My Fair Man

It wasn’t that Toby was unattractive. He was good-looking in a clean, smooth-skinned, bookish way. He wore little round steel-rimmed glasses that had made her think, when she had first met him, that he was sensitive and deep. Now she thought that one of the main reasons she had been drawn to him was the fact that he was physically more boyish than manly – his thin, underdeveloped body was entirely hairless – which made her feel that somehow she would be safe with him.

How long, she wondered idly, would he go on this time? Aware that he was waiting for some indication of her own abandonment she muttered something he might take as an endearment. Then she went back to making out her imaginary Sainsbury’s grocery list – her own reason for making a strong connection between sex and shopping. When Toby made love to her – at least on Saturday mornings – she would take a mental trip down the aisles of her local superstore: Two kilos of Cox’s Orange Pippins, a bunch of small bananas, one kilo of seedless grapes, butter, a pack of Yakult …

‘Yes, yes, yes …’

She lay still for a few minutes after he had finished. She was always impatient, after sex, to get up and off but she knew that sexual etiquette decreed that she lie for a while panting and looking sated – even if she was, in her mind, just making her way down aisle 10 towards the bakery. She was always amazed when Claire, at the outset of some new affair, would admit to having spent two or three whole days in bed. She didn’t mind sleeping in the bed next to Toby but lying next to him in a conscious state was terribly taxing for her. Particularly when, as today, there was so very much to do.

It was at this moment, almost as she had reached the checkout in Sainsbury’s with her imaginary trolley, that she remembered the bet. Had Jon really meant it or had he been joking? Grabbing her robe from the chair by her bedside she got up and made her way down the flight of stairs and through to the kitchen, the only closed-off part downstairs of her otherwise open-plan loft apartment.

And there, at the very top of her Samsonite briefcase, tucked alongside that copy of the Big Issue was Jon’s hand-written wager.

‘Do you think he was serious?’ she asked Toby as he joined her.

‘The terrible tragedy is that even when Jon’s joking he’s serious,’ commented Toby, ‘and he’s always been a gambler. He’ll bet on anything. Years ago he had a bet with Chris and me on the number of orgasms he could achieve in one night with a dreadful slapper we all knew. She had to swear an affidavit before we gave him the money …’

Hattie looked at Toby and realised that after six years together they barely knew one another. It genuinely surprised her that the word ‘slapper’ was one he was – well – familiar with.

‘Toby, you know I really want to do this. It would be like the ultimate sociological experiment for me. I might even write a paper on it. Profit professionally as well as getting considerable satisfaction proving that dreadful fool wrong,’ she said as she made her way through to her minimalist bathroom.

Minimalism appealed to Hattie because she had grown up in a dusty, cluttered, overdecorated stately home which was a virtual shrine to hereditary possessions. Every nook and cranny of her childhood home had been filled with rare antiques, paintings and objets d’art, most of which – despite her father’s assertion that they were ‘priceless’ – were all about money and the ostentatious presentation of their family wealth. The fact that her own choice of living space – almost entirely empty of possessions – was now fashionable was not important to her. What she loved most about her bare white surroundings was the way in which it contrasted so totally with her ancestral home. It fitted perfectly with her general philosophy on life – which had caused such grief in her teenage years – property is theft. Jon’s favourite joke at Hattie’s expense involved him saying that when it came to her own apartment that ridiculous phrase was true – the 3000-square-foot loft-style property, he would say, had been absolute daylight robbery when she bought it three years previously.

Sitting on the edge of her sandstone bath Hattie picked up her portable phone and rang Claire, who agreed that she thought Jon had been serious.

‘Toby tells me Jon always wins his bets,’ Hattie said carefully to Claire who had, after all, once lived with the man.

‘Not this one he won’t,’ said Claire confidently, ‘although I think that we will have our work cut out. For a start we have got to find that man again. And then we’ll probably need Rentokil and an intepreter when we do,’ she finished with a giggle.

