The Love Market (18 page)

~ * * * ~

Father?

Evening?

Flattered?

What is she on about? I quickly type back telling her where I am, and add,
I’m sorry, Sandra, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about! I am about to ring my father now, to find out.

Then I ring my father.

Of course I know he won’t pick up when he sees it’s me. So I do Kim’s trick of hanging up then ringing again, until I’ve annoyed him enough.

‘Hey,’ he starts singing, ‘did I happen to meet the most beautiful girl in the world? And if I did, was she called Sandra? Sandra…’

‘Anthony!’ I growl. ‘What on earth is going on? How did you end up spending the evening with one of my clients?’

‘Not the entire evening. Though it wasn’t through lack of trying. Just dinner.’

‘You took her to dinner?’

‘I did, yes.’

I have to sit down. ‘How?’

‘Well, she didn’t exactly go out with me. She went out with a six-feet tall, thirty-eight-year-old paediatrician from Jesmond, who has never been married, wants children, loves foreign holidays, country walks and fine dining.’

It takes a moment for the penny to drop—which it does, as soon as I hear his dirty chuckle.

‘Hang on, you set this up? You pretended you were one of my clients?’ I’m so stunned I think I’m must be still asleep and having a nightmare. ‘But how? How did you do that?’

‘Well, I didn’t exactly set it up. It was your trusty assistant, Freddy, who phoned her and told her about the date.’

‘My who? Who is Freddy?’

‘Nice fellow. A little long in the tooth to still be working at his age. But he has an instinct for a match made in heaven.’

‘Hang on, you’re saying that YOU posed as the assistant I don’t have, then you rang a client, and set yourself up with her when she thought she was meeting someone else?’ Patrick is just coming out of the shower.

‘She’s thinking of sitting for me. I told her that the planes of her face make her the ideal model.’

‘Oh God help me!’ I hold onto my head. I bet he wasn’t looking at her face. ‘I don’t believe this. How many others have you done this with, Dad?’

‘None,’ he says, disdainfully. ‘But now you’re giving me ideas.’

When I hang up, I fly off another email to Sandra.

I am so sorry! I am so embarrassed!!! I can’t believe he’d do something like that! I don’t even know how he got your contact information!!!!! This is terrible! Please accept my apology!!!! Will have much more “appropriate” match for you as soon as I return!! Promise! And will kill my father!

Then I re-read, delete all the exclamation marks and send.

When I come back upstairs from breakfast and check messages again, Sandra has written:

Had a wonderful time with your lovely father!!! No need at all to be embarrassed! As I said, he was utterly charming, and knowing someone would go to those lengths to meet me really gives me hope!

Well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, yes.

We agree that Patrick is going to come up north.

I am to go on ahead today—Sunday—as planned. Then Patrick will take the train up on Wednesday. I will check him into the Station Hotel in Newcastle. And I will try to wangle as much time with him as I can get, before he has to go back down to London the following Sunday, for his Monday morning flight. I’ve decided, after a good deal of thought, that I’m not going to tell Jacqui. Patrick and I will have too little time together as it is, without my having to parade him before everybody. Plus we still don’t know where any of this is going—perhaps there will never be any need for him to meet my family. But most of all I don’t want Aimee or Mike knowing about him. It would hurt and confuse Aimee. And it’s impossible for me to imagine how Mike is going to feel if he knows that Patrick is back in my life—only perhaps, that his marriage had been a sham.

We go to Kings Cross Station and get Patrick a train ticket, and he waves me off on the platform.

While I’m on the train I miss him already. I sit in a daydream for a while then force myself to do a bit of work, mainly to catch up, because I’ve fallen so far behind this last week or so. I email Trish to make sure she’s going to show up for her coffee date with Liam Docherty the ex-footballer. She cancelled on him the first time. Then I spend a bit of time pouring over my mental filing cabinet of ladies to try to find someone for Trish’s James Halton Daly. He emailed me this two days ago.

‘Know that Rome wasn’t built in day, but am fossilising waiting for the list of lovelies you are setting me up with….?’

Something niggles me about James. He’s right; I haven’t exactly jumped to line him up with dates. There really is no reason why. I think I just have to try harder. I pull up his digital photo on my phone so I can stare at it and rack my brains.

I have Petra, another client who owns a spa in a posh end of Newcastle, and is very attractive in a high maintenance way. Perhaps too? Then I have Elaine Thompson, who owns a travel agency. She’s worldly, interesting, but five years older than James. A bunch of others just wouldn’t be on his intellectual level. I could see him getting really turned off by Lorraine McNaughty’s lack of self-confidence, and Julia Forrest’s talkativeness and her very strong and sometimes incoherent northern accent. Diane Bookington isn’t a bad one. I re-read her profile, and the notes I made on her. She works in marketing for the Northern Sinfonia, is certainly attractive, well-educated, dignified… I stare at her photo now, then back to James. They’d certainly look fine together. I can’t think of a reason
not
to match them.

Well, only one that keeps floating around in my head…

~ * * * ~

Monday is a powerhouse day: I frantically check stuff off the to-do list so I can free up time for Patrick. The day starts with Aimee stomping around the kitchen in the new cork-heeled shoes that her dad bought for her, grunting incoherent replies when I ask her how her weekend was.

Next, I do something I’ve never done. I finally return Jacqui’s millionth phone call and I lie to her. I tell her that Patrick was fantastic, but I’m not sure all the old feelings are still there, for either of us. She’s at work, so can’t talk much. ‘But I thought you said he was fantastic and it’s all just like it was years ago…?’

Nothing escapes my sister. ‘Well, it was. I mean, he was. And he is.’

‘So what’s wrong?’

I stumble for words, then ask her if we can dissect this later.

