The Love Market

by Carol Mason

‘How about I ask you a better question? Are you getting back together with Mike?’

  I glare at him. ‘No!’

  ‘Well you should,’ he says. ‘That is, if you love the man. If you don’t, well, obviously that’s a very different matter.’ Then he looks out of the window. ‘They’re far back, so they’re hard to brush. And besides, the rest of the teeth are crowded, so once they’re gone, the top teeth will finally have room to stretch out.’

  We shoot each other a suspicious glance, then he directs his gaze out of the window again, and seems to refuse to look at me.

  I sit reading a well-worn magazine while he’s in the chair. There is a whirring of dental instrument noises, and the dentist’s pleasant and reassuring voice from time to time. A radio quietly plays chart hits. The receptionist makes dinner plans on the phone with her boyfriend.

  And then, after about an hour, my father reappears with the dentist—a tall, serious-faced but not unattractive man—walking him out.

  ‘All right?’ I stand up, as my dad manoeuvres toward the reception desk, mopping saliva from his chin with his red hankie.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ the dentist smiles at me. He has a nice voice, and manner. I tell him, ‘thanks.’

  The receptionist confirms he knows which mouth rinses he has to do, and tells him she’ll ring him in a day or two to see how he’s getting along.

  We leave. My dad still hasn’t spoken.

  ‘Are you sore, Dad?’ I lay a hand on his arm.

  From behind his hankie, he mumbles oral hieroglyphics.

  ‘Go on then, give me a little look.’ I reach to pluck his hand from his face.

  He swipes me away, mumbling a mouthful of invective. And it’s only then that I catch a glimpse. His greying, peg-like teeth have gone, and a set of skittle-like creations, the colour of double churn butter, have mysteriously appeared in their place.

  ‘Say cheese,’ I coax him, as we wait for the lift. I’m dying for another glimpse. Has my dad really got dentures?

  He turns his head away, like a dog whose mouth you are trying to remove a bone from.

  ‘Go on. Please. Cheese.’

  He turns his head away more. His hands are still clasped into fists by his sides; his small shoulders square and rigid.

  ‘Hah can hawk,’ he says.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Hi said, hi can-t hawk,’ he repeats himself, slowly.

  ‘You can’t talk?’ I say, cottoning on. ‘Ah! You should have told me!’

  We walk to the car. Driving home, I steal glances at him when I hear the sound of tiny chomping noises coming from him.

  ‘Heep your eyes on the hoad,’ he growls.

  ‘Okay!’ I say. ‘I’ll keep my eyes on the road. Like any good driver.’

  Eighteen

  I met Jennifer Platt a few weeks back when I was posting an ad for The Love Market on the bulletin board of an exclusive Jesmond tennis club. Jennifer works there part time, while she is trying to get a home business off the ground making gourmet meals for National Express East Coast—the North East to London train line. What struck me about her was the fact that here was a pretty lady with a brain and ambition, who seemed to be the real thing. She said she would never have considered going to an introductions service before if she hadn’t met me personally first. I’ve agreed to take her on and waive my fee, mainly because I know she’s not well off, and I can think of a few men who are going to be interested in her. She’s got virtually everything (minus the hair colour) that the modern man goes for. Yes, the textbook male client, as written up in the Daily Mail, wants a five-feet-eight inch blue-eyed blonde, who is an extremely fit size twelve, who rents rather than owns her own flat, and makes less than twenty-five grand a year. I just want them to occasionally surprise me.

  We meet in Deb’s Tea House in Jesmond, near where she lives.

  The first thing she says to me is, ‘I’m nervous about getting back out there. It’s been so long. I was married for eight years. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with someone else’s sexual preferences, navigate someone else’s body. What if I’m no good?’

  Haven’t I spent nights wondering the same thing? Dreading stripping off for someone new? Having to adjust to a new pace? Third date pressure—or is it second now? Wondering if there are new sexual positions that have rendered what Mike, Patrick and I have done passé.

  I can see that Jennifer’s temperature has risen just by talking about this so I instantly rule out two of the men that first came to mind for her because their sexual personalities might be a bit too intimidating for her.

