The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  It strikes me that I’ve never been on a fake date since Mike walked out, which makes this feel more like a test-run than a business-meet.

  The Instant First Impression. Hair: blond and shaggy, like a Wheaten Terrier’s. Handsome, in a Sebastian Flyte meets Hugh Grant way. I already know he went to one of the top public schools in England, then Oxford (where he met Trish), and now at thirty-eight, he’s a partner at a top Manchester law firm. A charming, likeable toff. “A” for style. The tweed blazer with the turned up collar. The pink, striped, dress-shirt, open at the neck, and the dark jeans with the turned-up cuffs.

  ‘We could forget that I’m about to hire you to find me a girlfriend, and you could be my girlfriend,’ he says.

  ‘I’m taken.’

  ‘Are you?’ he lays a hand on his heart. ‘Well, I imagine it must be one of the leading credentials of being matchmaker, right?’

  I hope not.

  ‘How do you become a matchmaker, anyway?’ he asks, as I sit down. ‘I mean I thought you’d have to live in New York and look like Cher.’

  I tell him how I wish I looked like Cher. Then I tell him how I got started, and what it is about the business that gives me a buzz. He seems fascinated. We chat easily. He is shamelessly checking me out, but I’m flattered. I like his boldness. I like the thick silver ring he wears on his left index finger and the way he corrects the waiter by reminding him he should be taking the lady’s order first.

  I finally get him onto the topic of women.

  ‘Well, the last ten I went out with—’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘Well obviously not all together. Over a period of…’ He pulls a thinking face, ‘…a year and a half maybe, went from bad to catastrophic. There was, in no specific order: the smoker, the inferiority complex, the one that was more interested in my friends, she who thinks all lawyers get murderers off, Jen who was obsessed with Tango dancing, then there was Miss Religious, Miss Missing Front Tooth, the one that was only fourteen years older than her daughter, then Frannie Fat Fingers—’ he recoils, squeamishly ‘—and then the one who compulsively checked her mobile for messages.’

  ‘Whoosh! That’s quite a list of fatal flaws. Especially the compulsive checker of messages.’ I tease him, sipping on the Kir Royale he insisted I have.

  ‘It seems that every single woman in her late thirties has issues. Desperation issues, confidence issues, ex-issues, chips on the shoulder…’ He shrugs.

  ‘Fat fingers and chips aside though, what is it that you’re looking for?’

  He seems to think about this, lolling back in his chair, totally at ease. ‘Well, an independent, free-minded brunette, who doesn’t take life or herself too seriously. Who likes to travel, be spontaneous, is perhaps unsure if she wants kids. She’d be a fabulous mother if she had them, but she’d feel just as complete in an exciting, child-free marriage.’

  ‘Don’t you want kids?’

  He looks at me candidly. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ve not met anyone yet that I could see as the mother of my children.’ He looks up at the ceiling. ‘Oh, and I don’t want any golden retrievers.’

  I dip some French bread into the poached egg and bacon appetizer on frisée lettuce that the waiter has just set down. ‘What’s a golden retriever?’

  ‘Blonde. Beautiful but generic looking. Always needs brushing and grooming. Eager to please but suffers from separation anxiety. Destructive when she gets bored.’ He chinks his spoon off the edge of his escargots dish.

  ‘Plus, I don’t want a lawyer.’

  ‘Why not?’ I glance him over, totally taken with his confidence and charm.

  He leans across the table to whisper. ‘Generally I don’t find them very interesting.’

  I study him. ‘What about Trish?’

  ‘Trish?’ he frowns. ‘Well, Trish is definitely not your typical lawyer. But she’s a mate. I’m hardly going to have a romantic relationship with a mate, am I?’

  ‘Aren’t you? Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he narrows his eyes, as though he thinks I’m testing him. ‘Did she tell you, by the way, that she and I are in competition? We’re curious to see which one of us is going to find our soul mate first.’

  ‘Are you? No, actually, she never mentioned that.’

