Cupid's Dart

by David Nobbs

  We passed the cooling towers of Rugely. We rattled through Rugby. I wondered what she was doing at that moment. I recalled my very last words to her, and I found . . . yes, I did, I really did . . . that I had the strength in me to live by those words.

  I smiled ruefully to myself at the thought of that sad, virginal, pedantic anorak who had travelled this route exactly a year ago . . . well, not exactly a year ago, this train was going to be late, it kept slowing down . . . who had travelled this route exactly a year and seventeen minutes ago. I laughed at this caricature of my pedantry, laughed out loud, which made my travelling companions uneasy, which gave me a little stab of wicked satisfaction.

  I smiled at them. I wondered how they had managed to find a bed strong enough to stand up to their ungainly couplings, but I didn't say anything about that, of course.

  I said, 'I wouldn't have laughed like that a year ago, before I'd met her. I've a lot to thank her for. That's why I've made this journey really.'

  They looked frightened. There were forty-five miles to go before we reached London, and they were beginning to think I was unhinged, and they were stuck with me on that crowded train.

  I thought of the waiter in the snobby French restaurant, that first night, and I leant across the table towards them.

  'I'm out on parole,' I said, 'but I have to report in every week.'

  They retreated into their blubber in horror. How she would have laughed.

  It made me sad to think of how she would have laughed.

  TWO

  Young women had spoken to me before, of course. They had said, 'Can I help you, sir?' and, all too frequently, 'There you go', and recently, to my chagrin, a couple of times, 'Would you like this seat?' But I couldn't remember any young woman speaking to me as if she was interested in me. Not even Rachel, in all the seventeen months of our sterile and abortive relationship.

  This young woman got on the train at Stoke-on-Trent, and walked slowly down the carriage, looking for a seat. The train was rather full, but I had a table to myself. There is . . . or was . . . something about me that deterred other travellers. The seats near me were always the last to go. That pleased me, but it also hurt me somewhat. I am more sensitive than people imagine.

  She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, on which was the legend, 'Townsend Tissues', below which was a thoroughly off-putting picture of a large man with a beer belly sneezing into a tissue.

  She was carrying an overnight bag, and she gave me a little smile as quick as a snake's tongue.

  Her first remark didn't really count. It was, 'Is anybody sitting there?'

  I looked across the small table, on which some notes for my lecture were strewn, and said, 'I have an uninterrupted view of the frankly rather dull upholstery. I think I can safely deduce, therefore, that nobody is sitting there.'

  I was appalled by my pedantry. What on earth had possessed me? But it seemed to wash over her.

  'Thanks,' she said.

  She reached up to put her bag on the rack. As she did so she revealed a few inches of smooth young flesh below her T-shirt. The top of a tattoo peeped shyly out of her jeans, like a cautious cat.

  There was a jolt as the train started abruptly. She sat down more quickly than she had intended, and gave another quick little smile, but this one had elements of a grimace in it. I found myself smiling back, which surprised me. I'd never been known for smiling. 'There's no risk of anybody ever calling you Smiler Calcutt, is there?' Rachel had once said. Or, more probably, at least twice. Her dry comments on my failings used to come round on a fairly short loop.

  The train slid slowly out of Stoke's suitably sombre station. The young woman . . . girl? (how should I think of her? What age was she? Twenty-five? I had so little experience of judging ages, especially young women's ages) looked out of the window. I found myself doing the same, but I saw nothing, and I soon went back to my notes. I found that I could no longer concentrate. I was too aware of her.

  She sighed, stood up, lifted her bag off the rack, opened it, removed a magazine from it, closed it, and put it back on the rack.

  'A disorganised mind,' I thought dismissively, my first brief interest fading.

  She began to read her magazine. The train gathered speed. I tried to gather my thoughts. I couldn't. It wasn't going well. It didn't really matter, there were several weeks to go before the lecture, but it made me feel uneasy. I was, in truth, just beginning to be gripped by a still distant fear – that, having been given my great chance to show the academic world something of my innate brilliance, I would discover that I had nothing to say.

  I became aware that she had looked up and was studying me. This was extraordinary – extraordinary that she should be studying me, and extraordinary that I should sense it. I had never been intuitive.

  I looked up too and met her eye. That also surprised me. Why on earth should I have looked up? Why on earth should I be interested in her, once it was established that she had a disorganised mind?

  That was when she came out with it, her question, her three monosyllabic words, which she would surely not have bothered to say if she hadn't been at least slightly interested in me.

  'What are you?'

