Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met –

  All tenderly his messenger he chose;

  Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet –

  One perfect rose . . .

  Why is it no one ever sent me yet

  One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

  Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get

  One perfect rose.

  DOROTHY PARKER: One Perfect Rose

  O’er the rugged mountain’s brow

  Clara threw the twins she nursed,

  And remarked: ‘I wonder now

  Which will reach the bottom first?’

  HARRY GRAHAM: Calculating Clara

  Time to take up my pen again, except this is the twenty-first century and so what I actually do is switch on my PC and get back to the action. In a certain type of old-fashioned novel – the kind written in the Victorian age for readers who couldn’t deal with too much suspense – there would be chapter headings which told you what was coming in advance. They always started In Which. In Which Charles Fortescue Proposes to Miss Copeland, Freda Visits the Insane Asylum and Meets Horace’s Wife, and Miss Morton Hears some Unexpected News. That sort of thing. Anyhow, if this chapter had an In Which, without wishing to give too much away, it would go something like this: In Which Georgina Meets a Selection of Millionaires, Lindsay Goes on a Date, and Emma Jane’s Wish to Become a Sex Goddess Comes True. And all I will add about that is that the fairy in the Bel Manoir Wyshing Well had a very nasty sense of humour.

  Georgie’s Cinderella X ad was producing phenomenal results, at least on screen. It occurred to me that we were all would-be Cinderellas really: that’s what wishing is all about. Georgie wanted a wealthy prince, I wanted the transformation scene, and Lin just wanted to get out of the kitchen. ‘Another couple of dozen last weekend,’ Georgie told us on Monday. ‘I can’t possibly meet them all. I’m scrapping anyone who says they want a meaningful relationship or claims to have a gsoh.’

  ‘A what?’ I said.

  ‘Good sense of humour, I think. The point is, how do they know? Everybody thinks they have a sense of humour, even people who haven’t one – especially people who haven’t one – but it might not be the same as mine. Anyway, I asked for dosh, not jokes. Gsohs get dumped.’

  ‘What about serial killers?’

  ‘Depends how rich they are,’ said Georgie.

  ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ Lin said anxiously. ‘If you’re going to meet them . . .’

  ‘Of course I’m going to meet them. Once I’ve whittled the list down to the most likely prospects. What really shocks me is how many of them insist they’re frightfully healthy. I mean, with the high incidence of heart disease in this country, you’d think a fair proportion would be cardiac cases. It’s supposed to be very stressful becoming a millionaire.’

  ‘Not nearly as stressful as poverty,’ Lin said.

  ‘Never mind,’ I told Georgie in consoling tones. ‘If you can’t give a man a coronary, no one can.’

  She preened herself, not visibly, but in spirit. ‘I should hope so,’ she murmured. ‘I tell you, this had better be worth it. Nobody mentions how time-consuming it is, doing an ad. I spent most of the weekend sorting my respondents into separate files, because otherwise I’m going to get them all mixed up. You send off so many answers, you forget what you’ve said to whom. I got so exhausted, one guy asked me what I really really wanted, and I couldn’t be bothered to compose a proper reply, so I e-mailed one word: Diamonds.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Lin demanded, intrigued.

  ‘He asked me what kind.’

  ‘He must be mad,’ Lin said in awe. ‘I mean – diamonds. He doesn’t even know you.’

  ‘Mad is good,’ said Georgie. ‘Next to cardiac arrest, I’ll take mad. I can have him looked after by a nice friendly nurse while I go out and spend all his money.’

  ‘Makes it awfully easy for his relatives to contest the Will,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Some of my best friends are lawyers. Anyway, for the moment I want my millionaire alive. One thing at a time.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have told Cal by now?’ Lin whispered as he appeared beyond the glass partition, obviously heading our way.

  ‘No,’ Georgie hissed back. ‘Project Cinderella X is Top Secret. For your ears only.’ And, as Cal came in: ‘Hi.’

