My Fair Man. Jane Gordon
months?’ mused Claire
‘Your chance, Hattie,’ said Jon with a slight sneer, ‘to put into practice all your wonderful theories of nurture ruling over nature. And your chance, Claire, to get back at me …’
‘Just twelve weeks,’ said Hattie doubtfully.
‘So you don’t believe it’s possible either?’ said Jon with glee.
‘Of course it’s possible!’ Hattie exclaimed, glancing at Claire for confirmation that she was still on her side.
Oh the back of a menu Jon began to write out, in fountain pen, his version of a betting slip.
‘I promise to pay £5000 if in three months from this day, 16 May, Claire Martin and Hattie George can transform a tramp into the talk of the chattering classes, signed Jon Riley.’
‘Take it or leave it,’ he said.
‘We’ll take it,’ said Hattie.
‘Then write out your response,’ he said, passing the pen across to Claire.
‘Claire Martin and Hattie George promise to pay Jon Riley £5000 if, in three months’ time, they have failed to prove him wrong …’ she said aloud as she wrote the words beneath those of Jon. ‘Here, Hattie, now you sign.’
Hattie took the menu from Claire and signed it. Then, very carefully, she placed it inside her battered briefcase where it lay nestled against her still damp copy of the Big Issue.
The strip of light that had worked its way through the crack in the shutters told Hattie that it must be morning. That and the fast breathing of Toby who had been too weary and drunk to make love the night before and was now attempting to redress his usual balance (it was Saturday after all) with some fairly basic foreplay.
She wished he would stop. She didn’t like sex first thing in the morning before she had brushed her teeth or showered. But then she probably didn’t like it that much last thing at night either. She was, though, far too kind to upset Toby by telling him that she didn’t want him. Or to break it to him that the earth had never really moved for her, that in fact when it came to sex she was a founder member of the flat earth society, unable to imagine that, even on its axis in space, it could ever achieve motion.
Claire had recently confessed how she had once told some man, in flagrante, to get off her and go home. He had sat weeping into his wilting manhood at the bottom of her bed. But she had not relented. If Hattie were as honest as Claire she would probably have told Toby on more than one occasion to go away and leave her alone. But Hattie approached her partner in rather the way that she approached her patients. The only kind of passion she really felt for him was the occasional bout of compassion.
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,