Love @ First Site Read online

  "This is my husband, Ralph."

  Shaking his hand, I gesture for them to follow me along the corridor. "Are you looking forward to this?"

  She nods, a look of pure joy on her face. "You bet. I was just saying to Ralph this morning, I've always wanted to be pampered . . . you know, go on one of those health farm days or something . . . but we've never been able to afford it. So this is such a treat for me."

  Leading her into the makeup room, I introduce her to Kevin, Camilla, and Trudi, who are lined up like soldiers on parade. Unsurprising, since I have placed them all under pain of death if they don't make this one of the best makeovers they've ever done.

  "Hello!" gushes Kevin, breaking rank to take Anne's coat. "It's so lovely to meet you. We've heard so much about you!"

  "Oh?" Anne looks baffled that she should be the subject of any conversation, let alone one between what she clearly perceives to be such busy, glamorous people. "Well, that's nice to know. Thank you very much."

  Within seconds, she is encased in one of Kevin's plastic cloaks and gently shoved into a dentist-style chair in front of a vast mirror encircled with bright lights.

  "Right!" Kevin claps his hands together, causing his various bracelets to jangle alarmingly. "Let's have a chat about what we're going to do with your hair."

  Placing one hand on Anne's shoulder, I place the other on Ralph's forearm to show I'm talking to both of them. "The item works best if Ralph is surprised by your new look, as well as the viewers," I say. "So I'm going to leave you here, but take him along to the green room, where he can read the papers and get a coffee. OK?"

  They both nod their agreement, but Ralph looks terrified at the thought of being left alone to deal with these fancy London types.

  "Is he OK?" It's ten minutes later and Tab is sitting opposite me in the canteen, nursing a mug of coffee.

  "Yes, he's fine. I left him sitting in the big comfy armchair with a copy of The Sun and Dee fussing over him." Dee is the bosomy, homely woman who clucks around all guests in the green room, tending to their every need. "At the risk of sounding really corny and patronizing, it's seeing people like him and Anne enjoying themselves that occasionally makes this job worthwhile."

  "Are they the ones you were telling me about, who lost the young daughter?"

  I nod and load another sugar into my weak, tasteless tea. "Yes. And now she puts her all into that Sunshine House place where Ben works."

  "Did you see him there when you filmed?"

  "Yes." I fill her in on what happened there, enthusing about the work of the charity and how Ben and Anne, in particular, are the linchpins of the entire place.

  "Blimey." Tab laughs when I have finished. "You've certainly changed your tune from that first meeting in the pub. Then, you couldn't get away from him and his good works fast enough."

  "I know." I sigh. "I behaved like a complete prat. But now I've got to know him a bit, I really like him."

  Tab raises an eyebrow. "Like, or like?"

  "No, definitely just like. He's a lovely man and I really respect the work he does. In fact, I hope we'll stay friends after this." I wave across the canteen to Camilla, who is rushing back out of the door with a coffee cup in her hand. She gives me the thumbs-up sign, which I take to mean Anne's makeover is going well.

  Tab leans forward slightly. "I'm glad you don't fancy him, because you may have been barking up the wrong tree," she says conspiratorially.

  "Sorry?"

  "Will and I were talking about him the other night, and Will says the feeling among the rugby boys is that he might be . . . you know."

  "What, really a woman? A secret Debbie Gibson fan?" I say facetiously.

  She tuts. "No, they call him the Beaver leaver," she whispers. "They think he might be gay."

  I make a scoffing noise. "That lot of pumped-up no-brains? They'd think Arnold Schwarzenegger was gay."

  She wags an admonishing finger in my face. "Excuse me? That's my husband you're talking about."

  "Sorry." I grin sheepishly. "Will is the exception to the rule, of course." Not. "But honestly, Tab, what evidence is there?"

  She shrugs. "Nothing concrete. But Will says that whenever the lads sit around talking about sex, Ben always goes very quiet."

  I raise my eyes heavenward. "That's known as being discreet, not gay."

  Shaking her head, she gulps her coffee. "No, it's more than that. They say he's just not like them, he's different."

