Chapter 1
Chapter 1
‘Hello, there.’
It was a rather avuncular way to start, but Sara tried not to mind. The previous candidate had been much worse than avuncular - you only got five minutes with each man yet he had nonetheless managed to get his penis size into the conversation. What he had expected her to say she didn’t know. Was she supposed to (figuratively) admire it, like a prize marrow at the village show?
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Sara.’
‘Nice to meet you, Sarah.’
‘It’s Sara actually – like the shop Zara, but with an S.’
‘Zara,’ he repeated.
‘Yes, you know the high street shop?’
‘I’m not much of a shopper, Zara.’
‘No, it’s . . .’ Oh, what did it matter? He’d be gone in . . . she sneaked a look at the big digital clock set up on the bar . . . four minutes and thirty-five seconds. The clock
sat next to a glossy sign bearing the name of the dating agency, Kiss, Marry, Avoid. The name had been chosen, her friend Angela had told her when she founded the agency ten years ago, to illustrate that whilst they were committed to providing a high quality, personal service, dating after fifty could be enjoyable, light hearted. It wasn’t all National Trust memberships and knitting by the fire – there was still fun left to be had.
As part of their profile, the daters were encouraged to share the celebrity they would choose for each category. Sara had chosen to kiss Hugh Grant (now, in his rumpled, anti-Murdoch warrior era, not the floppy, foppish years), marry Michael Palin (such a lovely man) and avoid Tom Cruise. She couldn’t be doing with a man who took himself so seriously.
‘I didn’t get your name,’ she said to her companion.
‘Ah, that’s because I haven’t told you!’ He laughed, happy to have caught her out.
‘Yes, I know. And now I’m asking.’
‘I see. I thought you meant I had told you but you hadn’t caught it, or had forgotten it. Sometimes I do that if I’ve forgotten someone’s name when I’ve just been introduced to
them. I’ll say “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name”. Useful trick.’
Four minutes and twenty seconds to go. Sara adjusted her position. The cinched waist of the dress that had seemed so flattering back in her bedroom was restricting her ability to
take a full breath, and the new bra that had promised so much in terms of lifting and separating had her in such a tight grip she felt sure there would be angry welts on her skin when it came to the sweet release of removing it.
‘It’s Philip. And before you ask, my celebrity choices are kiss Scarlet Johansson, marry Emma Watson and avoid Jennifer Lopez. She seems rather high maintenance.’
In your dreams, Philip. Sara knew it was meant to be fantasy, but men who didn’t pick age-appropriate celebrities to kiss and marry gave her the serious ick. The only one of Philip’s who was anywhere near his age was the once he’d chosen to avoid, and the reason was pretty depressing too. In Sara’s experience, men who used high maintenance as a
derogatory term were looking for a quiet woman with no opinions who would be happy to nurse them in their old age.
‘What do you do?’ If she was actually attracted to someone she rarely asked this question, finding it to be the least interesting thing about a person. However, if she was sure, as she already was with Philip, that it was dead in the water, then it was useful. They would drone on and fill the remaining time and she could nod and smile in the appropriate places whilst surreptitiously casting her eye over the other candidates. Like most people who find themselves single in their fifties, Sara bore the scars of relationships past, along with the other wounds life had seen fit to inflict. The slow, painful death of her husband James from pancreatic cancer was the biggie, but there were other, smaller cuts too, from sources that appeared innocent, like a sheet of paper that slices into the top of your finger leaving a bloody trail on the pristine, white page.
‘I work in plastic,’ he said.
‘Interesting,’ she said automatically. ‘What kind of plastic?’ Tupperware was the one that sprang to mind. She imagined him spending his days colour coordinating it and neatly stacking it in size order.
‘We’re very big into sustainable packaging solutions at the moment.’ She was right about the Tupperware! There was a portion of soup in her freezer in a plastic container that had been given to her late mother as a wedding present sixty years ago. What was more sustainable than that?
‘It’s a project management role. I manage a large team who are split across a variety of sites, which can be quite a challenge.’
As he bleated on and on about polymers and climate change, she became distracted by the tinkling laugh that kept ringing out from the next table. Sara wondered if the woman’s ‘date’ was actually funny or if it was more of a nervous tic. She allowed her eyes to stray to the left, where they met the gaze of the dater opposite the giggler, a square-faced bear of a man with a neat, dark beard peppered with grey. His eyes widened as they met Sara’s and he gave a micro-shrug as if to indicate that no, he didn’t know what was so funny either.
‘You’ll enjoy this,’ Sara’s companion said, pulling her focus back to him. ‘He said there was no way he could work with someone in a different country! What does he think I do,
managing an international team?’
‘Goodness,’ Sara murmured, catching the bear’s eye again. They both smiled.
Sara jumped as the bell rang to signal the end of this micro-date. Philip shook her hand across the table.
‘Good to have met you. I enjoyed our conversation.’
‘Me too,’ Sara said politely, deciding against asking whether monologue wouldn’t be a better word for it. God, she missed James. She longed to be part of a couple again, but what she’d seen so far of the world of middle-aged dating made that seem a very remote possibility indeed.
Philip stood and moved one table to the right, joining a striking, dark-haired woman in a maroon trouser suit. Sara heard him say ‘Hello, there’ to her.
‘Was he right?’ The bearded man materialised in the seat across from her, filling it much more convincingly than its previous occupant had done.
‘About what?’ she said.
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘The hilarious comment about working with someone in a different country, or the whole date?’
‘Both, I suppose,’ he said, eyes twinkling.
‘I certainly know a lot more about the production of sustainable plastic than I did before, so that’s something. I’m a bit disappointed in this date, though.’
‘How so?’ he said, unoffended.