  I was so surprised that for a moment even these three simple words made no sense, but I pulled myself together.

  'Ah!' I said. 'Good question. Funny you should ask me that. I'm a philosopher. I have devoted a lifetime to the painful process of finding it harder and harder to answer even such apparently simple questions as "What are you?"'

  'No,' she said 'I meant, "what sign?"'

  'Sorry?'

  'What star sign?'

  'Ah. Sorry. Er . . . Virgo.'

  It was absurd, at my age, to feel ashamed of my star sign.

  'Virgo, eh? Oh yeah!' She laughed. There was no cruelty in her laugh, and I noticed how good her teeth were. I'd have struggled to remember the colour of Rachel's eyes, yet here I was noticing this young woman's teeth!

  'But I'm on the cusp,' I said, as though this made things better.

  'I'm on the pill,' she said.

  I smiled, carefully hiding my alarm at her directness.

  'Virgo!' she repeated. 'I ain't never met many virgos. Bet it's not very appropriate.'

  'Oh well . . .' I let my remark hang in the air. I found that I didn't want her to know how appropriate it was. It's not exactly fashionable to be a virgin at fifty-five, in the twenty-first century, in sex-mad Britain. I wished that I was braver, less inhibited, less self-conscious. If only I could have said, quite casually, 'It's very appropriate actually', the whole embarrassment would have been over in seconds. How complicated I make life for myself.

  I hoped my face wasn't revealing any of these thoughts to her.

  I welcomed the little two-tone ring that precedes public address announcements the world over.

  'Good afternoon,' said a slightly stilted male voice over the Tannoy. 'My name is . . .' There followed two words spoken so swiftly that nobody could catch them. People are so familiar with their own names that they see no need to speak them distinctly. '. . . and I am your customer services manager for this journey. For those customers who joined the train at Stoke, this is the 2.48 Virgin train for London Euston.'

  'Shouldn't be on this train if it's for virgins, eh?' she said.

  I feared for a moment that I would blush.

  I felt that I must offer her some comment, to show that I was not being unfriendly or snobbish, but what could I possibly say to her? I couldn't even make small talk to my fellow dons, people of the same sex and similar age. What could I say to a young girl at least thirty years my junior?

  'Probably not many people should be,' I said, gamely entering into her little joke.

  'You can say that again,' she said.

  I didn't. I hadn't been too proud of saying it the first time. But I had to say something.

  'So,' I asked, less than brilliantly, 'what are you? What sign?' I tried to look as though I cared.

  'Guess.'
/>
  'Oh . . . well . . . it's not the kind of speculation I habitually . . . Aries?'

  'No! Never in a million years.' She laughed. 'Leo.'

  'Ah! Lion-hearted!'

  'Of course. Sorry, I'm interrupting, ain't I?'

  'No. No. Not really. The . . . er . . . the train of thought's been pretty well broken.'

  'So, this philosophy,' she said, 'what's that all about when it's at home?' The impossibility of giving an adequate answer to anyone, let alone to her! Suddenly I felt extremely tired. I longed to close my eyes and have a Churchillian nap.

  'Ah!' I said, playing for time. 'Now that's quite a question.' I have sometimes been told that when I discuss philosophy I can sound like a walking text book. As I spoke, I was painfully conscious of this, but I didn't know how to avoid it. 'Well . . . er . . . it's the search for truth and knowledge about the universe, human existence, perception and behaviour, pursued by means of reflection, reasoning and argument.'

  'Bleedin' 'ell. So in the morning do you wake up and say to your wife, "Well, darlin', I s'pose it's time to get up and search for truth and knowledge about the universe and that?"'

  'I . . . er . . . I don't have a wife.'

  I said it casually, as a man might say, 'I don't have an umbrella', but for the first time in my life I felt that maybe it was a cause for regret. I also felt just a faint tingle of . . . yes . . . distant sexuality. Very distant still. I had . . . no, not an erection, but, if it doesn't sound too silly, an intimation of erections to come.

  She went back to her magazine. I saw, on the front cover, details of the jewels within. 'Stretch marks of the Stars'. 'I'd never had an orgasm till I met my optician – he opened my eyes to sex'. 'Condors and condoms – where SA means Sex Appeal as well as South America'.

  I looked away hurriedly, and began to study her face. I was vaguely aware how unusual it was for me to find a person more interesting than their reading matter.

