Raven

by Monica Porter

  Poor Frank had been killed in a road accident and Wendy was comforted by an old family friend, who was himself single again following his break-up with his partner. Before too long Wendy and Richard had become inseparable, middle-aged lovebirds looking forward to a future together. I had never met Richard but Wendy told me all about him when she came over for supper one evening.

  ‘I finally get it,’ she said, grinning. ‘God, I finally get what it’s all about. I’m having the best sex of my life. Two, three orgasms a night.’

  I gawped at her in awe. From plenty of nuthin’ to Woody Allen’s orgasmatron, virtually overnight. Even in my heyday I could never manage more than one per session. ‘How on earth did it happen?’ I was dying to find out the secret recipe.

  ‘Richard is just incredible, the things he can do. He makes me feel things I’d never felt before and it’s all so exciting.’

  Naturally, I was keen to meet this genius of the bedroom arts. And a couple of weeks later I did, when he and Wendy held a barbecue party in her garden and invited me along.

  I don’t know what I had been subconsciously expecting – some kind of rugged Marlboro man, perhaps, with a sexy glint in his eye – but I could scarcely believe it when this diminutive, fusty-looking man came hobbling towards me bearing a jug of Pimm’s. With his thick glasses, receding hairline and ill-shaven chops, he could have been a retired provincial librarian, or perhaps a member of the planning committee in some rundown seaside town. And what was with the funny walk?

  But there you have it. This unlikely candidate was Wendy’s love god. And while I wouldn’t want a weaselly little fellow like that tampering with my own privates, thanks to him Wendy was at long last firing on all cylinders. And I was delighted for her.

  *

  Towards the end of my second date with Charles, in the morning, just before we got out of bed and returned to our respective day jobs, he said something I didn’t want to hear: ‘I’m going to be really busy for a while. Colleagues coming from the States, lots of meetings, business dinners. Just give me a couple of weeks, okay? Then we can be together again.’

  Uneasy echoes of SuperA. But I refused to let that concern me. Because Charles wasn’t anything like SuperA. Charles actually seemed to care about me. He had thanked the makers of Limoncello for helping to accelerate matters between us, and by matters he clearly meant our relationship. Because that was what this felt like – the blossoming of what could be a real relationship. So I just tightened my arms around his neck and said it was a shame. Two weeks! But that was all right, and we would have to think of something really nice to do on our next date.

  ‘Do you like the theatre?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure. We’ll do something like that.’

  Perhaps I imagined it, but I thought I caught a slightly hesitant note in his voice.

  *

  One day I received a wink and message from Scotland. Andy was 28 and worked for a publishing company in Edinburgh. His pictures showed a studious-looking young man in glasses. Open, guileless face, pleasant smile.

  ANDY: Hi. I know I’m a lot younger and far away. But I like the way you look. I hope my wink didn’t offend?

  ME: Not at all. You look rather sweet yourself. And I like younger men.

  ANDY: And I like older women.

  ME: Do you wear a kilt?

  ANDY: Only if you want me to.

  Andy was shy and inexperienced with women. He needed someone who had been around the block to take him in hand and give him a bit of self-confidence. ‘You’re very nice,’ he wrote, and a few messages later he wasn’t too shy to suggest that he would make a good toy boy.

  ‘Ah, well that depends, Andy. Are you planning to vote for Scottish independence?’

  ‘No, but I have a cute Scottish accent.’

  ‘Can I hear it? Call me.’

  But Andy was too bashful for that.

  After some of my recent dating experiences, his boyishness was refreshing. He got straight to the point, though. ‘I think you could help me a lot. Do you think we would be good in bed together? I’ll bet you could teach me a thing or two!’

  I tried to explain that it was impossible to predict such a thing until we had actually met and seen whether we hit it off. ‘We’d have to have a drink and a bite to eat and chat about publishing and Robbie Burns and haggis for a while first. Then we’d know whether or not we fancied each other.’

  Of course, his living 400 miles away was an obstacle to any such agenda, and that was fine with me.

