At this point an affable old geezer took a fancy to me, clearly beguiled by the crafty reference on my profile to my former biker chick days. ‘Grab your leathers, put your helmet on, and meet me down the Ace Cafe for a fry-up. You're only young once!’ wrote the 65-year-old DanBoy, retired oil rig worker and as-yet-unretired biker dude. When I send an appreciative response, he wrote: ‘You're unique!! Most people on here wouldn't go within a mile of a bike, let alone a biker who plays guitar in a rock band.’ (Rock music was another of his passions, and I admit that appealed to me. He might be getting on a bit, I told myself, but DanBoy knows how to have a good time.) It also occurred to me that, while it hadn’t worked out with the Harley-riding LondonsBurning, I might yet hop back on a pillion with this new contender.
There was a downside to DanBoy, however. In addition to the photos of him performing with his fellow old-fart rockers, and the ones showing him astride his Honda Blackbird, his profile displayed a few snaps showing a boring caravan sitting by itself on a bleak, windswept landscape. What was that all about? I wondered. And I soon found out.
‘I keep a caravan on the north Norfolk coast,’ he informed me, ‘and love to go there for long spells to enjoy the peace and beautiful scenery.’
This was off-putting indeed. I recalled my married days, decades earlier, when we owned a weekend cottage in a small north Norfolk village. A worryingly remote part of the country, where you were considered irredeemably foreign if you didn’t have five generations of ancestors buried in the village graveyard. Even the denizens of the neighbouring village, five miles down the road, were seen as strangers and treated warily. These in-bred locals spoke in a flat, dull accent and definitely could have done with a dose of bright lights, big city, to jolt them out of their rural torpor.
And then there were the scurrying mice in the thatched roof…
At the end of every Norfolk weekend, as we hit the road back to London, my heart lifted with hope and joy.
Should I tell DanBoy any of this?
He called me one evening and we had a long chat, although he did the lion’s share of the talking. For the first fifteen minutes I heard about the devastating breakdown of his first marriage, due to the adultery perpetrated by his heartless wife, and how neither he nor his children ever forgave her. That was bad enough. Then came the second fifteen minutes, during which DanBoy shared with me the trauma of his Wife Number Two’s intolerable behaviour towards him, exacerbated by her drink problem. In the end she ran off, too, shattering once more his faith in womankind. And all this time I was thinking: where’s the fun, dude?
Still, I made all the right sympathetic noises, and by the end of our elongated conversation we had planned our first date. On the following Saturday evening, three days hence, he would drive into London from his home in Hertfordshire and we would dine at a favourite haunt of mine, a Chinese restaurant near Hampstead. I booked a table.
But DanBoy texted me on the Friday: ‘Hi. Hope you don’t mind but as this rare fine weather is due to last into the weekend I have decided to make the most of it and take my grandchildren away to the caravan. Perhaps we can catch up during next week. Dan x.’
I was slightly miffed at being so easily blown out. There was my plan for Saturday evening gone. Now what would I do? It would have been worse, of course, had he suggested taking me to the caravan for the weekend. But even so. If anyone was going to do blowing out, I would have preferred to do it myself.
The following week came and went, and the week after that. I didn’t hear from DanBoy again and never contacted him to find out what had put the old buffer off. Another mystery, like that French freak, Édouard. So once again, there would be no hot-shot biking for me. Nor any bopping along to his rock band’s rendition of Long Tall Sally at some small-town garden fête. But I didn’t care much. As I took one last look around his photo gallery and gazed at the snaps of his beloved caravan stranded in that East Anglian desolation, I imagined my own miserable face peering out through one of its rain-splattered windows. Help! Get me out of here!
But with one bound I’d been set free.
After this episode I adopted a harder edge. No longer would I unfailingly respond in kindly mode to every message received, no matter how lamentable the sender. ‘Thank you for your interest, I do appreciate it…’ From now on I would just ignore the ones that didn’t immediately grab me. Too dull? Not good-looking enough? Can’t spell? Next!