  ‘Don’t ever think in terms of you being inadequate, Jennifer. No man who is lucky enough to be in that position with someone as lovely as you is going to be worrying about your skills or adequacy.’

  Wish I could take my own advice.

  She smiles. ‘That’s very kind of you, thanks.’

  ‘But why not just forget about joining The Love Market for now, and just go out there and have some no strings fun first. Have you thought about that?’

  She’s shaking her head before I’m finished. ‘I think you can have fun in a committed relationship. I want someone who is going to be around once I’ve got to know him.’

  ‘If I wasn’t a woman I’d want to go out with you myself.’

  She laughs. I snap a photo of her for my records. ‘So tell me, Jennifer, what are you really looking for in a man?’ Sometimes they think I’m testing them, given that I generally ask them this on the phone and then in more detail when we meet. And occasionally I am. Like asking them their age. If you quickly follow the question with, “What year were you born in?’ and they hesitate, you discover one universal truth: that people generally aren’t as quick with numbers—or lies—as they might have thought.

  ‘You know, I’ve never had a particular vision. It always bothers me when friends say oh he has to be six feet tall, and have all his hair. I mean, it takes more than height and hair to make someone attractive.’

  I nod. ‘You’re brilliant! Maybe you should work for me?’

  She blushes. ‘Really, he doesn’t have to be any one particular thing. Except honest and kind. I like finding qualities that are attractive in people that aren’t necessarily the glaringly obvious things.’ She scowls. ‘Does that make sense?’

  ‘Perfect. And it’s a brilliant answer. I wish all my clients were like you! Do you have a single sister or any friends?’ I am half-serious. Referrals are fail-safe. They are how I get eighty-percent of my clients. Nice people usually have nice people in their lives.

  She beams, sips her tea, a silver signet ring on the middle finger of her right hand. There is something faintly old-fashioned in her gentleness and good manners. Although nothing mumsy in the curves that hide under her clothes.

  ‘If I did match you with a high earner, how would you see your life changing?’ I never ask this in the first conversation or, for some, it becomes all about the money. And then that tends to influence how they market themselves to me from then on. More up-sell, less honesty. I am all for impression management. I encourage it on those early dates. Beyond dress and the visual appearance, I urge them to manage their general behaviour, to come off pleasant and assertive, to watch their body language, conceal anxieties and show openness. I beg them to be economical with their life stories and past mistakes and downplay any negatives that might result in them being written off. But I don’t like them holding back and managing me.

  She seems to think about this. ‘You know, I’m not sure. I think in the fundamental ways I’d not want to change my life. I’m not sure I’d continue to work at the tennis club. I mean, I don’t even know why they gave me the job. I can’t even play!’ She blushes again. ‘No, I’d probably want to invest a bit of money in setting up my kitchen with a commercial sized oven, then I’d be more able to handle the big contract when I get it. If I get it, of course.’

  I tell her that I’m sure she’s going to get her contract.

  When
I reach for the bill, she insists on buying our tea.

  Nineteen

  Patrick is staying at the Cadogan Hotel. When I phone him back and he tells me this, a chill flutters up my spine.

  ‘I always stay there,’ he says, when I quiz him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  I tell him that I was in London three years ago and I thought I saw him, coming out of that very hotel. ‘We were there for our tenth anniversary. It was in the November.’

  ‘November 07?’ he repeats. Then after a moment: ‘I was in London then. I was on my way back from Baghdad to Toronto, then Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh. They decided to send me there to cover it. That was…. Wait a minute… Around the 16th when it happened.’

  ‘My anniversary was the 24th. I saw you the day before. We’d just got off a bus. You were coming out of the hotel. You flagged a taxi.’ I am almost breathless with tension.

  ‘Yes. I was back the week after the 16th. It would have been then, for sure.’

  ‘Patrick, I phoned the hotel! They said they had no guest by that name.’

  ‘We rarely travel under our own names. For security reasons.’ He sounds confounded. ‘So you got off a bus with your husband, in the middle of London, and you saw me, of all people, get into a taxi...’

