by Carmen Reid
Owen made vomiting noises while Lana crossed her arms and scowled at her mother.
Annie climbed the hotel’s thickly carpeted staircase with unbridled optimism. This was a classy place. Nothing cheesy about it. Well, OK, maybe booking the Anne Boleyn Function Room hadn’t been the organizers’ best decision: ‘My second wife? Yes, she was beheaded, unfortunately. So sad. But there we are . . . that makes me single again.’
No more dates via the Lonely Hearts columns! Annie was triumphant. No more hasty glasses of wine downed while she made her excuses to the poor bewildered souls she kept encountering. No more internet dating! Her inbox would be free of the entirely deviant fantasies of Mr Perverted of Tampa Bay, Florida and pals.
Red carpet dinner dating. This was the way to go. Yes, it was expensive, at a moment in her financial life when she really couldn’t afford it. But she was looking on it as an investment. Finding not just Mr Right, but Mr Wealthy-and-Right was going to be money so well spent. Anyway, this was a trial dinner. She’d only paid for the meal. The full subscription was due only if she signed up after tonight. Maybe she’d get lucky first time. She was feeling very lucky.
How Dinah had rolled her eyes as Annie had read to her from the brochure: ‘A gourmet dining experience with forty hand-selected singles . . .’
‘Look thorough the guest list,’ Annie had urged her, handing over the profile pages studded with grainy printouts of passport-sized photos.
‘There’s a property developer, a Czech businessman, a computer entrepreneur, someone interesting from the West Country . . .’ Annie had pointed out.
But Dinah had labelled each photo in her own way: ‘Man who does DIY, Eastern European gangster, husband not over his wife who dated lesbians on the internet . . . mono-browed Welsh werewolf . . .’
‘Stop it!’ Annie had ticked her off. ‘What about him then?’ – she’d ringed one profile – ‘Dominic runs a garden design consultancy. He loves French wine and Cuban music . . . Ooh!’ Her eyebrows had perked up with interest. ‘Half French. Now he is very, very promising.’
‘Let’s see the picture.’ Dinah had peered at the page and grudgingly agreed that Dominic wasn’t bad. In fact, really quite handsome: dark hair, nice jawline and smile . . .
‘Why do you think he needs a dating agency?’ she’d wondered.
‘Maybe he’s just so busy running his consultancy, he can never find the time to meet anyone,’ Annie mused. ‘He is good looking, isn’t he?’
Smoothing down her dress, pulling back her shoulders and setting what she hoped was a slightly mysterious smile on her face, Annie opened the Anne Boleyn room door and stepped inside.
At a reception table directly in front of her an overenthusiastic girl with a stack of name badges was gushing: ‘Hello and welcome to Discerning Diners.’
Name badges? Annie hadn’t expected something as functional and conferencey as name badges, but far, far worse than that was the fact that everyone Annie could see milling around in the drinks area was dressed in regulation office clothes: the men were all in grey and navy suits, the women likewise. This was a sea of jackets, long-sleeved blouses and smart trousers with not one pretty dress to be seen anywhere, let alone a strappy one. She was going to look like a divorced and desperate housewife amidst all the high-flying, executive girls.
‘So, what’s your name?’ the super-smiley blonde behind the desk wanted to know.
‘It’s Annie Valentine and . . . I thought we were supposed to dress up!’ she added in dismay.
‘We do ask everyone to make an effort, but I’m afraid so many people come straight from work, they don’t have time. Can I take your jacket?’
‘No . . . ummm . . . well . . .’
It was warm in the Anne Boleyn room, too warm for yellow wool gabardine with a satin lining, especially now that she was feeling the added heat of embarrassment.
She could either hover round the drinks reception quietly sweating her jacket up and her make-up off, or she could be brave and breezy and take it off.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she relented, slipping off the Valentino and exposing slim shoulder straps, bare arms and a lot more cleavage than the event required.
‘I’m going on to another party afterwards.’ Suddenly the perfect excuse, not to mention fib, sprang to mind. She would tell everyone this. Oh and it meant she could leave early if – surely no chance of this – the evening was a horror.
