Jemma snapped one of those pointless, pencil-thin and tasteless breadsticks in half and risked her very fine sparkly white teeth by biting it. “My sister and your brother are driving me potty,” she said with an exasperated huff. “They are both so bloody stupid.”
It was seven o’clock and Calzone’s was already comfortably busy. The pesto sauce and Chardonnay brigade were out in force, and their laughter crackled in the air above the soft jazz. Neil had taken off the yucky jacket before he noticed the £1,700 price tag, and now he didn’t know what to do with it. He had hung it on the back of his chair and couldn’t stop checking that it hadn’t inadvertently fallen on the floor.
He had phoned the potentially topless bridesmaid yesterday to attempt to postpone their “session” until another time and had been met with a stream of invective casting aspersions on his parentage, himself and photographers in general. This made Neil think that she wasn’t quite the blushing bridesmaid she had portrayed herself to be. But then again, neither was he the suave, sophisticated society photographer that he’d made himself out to be.
That was the trouble with dating these days—or trying to. You couldn’t really be yourself or the chances were no one would want to go out with you. All the women he knew wanted to find themselves dynamic, urbane multimillionaires, or wanted to become dynamic, urbane multimillionaires themselves. It seemed as if the qualities of kindness, reliability, contented slothfulness and scruffiness were just not appreciated by the new millennium daters. And he was trying very hard to become dynamic, urbane and even just a minor millionaire, but it was all such a lot of effort.
Ed had never suffered from the family trait of lethargy. No sacrifice was too great to make Wavelength the successful, growing company that it was. But no matter what he did, his brother always seemed to harbor the overriding feeling that it was never quite enough. Whereas Neil blamed their father for his in-built apathy where everything was more than enough. Daddy Kingston had been a company director for most of his life—stressed, successful and totally selfish in his pursuit of that success. Then one day he decided he was going to die of an early coronary if he carried on and he resigned. Just like that. He banked his golden handshake, downsized to a smaller, cozier house, somehow discovered a previously untapped altruistic streak and took up a part-time job helping ex-prisoners to rehabilitate by starting their own businesses and, when they weren’t away on lavish exotic holidays, he and his wife played golf every afternoon. It was an idyllic existence, and he continually said how he wished he had got out of the rat race earlier. Neil aspired to the same thing—but without the striving, success and ensuing stress in the middle. Ed, however, was definitely taking after his father in his working life. Neil just wished his brother would put a bit more effort into trying to save his marriage.
Alicia was wonderful, Neil mused. He only wished he could find someone just like her. He stared up at Jemma, who was sucking the end of her breadstick and returned quickly to his dish of linguine. There was a certain desperation creeping into his dating habits, he had noted. After all, he had just turned thirty-six, and suddenly from somewhere had unexpectedly sprung the desire to be married and spend his weekend shopping at Ikea and Baby Gap as all his other friends did. Maybe the taste of take-away food was starting to pale. Whatever it was had driven him to join Snappy Setups, and he should have known from the name that it was likely to be a disaster.
Snappy Setups was a dating agency that “specialized” in finding partners for “busy, beautiful, professional people” who were presumably too tied up in being busy, beautiful or professional to have a life or bother finding people to love for themselves. And the odd photographer. Who was neither busy, beautiful or particularly professional, but was, by his own admission, too lazy.
The concept was sold on the simple idea of why should you need to spend an entire evening deciding if the woman for whom you’d just bought a gin and tonic was Miss Right, when you could get through half a dozen said women in one night. Speed dating. The fast-food version of good old-fashioned courting. It took Neil back to his days of extended adolescence in Scamps disco. Had that been any different? Only financially, he decided. This was an expensive cattle market and, therefore, trendily acceptable.
For the paltry sum of one hundred pounds, Snappy Setups made sure you were herded round a swishy wine bar for the evening by a “fixer”—his had been, inevitably, blond, bubbly and called Felicity—who was intent on finding you the “date of your dreams.” You were allowed half an hour to suss out each prospective soul mate before Felicity appeared to whisk you away to meet the next victim—or predator, depending on your viewpoint. Half an hour to decide whether you could hear wedding bells or the waste bin calling—at which point you were supposed to mark a little white card accordingly to allow Felicity to do further “fixing” and move on without a backward glance. There had been some very attractive women present, but the whole thing had been terribly depressing, and by the end of the evening Neil had lost the will to live and was ready to admit defeat and string a rope up round the beams.
The women seemed even more desperate than he was, and explaining why you were still single at the tender age of thirty-six to the fourth person in a row was enough to bring on a panic attack. The only person he really and truly fancied was Felicity and, when he found the nerve to voice this opinion, she informed him that she’d been with the same man for five years and there was no way she’d ever sign up for this sort of stupid stunt. At least he thought she said stupid stunt. The music was very loud.
There was something very demeaning about hoping to select a woman as if you were going round Sainsbury’s looking for a nice bit of rump steak. He wasn’t the most romantic soul on the planet—in fact, one or two of his girlfriends had, in the past, felt moved to remark on it. But even Neil would rather spend Friday nights in with a take-away and an old James Bond film than find a relationship with all the verve and glamour of doing the National Lottery.
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying,” Jemma said.
Neil snapped his head up, and she was glaring at him. “I was thinking.”
“About what?”
He tried to look as if he’d been concentrating. “About what you were saying.”
“And?”
“And, I think you’re right.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” Neil said with conviction. “Absolutely everything.”
Jemma smiled. “Good.”
Neil smiled back. “Good.”
“That’s what I like about you, Neil. You’re so easy to talk to.”
He gave a self-effacing shrug. “Thanks.”
“So you think we should meet regularly to discuss tactics?”
“Yes,” Neil agreed. “Regularly.” This was as easy as falling off a log, and the bill at Calzone’s was easily going to be less than one hundred of our fine English pounds.
“Good.”
“Good.”
“God, is that the time?” Jemma drained her wine. “I don’t want to beat about the bush. I need to get you out of that outfit right now.”
Neil’s smile widened. He loved women who were upfront about what they wanted.
“I’ve got a date,” she said as she stood and slipped on her coat. Jemma winked at him. “Hot stuff.”
And Neil had that awful sinking sensation in his stomach that indicated she wasn’t necessarily referring to him.