  The difficult part, I reflected, was that actually I rather liked him. In the past, having filed him under ‘Office Lech’, I’d only thought of him as a guy with a dirty grin who would make suggestive remarks to any woman, even me, if there was no one else available. But as his relationship with Georgie developed his attitude changed, and I’d found out there was a nice man behind the mock-Casanova exterior. As Georgie’s special friends, Lin and I acquired a new status in his eyes, and he treated us accordingly. Georgie came first, of course, but I didn’t like to think of him being left high and dry while she absconded with some ageing Croesus. There were times when I had to remind myself pretty sharply that he was, after all, a married man cheating on his wife – whatever the state of his marriage might be.

  I tried to greet him without constraint and left the office feeling uncomfortable. Lin, who had launched into an unnatural flow of chat, was evidently having the same reaction.

  Later that week, Georgie made a start on her shortlist. She had a dinner-date at the Bel Manoir – ‘I thought it would be appropriate’ – with a property tycoon who insisted he had never had time to meet Miss Right. She made an effort (Georgie always made an effort), wearing a tight black skirt split up the side, short black jacket, and a plunge blouse which frilled her cleavage like a ribbon round a wedding-cake. Her date looked duly appreciative. Hesitant and almost shy by e-mail, in the flesh he proved to be a stocky, blocky fifty-something with the kind of abrasive self-confidence that stumbles over its own feet every so often. His accent was Yorkshire, his face not so much lived-in as vandalised. Georgie gritted her teeth and determined to find him likeable.

  ‘And he was,’ she concluded the next day, ‘in a blunt, northern sort of way. He talked about property all through the main course, which was boring, and his unhappy experiences with classifieds over dessert, which was sad. He kept telling me how wonderful and sympathetic I was, probably because no one had ever asked him about himself before. It won’t do, though.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Lin. ‘He sounds as if he might be nice. I mean, for a millionaire. He is a millionaire, isn’t he?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘Did he have a ruddy complexion?’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Yes – why?’

  ‘High blood pressure. Bound to be cardiac. He’s the right age, too.’

  ‘I daresay, but it won’t do.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lin repeated.

  ‘He lives in Huddersfield.’ There was a depressed silence. ‘What’s the point of having lots of money, if you have to spend it in Huddersfield?’

  ‘I thought you were going to clear your credit card,’ I said. ‘Not blue someone else’s.’

  ‘Just trying to plan ahead.’

  ‘Anyhow, what’s wrong with Huddersfield? Have you ever been there?’

  ‘I don’t need to.’ Georgie shuddered. ‘It’s up north. It’s cold and damp and the natives drink lots of beer and eat Yorkshire pudding and worship football.’

  ‘Sounds a lot like the south to me,’ I said. ‘Bar the Yorkshire pud.’ I like Yorkshire pudding, but I wasn’t going to say so. It was against the spirit of my new diet.

  ‘Shut up . . .’

  On the Saturday, Georgie went to the Pont de la Tour to meet a City fatcat who said he had never answered a classified ad before. (‘You wouldn’t believe how many of them say that,’ Georgie had remarked.) On arrival, the only unattended male she could see was a pink-faced young man of about twenty-five with fluffy blond hair and the beginnings of a gut framed rather unfortunately by a gaping bomber jacket. She requested James Wingrove with a feeling of trepidation which was fully justified. ‘I
say,’ said the young man, ‘you’re a bit older than I expected.’

  ‘How is your heart condition?’ Georgie retorted frigidly.

  By the end of dinner, James was waxing enthusiastic on relationships with mature women. ‘I bet you know stuff the younger ones don’t,’ he said. ‘Experience tells, right? A mate of mine got off with his girlfriend’s mother: he said it was the best night of his life. Apparently, she totally blew him away. She handcuffed him to the chandelier, stuffed a courgette up his—’

  ‘Courgettes are so yesterday,’ said Georgie, who had decided to go with the flow. ‘They went out with the gerbil. Which public school did you go to?’

  ‘I didn’t say I went to public school. How did you guess?’

  On Sunday, she lunched with an Internet executive at a pub near Henley. ‘I’m worth seven million at the latest computation. Well, yes, that’s on paper, but the crash has hardly affected us. Boohoo.com is rock solid. The future of business is on the web.’

  ‘Sounds like science fiction,’ Georgie murmured unwarily, unable to think of anything else to say.

