchen and padding through to the spare bedroom, the one she had turned into a wardrobe for herself. She never had people to stay and she liked to see her clothes properly stored.
Grant and Laura. She leafed through the ‘cocktail dress’ section, wondering what Grant would like to see her in. She owned nothing black. You were already ahead of the pack if you walked into a party in a colour when all the other women had crapped out. She always took care to compliment them, of course, on their beautiful sequins, or beading, or chiffon, or fringes, as if any of those token efforts made up for the acceptance of defeat that was the little black dress.
Should she go sleeveless? Her arms were in perfect shape. But there was nothing to show on a second date if she went sleeveless on the first.
Grant and Laura … what? Would she change her name? She had always thought ‘Wade’ would make a good element in a double-barrel. It would depend on his, she supposed. If he was called Foxworth or Montague she would dump Wade like a poo-bag. But if he was called McGuffin or Burke or something, she’d weigh up her options. Briefly, she wondered what the Ghanaian’s second name would be and whether an exotic touch would be good for business.
She plucked an emerald-green dress off the rack. She’d send it to be dry-cleaned before the dance. Not that she had put it away dirty. But the truth was she hadn’t worn any of her cocktail dresses since a year past Christmas, her last weekend away with Gareth, so it might have got stale.
Somewhere in Laura’s future, she firmly believed, there was a real walk-in wardrobe waiting, cedar-lined and air-filtered. There would be lights under the shelves and round the mirror and she wouldn’t need to keep an exercise bike in it. She had a niggling little worry that she’d seen this wardrobe in a film and wasn’t being realistic dreaming of it for her own future, but she batted the thought away. Even divorced Piers from Glasgow, dragging his failed starter marriage along behind him, couldn’t object to his wife – his keeper wife, mother of his child – wanting some decent hanging space and a few shelves for her shoes.
When she wrote back to Fairytale Endings she didn’t stand on her dignity. She loved the sound of Grant and was also very interested to speak to Robert, since s
he had never been to Africa. She was glad to have Piers as an ice-breaker. Perhaps she was fulfilling that function for him too? In any case, she was looking forward in great anticipation to May and to what promised to be a rewarding experience as well as a treat.
It was … concerning … not so much as troubling, but certainly concerning that Fairytale Endings didn’t want her to talk about them on social media or share details with non-members. Discretion, they said, confidentiality, exclusivity. She could see the point of it. Piers, Robert and Grant didn’t sound like the sort of men who would want their private lives plastered all over the internet. But still, it was concerning.
Laura thought of what all the other dating sites advised. Tell someone where you’re going. Meet on neutral territory. Go in the daytime the first time, not in the evening. But then there were going to be thirty people at this dance as well as the organizers. She was being too cautious. She had suffered so many sharp falls that she couldn’t accept something pleasant coming easily to her and offering a smooth path. Besides, she wasn’t talking to a strange man online, arranging to meet. She was talking to a professional woman, like herself. Myra, from Fairytale Endings. Laura had a good feeling about this one.
A Gingerbread House Page 11