  Intertwining my hands in front of me, I hum the theme music from The Twilight Zone. "Oooooh, he's different," I mock.

  "Very funny." She sniffs. "But he is. Apparently, he's never mentioned having a girlfriend. Ever."

  I shrug. "Whatever. I don't care if the only woman he's ever entered is the Statue of Liberty. It doesn't stop him from being my friend." I look at my watch and stand up. "Gotta go. I want to make sure Kevin et al. haven't turned Anne into RuPaul in my absence."

  Twenty Three

  It's 6:30 p.m. and I'm trudging towards the tube station with a heavy heart. Not, I'm pleased to say, because Anne's makeover was a disaster. No, in fact it was an unqualified success, which ended with her bursting into tears of happiness on air and Ralph gazing at her with even more adoration than before. If that was possible.

  No, my leaden gait is purely down to the fact that tonight's the night I'm meeting Dan to try to establish why he dumped Kara.

  I have nothing against him per se, in fact, since he elbowed the witch queen I have found myself warming to him. It's just that tonight, I'd rather go home and chill out alone than schlep into town on someone else's behalf. Unfortunately, Kara's been nagging me about the rendezvous ever since she showed up at my house last week. The little people pleaser, that's me.

  The venue is a noisy theme pub called Badger and Biscuit, chosen by Dan, I suspect, largely because of its large plasma television in one corner, showing Sky Sports ad nauseam.

  As I walk in through the door, a wall of cigarette smoke and stale beer hits me. The clientele is 90 percent men, the other 10 percent being disconsolate-looking women staring into their drinks whilst being steadfastly ignored by their sports-loving companions. Hmmm, just my kind of place.

  I spot Dan squashed into a tight corner, a smoke in one hand and a half-empty pint of lager on the table in front of him. As predicted, he's staring fixedly at the large screen on the other side of the room, showing a soccer match between two obscure foreign teams. Well, obscure to me anyway.

  "Hello." I stand in front of him smiling.

  He drags his eyes away from the screen and looks momentarily surprised to see me. "You're early."

  I look at my watch. It says 7 p.m. "No, I'm spot on actually."

  He shrugs and grins. "I must be used to Kara's bad timekeeping. Drink?"

  It's a good five or ten minutes before he manages to battle his way to the front of the bar queue and order my gin and tonic. "There you are." He places it in front of me and sits back down. We're sandwiched together like sardines, surrounded by other punters in various states of drunkenness. "Nice to see you." He clunks his glass against mine.

  "Yes," I reply. "Shame it's not under more pleasant circumstances though."

  "Eh?" He looks baffled.

  "You and Kara splitting up."

  "Oh right, yeah." He sounds unconvinced. "So, you're here on a mission, are you?"

  I smile enigmatically. "Kind of."

  "So what does Kara want to know then?" He looks slightly bored and takes a long drag on his cigarette.

  We both know why I'm there, so I feel it's pointless to dance around the subject and make small talk. "Um, well I suppose she wants to know where it all went wrong . . . why you suddenly decided to end it."

  "And she couldn't ask me that herself?"

  "You tell me." I shrug. "Maybe she thought you wouldn't be amenable to the idea."

  He turns down the corners of his mouth. "She's right, I probably wouldn't. And by the way, it wasn't sudden."

  "Sorry?" />
  "It wasn't sudden," he repeats. "I've been telling her for some time that I didn't feel it was working, but she just wasn't listening. Or didn't seem to be anyway."

  I take a long glug of my virtually ginless tonic. "So what did go wrong? Because she seems baffled by it."

  "If she told you that, then she's being disingenuous," he says matter-of-factly. "Basically, she wanted to get married and I didn't."

  This news takes me by surprise, but I disguise it well out of a misguided loyalty to Kara. For months now, she's been telling me that Dan was about to propose at any moment. So I'm not quite sure what to say after his declaration. I mean, what can you say about such a fundamental difference between two people? We sit in silence for a minute or so, his gaze briefly returning to the TV screen.

  Draining his pint of lager, he stands up. "I'm getting another. Would you like one?"