  I can’t tell him how I belted after him. How, if I hadn’t seen him, maybe I wouldn’t even be divorced now. I think Mike could handle knowing that he was always surer about me than I was about him. Yes our marriage had fissures, but that could have easily been all they were. But that day in London Mike saw that Patrick was clearly more than a fissure. He was a regret that never went away.

  ‘If only I’d seen you,’ Patrick says.

  But if only, what?

  ~ * * * ~

  We have agreed that I am to get the 9:55 train to King’s Cross and he’s going to meet me on the platform.

  That is, if I ever get there.

  On Wednesday morning Aimee has a very bad headache. When it’s still bothering her on Thursday, I phone Mike in a panic. ‘Do you think I should take her to the hospital?’ I ask him, catching him still in bed as it’s only nine a.m. and he would have been at work until the wee small hours.

  ‘For a headache?’

  ‘She looks really awful. And she’s just lying in bed. She’s so lethargic, Mike. There’s something wrong. I’m sure there is.’

  Pause, while I know Mike is second-guessing himself. ‘Well, maybe you should take her.’ I hear him shuffling around, probably looking for his jeans to pull on, his shoes from under the bed. Sometimes I get the oddest feeling that Mike and I aren’t really divorced; he is away somewhere, but he’ll be home soon. And that’s not necessarily what I want; it’s just the way it is. ‘Do you want me to come as well?’ He doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘Hang on, give me twenty minutes to get some clothes on and I’ll pick you both up.’

  I’m instantly relieved, even though, technically, I’ve given up the right to lean on him. ‘What if it’s connected to her fall, Mike? A blood clot or something?’

  ‘Celine!’ he sighs. ‘Just get her ready. She’s not having a bloody stroke, all right?’

  When I hang up, Aimee is standing in the doorway of my bedroom, looking a mite more alive.

  ~ * * * ~

  We’re at the hospital forever. Waiting. For the doctor. For another doctor. For a head scan. For them to read the results. For them to talk, examine her, look over her medical reports, say little and leave us in suspense, walking in and out of rooms, running shoes squeaking on the polished floor. Aimee sits slumped against Mike, with her head under his arm, once in a while sending me a look that’s laden with blame and designed in some way to make me jealous.

  The verdict: everything’s fine. Their words don’t sink in. I had prepared myself for worse. Now we don’t have worse I am feeling suspicious. ‘Are you positive it’s not connected to her fall?’ I ask. I remember the doctors saying at the time that it was a miracle she hadn’t hurt her head because unbeknown to me she had gone out without her helmet on. ‘What would have suddenly brought this on?’ I ask. They want to know if she has been unusually stressed about anything. Mike and I look at one another. Mike tells them about how we have gone through a divorce, in addition to the fact that she seems to be struggling in school a lot, and lost out in participating in a competition that had meant the world to her. Aimee sits stock-still, with that posture of someone being talked about. The doctor gives her some pills. ‘Come on,’ Mike says to us. ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘Can we go eat together?’ Aimee asks, once we’re in Mike’s car. ‘The three of us.’ When I glance round at her, her eyes are sadly imploring me.

  ~ * * * ~

  The restaurant used to be one of our regulars. I’ve never come back here since we split up, and I wonder if Mike’s been back, but I can’t bring myself to ask. Knowing he had would hurt, and would make me think that Mike doesn’t attach the same sentimentality to our old routines and has managed to continue on, taking sole ownership of what was once ours.

  It’s full for a Thursday night. Mike goes to the bar and gets Aimee a lemonade, and us two glasses of red wine. He walks back to our corner table slowly, carrying all three drinks carefully stacked in a triangle up by his chest. ‘Should we help him?’ I ask Aimee, and he looks up and catches us watching him warily.

  ‘You thought I was going to drop them, didn’t you?’ He sets them down carefully on our small table. ‘Faithless buggers.’

  Aimee chuckles.

  At the carvery station the chef loads us up with slices of roast turkey, and we help ourselves to the accoutrements. ‘Take some veg, Aimee,’ Mike tells her.