‘I assumed from the gales of laughter coming from your last table that you were going to be hilarious. You haven’t made me laugh once yet.’
‘Give me a chance! What sort of thing does make you laugh? Programmes? Comedians?’
‘Victoria Wood is my all-time favourite. Nobody made me laugh like she did.’
As well as being true, this was also a test to see if he was one of those men who think women aren’t funny.
‘She was amazing, wasn’t she? I miss her.’
‘Me too.’ He had passed with flying colours.
‘I would have chosen her for my “marry” celebrity actually, but I felt weird about picking someone who wasn’t alive.’
‘Who did you choose?’ she asked, almost reluctantly. She’d felt more of a spark with this man in the last two minutes than with anyone she’d met since she started dating, and she
was unwilling to have it ruined just yet.
‘My kiss is Nigella Lawson.’
‘Of course,’ Sara said, pleased. Not only was Nigella age appropriate, she had an almost indecent love of a good meal and had always seemed like someone Sara could be friends with. ‘And to marry?’
‘Emma Thompson.’
‘Another good choice.’
Sara was delighted. Whilst Emma Thompson was an attractive woman, picking someone famous for her incredible talent rather than her looks demonstrated his integrity, his desire
for a real relationship. Emma Thompson was another one on Sara’s mental list of celebrities she like to be friends with - warm, funny and a huge champion of women. He was ticking a lot of boxes.
‘I struggled with the “avoid” category, it felt a bit mean,’ he went on. ‘In the end, I think I put something like “anyone who seeks fame for its own sake.” Bit of a cop out, probably. Have you done a lot of this kind of thing?’ He waved a hand around the roped off section of the upmarket wine bar and assembled daters. The women ranged from the ultra-groomed to the defiantly bare-faced. Apart from one outlier in black jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt, the men were wearing chinos or their best jeans topped by a shirt that aimed to show a bit of personality without verging into full midlife crisis territory. As a group, they represented the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.
‘A fair bit, yeah, over the last couple of years,’ she said. ‘With varying degrees of success. You?’
‘It’s my first time. Be gentle with me.’
Delivered in a less silly way it was a comment that could have put Sara off, but it made her laugh.
‘See, I am funny!’ he said.
‘Hilarious,’ Sara agreed. ‘So you’re . . . what, recently divorced?’
‘You got me. Well, recent-ish – it was all finalised a couple of years ago. It’s taken me this long to pluck up the courage to start dating.’
That sounded promising. She’d been on dates with men for whom the ink on the divorce papers was barely dry – and indeed with men who, despite appearances, were very much still married.
‘Do you have children?’
‘One daughter. Isabel. She’s thirty now – blimey, that makes me feel old. I still feel about twenty-five inside, so it doesn’t seem feasible that I have a fully grown adult daughter.’
Sara was relieved. If the daughter was thirty, she would have flown the nest and wouldn’t be hanging about making it difficult for her father to date. She’d had a taste of that with previous men she’d been seeing.
‘She lives in America, so I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like, but we’re close.’ A plane rideaway. Even better.
‘And you? Are you divorced?’ he went on.
‘The other one,’ Sara said. ‘Widowed. Five years ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Run for the hills if you like,’ she said, having been burned by men who couldn’t deal with her widowhood, claiming she wasn’t ready to date or who got upset because she refused to remove all traces of her late husband from the house.
‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘My dad died when I was six, and my mum met someone else a few years later. He was brilliant.’
‘Sorry about your dad.’
‘Thanks – I don’t remember much about him, to be honest. Do you have kids?’
‘Yes, but they were a bit older when James died. Almost grown up.’
‘Still hard though. Worse, in some ways, to have had him their whole childhood. I didn’t know what I was missing, and then when Mum met Stu, he became like a dad to me and my brother. He hadn’t had kids of his own, but had always wanted them, so he was well up for being part of a family.’
‘That sounds perfect. It’s one of the sadnesses for me of Max and Jonny being fifteen and eighteen when we lost James. They were young enough to still need a dad in lots of ways, but too old for anyone who came into our lives since to become a father figure to them. Not that anyone did, or has, but anyway it would have been too late and they wouldn’t have wanted it. So they had to manage without. I mean, they are managing, brilliantly, but . . . it just makes me sad, especially when I see their friends developing proper adult relationships with their own fathers.’ Her voice cracked. The grief that cut so sharply five years ago was duller now, but it still had the power to hurt her. ‘James wasn’t well by that point, but he managed to take Jonny to the pub on his eighteenth birthday for his first legal pint – it was this big thing, you know? But when Max turned eighteen he just went out with his mates.’
Luckily (as Sara was on the verge of tears) the bell clanged.
‘Sorry, that got deep a bit quickly!’ she said, brightly. ‘You really will want to run for the hills now!’
‘No, I promise I won’t. I’d always prefer to talk about real things. There’s only so much to say about sustainable plastic, right?’
‘I thought so, before today.’
‘I’ve enjoyed our chat,’ he said, standing up. ‘And, well, hope to see you again soon, I guess. I’m Nigel, by the way.’
Sara resisted the urge to throw herself on the ground and cling to his ankles, to stop him from moving on to the next woman who, Sara now recognised, was uncommonly beautiful – fine-featured, elegant and slender. Sara cursed her own curves. On a good day she might describe herself as voluptuous, but today her body seemed to stick out in all
the wrong places. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d had a truly meaningful conversation with a man, and although she told herself it was utter foolishness, she was overwhelmed with the feeling that he was meant to be in her life.
She arranged her face into a suitably welcoming expression to greet her next date, a hollow-eyed man in what was she was rather afraid was a brown shirt, and tried very hard not to mind that the beautiful woman in the maroon trouser suit lit up like a beacon when Nigel sat down opposite her.