  ‘Anyway Andy, I don’t see you as a toy boy. That’s just a plaything. It seems to me you are worth more than that.’

  ‘You are lovely.’

  ‘You mean for a Sassenach?’

  He wanted to come down to London and spend a weekend with me, but I wasn’t up for that. Not only because of what had begun with Charles. In any case, I would never commit myself to spending an entire weekend with some fellow I had never clapped eyes on, not even one as sweet and shy as Andy. So I rejected this idea.

  ‘Sorry, Andy. I assume you’re not an axe-murderer, but even so!’

  ‘Okay.’ And with that single crestfallen word he disappeared off the radar. I would have liked to help the guy out, honestly I would, but he’d started to make me feel as if I were some sort of unpaid social worker with a brief to assist the sexually disadvantaged.

  *

  After the Scotsman came the Irishman. (I know, it was beginning to sound like a comedy routine.) But while Andy had been a gentle naïf, Ryan was a flagrant Casanova, crude, over-heated and extraordinarily confident of his desirability as far as the opposite sex was concerned. He was 35, but despite stating on his profile that his ‘ideal date’ was aged 25 to 35, he told me he much preferred ‘a mature woman who knows what she wants’. Ryan was tall and brawny, and admittedly highly appetising with his dark hair and bright blue eyes. His charms drew me in, as he must have guessed they would.

  RYAN: Fancy some fun? How about a drink somewhere near yours and if we click we go back and explore each other in private. Lying in bed naked now, thinking about it.

  ME (amused): You’re in a hurry.

  RYAN: Yes I am! What’s your dress and cup size?

  Me (slightly irritated but still enjoying the game): Now you're getting tacky. Listen, I'm slim, no huge boobs, so if you're looking for some blow-up doll you've come to the wrong place.

  RYAN: No, not at all. Want a real woman who loves sex and has a brain.

  ME: You can tick both boxes.

  RYAN: When we go back to yours I will give you a sensual massage first.

  ME: That sounds nice. And have you got a cute Irish accent?

  RYAN: No, but I can turn it on. What turns you on, apart from the accent?

  And so we played on. Ryan was a thrilling prospect, in the way that hang-gliding might be for someone who has never been. I didn’t think I could turn him down. I didn’t want to. He was dead sexy. So after a little persuasion I agreed to let him come over late that night, after the ‘gig’ he was attending with a mate.

  I could hardly believe it when during the intermission at whatever concert he was at, he texted to inquire whether I had a ‘clean ironed shirt’ for him, as he needed it for work the following morning.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I replied. ‘And should I polish your shoes as well?’

  But he was insistent about the shirt and so, after a little further beefing about it, I went off to search for one and found an old striped shirt of my ex’s, which I had occasionally worn while mooching about the house. It was clean but creased, so I grudgingly got out the iron and the board and ironed the damn shirt, wondering all the while what Vanessa would say about my performing this servile act, not to mention the entire feminist sisterhood. Then I sat down to watch some telly until Ryan arrived; he told me he would be at my place by 11 o’clock.

  But the Irish stud, God’s gift to the fairer sex, never showed up or got in touch. When I tried to call him, his mobile was on voicemail. I finally tru
dged off to bed just before midnight, tired, depressed, angry and humiliated. I promised myself I would never do anything like that again and I was serious.

  The last thing I saw that night before switching off my bedside light was the striped shirt hanging, beautifully pressed, on my wardrobe door. Asshole, I thought.

  *

  I decided to consign Ryan to the dating dustbin. Rather than take issue with his inexcusable behaviour, I preferred simply to forget him. He wasn’t worth the time it took to send a furious message. But he would not be forgotten. The following afternoon my mobile tinkled with the arrival of a contrite message.

  RYAN: Hey sorry about last night. Phone died. No way to contact you. Can I come and make it up to you tonight?

  ME: Oh really. Why should I believe that? I won’t be jerked around and I know what shits most men are.

  RYAN: No, honest. My iPhone5 battery is terrible.