It wasn’t going to be as easy as Hattie had thought. The woman at the customer service desk inside the Halifax had been most unhelpful. They had absolutely no idea who – or what – lay in their doorway after closing hours, unless, that was, they happened to know his account number. Why didn’t madam try the Salvation Army?

Hattie was disconsolate.

‘For Christ’s sake, Hattie, it doesn’t have to be that homeless man. It could be any old vagrant. Let’s go down to cardboard city and find another one,’ said Claire.

‘No, Claire, it’s got to be that young man. Jon specifically said that man. And anyway I believe it was somehow fated. I’ve just got to find him …’

‘But you probably wouldn’t recognise him if you did stumble across him. It was dark and I certainly only remember the smell of him.’

Hattie didn’t say anything but she knew that she would instantly recognise the man. His eyes, even in that dingy doorway, had a quality about them she knew she would never forget. And however much Claire might sneer she felt increasingly there was some, well, some cosmic link between him and herself.

‘We have two options open to us. We either come back here tonight and hope that he turns up or we could go down to the mission and see if he’s there.’

But he wasn’t at the mission either and they had so few clues as to his identity that there was precious little more they could do. An earnest young man on duty suggested they try a couple of haunts that were frequented by the homeless young.

‘Otherwise you could try the offices of the Big Issue on Monday. If he sold you a copy he must be registered with them,’ he said.

Claire was all for this latter course but Hattie wouldn’t think of it. And when Hattie made up her mind about something they were both generally carried along by it.

It was, Hattie said later, a depressing day on a number of levels. They trudged around soulless cafés and drop-in centres encountering, along the way, a new awareness of the meanness of the city they lived in.

By late afternoon Claire was ready to give up.

‘Look, Hattie, I’m going to some dinner tonight. I’m going to have to get back to get ready.’

‘Someone special?’ said Hattie, who was always rather intrigued by Claire’s relationships.

‘No, only some friend of mine – another PR – who has lined up this man she just knows is right for me. As if I haven’t heard that a million times before. His CV sounds hopeful though – good-looking, intelligent, divorced, successful …’ she said wistfully.

‘Sounds like the prototype of every man I’ve ever known you get involved with,’ said Hattie. ‘Take care, won’t you, and er, take it slowly …’

‘If I took it slowly, Hattie, I’d never take it at all,’ answered Claire, kissing her friend on both cheeks as she prepared to leave her. ‘You going home to cook dinner for Toby?’

‘No actually, he’s got some squash thing tonight. I think I’ll carry on looking for a while. I’m not ready to give up quite yet,’ she said.

‘Well, be careful. The streets are no place for a nice girl like you,’ warned Claire as she climbed into a cab, wondering, not for the first time that day, if this whole business of the bet hadn’t been a terrible mistake.

There were ten of them at dinner. Three couples and four ‘singles’ as Antonia insultingly called anyone without a live-in lover and a joint mortgage. Claire was rather hopeful about the man who had been placed beside her at Antonia’s long, bleached wood table. But then when it came to men she was a hopeless optimist.

‘Hi,’ she said as they took their seats, ‘I’m Claire Martin.’

‘Chris White,’ he replied.

He was tall enough, she reckoned, and if not quite as good-looking as Antonia had promised, he wasn’t unattractive. He had mid-brown hair and grey-blue eyes and very good cheekbones so that when he smiled, as now, he looked really rather fanciable.

The only vaguely worrying thing about him was his goatee beard. Claire wasn’t very keen on facial hair. But, hey, she reminded herself, you can’t have everything.

‘Antonia talks about you a lot,’ Chris said.

‘She does?’ Claire looked across at Antonia with surprise; they were not exactly close friends.

‘Yes, she’s always saying how you would be perfect for me.’ Chris was also looking across the table at Antonia.

‘She mentioned something similar to me,’ Claire replied.

He poured her a glass of wine, and then another of fizzy mineral water.

‘Are you a friend of Steve’s?’ she said, unsure of Chris’s connection with Antonia.

‘I was best man at their wedding. Known him since I was a child.’ he said.

He was very attentive, filling her glass – just that little bit too often really – and virtually ignoring the woman on his other side. He wasn’t particularly witty or overly fascinating (he was, after all, an accountant) but he seemed pleasant enough.