Would this new-style Raven have driven through the rain all the way up to the dreary north London hinterland to sit with NiceMan in a tiny sitting room, smiling uncomfortably whilst he attempts to cajole her into a relationship? No, I fear this Raven would have cut NiceMan off at the knees very early on, with no chance at all of ‘face time’.
*
I am having dinner at one of my trendy local eateries with my friend Francine, who is three years younger than me. She runs her own business and is one of those women who is successful and tough and powerful in her professional life but, as she readily admits, hopeless in her relationships with men. She has had three long-term relationships and they have all ended in acrimony. Talk about rascals. These men abused her, cheated on her, lied to her and took her money. She always manages somehow to pick a rotter, who then proceeds to trample all over her life. I haven’t seen her since the last of these relationships ended a few months earlier, and Francine tells me she is through with being a victim. It seems she has discovered her inner Boadicea.
‘Harry used to make me so depressed,’ she says, and her expertly made-up face and expensive coiffure ooze glamour in the warm light of the candle on our table. Her perfume wafts over to me. ‘In the office I am always in charge, everyone respects me, I’m happy with myself and my achievements. But with Harry, as soon as I walked through the door at home I felt useless. I did everything I could think of to please him, but nothing ever did. When he told me I was too fat I went on a diet. I bloody starved myself for that man and lost twelve pounds and he didn’t even notice.’
‘He was jealous of you, Franny,’ I say as I munch my rocket salad, ‘because you are way more successful than he is.’
She nods thoughtfully. Then her eyes light up and she announces: ‘Anyway, I’m free now! And I’m not on a diet any more! From now on no one can tell me what to eat, what not to eat. The day after Harry and I split up I went food shopping and I went crazy in the supermarket, charging up and down the aisles, tossing all my favourite things into the trolley – stuff I hadn’t bought in years because Harry didn’t approve.’
‘Oh yeah? Like what?’
‘Walnut Whips!’
I laugh and then she laughs and I give her arm a squeeze.
Then Francine asks about my internet dating and I give her a summary of the story so far.
‘I hope you’re being careful,’ she says.
‘Well, sure, I try to be. Pretty much.’ I smile at her feebly. ‘Sara wants me to text her with the name, rank and serial number of every bloke I have a drink with. Ha ha!’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean I hope you’re using protection.’
‘Oh.’ We are going to have the condom conversation.
‘Listen, a friend of mine didn’t use protection and got chlamydia recently. It put a real damper on her sex life. And she should have known better. She’s almost seventy.’
‘Rock and roll!’ I laugh.
‘It isn’t a joke.’
‘No, no. I know. Don’t worry, I’m being careful.’
But that isn’t strictly true. I always aim to be careful. But as with waiting for the green light before crossing a road, I’m not dogmatic about it. Women of my age, who can no longer get pregnant, tend to stop thinking about things like condoms and coils and caps. And that is a liberation, just as the Pill was a liberation for us when we were young and fertile. So in the heat of the moment, I have at times found it all too easy to forget the exhortations (from Sara, Vanessa, et al.) to be ‘careful’.
But I had read the newspaper article
s about the rise in STDs amongst the older generations, who were living longer and fitter lives and apparently still going at it like rabbits, with nary a care in the world. So I did see the potential for coming unstuck.
And with that in mind, I had gone to Boots for a box of condoms to keep in my bedside drawer. I couldn’t remember the last time I had bought condoms, and it reminded me of that coming-of-age movie, Summer of ’42, in which 15-year-old Hermie goes to a drug store to buy his first ever ‘rubbers’ but is so embarrassed to ask for them at the counter that he gets a strawberry ice cream instead. Absurdly, I felt a bit like Hermie. After all, whether you’re a green youngster or a 60-year-old grandma, you don’t want the shop assistant knowing your intimate business. Then it occurred to me that nowadays you can just pull stuff off the shelf and pay at a self-checkout till, where no one knows or cares what you’re buying. So I bought my big box of condoms and, feeling pleased with my admirable prudence, installed it in my bedside drawer…although admittedly the box didn’t get opened all that often.