  ME: And it took you all day to let me know?

  RYAN: Been in meetings all day at work. [I had no idea what his vague ‘management’ job description entailed and neither did I care.]

  ME (softening slightly): So what are you proposing?

  RYAN: I can come over tonight at 8. Okay? I owe you a full body massage…followed by passionate sex.

  ME: Better make it super-passionate then.

  RYAN: Don’t worry. I will want to rip your clothes off as soon as I see you. [How could he be so sure? I wondered.]

  ME (totally forgetting my promise to myself of the night before): Well, then you’d better charge your phone. Now.

  Early that evening I took a long scented bath and carefully went through my whole grooming routine, then deliberated over what to wear, finally choosing a pair of figure-hugging black trousers and sleeveless lacy top. I laid the clothes out on my bed and started to work on my hair, which could take a fair bit of taming.

  He had said he would call before setting off, in order to confirm directions to my house, so when it got to 7.30 and I still hadn’t heard anything I texted him, a little uneasily: ‘Helloooo. What’s happening?’ I got a return message a moment later.

  RYAN: Send me a photo of you.

  ME: Sorry? You want me to audition?

  RYAN: Want to see what you look like.

  ME (crossly): I don’t do naked pics and you already know what I look like with clothes on. Should we just say you’re a twat and call the whole thing off?

  RYAN: Take a photo now.

  ME (even crosser): Fuck off. I don’t need to demean myself for anyone.

  RYAN: Send a classy pic in your lingerie and I’ll be there.

  ME: How’s about a pic of you in Y-fronts? Got a six-pack? How many inches are you?

  RYAN: You send a lingerie pic first.

  ME: Otherwise you’re not coming?

  ME AGAIN (after receiving no reply for several minutes): Right, I’m done messing around. You need to grow up. Bye.

  I couldn’t believe I had wasted hours, once again, on that Irish lecher. He was 35, going on 15. I could just picture him in another ten years, still manning his dodgy stall on the dating site, luring in unsuspecting females and then setting them up with his deceitful blarney and adolescent demands for lingerie shots.

  But maybe that’s what I had coming, for not waiting calmly and patiently for Charles to re-emerge from his business exec’s purdah. Almost three weeks had passed since our last, highly promising tryst, during which we had exchanged only the odd brief ‘how are you’ text. I was eager to be with him again. Where was he already?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  And where was I? Ah yes, the Scotsman, the Irishman and then came the Englishman, whom I will call George, naturally.

  George, who was 48, so hated his job as a property lawyer that he gave up the law, but then promptly forgot to find some other means of earning his daily crust. So when we met he had been unemployed for a couple of years and had by now possibly become unemployable, because he appeared to be doing nothing with his life besides hanging about on the dating site day and night, gazing at women’s photos, checking out their profiles and sending random winks and messages to the ones that caught his horny eye.

  I fell into this net one evening when George messaged to say he found me ‘enticing’ and asking whether I had any plans for that evening. He looked fairly presentable and his profile, if somewhat awkwardly and self-consciously composed, seemed sane at least.

  ME: This evening? Boy, you move fast. And would it be a drink and conversation you are after, or something more intimate? I am not one of those desperate older women, you know, gagging for a shagging.

  GEORGE: That would be entirely up to you. I'm not the type to pressurise a woman into anything.

  ME: Yes, I am sure you are well-behaved. But I’ve been getting overt come-ons from guys younger than my sons who only want the one thing and even before they’ve met me, for Pete’s sake.

  GEORGE: All men want the one thing. It's just that some of us are more honest about it than others. Lots of men will feed you the flannel and bullshit which they think you want to hear. So…fancy meeting up?

  ME: Well, first of all I would have to take a bath, wash my hair, decide what to wear. That would take us up to 8.30 at least.

  GEORGE: Okay, let’s meet at nine.

  I always felt I had Sara sitting on my shoulder at times like that, and she would now doubtless be jumping up and down. Don’t do it! But George called me on the mobile and we talked in a sensible, grown-up fashion, he was quietly-spoken and articulate and, what the hell, I wasn’t doing anything that evening. So I invited him over for a drink.