And when the meal was finished he sat next to her on one of the sofas in Antonia’s living room, one hand, very casually, slipped behind her. Signalling, she thought, some kind of intent.

It was going well, Claire decided. He was successful and established – he had one of those lovely little Georgian cottages in that network of streets between Notting Hill Gate and High Street Kensington – and he had been divorced for just about the time a man should be before he considered remarriage.

At the end of the evening, as the other couples tumbled out into their cars, Claire asked Antonia, within earshot of Chris, for the number of a local cab company. Antonia looked at Chris meaningfully.

‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. ‘It’s not far out of my way.’

She smiled, thanked him, and nipped into the loo on her way out to retouch her lipstick and check that she looked OK. In the car they talked a bit about the other guests and when he drew up outside her mews house he stopped the car and turned off the ignition (another sign of intent, she thought).

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

She remembered Hattie’s advice, earlier that evening, about taking it slowly. But Claire had reached an age – and if she were honest a state of desperation about ever finding a man she could really love – when caution was pointless. If she said ‘no’ she would probably never hear from him again. And if she said (as she probably would later) ‘yes, yes, yesss’ she would probably never hear from him again. There was nothing to be gained, and nothing to be lost, in being coy.

He didn’t waste any time. Within seconds he was passionately kissing her. Telling her, whenever he surfaced to take in a gulp of air, that she was beautiful, hot, wild, the best – the usual gamut of meaningless compliments induced by male sexual arousal.

She broke off for a second, as she considered only proper, to offer him a drink. She didn’t want him to think that she was inhospitable (which, of course, he didn’t).

‘Is there anything you want … wine, brandy …?’

‘Just you,’ he said, falling on her again with a ferocity that rather overwhelmed, not to say irritated, her. What was the hurry?

‘Well, I’ll just put on some coffee,’ she said, struggling free and rushing into the kitchen, pulling the zip up on the back of her dress as she went so that it didn’t fall off her completely.

Claire hadn’t lived with anyone since she had broken up with Jon five years ago. In truth she hadn’t really had what you might call a regular partner for three of those five years. There had been a few married men with whom she had enjoyed brief affairs that would involve a couple of weeks of frenzied clandestine sex (what she called her fortnightly men). And there had been two complicated relationships that had – over a period of a couple of months – never quite come to anything.

For some reason she didn’t seem to meet men in the way she had a few years ago – at parties, through friends, in clubs. Most of her female friends (and she didn’t have many) seemed to be caught up in long-term relationships so there was no one to go clubbing with, and anyway she was so caught up in her work that really, finding time to develop relationships – let alone draw up some strategy on how to meet decent men – was almost impossible. Of late she had got rather used to snatching, as it were, whatever sexual action was on offer. She had a strong, growing feeling that this Chris was not going to be the love of the rest of her life, but what the hell? She wanted sex, even if she wasn’t sure if she wanted him – and that horrid little goatee.

By the time she got back to the sofa he was so sexually charged that she wasn’t sure there would be time to guide him up the little staircase to her bedroom. If she didn’t hold him back for a minute it would all be over before the espresso machine had finished.

‘Chris, Chris …’ she said, pushing him back a little, ‘let’s go upstairs …’

They part walked, part stumbled, part fucked their way up the stairs.

‘Oh GOD!’ he cried within seconds of reaching the bed and fully entering her. ‘Oh GOD!’ he screamed again. And then there was silence apart from the ticking of her bedside clock and the beating of her own disappointed heart. Then they lay there in what she could only describe as postcoital gloom for several minutes.

‘Are you going?’ she asked, astonished at the speed with which he had then got out of bed and dressed.

‘Yes, I think it’s best,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this. I never meant it to happen …’

Oh that’s nice, she thought, so what did he think would happen when he asked to come in for a drink and then jumped on me?

He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands.

‘What is your problem, Chris?’ she said.

‘Antonia,’ he replied.

‘What’s Antonia got to do with this?’