After Franny and I have finished eating, as we linger over our Amarettos, I suggest that she too might like to try online dating, now she is single again. ‘There’s a whole world of men out there, Fran. A cornucopia. And not all of them weird!’
She shakes her head. ‘Too dangerous. If my business rivals get wind of me being on a dating site they might try to trip me up somehow. It could cause all kinds of trouble. And can you imagine what Harry would say if he found out? Oh my god!’
‘What do you care what Harry would say? You’re free of him now, remember?’
We look at each other and she smiles. I think I see a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, but it could just be the candlelight.
*
It was 10.30 when I got home that night, and after all the wine and the Amarettos, I was decidedly tipsy. Getting undressed for bed, I was down to my bra and knickers when I had an idea. It was one of my impulsive tipsy ideas, obviously, but struck me as a good one at the time. I grabbed my mobile, stood before the full-length mirror on my bedroom wall, and took a snap. It was only mildly saucy, revealing no more than the typical lingerie poster in Marks and Spencer’s, while being rather less suggestive. But it worked well, I thought. An effective lingerie shot. I texted it to the randy Ryan, who weeks earlier had asked me for a ‘selfie’ of this kind, with a short caption: ‘Here you are.’
It took less than three minutes to get a return message. ‘Holy shit. Why didn’t you send me that before? I really want you now.’
‘Ha ha! Get your Irish ass over here then.’
A little later came his rejoinder: ‘Can you take a pic with the bra off and your boobs up close?’
Reader, I switched my phone off in disgust and went to bed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was another of my ‘snap’ decisions (get the pun?) a couple of days later, which led me to send my lingerie shot to Charles. I was sitting in the lounge area at my health club, shortly before aqua class, when I sent it. I’d grown bored of being all good and patient (‘good’ is a relative term here). A month had passed since our last tryst. He had promised to call and arrange to see me, but failed to follow through, always pleading that he was ‘busy’, and I hoped the photo might shake him into action. It did.
‘Good to hear from you,’ he texted. ‘I hope you’re well.’
‘It would be great to go out for dinner and then come back to my place so that you can ravish me. I’ve been so looking forward to it, corny thing that I am.’
‘Is that “corny” or do you mean horny?’
‘Maybe both.’
To my delight he suggested we meet early the following evening at his favourite martini bar in the West End.
Me: ‘Yes, maybe I should start drinking martinis. Will they have the same effect on me as Limoncello, do you think?’
‘Even more so perhaps! Let’s try it and see what happens.’
‘I’m getting excited now. Glad I sent you my saucy photo.’
‘I was going to call you anyway. But the photo was still nice.’
*
Charles met me outside the entrance to the martini bar, near Oxford Street. He was leaning against the wall and smoking a cigar, looking debonair. You couldn’t imagine him using a chemical loo in some caravan crawling with spiders on the Norfolk coast, not in a million years. And I loved that about him.
After such a long gap, I put my arms around his neck and gave him a big, wholehearted smooch. But this appeared to embarrass him and as he took my arms and lowered them to my sides, he said in a gently disapproving tone, ‘I don’t think we should do this in the street.’
‘Why? We’re not in Dubai.’
We went down the stairs to the basement bar, which was cave-like and eerily lit. It had a vaguely iniquitous atmosphere, like some 19th century opium den. I liked it. Such a thrill after my usual West End haunts, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer.
It was early so the place was almost empty. We sat down at a table in a corner and Charles handed me the martini menu. I listed a dozen different varieties. Orange and cherry and vanilla and espresso and passion fruit and ginger and mango and chilli and the one that really caught my eye, chocolate.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘So many kinds to choose from. Which should I have?’