  He nods, studying me now. ‘So what were you asking? Oh, yes, if I was going to have a romantic relationship with, say, Trish for the sake of argument, then I wouldn’t be here, would I? Hiring you?’ He leans across at me. ‘No, frankly, I don’t want a lawyer for practical reasons more than anything. The balance of work and home life. I just don’t think lawyers get the concept of balance very well.’

  ‘So you don’t want any woman who has a demanding career?’ They never do. Even though most of them don’t want dead-heads and dingbats either, or women with no interests or ambition.

  ‘Not true. I’d love a woman who had an absolutely fascinating headache of a career. I just want it to be different to the headaches I have in mine. And I want her to work to live, not the other way round. You can’t have two people doing that in any one household. And if we ever did want kids…’

  ‘You’d want her to stay home to take care of them.’

  ‘Politically incorrect. But true.’ He pops the last of his six escargots into his mouth then quickly adds, ‘But only if she wanted to. I’d prefer it—the kid—my child—didn’t get brought up like I did, by a parade of nannies.’ He watches me put my napkin on my side plate. ‘I’m in the bin now, aren’t I? Did Trish warn you you’d go off me this fast?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I smile. ‘If I put you in the bin, then I don’t know what that would mean I’d have to do with some of my other clients. Cremate them maybe, then bin their ashes?’

  He laughs. ‘That bad eh?’

  ‘Actually, no. I’m just joking. I have lovely clients.’

  ‘So what’s with this personality profile thing you had me fill in?’ he asks over his steak frites, and my Roquefort-stuffed free-range chicken breast. We have talked about his university days, his travels, his social life and his last proper relationship that lasted six years. ‘Can you really match a person with another person based on their answers to those particular forty questions?’

  ‘You mean, as opposed to any other forty questions?’ I find flirting with him quite easy and have found my mind wandering a few times to how good in bed he might be. I’m guessing, with that roguish, confident way he has, that he might be a ten. ‘Actually, you’d be quite surprised. If a woman answers that a mate’s physical attractiveness is extremely important, then I’m not going to set her up with a six stone jockey with a third eye, am I?’

  ‘Do you have a three-eyed jockey on your books?’

  ‘I used to have a two-eyed one.’

  ‘Did you match him?’

  ‘Eventually, yes.’

  ‘Hang on,’ he wags a finger, then reaches down and digs in his briefcase. ‘Question, what was it? Thirty-two?’ He pulls out the questionnaire I emailed him. ‘Ah yes. Love it! IS YOUR BEDROOM MESSY?’ His face becomes serious. ‘I mean, if I say yes it is—which, yes, it always is actually—does that mean you’ll match me with an equally messy person so we’ll live in complete chaos forever? Or are you going to pick a neat freak? That way she’ll get so frustrated with my mess that our marriage will become a constant nag-fest?’

  I’m about to answer, when he says, ‘Or this one: DO YOU ENJOY A GOOD JOKE? I mean, I’m just curious, is there anyone who will say “no, personally I bloody loathe a good joke. Despicable things, good jokes.”?’ And what about, HOW OFTEN DO YOU GET ANGRY? ONCE A YEAR? ONCE A MONTH? ONCE A WEEK? A FEW TIMES A DAY? Are we talking angry as in ready to singlehandedly open fire on a care home of snoozing senior citizens? Or your more garden variety anger, of “that wanker just cut me off in the passing lane”?’

  He’s wearing me out. ‘Are you done mocking my questionnaire?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I mean, I don’t have to be. I could go on if you like.’r />
  ‘No, I think there’s no need. Actually, I never used to have any sort of psychometric evaluation—’

  ‘You call this a psychometric evaluation?’ His eyes are a mischievous twinkle. ‘Oops, sorry, go on.’

  I push a rosemary-basted potato into my mouth and try not to show any amusement by the fact that he’s trying to make me look ridiculous. ‘What I mean is, I used to just go on instinct. You know—do they look right together? Do I sense a similar outlook, views, values, humour? But so many of my clients expected to fill in a personality profile, because other dating services have one. Personally I think it’s people who are looking to pass themselves off as somebody they’re not. You don’t have to fill it out if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Now if I say I want to, you’re going to think it’s because I’m dying to lie about myself.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’ve got you sussed already as it is.’