  As he lived in Islington, he drove across London from east to west and through Regent’s Park, arriving at my place on the dot with a bottle of wine. We sat down on the sofa, sipped our drinks and conversed about our lives, as the light summer breeze flowed in from the garden through the French doors, and George was, to all intents and purposes, like some old-fashioned ‘gentleman caller’ in a play by Tennessee Williams. Very genteel, we were.

  But the longer we talked the more morose George grew. It was clear that he hated himself. He told me he had never married, never had kids and never had a relationship which lasted more than a year or two. Besides all that, he said he had failed to find his true vocation, was a layabout and embarrassment to his family and friends, and had put on weight and was now fat. This last self-accusation was patently absurd, as he was actually quite trim.

  He appeared to be a fundamentally decent guy and I felt sorry about his being carried away on this tidal wave of self-loathing. ‘I’m a failure and a coward,’ he declared gloomily. I didn’t want to agree with him, yet I knew that he would scornfully wave aside any of the standard platitudes usually wheeled out to buck people up in such situations. Because the key thing about George was that he was extremely intelligent and you couldn’t bluff him with banalities. Just about the only thing he seemed proud of was the fact that, as a kid from an ordinary small-town family who had attended a run-of-the-mill comprehensive, he had won a scholarship to Oxford and got a first-class law degree. He interested me.

  ‘Just out of curiosity, George, without a job, what do you do for money?’

  ‘Live off savings.’

  ‘What about when your savings run out?’

  ‘I’ll sell my house.’

  ‘Yeah, and then what?

  ‘I dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Something will happen.’

  He was scathing about the women he had met through the dating site: ‘Boring secretaries, mostly, who take holidays in Torremolinos.’ He had also tried the personal ads columns in some of the newspapers. ‘First I tried the Guardian. Had a few dates. It was like going out with Swampy. Women in ugly sandals with pierced noses, who belonged up a tree. So I moved on to the Times, where the women looked more respectable but all thought they should be married to a cabinet minister. They had no time for me, obviously an abject failure.’

  He seemed so paralysed with hopelessness and the expression on his face wa
s so despondent that my heart went out to the guy.

  Fatal move. The next thing I knew we were heading upstairs for the act of human compassion commonly known as a mercy fuck.

  George wasn’t such a pessimist, however, that he did not come prepared with a supply of condoms. Our coupling was an intense but mechanical affair, during the course of which a baffling number of condoms were put on and taken off, at odd moments. The whole process didn’t convince me that there should be a follow-up.

  Later, as I ushered him out the front door, I gave his cheek a playful pinch. ‘Try not to beat yourself up, George. It’s a real downer for other people and you’ll never get a girlfriend that way.’

  ‘I’m a loser.’

  ‘You will be if you keep telling yourself that. Just find something you like doing and do it.’

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  ‘Yes it is. Because it’s true. And meanwhile find somebody nice to date. It shouldn’t be so difficult online.’

  He threw me a doleful look as he strode off to his car. ‘Oh yeah? Try being a man.’

  ‘I’d love to!’ I called after him. ‘It’s a man’s world, in case you haven’t heard!’

  But I’m not sure I really believed that.

  *

  Every few days I had noticed that Charles was active on the dating site. Of course I would never mention this to him. I wouldn’t want him to think I noticed, or cared. I did care, needless to say. But I knew the worst thing I could do was give the impression I was snooping on him. But anyway, as a well-behaved man he was probably only logging on to the site, every so often, to send polite replies to the many ladies understandably captivated by his charms, the army of winkers and messagers. Right?

  Meanwhile I carried on trucking with my own dating activities, for good or ill, so I was hardly in a position to gripe about his doings. Something had happened between Charles and me, of that I was certain. He just needed time to realise that fully and take the next step. After all, he was a man, and men required careful, patient handling or they would take fright like skittish horses and gallop off into the dusty distance.