  "Thanks. This time, I think I'll have something alcoholic." I smile ruefully, looking at my empty glass. "White wine will do."

  He returns with another lager and a bottle of wine with two glasses. "I'll join you after this." He points to his pint glass.

  I wait for him to sit back down before returning to my line of questioning. "So why didn't you want to get married? A tad commitment-phobic, are we?" I punch his arm playfully, as if the question is a joke. But, as any woman on a mission for her friend will tell you, it's deadly serious.

  He purses his lips and thinks about it for a moment. "I've never really thought about it," he says slowly. "But as you're asking, no, I don't think I am. I just didn't want to marry Kara."

  "Why not?" I kid myself that I'm asking this purely so I can report back to her in full, unexpurgated detail, but inwardly I must admit I'm rather reveling in the knowledge that behind Kara's supposedly chocolate box relationship has been lurking an unpalatably hard center.

  Splaying his fingers in front of his face, he studies his nails thoughtfully. "When you're in a relationship . . . well, if you're a man anyway . . . you tend to muddle along without thinking about it too deeply. It's not until your girlfriend starts putting pressure on you for it to move to another level that you actually focus on what you feel about the person. And when it came down to it, I guess I just didn't love her."

  "Enough?" I ask.

  "At all."

  I nod encouragingly, as if I'm empathizing with every word. The reality, of course, is that the muddling-along-for-two-years mentality is completely alien to me and just about all of my gender. We all come to it with varying speeds and degrees of success, but the bottom line is that, by the time a relationship is a year old, we regularly contemplate its long-term prospects and whether the nursery will be blue or pink. Having said that, I did waste several years with the noncommittal Nathan, so I can't talk.

  "So," Dan continues. "I ignored it the first couple of times she brought it up, but when she kept going on . . . and on . . . and on," he says in a droning voice, raising his eyebrows heavenward, "we ended up having a couple of those tense conversations in restaurants where I would tell her I didn't want to get married, and she would storm out in tears."

  Just for a moment, I find myself feeling sorry for the woman in the scenario he's describing. Then I remember it's Kara, who would positively squirm with delight if she was hearing the same story about me.

  "It got to the point where the subject was coming up about once a week, and I couldn't feel comfortable in my own home," he adds. "Every time we turned on the TV there was someone getting married on a soap opera or on some movie, or she would leave one of those magazines that features celebrity weddings strategically placed somewhere. I'm only surprised she refrained from gluing it to my forehead in the middle of the night." He lets out a long sigh.

  I pour two generous glasses of white wine and push one towards him. My head is starting to feel slightly woozy, a combination of the wine, smoke, and continual noise.

  "If she hadn't talked about marriage, would you have happily carried on as you were?"

  "Dunno." He shrugs. "There wasn't much chance of that anyway. She has always made it quite clear that on Planet Kara, if a man hasn't proposed two years into a relationship, he's never going to."

  "But she must have thought you would," I venture, "or she wouldn't have hung around for as long as she did."

  He nods. "Yeah, she must have." He lights another cigarette. "She was absolutely fucking furious when I ended it, saying she had wasted the best years of her life on me and that time was running out for her to try for children. Children!" His eyes bulge at the thought. "What a mind fuck."

  It doesn't take Ann Landers to surmise that, far from wavering about his decision to end the relationship and therefore being open to renegotiation, Dan has never been so sure about anything in his life and it's pointless pursuing the matter further.

  I notice it has started to tip with rain outside, and a nasty gale is making the wine shop canopy across the street billow alarmingly. I could curtail the evening and brave the storm, or stay in the cozy, albeit tobacco-filled, confines of the pub a while longer and hope the weather calms down.

  "My turn to get the drinks." I point at the empty bottle of wine.

  For the next hour, hemmed in as yet more desperate people pour in from the cold outside, we sit within centimeters of each other and talk animatedly about the state of the music industry and how no one invests long term in talent anymore.

  For reasons of space, Dan's arm is stretched along the banquette behind my head, his body turned towards me. "It's such crap," he says animatedly. "A&R's keep coming to our gigs and they all say 'Yeah, you're great,' but then give us some old bollocks about how our kind of music just isn't what the 'trend' is at the moment." He makes a quotes mark sign with his hands. "It's soul destroying."