  His eyes are flirting outrageously with me. And if this wasn’t a professional relationship, I’d drag him to the bedroom. ‘Did Trish fill it out?’

  I think back. ‘No. As a matter of fact, she didn’t.’

  He drops it onto the floor by his briefcase, sits back, looks at me, and beams. ‘Fancy sharing a dessert?’

  I conclude, after our date, that, of the four main masculine personality types (thinker; doer; ideas man; dreamer) James is the classic thinker: the type that forty-one per cent of women are drawn to. Thinkers will immediately command attention when they walk into a room. Thinkers are logical and challenging; they’re the managing directors of big business. Communicative, emotional women are attracted to them because they represent stability and security.

  All that, and he’s sexy as hell. I’m going to enjoy finding the lucky lady who will think this guy’s fantastic.

  Admittedly, I do.

  ~ * * * ~

  A high has to be followed by a low. On the train home, Kim, of missing underpants fame rings me.

  ‘It’s no good, Celine. I went out with him again last night. I picked a very low key restaurant and I just came out with it and asked him if he was wearing any underwear.’

  ‘What? Kim, that’s not exactly how we planned to broach the subject.’ I attempt to whisper, cowering in my seat and trying not to look at my travel companion—a businessman opposite who is glaring at me around his copy of the Financial Times. I accidentally got booked into a quiet car and should not be using my mobile.

  ‘Well, he said it’s completely unreasonable of me to tell him how to dress!’

  ‘Well, in a way he has a point, doesn’t he? I thought we were trying the subtle approach? That we were picking the right moment to say how much it would turn you on to see him in a sexy pair of briefs?’

  The man across from me has lost all interest in his paper.

  ‘I know. But I’m an out-with-it person! I can’t bear pussyfooting around. It’s such a time-waste.’

  ‘But he may have felt ambushed.’

  ‘Over underpants?’

  ‘Over the set up. You. Him. In a restaurant. Grilling him on whether he was wearing underwear. It probably really embarrassed him.’

  ‘I was the one who was embarrassed!’

  ‘Well, what would you like me to do, Kim?’ I ask her. ‘If the knickers are the deal-breaker, which I’m sensing they are?’

  ‘Find me someone else,’ she says.

  I pointedly switch off my phone and smile at my now rather stupefied-looking travelling companion.

  No wedding ring. Should I give him my card?

  Seven

  ‘Who’s that dude you’ve been Googling?’ Aimee looks up from her history book. I was going to quiz her on Peter the Great, for her test tomorrow.

  My hand freezes on the door handle. ‘Which dude, I mean, person, are we talking about?’

  ‘Patrick Shale.’

  ‘Since when do you check my Internet history?’ I clamp a hand on my hip.

  ‘Since you check mine.’

  ‘That’s different. You’re twelve. There are a lot of perverts out there.’

  She rolls her eyes, as though she has met a few. ‘So who is he, this Patrick? Is he your new boyfriend?’

  ‘Boyfriend? No! He’s just someone I used to know years ago. A Canadian who I met when I travelled Asia.’

  I see the rare interest, and tinge of scepticism, in her eyes. ‘When did you ever go to Asia?’

  ‘When I was twenty-one. Right after I finished Uni, I went travelling around the world.’

  ‘You never told me you went round the world before.’

  I think about this. ‘I suppose it never came up.’

  ‘So you had a boyfriend centuries ago, and now you’re back in touch with him the second Dad is out of the picture?’

  I laugh a little. ‘Well! It was hardly centuries. And he wasn’t really my boyfriend. And I’m not in touch with him. I might have Googled him when I had nothing to do, but that’s all.’

  She frowns. ‘Why was he not really your boyfriend?’

  I remember the mysteriously covert world that adults move in. My mother never gave me an ‘in.’ I was like a dog sitting waiting for table scraps of knowledge about her interior life. But they never came.