  ‘That’s exactly it. Science fiction is becoming business fact. Did you catch the last series of Babylon 5? It was brilliant . . .’

  He moved on to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, and something called Mutant X, dabbled in Buffy and Roswell High, and wound up with Blade Runner (the director’s cut), Alien (all of them), and Terminator II (‘Far superior to Terminator, of course. The apocalyptic vision . . . the horror of the imagined holocaust . . . Linda Hamilton’s outstanding performance . . .’). This, Georgie decided, is where I terminate. Time to return to Earth. And must make a note never to invest in the Internet – should I ever have something to invest.

  Back at home, she collapsed in front of the TV, which was showing a nice soothing English country murder, and wondered if solvency was really worth all this trouble.

  ‘So he was a nerd,’ I said to her in the morning. ‘We live in an age where nerds can make millions. Look at Bill Gates.’

  ‘Millionaires are supposed to be interested in the Dow Jones and the Footsy – whatever they are,’ Georgie said. ‘Not Klingon foreign policy and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biceps. Or am I out-of-date?’

  ‘You said it,’ I grinned.

  On Tuesday, she got the serial killer.

  She knew he was a serial killer the moment she set eyes on him. Fortunately they were in a suitable venue for such meetings (a public place with other people), in this case an old-fashioned pub on Duke Street St James, although it did seem to be little frequented and there were rather too many dark corners. Her respondent looked elderly, though he must have been under fifty; he was the type who had probably looked elderly from thirty on. He had pale eyes set slightly too close together, in the accepted manner of serial killers, and a mouth drawn tight like a miser’s purse from much primming in disapproval. His smile, when it came, was sudden and toothy, full of secret hunger. His clothes were so nondescript as to render him all but invisible and Georgie sensed immediately that he had a mother complex. (They always do.) Inwardly, she thanked Providence that she had only committed herself to having a drink with him. She ordered vodka and Coke, specifying non-diet.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not anorexic,’ her companion said. ‘One woman I met asked for Diet Coke. She was very thin. I knew at once she was anorexic, of course.’

  Georgie wondered what he had done with the body. It seemed a little extreme to murder someone because they might have anorexia, but clearly any excuse would do. Possibly he had a mission to rid the world of anorexics.

  ‘My mother doesn’t approve of dieting. She says young women nowadays are much too skinny. She says anyone who had lived through rationing would really appreciate good food. They don’t know when they’re lucky, she says.’

  Aha! thought Georgie. The mother already. Knew it. Mother Knows Best. Anyone Mother doesn’t approve, we eradicate. Bet my credit-card bill she wouldn’t care for me.

  ‘Do you like chocolate?’

  Was this another test for suspected anorexia? ‘Sometimes,’ Georgie admitted cautiously.

  ‘I could cover your naked body in molten chocolate, and then lick it all off,’ he suggested, his tongue flickering in the toothy suddenness of his smile like that of a lizard. ‘Or is that too daring for you?’

  Georgie felt her skin crawl. Not only was he a serial killer, but he suffered from outmoded erotic fantasies which he obviously imagined were kinky. ‘A bit much for a first date,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I did that when I was a teenager. It’s frightfully passé. Tell me, are you really a millionaire?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so mercenary. My mother doesn’t like women who are mercenary. Your ad was all about money, when it should have been about finding a beautiful relationship.’

  Georgie was temporarily staggered into speechlessness. I don’t want a beautiful relationship! I asked for a MILLIONAIRE! Of course I’m mercenary.

  ‘As it happens, Mother has a large house in Surbiton,’ the psychopath continued.

  ‘Do you share it with her?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Oh no. But we’ll get it when she dies, naturally.’

  Georgie ignored the ‘we’. His e-mails had clearly been misleading – or had she mixed them up? – but she had never given him her real name, so she would be relatively safe if she could only survive this date. She considered asking when his mother’s death might occur, but curbed the impulse. In any case, the mothers of serial killers are notoriously long-lived (there may be some sort of compensation factor operating here).