  "You've got to keep slogging away at it though," I slur slightly, the wine and heat taking its hold. "All the best bands had to do that, some for years before they got the big break. But then, because they've done the slog, they get taken seriously and last the course."

  I'm not really sure what I've just said, or whether it makes any sense at all, but I notice that Dan is staring at me with undisguised admiration.

  "You know, you have just managed to be more supportive about my music career in that one sentence than Kara was in the entire two years we were together," he shouts above the roar as some ponytailed Neanderthal on the TV screen scores a goal.

  I pull a doubtful expression. "She always spoke in glowing terms about how talented you were."

  "Really?" His eyebrows shoot up. "At home it was a different story. She was always on at me to get a proper job, like banking." He makes a scoffing noise. "She wanted me to get dressed up like Mister Fucking Big every day and go work in the City. I mean, can you imagine?"

  No, I couldn't. Dan was a struggling musician through and through, a type I was used to after five years of Nathan wittering on about how he was going to be the new Bob Dylan.

  I suppose that's why I know all the meaningless platitudes they want to hear.

  "You were a musician when she met you," I say, swigging more wine. "So it seems odd that she'd suddenly want you to change careers."

  "Precisely!" he says triumphantly, wine spilling over the edge of his glass. "But nothing is ever good enough for Kara. She's a fucking cow . . . not like you."

  There's that admiration again. Hang on, possibly make that lust, as his hand is now idly caressing the nape of my neck. I have to admit that it feels wonderful, so intimate, so soothing.

  Through the fog of alcohol, I can't focus my mind enough to decide whether it's simply the platonic gesture of someone tactile, or whether we're veering into dangerously sexual territory. As we're surrounded by people, I rationalize that matters can't get too out of hand, so it's best not to overreact.

  "I've always fancied you," he says in my ear, brushing my hair to one side as he does so.

  Oh dear. Mayday. Mayday! I'm paralyzed by excess alcohol and uncertainty, so I just sit there, saying and doing
nothing.

  Clearly, he takes this as acceptance, and shuffles closer so his right leg is pressed tightly against my left. I can smell the smoke on his breath as he moves in to gently nibble my earlobe.

  "You do something to me," he croons, sounding uncannily like Paul Weller, a.k.a. God of sexy song writing.

  Bugger, bugger, fuck, fuck. What do I do now? On the one hand, it's immensely pleasant sitting here, having my erogenous zones tantalized in the warm whilst a storm rages outside. But on the other, I came here to try to reunite him and Kara, not plunge myself into an awkward situation that, at the very best, will simply result in a meaningless shag.

  Suddenly, his full body weight is pressing against me, his left arm snaking around the back of my neck and pulling my face towards his. He kisses me, pushing his tongue into my mouth.

  At first, rigid with shock, I don't respond. Then, without so much as a passing thought to the consequences, I do, and we shamelessly indulge in a long, slow necking session.

  "Excuse me?" A cattle prod couldn't have prompted us to spring apart any quicker. "Is this finished with?" A barmaid is pointing at Dan's empty pint glass. He nods wordlessly and she takes it.

  The intrusion is enough to bring me sharply to my senses. I grab my handbag and start to extricate my coat from under me. "I'd better go."

  "Why?" His hand has moved to the back of my neck again, but this time I lurch forward out of his reach.

  "Just because."

  "Because of Kara?" he says wearily.

  "A bit, yes," I mumble. "But also because we just shouldn't."

  "Well, you seemed to be enjoying it." He removes a cigarette from the packet and sticks it in his mouth, rummaging in his trouser pocket for a lighter. "And I certainly was."

  I stand up, edging along the banquette and between two tables, one of which digs into the backs of my thighs. "As I said, bad idea. But thanks for the drinks."

  "Pleasure." He seems relatively untroubled by my hasty exit. "And do me a favor," he adds as an afterthought, "don't give Kara any false hope. As far as I'm concerned, it's over for good."