‘Let’s start at the top and work our way down.’
I could see Charles was in his element. He went up to the bar and gave the bartender our orders and watched with rapt attention as the young man did the measuring and mixing, shaking and stirring and whatever else he had to do – I had no idea, but it took a long time. Then Charles came back and set my drink before me. And I smiled up at him, cheerful and full of anticipation.
We worked our through several different types of martini, although as I had suspected the chocolate was by far the best, in my opinion, so I had two of those. I felt pretty full after that but Charles suggested we go and have dinner somewhere.
As we emerged from the murky bar into the bright summer sunlight, I took Charles’s hand, but as with my earlier kiss, this didn’t go down too well. He let me hold it for a minute or two, then slipped it out of my grasp on the pretext of pointing to something down the street. Well, some people just don’t like being demonstrative in public. Fine. I would desist.
We strolled around on St Christopher’s Place and the narrow streets nearby, until we found a little Italian restaurant, one of those tight-squeeze eateries which serve traditional fare and always have at least one genuine Italian waiter, even in these ethnically jumbled times. Charles, tall and well-built Yank that he was, seemed an outsized diner at our small table in that small establishment, with Japs and Germans and other tourists edging past us down the narrow aisle. But this was the hub of London and it was humming and I was full of martinis and gazing at my date’s handsome face and hearing his easy-going spiel, and everything was great.
Charles was explaining that red wine shouldn’t be drunk at room temperature, it should be cooled down and it all sounded like rubbish to me but I didn’t care. He asked the waiter for an ice bucket and plonked the bottle of red in it. If he wants it cool, I thought, we’ll have it cool.
We ate our pasta and drank our cool red wine, and afterwards Charles ordered a couple of Limoncellos.
‘Oh no,’ I piped.
He looked at me in mock surprise. ‘But you love the stuff.’
‘Yeah but I’ve already drunk plenty and I’m mellow enough.’ Then I added: ‘As Woody Allen said in the unforgettable Annie Hall “if I get too mellow I ripen and then rot”.’
He commented that he’d never much liked Woody Allen, didn’t find him funny, and he had never heard of Annie Hall. This didn’t surprise me. I had already discovered that I shared about as many common cultural threads with Charles as I did with Little Pup, only Pup at least had the excuse of having been born yesterday.
Charles ended up downing my little glassful of Limoncello as well as his own. Then we set off for his place. For th
e first time we would spend the night there instead of at my house.
It was a business-like flat, really half-home, half-office. The sitting room contained a mammoth desk with a serious-looking computer, and there were shelves stacked not with books but with ring binders. The modest kitchen area looked as if no one had ever cooked a meal there, it was spotless and there was little in the way of foodstuffs. There was however a large jar of olives on the counter. For martinis, I guessed.
We sat down on his neat two-seater sofa. I kicked my shoes off and, curling up beside him, gave him a tender kiss. Then I said: ‘There’s no one around now. So it’s okay, right?’
He leaned back with his eyes closed and it wasn’t long before I realised that he had drifted off to asleep. Well, it was late and he had put away a lot of booze.
But that, I knew, was just an excuse. In truth he seemed very much like a man who was unmoved by my charms. And as I scanned the unfamiliar and somehow unwelcoming surroundings, I felt my spirits droop. What could have changed between us in the weeks since our last meeting, which had held so much promise in its closeness and warmth? Or had I imagined it all? No, I couldn’t have.
And what was with his allusions to my dating? A couple of times that evening, when my mobile tinkled to announce the arrival of a text or email, he remarked, casually: ‘There’s your next date.’ I found this vaguely unsettling. It was as if he were willing me into the arms of other men. Did he intend to send the signal that he and I were just two people whose paths had crossed, randomly, on a dating site, that there was nothing more to it than that and I shouldn’t view him as more than just one small part of my dating life? That I shouldn’t read too much into ‘us’? That ultimately he just didn’t care enough?
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