Then, I ring Kim on the off-chance that she will agree to meet me in her lunch break. She does. I take the train into Newcastle, popping first into the Station Hotel to inspect rooms and book the best one for Patrick.

It’s a warm May day, and Kim is wearing a floral dress with a lime green cardigan over it, and lime green fifties-style sling-back shoes. With her luminous blue eyes and the pink lipstick she’s put on, and her blonde hair, she looks strikingly girlie and unintimidating. She orders a Pinot Grigio spritzer and sinks it quickly. But she glances around a lot, as though she has skipped bail, or she doesn’t want to be seen with me.

‘I just don’t think I can do it,’ she says, whipping a glance around both shoulders again. I’ve never seen her this on edge. ‘I’ve spent the best years of my life trying to meet someone and for reasons that are beyond me it just never seems to work out. And I’m just so tired of getting my hopes up, only to repeat the same disappointments.’

The waitress comes to take our order. Kim petulantly says she wants “nothing”, then calls her back and changes that to a chicken salad. The salad arrives, she comments that it looks oily. She doesn’t touch it, but knocks off a second spritzer. I tuck into my lamb burger anyway because I’m starving. ‘Kim, there are things we can’t control and things we can. You should try to remember that of all the matches I’ve sent you, not one of them didn’t like you. It was you who didn’t like them.’

Her cheeks turn the same shade as the fiery undertip of her nose. ‘What was there to like?’ she says, with a small sarcastic laugh. ‘If I’m paying highly for a professional service, I should be able to meet better men than I would find walking down the street.’

Ah! That’s just what they all think! When Kim signed on with me, she came up with a Wish List of what she wanted. Right down to her completely shameless declaration that he should have “a tanned complexion but not be a foreigner.” He had to be six feet or over, with all his hair, possess the type of physique that said he worked out at least three times a week, and have no hard skin on his feet. On top of that he had to have an income of over eighty-thousand pounds a year. I had four people who matched her ideals—although, admittedly I took a gamble on their feet. I introduced her to all of them and she found fault upon fault with each one of them.

I catch with a finger the little river of grease that is on its way down my chin. ‘I think I know what the problem is,’ I tell her.

She tries to drain her glass even though it’s empty, and says a sceptical, ‘Oh?’

‘You remember how you only used to go for blue collar types? Then when they saw your fancy BMW they seemed to lose interest? You thought they were rejecting you, yet still you went after them. You kept thinking they weren’t impressed with you. But the problem was they were too impressed with you—you were out of their league. Now, I’ve fixed you up with five good matches—in addition to the four that were almost tailor-made to your specifications—and you’ve rejected all of them—almost all for trivial reasons.’ Her eyes have not once blinked. Not a muscle in her body has moved. But she looks like she’s ready to explode. ‘So I’m thinking either you’re now getting your own back—revenge on the male sex at large. Or, deep down, you really don’t want to meet someone.’

She doesn’t instantly jump to contradict me, but she looks less ready to burst a vessel. I press on. ‘You know, all through my teens I had acne. I bought every kind of cream, always trying to hide it. When it finally cleared up of its own accord, you’d think I’d have been overjoyed. But I actually missed it. I missed not having something to be constantly trying to get rid of.’

She scowls. ‘How has this got anything to do with what we’re talking about?’

‘Well, you’ve got into such a habit of trying to meet someone and it’s not working, that you’d actually be a bit lost if you met someone and it worked. You’ve made unsuccessful dating a habit, and in your own way, you’re happy with it.’

She does a small, shocked laugh. ‘Why would I be paying you then?’

‘To feed the habit.’

I watch her and she won’t meet my eyes.

‘There are such things as the perfect pair of shoes. Or the perfect hair cut. There is no such thing as the perfect human being.’

She picks up her fork. ‘I really do want to meet someone. You’re wrong there.’ She spears a piece of chicken, looking downcast all of a sudden. ‘I just… I suppose I do have some problems, and sometimes I think it’s not worth it—I might as well give up.’ She looks up at me now. ‘But maybe I shouldn’t. Yet. Maybe one or two more tries? Unless of course, you want to give up on me.’

I wag my fork at her. ‘I am not a quitter.’

She puts the piece of chicken in her mouth, smiles a little.

‘Baby steps up the mountain,’ I tell her. ‘Eventually we’ll find you someone. I fully believe it.’

~ * * * ~

Next, in my powerhouse day, I dig deep and I phone Mike to give him the news I know he is wanting to hear. ‘I have someone I think you might like to meet.’

I wonder if my decision to set him up with lovely Jennifer Platt is motivated by my own guilt about my reunion with Patrick.

‘She’s thirty-seven. Divorced. Her name is Jennifer and she’s presently employed in trying to set up her own catering business. She’d like to meet someone but is certainly not desperate. In fact, I actually approached her about joining the Love Market, not the other way round.’

I’m finished my brief intro, but he continues to listen. ‘I think you’re going to like her,’ I add.

‘Right,’ he says, after a second or two of pause. ‘Okay. Well, when am I going to get to meet her?’

‘I’m going to see if she’s free this Friday.’ My usual practice is to give the women the man’s number and let them make the first contact. I used to do it the other way round because even though I’m a modern woman I’ve never been keen on women asking men out. I have noticed that the most successful relationships are the ones that still maintain a degree of respecting traditional roles for the sexes. The most common complaints I have heard married women make are not that the husband has a wandering eye, but that she is expected to wash out the rubbish bin and mow the lawn. But the main reason why I prefer the woman contacting the man to set up a date is because I had one situation where the man wouldn’t accept rejection and became a nuisance. Like most aspects of this business, I’ve learned through trial and error.

‘Mike….’ I try to tactfully broach this. ‘I was hoping that on Saturday you might take Aimee again. I know you just had her at the weekend, but…’