Behaving Like Adults (58 page)

‘It's out, it's out!' shrieked Claudia, when I got into work one day.

‘What?' I said. ‘Who? Don't tell me. Tom. Penelope was a beard, I'm head over heels with Russell – ooh, he's such a scamp and so outspoken – I'm putting him on a diet and we're eloping to Canberra, romance capital of th—'

‘Shush, you're not funny. The
Glamour
feature!'

I snatched the magazine she was waving. Claudia sank to her knees and kow-towed to an imaginary Tabitha. Four minutes later and I was down there with her, kow-towing to Xak and making a mental note to get the office carpet cleaned.

Tabitha had written what I can only describe as the dream feature. It was funny, self-deprecating, sweetly cynical about dating agencies and bashfully charming about ours. Well, it would have to be. Seeing as she was announcing her engagement to Xak in print. Best of all, there was a photo. She looked sparky and fun, he looked good enough to eat. He'd also been kind enough to give his fiancée an exclusive. All the women he'd met at Girl Meets Boy were sexy, clever, a laugh – filthily eligible, in fact – but then he'd seen Tabitha taking notes in shorthand and nearly expired with desire.

‘“Filthily eligible”, what a delicious phrase, the little rentaquote.'

Claw, forgetting her orientation for a moment, rained kisses on Xak's dolly face, leaving red lipstick prints on the page. ‘I love you, I worship you, angel boy! I praise the day you walked through our door! I bless the unlikely fact you find shorthand sexy! May you make Tabitha the happiest woman alive and if you ever divorce, please let it be in fifty years' time when she's retired and arthritic and can't write about it!'

As if on cue, the phone rang.

‘A thought,' I said, reaching for the receiver. ‘It's a women's mag. What if
only
women apply?'

Claw frowned. ‘Then we'll have to invite a reporter
down from GQ to even out the odds. Or
Esquire
. Or
FHM
. Or start up our own men's magazine. Pick up already!'

I picked.

‘Hello, Girl Meets Boy. How can I help you?'

‘Yeah,' said a male voice. ‘Um. The dating agency, right? I saw this thing about you? In my flatmate's copy of
Glamour?
She'd left it lying around? On the kitchen table? I had to move it to, um, read
Newsweek?
And I caught a glimpse of the article? Thought it sounded a laugh?'

After twenty-seven such calls – give or take a few ums and ers – I realised that Britain's young single men are voracious readers of women's magazines, forever leafing through them in a feverish hunt for rogue nipples (
Loaded
and other publications where female full-frontal nudity is compulsory presumably don't hold the same sly appeal). In comparison, we had eighteen calls from women.

‘And that,' crowed Claudia, vampire teeth glinting, ‘isn't counting all the queries via email and the hits on the website.'

She looked around the scruffy paper-ridden office. I followed her gaze. It had that generic office look – a grey aura, buzzy white strip lighting, messiness even when it was tidy, hardwearing
fitments
. ‘Hol,' she said. ‘We should do this place up a bit. Paint it hot pink and azure blue . . . and have a hardwood floor put down instead of this manky hide-a-million-stains carpet. It's not a
crèche
for godsake, how many stains are we expected to make? I've only dropped my coffee once. And I make it a rule never to drop food. This is only a tiny room, it won't cost much.
We
can do the painting. I think we need to do something to mark the fact that business is on the up. And not just because of the
Glamour
piece. It's been improving steadily month on month – after that awful series of blips. We're really doing
very
well.'

I was pleased. It's certainly good, I thought, to have at least one portion of your life sorted out. Rather like a child
dividing peas, potato and chicken into seperate sections on their plate, I retained a habit of dividing my life into compartments. (Except at five years of age I'd gone a step further than most children, I used to remove all the blackcurrants in my Ski yoghurt, after cleaning them in my mouth, and line them up on the table for afterwards.) When Claudia forced me to analyse how I felt about my achievements, I realised that I'd dragged whatever neurosis lay behind the yoghurt custom with me into adulthood.