  I go over and sit on her bed, disturbing Molly, who growls then resettles herself in the side of Aimee’s legs, and starts purring.

  ‘He was a Canadian foreign journalist working as Asia Correspondent for The Associated Press, based in Hong Kong. He was my first true love.’ She pretends to go on reading, which amuses me. ‘Patrick was intense, argumentative, energetic, devastatingly attractive. He was the most exciting man I’d ever met in my life, and I was lost the minute we looked at one another.’

  She puts her book down now, turns onto her side with her back to me and pulls up the duvet, leaving an ear peeking out.

  ‘There’s a village in the mountains of Vietnam, called Sa Pa. And the story had it that many years ago, a girl and a boy from rival tribes met here, in the market square, and fell in love. But their parents forbade them from marrying. So the lovers made a pact that for the rest of their lives they would meet every year in the same square. And it started a bit of a tradition. It became known as The Love Market—’

  ‘That’s the name of your company!’

  ‘Yes,’ I smile. ‘The way it worked, families would bring their daughters to the Love Market. They were probably the same age as you. And the young boys would come looking for a wife.’

  ‘Wife? At my age?’

  ‘Yep. If you lived there Aimee, you’d probably be married with ten oxen, a couple of dozen buffalo and seven kids by now.’

  I see her ear move up. Could that be a smile?

  ‘The Love Market,’ she repeats.

  ‘Well, it was really a marriage market in many ways. We go to our local market to buy food; these people went to find a wife.’

  ‘That’s very twisted.’

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t. It was charming. The boy made up a love song and sang it into the darkness. And somewhere in the crowd, a girl sang her own words back to him. Soon they’d be singing in perfect harmony—’

  ‘I’m going to barf. What did they sing about?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not like they sang in English just for me!’ Her ear moves again, and now I see a cheek, and a smile.

  ‘Anyway, the two lovers would then disappear into the forest for three days. And when they next emerged, that basically meant that—’

  ‘They’d had sex.’

  I still cannot get used to hear the word “sex” come out of my daughter’s mouth.

  ‘Well, okay, yes, they probably had. But over there, Aimee, once you’d had sex with a boy that was it for you; you got him for life. The girl would go off to live with the boy’s family. Her parents would lose a daughter, and another family would gain another pair of hands to work the land.’

  ‘Drastic,’ she says. ‘I am SO glad I don’t live there.’

  ‘No! It was romantic!’
r />   ‘Ergh. Which part precisely?’

  ‘Perhaps you had to be there.’

  ‘Or not, as the case may be, thank you. I am SO NOT EVER going there.’

  I smile at her as she shudders. ‘It wasn’t just young lovers though. Many of the people were there because they were married to somebody else, but their hearts belonged to another. I remember Patrick telling me that people came to the market to find what they had lost, or what they’d never had.’

  She turns slightly again, and looks at me, a little intrigued. ‘In my case, someone I met in Asia had told me about The Love Market. I always felt like I had to go there on my own. Something about it appealed to my young romantic heart.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, Patrick was staying in one of the tribal settlements, in a primitive wood hut, the typical place you’d imagine a foreign newsman roughing it in. And I was staying in a fairly westernised, sanitary little two star hotel.’

  And it was a swift, wordless passage from hello into bed. I beam a picture of him to mind, and all the old feelings come with it. Patrick was tense and intense, and had trouble relaxing; he couldn’t seem to stop over-thinking everything. That confidence that bordered on arrogance but never quite crossed the line. He could be demanding and quite cutting. But I loved that about him because it said he was comfortable with me so quickly. He had a glamorous career. I had a degree in Human Resources and no career plan. We were opposites, yet none of that mattered.

  ‘Go on. It’s just about getting interesting. Did you have sex with him on the first date?’

  ‘Aimee! You’re twelve. I’m not talking about my sex life with you.’

  ‘But did you?’

  ‘No. You never ever have sex on a first date, with anybody.’

  ‘So after how many dates is it okay to have sex with someone?’

  I think for a while. ‘Fifteen.’

  Her jaw drops. ‘Go on then, get back to what you were saying about Patrick.’