  ‘I have,’ she says, ‘Potato.’ She walks back to the table, clomping her feet ‘like a herd of pet elephants’ as I will always tell her.

  I slide some of my veg onto her plate. She tucks into her meat with a remarkably good appetite for somebody who just had us all so worried.

  ‘So you’re getting an early train?’ Mike asks, just as I am thinking of something Jacqui said: that I’m lucky that Mike and I have managed to remain friends. But have we really? Aimee is the glue that still sticks us. I had convinced myself it was a mutual breakup. Considering that I was the heartbreaker by never being fully present in the marriage, Mike ought to hate me. And for all I know, maybe he does. This is the thing with Mike: you can never really tell what’s going on in his head. He has the remarkable ability to act as though nothing much of any concern is.

  It’s only when he mentions the word ‘train’ that I remember I’m supposed to be going to London in the morning. I told him I was going down for a work conference.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘Your work’s important. Go.’ He looks at Aimee now as he pushes his last bit of potato into his mouth. ‘Can’t you eat at least some of those vegetables?’ he says to her, somewhat uncharacteristic in his firmness, but she’s absorbed in whatever it is she’s doodling. ‘Hey, Aimee! I said why don’t you try to eat some of those carrots?’

  She glances at him now, disdainfully, then pointedly picks up a carrot and directs it into her mouth. Mike shakes his head at me. Then he lays an arm across Aimee’s shoulders and pulls her in for a kiss, eyes planted on mine. ‘You can’t change who you are, and what you feel,’ he said when we were splitting up. ‘Maybe you once thought you could.’

  ‘You go to London and do your thing and we’re going to have a very good time, aren’t we Aims?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she replies, subdued.

  ~ * * * ~

  Patrick is there waiting for me. I see him the second I step off the train. He is at the far end of the platform. In the instant after I see him, he is smiling and holds up his hand in a wave, and I just know.

  Then he is cutting an urgent path through the crowd. He is beaming, his eyes seeking out my face, as a sea of people bob in between us.

  I am rooted to the spot. Then he is right here. The idea that this really is him is on a slow burn inside of me.

  He laugh
s a little. My hand cups my mouth now. He removes it, and holds it, briefly.

  It staggers me how much older he looks, now that I am no longer staring at him in a picture on the Internet. The face is fuller, even though he doesn’t really seem heavier in his body. The hair is still wavy, the same dark blond. But it’s the lines around his eyes. Patterns of them, like cracks in china.

  His arms go around me, he plants kisses all over my face and neck. Then his arms strap me to him. And I am aware of only one thing: of fitting, of belonging with him, of a click of something between us, an instant falling into place of all the pieces.

  And I feel like dropping into tears—at the shock yes—but at something far more indelible and tragic than shock. At the loss of his boyishness, and the years I could have had to love him that I never had.

  I wasn’t quite expecting this sort of greeting. ‘You’re really here!’ I say, in disbelief of him all over again.

  His hands fall away from me for a second, as though in astonishment, then he grasps my upper arms, and gives me the smallest shake. ‘It’s you,’ he says. ‘It really is.’

  ‘You’re wearing the jacket,’ I pull away from him, as much as he will let me because he seems to want to go on squeezing me. ‘The same one you had on when I saw you—’ I can’t finish. I am choked by the power a coat could have over me.

  He looks down at his casual olive-coloured jacket, still smiling. ‘Oh, this old thing? I’ve had this years. You’ll find I don’t actually own many clothes... How are you?’ he asks quickly, dismissing the importance of his jacket. ‘I was worried you might not show.’ I go to answer him, but he kisses me again, full and purposefully on the mouth.

  Patrick was always spontaneous.

  ‘Don’t answer that,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to hear that you may have considered not coming.’

  He stops me from speaking again, with a kiss. So here we are on the Kings Cross platform, as people move around us, looking at us: a real life, black and white Marc Trautmann photograph. The ticket man leans out of the train door and whistles overtop an announcement of a train arrival.