I couldn't even discuss it with Dr Goldstein. Over the last few months we'd had ten sessions. By session nine, I'd been scratching around for dilemmas to maintain his interest. He hadn't felled my bugbears with a big stick, one by one, as they ran at me. It wasn't that simple. But he was able to help me understand how a person who doesn't want to deal with a problem can invest all their energies in a distraction. I liked talking to him. He was the opposite of a god in that he turned wine into water. (Not so flashy, but a life essential rather than an extra.) And I think he liked talking to me – it wouldn't have worked otherwise. After our chats I felt the same intense satisfaction you get from popping bubble wrap. I could have gone on seeing him, except it was like a love affair: you know in your heart when it's over. I walked out of his office for the last time, quaking. Now I was on my own. But, I consoled myself, aren't we all?

‘Yes,' I said. ‘We are doing well. And you're right. We should paint the office blue and pink.'

The more I considered it, the more I loved the idea of such a colour scheme. It reminded me of a Walt Disney book I'd had when I was young. The illustration of Sleeping Beauty's castle had been a rush of hot pink and azure blue, to signify the spell cast by the kind fairy godmothers to save our princess from death and send her into a slumber that would last a hundred years.

Although, I had to concede, that spell was in no way the perfect solution. Sleeping Beauty's parents would die long
before she awoke,
and
– snooze of the century or not – until they did, it would be like having a daughter in a coma. I felt quite strongly that the King and Queen's feelings had been clumsily overlooked by the well-meaning fairy god-mothers. And the poor girl was at the mercy of being woken by a handsome prince. It was quite a gamble.

I was about to tell Claudia all this when the phone rang. Presuming it was new male client number twenty-eight, I answered with a trill. ‘Girl Meets Boy. How can I help you?'

There was an embarrassed cough, so I knew instantly it was the estate agent. He was curiously priggish. ‘Jeremy. We have an offer on your house. From Mr and Mrs Piddington. And' – dramatic pause, perhaps to illustrate his brilliance, my luck and the imbecility of the Piddingtons – ‘it's the asking price. I've spoken to Nick, and he's happy, but he wanted me to check with you. You'll wanna accept, right?'

For a moment I couldn't speak. Perhaps, had Nick and I painted the house hot pink and azure blue,
our
love story would have ended differently. Mr and Mrs Piddington would have been less likely to offer the asking price, that was for sure. I swallowed. I was being ridiculous. Ten hours with a shrink and I was subjecting the Dulux colour collection to psychoanalysis. What nonsense.

We'd paint the walls of Girl Meets Boy hot pink and azure blue because they matched the theme of our business. There would be
more
pink than blue, just in case anyone argued that, like Sleeping Beauty, our princesses had placed their lives on hold in the hope of being rescued by princes. If there was more pink than blue, then
we
could argue it was just as likely to be the other way round.

But listen to me. Why was I so defensive? Once I'd been proud, brazen even, about the goals of Girl Meets Boy. I'd never thought it was shameful to join a dating agency, to want to find love so badly you'd pay a firm to find it for you. Love, I'd declare to anyone who would listen, was the
meaning of life. After we are dead, all that remains is love. A big house, a powerful job – poor comforts if you lead a loveless existence. It was your duty to yourself to do everything in your power to ensure that you found love. And I
still
believed that, with all my heart.

So why was I suddenly coy?

The truth. I'd always been confident that I would find love without anyone's help. That was what distinguished me from my clients. Because, I'd always
had
love. From my family, from Nick. Now, I was staring a future of single-dom dead in the face. There was no guarantee that I'd find a prince – a prince, a pauper, who cared, so long as he was my soul mate? – or that he'd find me.

Now, I was the same as them. And when I thought about this, I saw that I'd always treated the members of Girl Meets Boy as children. Little people who couldn't look after themselves. I'd nurtured them, fussed over them, loved them. I'd felt compassion, empathy even, and I
thought
I'd respected them and yet . . . I had never regarded them as equals. But now – in a shock of cold understanding – suddenly I did.

I found my voice.

‘Jeremy?' I said. ‘Accept the offer on the house.'

‘
SATURDAY WEEK IS
Nige's last night,' said Claw, singing over the babble of Capital Gold. ‘I was thinking of taking Em and Dee. Evening at the theatre and all that. Do you want to come?'