‘Everything. We’ve been having an affair for two years. It’s the only way we can get to see each other socially without Steve catching on. If she invites another single woman …’

‘How many of her single friends have you fucked in the cause of perpetuating Antonia’s marriage to Steve?’

‘Oh, you’re the first,’ he said, looking at her with what he obviously thought she would interpret as sincerity.

I’ve heard it all now, she thought, ‘Oh, you’re the first.’ She wondered if it weren’t innate in men to come out with that phrase whenever they were caught in an awkward situation with a woman. It seemed to spring to their lips as automatically as a yelp if they were kicked in the balls or, in Chris’s case, the name of the Lord when he reached his sexual climax (if you could call it that).

But then, she thought, perhaps she had been the first of Antonia’s decoys to fall for the cheap lines Chris had thrown at her. Probably he never thought she would invite him in and when she did some automatic male instinct had taken over. However much in love he was with Antonia he wasn’t actually going to turn down ten minutes (or was it five?) between the sheets with another woman. Men are like dogs, she thought as she watched him shuffling awkwardly beside her bed, that eat every meal regardless of their hunger just in case it’s their last. Chris had approached her like an extra tin of Chum that fortune had thrown his way. And now that he had partaken of her he looked as if he were going to be sick.

‘You won’t say anything to Antonia about this …?’ he said hesitantly.

He had a nerve.

‘Perhaps it would be more relevant if I talked to Steve,’ Claire said coolly.

‘Oh Christ, no!’ A tone of real desperation entered his voice. ‘He’s my oldest friend.’

‘Isn’t he the lucky one?’ Claire turned over in the bed and closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again he would have gone.

After an hour or so of tortured self-examination she finally fell into a fitful sleep that was punctuated by odd, recurring dreams of Jon in that brief period of her life years ago when she had felt in some way emotionally fulfilled.

Hattie had no intention of giving up on her mission, even if it took her all night. She spent the evening drifting round a savage network of streets in King’s Cross, trying to get a better idea of the world the homeless man inhabited. She felt strangely diminished by the experience, as if she, in walking through this sad nether world, were somehow homeless herself. And that feeling made her all the more determined to find the man whom fate had placed in her path on the previous evening.

At nightfall she decided to return to the beginning, the doorway where the argument resulting in the bet had started. In almost every entrance she passed there were bodies in sleeping bags and boxes. She wondered if these people came to the same place each night or if they selected their pitch by chance. If so, she thought as she approached the Halifax, it was unlikely that she would ever find him. There were three bodies lying amidst a clutter of carrier bags and clothing, and her heart began to race. Moving into the entrance she peered down to see if she could identify the boy.

‘Thank goodness I’ve found you,’ she said aloud, relief and hope flooding through her as she recognised him, his hand clasped round a length of blue rope on the end of which was his thin, nervous dog.

They both flinched when Hattie approached them, the dog setting up a high-pitched squealing bark designed, she supposed, to protect his master. The boy didn’t recognise her at first and when he did he thought she had come for her change.

‘Yous give me a tenner,’ he said, taking a few coins from his pocket and holding them out to her. At this the dog began to growl and jump up at Hattie, a menacing look in his eyes.

‘Doon, boy, doon,’ the boy said firmly yet gently to the insistent dog.

‘I meant you to have that money,’ she said.

‘But it’s only 80p …’ he said, looking at her suspiciously.

She realised now, as she stood before the boy, that her interest in him must seem, at the very least, odd. She couldn’t possibly tell him about Jon’s bet because, she realised, it was insulting and patronising and would, in any case, make her seem like some rich, bored socialite looking for a diversion. There was a silence between them – punctuated only by the squealing of his dog – whilst she searched for a way to appeal to him.

‘The thing is I want to help you. I really do,’ she stuttered. ‘My name is Hattie George and I want to help get you back into the real world …’

He looked her up and down, wondering if she had any conception of what the real world was like but he didn’t say anything. One of the other figures camped by him sniggered loudly. Hattie felt ridiculous.