‘OK, Annie. Hi! Welcome! I’ll take you over to Hillary, who’s going to introduce you to everyone.’
With Hillary at her side, Annie was whisked through a blur of faces, smiles and introductions. She recognized some names from her list: the Czech turned out to be a rather meek-looking salesman; Idris was indeed a mono-browed Welshman, though probably not a werewolf; most disappointing of all was ‘very, very, promising’ Dominic, the garden designer, who was handsome, but came in at about five foot three. So, Annie, in heels, was a clear eight inches or so taller than him.
When they were ushered through to dinner, she felt a little disheartened to see that the name tag on the place next to hers was Dominic’s.
A rather shy, bland man called Will was seated on her left opposite a pale, nondescript woman called Maisie. But some sort of salvation seemed to loom in the form of Lloyd, the greying but nonetheless debonair-looking fifty-something opposite her. When he smiled, introduced himself, shook hands over the table and complimented Annie on her ‘ravishing’ dress, she found that her will to live seemed to be returning.
But over the starter – spinach and nutmeg soup, which quiet man Will couldn’t eat without splashing and slurping noisily – Annie discovered that Lucinda, the woman seated on Lloyd’s left, was also very taken with him.
Within minutes, it also became clear that Lucinda was very, very chatty and was going to do most of the talking at the table, imagining that she was helping everyone to mingle by going round and asking all those excruciating personal questions Annie did not want to answer: ‘Are you divorced?’ ‘How long have you been dating?’ ‘What do you do for a living?’
As her turn to be asked approached, Annie made the mature decision to bolt for the loo.
WÈ¡n she came back, she felt she should leave off Lloyd and devote some attention to Dominic, so as not to be rude.
‘The wine’s nice, isn’t it?’ she asked him, remembering his interest from the profile pages.
‘Not bad at all,’ he replied, turning the bottle to read the label.
‘I’ve taken the decision not to drink plonk any more,’ she explained. ‘Life’s just too short.’
He held up the bottle and said, ‘Indeed,’ as he refilled her glass.
Was it her imagination or had he given a little wince? What had she done? Maybe it was her use of the word ‘short’. He was obviously super-sensitive and she’d hurt his feelings. Subconsciously, she’d drawn attention to his height, or lack of it. Mental note not to use the word short again.
She asked him about his journey to the hotel and got an almost funny anecdote in reply.
Half French, Cuban-music-loving Dominic: it was obvious the French genes were strong, he was handsome in a dark and brooding kind of way, wore his shirt unbuttoned low and would have looked at home in a Parisian café puffing on a Gitane.
He should have been very promising date material. But eight inches . . . eight inches was quite a gap to overcome. Even sitting down, his head was tilted up to meet her eye level, which whizzed Annie back in time to dancing with boys a whole head and neck shorter than her, making her feel like an overgrown freak.
‘Your nephew’s at St Vincent’s!’ she exclaimed, because they had just made this discovery. ‘Small world.’
He gave the little wince again. Ooops.
As the first course had arrived, they began to talk about favourite foods; vegetables, to be precise.
‘Aubergine in a tomato ragout,’ he was telling her.
‘Dwarf beans, steamed with butter, delicious,’ Annie said.
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Dwarf?? Why did she have to say dwarf? Wasn’t ‘beans’ description enough?
Lloyd shot her a wink. Was he just being friendly or had he noticed her unfortunate choice of words? By the way, that was Lloyd, property developer, divorced, no children, large house in Wimbledon, hobbies: jazz and windsurfing – Lucinda had her uses.
‘Have you been dinner dating long?’ she asked Dominic, changing direction away from miniature food.
‘A year or so,’ he admitted.
‘Met any interesting people?’ She wondered if he’d had more luck than her.
‘Lots. Lots of interesting people – but nothing serious.’
After a few moments of attempting to make chit-chat with taciturn Will, Annie turned back to Dominic as it was hard to wrestle Lloyd from Lucinda’s focused attention for more than a moment or two.