  She had dark, straight hair, pale blue eyes and high cheekbones. I particularly liked the curl of her nostrils. There was a small, slightly irregular indentation on her chin. It might have been a natural dimple or the result of a fall from a bicycle. I guessed, from my memory of her reaching up to the rack, that she was five foot three. There was a slightly cheeky air about her, an unselfconscious gamine confidence which lent charm to her immaturity.

  She looked up, and I looked away, embarrassed to have been caught in such a detailed survey. Then I decided that looking away had emphasised my embarrassment, so I looked back at her just as she looked away because there was no point in looking at me if I wasn't looking at her.

  I tried to work on my notes, but they seemed dreadfully dull.

  I looked up again. I wanted to talk to her. But how? What about? I had no idea how to talk to young women. Or indeed, for that matter, old women. Or, come to think of it, young men. Or, actually, old men. In fact, to be honest, anybody.

  Rachel's voice came to me, sharp and strident across two and a half decades, tart, icy, every other word a hand grenade, giving me advice before a party to which I hadn't wanted to go, when I'd moaned that I wouldn't have anything to say to her radiologist friends. 'Ask them about themselves, the way normal people do. Pretend to be interested.'

  I could ask her what she'd been doing in Stoke-on-Trent. She might say that she'd been on the stopping train from Congleton, but in that case it shouldn't be beyond me to ask what she'd been doing in Congleton. Surely I could manage to sound as if I was interested?

  And then a minor miracle occurred. I found that I really was interested.

  'Er . . . what . . . er . . . were you doing in Stoke-on-Trent?'

  'I'd been to the darts, hadn't I?' she replied.

  'The . . . er . . . the darts?'

  'The Extra Wet Strength Eliminator.'

  'The what?!'

  'Townsend Tissues sponsor this event, don't they? It's like a regional qualification for the national championships, know what I mean?'

  I've noticed that people of a certain background invariably say 'Know what I mean?' when it's blindingly obvious what they mean – 'I find it difficult to get up in the mornings, know what I mean?' – but on this occasion I had to admit to myself that I didn't know what this young lady meant. I hadn't a clue. There were worlds I knew nothing about.

  'You . . . er . . . you like darts, do you?'

  I don't think I have ever felt that my conversational efforts were quite as lame as they were on that train.

  'You could say that,' she replied. 'I'm a darts groupie.'

  'Sorry. What?'

  'A darts groupie.'

  'Ah. A darts what?'

  'Groupie.'

  'I see. Yes.' I didn't want to admit that I was lost, but I had to. 'Er . . . what is a darts groupie?'

  'Well you know what a groupie is.'

  'Yes. Yes. In the . . . rather special sense of . . . er . . . no.'

  'Well a groupie follows pop groups around, mobs them and that, cuts off bits of their underpants, tries to sleep with them and stuff, know what I mean?'

  'Yes. Yes. Yes.'

  'Well I follow the top darts players around, don't I? I . . . er . . . I had quite a day yesterday.'

  'Ah.' Come on, Alan. You can't leave it there. 'Er . . . in . . . er . . . in what way, quite a day?'

  'I slept with Shanghai Sorensen.'

  'Who?'

  'Shanghai Sorensen. The Dashing Dane.'

  'He sounds Chinese to me.'

  'Not that Shanghai. Shanghai in darts.'

  'Ah!'

  I had tried to inject a knowing element into my 'Ah!' I had failed dismally.

  'You do know what Shanghai is in darts, don't you?'

  'Yes.' Oh come on, Alan. 'Once again in the . . . in the rather special sense of "No".'

  'Bleedin' 'ell. And you said philosophy was knowledge and that.'

  'Well, yes, broadly.'

  'And you don't know what Shanghai is in darts. It's when you get a single, double and treble of the same number in three darts. Shanghai Sorensen, the Dashing Dane, does these demonstration matches where he bets on getting Shanghai. If he doesn't do it fifteen times out of twenty the punters get their entrance money back. It's like his speciality. That's why they call him Shanghai. And I've slept with him.'

  I had never met this girl before. I didn't think that I would ever meet her again. She meant nothing to me. I was more than somewhat surprised, therefore, to discover that I was rather upset that she had slept with Shanghai Sorensen, and that I resented Mr Sorensen for being such a dashing Dane.

  'Well . . . jolly good,' I said absurdly.

  'Twice. But yesterday was the last time. He says he can't never ever have sex with me again, cos I affected his adjustment, didn't I?'

  'Sorry. His what?'

  'His adjustment. Like if the first dart's in the five, which it almost never ever is with him, but if it was, he'd adjust to get the next dart in the treble twenty, right?'