‘My friend and I – well, we want to get you back on your feet. Find you somewhere to live, a job, new clothes, you know the kind of thing …’

There was a huge guffaw now from the two other men but her man still didn’t say anything. Her tone of voice became more beseeching and desperate as she continued with her plea. She realised that she must seem hysterical and maybe even a little deranged. But she was determined to convince him.

‘I’m on the level, honestly. Please don’t think this is some kind of trick,’ she said.

The two men beside him, friends of his perhaps, made some comment she couldn’t quite make out. But the man she had come to see ignored her and began to spread out his sleeping bag.

‘Aren’t you listening to me? I want to help you,’ she said despairingly.

‘Listen to her, man,’ said one of his friends.

‘Why?’ he said, looking at them and then back at her with haunted and uncomprehending eyes.

‘Because I can help you,’ she said again, faltering a little for fear of offending him.

‘Why me, like?’ he said in his surprisingly strong and rich accent which, she thought now, was a little like that of that footballer who was always making a fool of himself.

‘Look, why don’t we go and have a coffee somewhere and talk about this? It’s very important to me that you understand,’ she said.

‘Coffee?’ he said blankly.

‘Well, I don’t know – can’t we sit and talk somewhere?’

‘This is me home, like. Sit doon here,’ he said, indicating his sleeping bag on which the growling dog was now sitting.

Hattie crouched down beside him, self-consciously aware of the enquiring stares of passers-by and the inquisitive attention of his two friends. Behind the three men, nestling next to a rucksack, there were several cans – some empty and overturned – of Special Brew. Seeing her glance at them he took hold of one and passed it to her. She shook her head and then thought that it was probably rather impolite to refuse so reached her hand out and brought the half empty can to her mouth, wondering if he would be offended if she first wiped it with a tissue.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked as she handed him back the cold can.

‘Why d’ ye wanna know?’ he said in the lilting tones that she now found oddly attractive.

‘Because if I am going to help you I will have to know everything about you.’

He laughed at that, laughter that was echoed by his incredulous friends.

‘I don’t want your help, hinny.’

‘Of course you do. You can’t want to go on living like this,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because it’s such a waste. Because I – we – my friend and I – we can give you the life you have always wanted.’

‘And how do you know this isn’t what I’ve always wanted, like?’ he said.

There was something very proud about him, Hattie thought as she sat watching him. Despite the grime that covered him, and that awful smell, he had an unmistakable dignity. And she had been right about the eyes – they were astonishing. Brilliant – almost turquoise – blue with long black fringed eyelashes that were almost beautiful. She was curiously excited by the idea of getting to know him, if he would let her. But she was aware of his ambivalence towards her. How could she convince him to allow her into his life?

‘Look, please come with me and meet my friend and listen to what we have to say,’ she said, reaching out to stroke his dog, which snarled and spat at her.

The boy leant over to grasp the dog.

‘Doon, boy … Na, hinny, I don’t want your help,’ he said, turning away as if to indicate that this was the end of the matter.

‘Look, you must have had dreams, you must have had hopes. You surely didn’t imagine that you would spend your life sleeping rough in dirty doorways?’ she said plaintively.

‘There’s worse than this, pet,’ he said, an edge creeping into his voice.

She went quiet then because she felt foolish. How could she have expected to put her own values, her own aspirations, on to this man who had led a life of such obvious deprivation. Why had she imagined that she could impress him with talk of clean sheets, hot meals and a regular job? She had no idea how he had got here and no conception of the suffering he had seen.

‘You can help me, darlin,’ slurred one of the other men, hopefully. ‘You can take me home with you …’

‘Nah,’ said the other man, ‘it’s Jimmy she wants. It’s always Jimmy they want …’

‘Jimmy,’ said Hattie, pleased to learn his name. ‘Look, Jimmy, here’s my address, my phone number, my name. You can reach me any time on my mobile, and there is a day office number and a home number. Think about what I’ve said and call me …’ She handed him a card, which he reluctantly took.

As she left she heard his friends begin to tease him about her interest and she wanted to cry. For the tragedy of his life and her own stupidity in imagining she could save him from it.