‘I love her, she’s adorable . . .’ Dominic was telling Maisie about his long-standing admiration for the French actress Audrey Tatou.
‘Oh, I feel the same way about Billy Crystal,’ Annie chipped in. ‘Although he’s obviously tiny.’ It was out of her mouth before she could even think about it.
Dominic’s smile was definitely too tight at the edges.
‘So, tell me about your gardening work?’ she asked, deciding any sort of apology would just make things worse.
This turned out to be a good question. Dominic was very enthusiastic about his job and talked with animation about the Modern Garden.
Annie and several other diners listened closely, chipping in with questions about their own little plots, wondering if he could offer a few tips. This was one of the many sad things about getting older, Roddy always used to joke; suddenly everyone’s as interested in gardens and where to score the best bedding plants as they used to be in drugs. Bird-watching no longer meant checking out the hot chicks, but setting out feeding tables and encouraging the starlings. ‘From big tits to blue tits: it’s downhill all the way,’ had been Roddy’s take on it.
‘It’s not growing, it’s just so . . . stumpy.’ Aaargh! Wasn’t there another word she could have used to describe a hedge that was failing to thrive? ‘So totally, well, you know, not . . . bushy,’ she managed.
‘Stunted?’ Lloyd offered, suppressing a smirk.
Annie had a sneaking suspicion that silent Will and Mousie Maisie were in fact smouldering with passion: they kept trying to take furtive glances at each other and blushing when they got caught. If only they could pluck up the courage to say slightly more than hello.
But just as she was wondering how to draw them into a conversation together, she heard Dominic tell Lucinda that he drove a mini-van. At this, she turned, caught Lloyd’s eye and heard him give a snort of laughter which he quickly suppressed by drinking a mouthful of wine.
She smiled at him knowingly, feeling pleased that they had this secret communication going.
Fortunately Dominic didn’t seem to notice . . . but it was talk of the midget gems that brought things to a head.
The conversation had moved on to favourite childhood sweets and out popped Annie’s revelation: ‘Midget gems.’
It wasn’t a lie. Along with Caramac bars, these were her top nostalgia trip treats.
‘Midget gems?’ Dominic asked a touch coldly and with obvious disbelief. ‘Midget gems? I’ve never heard of those.’
‘They were very tiny, multicoloured, iced biscuits,’ she stumbled.
He didn’t look convinced. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure either. Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe they were ‘Iced gems’, but she was so busy trying not to commit height gaffes that the word ‘midget’ had perversely sprung to mind.
‘Anyone else remember midget gems?’ She looked round at the other diners, hoping someone would prove she hadn’t lost her mind.
No. No-one could recall midget gems and put her out of her misery. Dominic glared at her and might have been about to say something but fortunately a little bell rang, which turned out to mean that the first course was finished and all the women had to stand up and move three places to their right. To Annie’s relief, this put her in Lucinda’s seat, right next to Lloyd. Unfortunately Dominic could still glare at her, but she’d try to ignore that.
Lloyd was a honey. He asked her about where she lived, he listened to her job description and property empire expansion plans with interest, he topped up her wine glass. He looked into her eyes and said in a low voice that he’d been coming to these dinners for over three months now and he’d met no-one as beautiful as her.
She asked where he’d got his tan and he muttered modestly about business in Argentina and how a trip to the Caribbean made February so much more bearable.
Annie felt a warm wave of happiness wash over her. A warm, sun-kissed Caribbean wave of happiness. Her luck was so, so in. He was lovely. Perfect. Her hands were itching to pick up her handbag, whisk out her mobile and commit his numbers to speed-dial.
‘So you have children, do you?’ he asked, picking up his wine glass to take a sip.
‘A gorgeous fourteen-year-old, Lana, and then Owen, who’s nine.’
‘Fourteen?!’ Lloyd was trying to restrain himself from a splutter.
‘Well, she’s my lovechild,’ Annie explained, always pleased with the ‘you look so much younger’ effect that mentioning her 15-year-old daughter had on people. ‘I had her when I was twenty.’