  ‘You know, you must get off the subject of money. You’re not really that kind of person: I can tell. All through our correspondence I’ve felt we had a natural affinity. Do you know, we’ve exchanged over twenty e-mails?’

  ‘I send twice that many every day,’ Georgie said. ‘I’m a compulsive e-mailer.’

  ‘Yes, but that must be for work,’ he responded, serene in his conviction of their affinity. ‘Those don’t count. I remember you said you work at a publisher’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ Georgie conceded, increasingly wary. That might, she felt, have been a mistake. It was not the kind of information you should throw around.

  Her worst fears were realised.

  ‘Actually, I’m writing a book myself . . .’

  ‘Why couldn’t he have just tried to lure me away somewhere and strangle me?’ Georgie lamented afterwards, on the phone to me. ‘I told him I worked in the Accounts Department, but it didn’t do any good. He said I didn’t look like an accountant. Then he kept hinting I must be great friends with all the important editors, you know, sort of roguishly, only he didn’t look roguish, he looked ghoulish. Then he produced his chunk of manuscript and sat over me while I read it.’

  ‘I don’t think you can sit over someone,’ I remarked. ‘You have to stand.’

  ‘Stop being so bloody editorish.’

  ‘Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘I had to read a whole chapter of it, and there was this sex scene, involving – guess what? – molten chocolate, and he obviously thought it was terribly raunchy, poor sod, and then I started to feel sorry for him, he was so pathetic, even if he was a serial killer.’

  ‘You didn’t say you’d see him again?’

  ‘Good God, no! I may be soft-hearted – on a bad day – but I’m not stupid. I got out as fast as I could.’

  ‘It sounds awful.’ My sympathy was sincere. I too have often been waylaid by acquaintances flourishing their literary efforts. People seem to think it’s perfectly okay to impose on someone in publishing encountered on the social circuit, though they wouldn’t dream of it with anybody else. I mean, you would hardly go up to a brain surgeon at a party and demand a lobotomy, would you?

  In the silence that ensued I could feel Georgie unwinding like a broken spring. ‘You know,’ I resumed after a moment’s reflection, ‘wouldn’t the molten chocolate solidify before you could lick it all off?’

  ‘Coming to think of
it,’ she said, ‘in my day we used chocolate spread. It made a fearful mess of the sheets . . .’

  Shattered by her experiences in the millionaire market, Georgie decided to take the rest of the week off (from millionaires, not work) and have fun with Cal. On Friday lunchtime we all went to a nearby pub for a snack and a drink (I passed on the snack, nobly. At least I’d lost the habit of snacking). ‘You really are looking gorgeous, Cookie,’ Cal told me. Georgie had filled him in on the business of the wishes as regards Lin and I, but clearly not herself. ‘Go easy on the weight-loss, though. It’d be a shame to shrink those tits any more.’

  ‘You don’t have to stare at them quite so much,’ Georgie said somewhat coldly. ‘They aren’t going to go away. Not this week, at least.’

  Cal grinned. ‘If Georgie drops me,’ he said, ‘I’d like to land in your cleavage.’

  ‘If I drop you—’ Georgie’s vocal temperature was plunging well below zero ‘– when I drop you – your life will be blighted, all other women will be as dust and ashes to you, you’ll turn to drink—’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘– and in the end you’ll probably become a monk. Okay?’

  Something in the way he smiled at her, a kind of warmth in his eyes, squeezed at my heart. I thought: He loves her. He truly loves her. What did she want with a millionaire and a debt-free credit card, when she had love? The price of a good man is above designer labels – as the Bible might have said had it been written rather more recently. On the other hand, Cal hardly qualified as a good man . . . did he? What is a ‘good man’, anyway? Does the woman of today want someone to offer her economic support and protect her from every wind that blows, or does she want a partner, an equal, a soulmate – an object of lust – a subject of love? Perhaps it’s simpler just to have a checklist requesting male 25–45, interested in arts/sport/music, n/s, gsoh, looking for ltr with lots of tlc. Love is the spark which you don’t find by advertisement or net-surfing, and what is a spark, in the end? A warmth in the eyes . . . a squeeze at the heart.

  The price of love is not payable by credit card.

  On which note . . .