I sat back on my heels and rubbed my aching shoulder. The first half hour of painting a wall is a thrill. Then, hot pink or no, it becomes mind-numbingly dull. Not as dull, however, as a Saturday night in front of the TV.

In the last year of our relationship, Nick and I had spent an alarming number of our Saturday nights in this way. It would have been fine if we'd nipped to the bedroom between
Blind Date
and
Inspector Frost
and ravished each other, but we didn't. Now I was single, there was no question of any ravishing (unless I ravished myself, which took three minutes and was about as satisfying as a lettuce salad) and this felt
nearly
as bad. If I plot my way through more than one evening a week via television programmes, I get the sense of my life draining away. Partner or not.

‘Yes, I'd love to.'

‘Good,' replied Claw, ‘because they keep hinting about getting together. They worry about you, you know.'

I knew. After I'd told them about Stuart, my normally unpushy parents had become
clingy
. I'd mentioned it to Issy, who said she'd only seen this behaviour once before, when Eden was born. Dad had taken to ringing me every night at ten, to see ‘how things were'.
I
would then be obliged to talk.
He
would listen, in complete silence, with not so much as a ‘really?' or an ‘mm-hmm' to encourage
me, and I'd keep thinking that either he or the line was dead. I love my father but he has no idea how to conduct a decent telephone conversation. As Woody Allen once said about being sent flowers, ‘the onus is all on the receiver'.

Mum was as bad. She'd ring at 8 a.m. and wake me up. A flurry of ‘how are you feeling's would ensue. Then, because I always felt rotten at eight in the morning, I wouldn't sound as chipper as her mental barometer required, and she'd start to panic and fall into a posting frenzy. One week I received: a fat series of clippings from the
Guardian
women's page on Rohypnol, serial rapists and other jolly tales, each sentient phrase dotted with a pink fluorescent asterisk; a rape alarm and a can of hairspray; a huge bottle of vitamin pills and
The SAS Urban Survival Handbook
; a pink T-shirt nightie from M&S (presumably, to kill any man's sexual urge on sight). Because my mother didn't wish to ‘intrude', she never sent any notes with these parcels, so it was like having a stalker.

Parental pressure was only alleviated by a call from Michael Mortimer, three days after the offer on the house.

‘Good news, Holly,' he barked. ‘The case Caroline Keats rang you about? The CPS have seen sense and brought charges against that swine, Marshall.'

If Michael Mortimer hadn't been Michael Mortimer I would have screamed. Instead, I said, ‘They have?'

‘And you can rest assured that their decision to prosecute was partly down to you.'

‘It
was
?'

‘Certainly. The police report would have mentioned that there had been a previous allegation.'

I paused, to see if he wanted to say anything else, but Michael was not a man who wasted words.

‘Is there,' I ventured, ‘a date?'

Michael said there was and mentioned which court. I scribbled it in my diary.

‘Do you plan to attend?'

‘I'm not sure,' I replied.

‘Think carefully, Holly,' he said, his tone soft.

I nodded at the phone. It would be wonderful to watch justice being done. But what if justice
wasn't
done? If I attended his trial, would I be letting Stuart back into my head? I was doing so well. After ruling my inner life for so long, he was receding to a dot in my mind's eye. And
I'd
made him recede. A tormentor rarely recedes of their own accord. I decided to wait till nearer the time, and see how I felt.

‘How's Nick?' I said, to change the subject.

New life entered Michael's voice. ‘Marvellous. Bit of a shock to the system, having the son and heir back at home . . . but marvellous. When the exchange on your house goes through, he'll start looking for a flat. What are your plans, my dear?'

‘I suppose I'll be looking for a flat too.'

I'd been putting it off. The thought of going back to a flat after living in a house made my heart sink. If your toilet stopped flushing, twenty-seven faceless people might be responsible, and you'd have to put in fourteen calls to the alcoholic porter (who, you suspected, spied on you with one hand on his binoculors, the other on his willy), who would in turn put in a call to the managing agents, who were like the worst sort of strict parents, rules coming out of their ears, no sense of humour, always wanting money off you. Ten days later, your toilet might be fixed.