‘You’re thirty-five?!!’ Lloyd asked. ‘But you look so much younger!’ Unfortunately, this sounded almost angry, unlike the usual compliment that revealing her age brought her. (Annie suspected it was her bright blond hair, use of first-class moisturizer – past-expiry-date Sisley – and the fact she found sunbathing boring which combined to give her a face that still looked late twenties, so long as she wasn’t laughing. In photographs taken mid-cackle, she looked about a hundred.)
‘Well, thank you,’ she smiled at Lloyd, but he didn’t look happy. ‘What’s the matter?’ She decided it would be best to know.
‘My cut-off point is thirty-three,’ he said coldly.
‘Thirty-three what?’ she asked, not sure what he meant.
‘Thirty-three years old,’ he retorted. ‘My ex-wife is thirty-four, so I’m going younger. Much younger.’
‘Oh!’ For a moment Annie was too taken aback to say anything. Then plenty of pithy responses came to mind like: ‘You sad old goat’, ‘When are you booking yourself in for a full facelift?’ or ‘Is dating a teenager so much fun?’
But she reined them in and settled on a dignified ‘Well, Lloyd, that’s your loss. Women get so much more interesting in their thirties. Not to mention expert.’ Unfortunately, she followed this with a snarled ‘But why are you here when there are so many Thai agencies that could help you?’
There was nothing for it now. Having offended the man on her left and the man opposite, she had to concentrate on Will, the soup-slurping Mr Quiet.
‘I think Maisie really likes you,’ she told him, after a quick preliminary chat. ‘You should get her number . . . get in touch with her. I think you’d both get along like a house on fire.’
Unfortunately this just made Will blush deeply and clam up completely. So now Annie had no-one to talk to. Time to execute plan A and claim she had to leave early to get to her ‘other’ fictional party.
With a quick glance round at everyone within earshot, she announced that she would have to leave and so sorry, etc etc.
Exiting the table head high in what she hoped was a dignified manner, she couldn’t help taking a glance back to see if Lloyd had got up to follow her. Well, why not? Wasn’t he desperate to know more about her? The dwarf-baiter? Even if she was 35!?
No! He wasn’t even watching her go! His head was turned, he was deep in conversation with Lucinda, who – outrageously – had moved herself back into the chair Annie had just vacated.
But of course Hillary the hostess was chasing after her, catching up with her at the door.
‘How did it go? You’re looking so fabulous by the way,�
�� she gushed. ‘We will phone you tomorrow and ask if there’s anyone you met tonight that you want to contact.’
‘Thank you,’ Annie managed, although she’d have preferred a pithy, Pah, don’t bother. What a bunch of losers!
She buttoned her jacket up, fled to the first pub she could find and gulped down a gin and tonic while waiting for her minicab to turn up, more thoroughly humiliated than she could ever remember feeling after any school disco.
Chapter Five
Connor babysits:
Dark blue chunky cashmere rollneck (Armani)
Slouchy indigo jeans (Nudie)
White T-shirt (Paul Smith)
Pink and aqua socks (Paul Smith)
Tight boxers (Aussie Bum)
Suede bowling boots (Camper)
Total est. cost: £520
‘Why does no-one want me?’
‘Mizz Valentine, you been on a hot date?’ the taxi driver greeted her with a grin. It was the same driver who’d taken her home from Dinah’s house last Friday, Mr Abdul Nwocha and his not-so-trusty Nissan Bluebird. The week before she’d noticed an ominous rattle underneath the car, hinting at an exhaust close to exhaustion. It was still there.
But, like all the other drivers she knew at this cab firm, he was cheap but polite, friendly and waited outside your home until you were safely inside.
‘How did it go?’ he asked Annie once she was buckled into her seat.
‘It was fine.’ She offered him a smile. She wasn’t even going to begin to describe the evening in its full glory. Yet another dating disaster, further proof, as if she needed it, that she was hopeless at this . . . that there was no-one good left out there . . . and that husbands were completely underrated. She squeezed away the tears of frustration that were threatening, balled up her hands and tried to concentrate on Mr Nwocha and his chat.
