I had been single since Sunday and it was already Good Friday, my ex’s boots still planted beneath the bed. In Time Out there was a three-starred gig listed at the Monarch. I preferred to drink elsewhere, but I thought I should find more original reasons to go into Camden other than getting laid. I had just finished my last session with Henry, where we had gone over again (as we did each week) the necessity for honesty in a relationship, and keeping my knickers on. Therefore my tentative resolve that evening was to remain sober and fully clothed.
As soon as I got inside the pub I saw him. He was sitting at one of the large tables near the door, still almost a boy. I remember nothing of what he wore – perhaps it was the purple T-shirt or the cropped ex-DDR coat that I can recall from other memories. He had brown eyes in a clear face.
I went over to the bar, as was my habit, and ordered a pint. The pub was crowded, the corner given over to a tiny stage. A couple of musicians were arsing about with their equipment. After a while they started to play.
Soon a Goth with blotchy eyeliner got chatting. Perhaps he offered to buy me a drink. I never accepted drinks. Sean had taught me that accepting drinks was falling into debt. And for that kind of debt the bailiff always called.
I humoured the Goth, my eyes shifting to the table and the boy. He dutifully paid attention to the band, a half of Guinness sitting in front of him, barely drunk. Occasionally he leant over the table and nodded at the person opposite. A man.
The music gave the Goth the excuse to lean in close and shout, his beer sloshing between us as he emphasised each of his points. The first act wound up to desultory applause. Five minutes passed, all of us more interested in the empty stage than we had been when it was filled. Still the headline band did not appear; my mind worked through possible pick-up strategies.
‘There’s someone bothering me at the bar,’ was what I said when I went over. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’
The boy with the cheekbones smiled, his friend shuffling along the bench. The friend introduced himself as Arnaud, and the boy as Matthias. Where were they from? I asked.
‘France,’ said Arnaud, indicating himself. ‘And Germany.’
Germany? I’d laid a heroin addict, a bedwetter and an alcoholic, but a German? There was also a hostile, self-assured quality about the friend, as if he knew the world and was tired of it already.
Matthias, my target, said nothing.
I watched the empty stage, wondering how to extricate myself. As I prevaricated, we were forced to listen to a good deal of Arnaud’s complaints about England. Matthias said little, his face set in an unflinching smile.
Arnaud disappeared to a phone box, leaving his charge alone. I insisted on another Guinness, and plenty of cigarettes. I probably also plied him with one of my rehearsed monologues – perhaps the one which involved a sadomasochistic neighbour who enjoyed hooking up her boyfriend to the car battery. Before a man took advantage of me I always liked to test his courage.
The boy continued to smile.
Arnaud returned. He was flustered. There was a great deal more fretting, this time over a toothbrush. Arrangements he had made to stay with someone’s mother had broken down. With each word their worlds and mine strayed farther and farther apart.
But despite his references to mothers and toothbrushes, perhaps I offered to let them sleep on my futon. They were children. Over-educated children, one doing a PhD at Cambridge, the other a non-specific postgraduate humanities degree.
Still exercised about the toothbrush and the absent band, Arnaud ordered us out of the Monarch and on to Bar Gansa on Inverness Street with its red awning and greying goose. It was on the way, sobering to the North London night, that I finally admitted that I was a secretary. Which led, over coffee, to Arnaud and I having a fight about Sartre. I said goodnight.
Reaching the top of the escalator in Camden Town I remarked to myself that I had maintained my resolve. It was the first time in a long while that I had arrived in Camden and left it both sober and alone.
The exhilaration lasted only as far as Archway, when I began to regret having no way of getting in touch. But the boy was German, I repeated. Asking for a number would have looked desperate. What I needed was a long-term relationship and this definitely was not it.
Yes, I threw myself in front of the television, it was a relief. He was German, and small. I’d always seen myself with someone bigger. Christ, he was a scientist too. I lit another cigarette. There was nothing redemptive about any of it. He lived in Cambridge. The countryside.
When I check my diary for movements over that Easter weekend, I find that Henry’s counselling had not had the conclusive effect I have pretended to myself. The relationship break-up was not going as cleanly as I would have liked, and to console myself I had hooked up with another ex.
Mess and sex aside, by the Tuesday I had made a decision.
I rang up Directory Enquiries from work and asked for the number of the University of Cambridge. The French sidekick had mentioned the Zoology Department.
‘Good morning,’ said the receptionist.
‘Morning. I wonder if you could give me the address for one of your PhD students. He left his jumper in the pub on Friday, and I wanted to post it back.’
It was Gillian, my colleague, who suggested the jumper. A perfect lie. A jumper was just the sort of object Cambridge University students might realistically leave behind them – or did ‘pullover’, I wondered, seem more authentic?
‘His name?’
‘Matthias Landgraf?’
‘How are you spelling that?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I heard her riffling through the pages of the directory.
‘Like I say, I just wanted to return his pullover …’
‘Landgraf, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just putting you through.’
In the bowels of the Zoology Department a phone rang and rang and rang. Eventually a woman picked up.
‘Hello?’
She sounded right in the middle of something very important.
‘Can I speak to Matthias Landgraf please,’ I managed to ask.
‘Matthias? I’ll just get him.’
There were rushed footsteps and a fire door banged. It was only when I heard someone coming back through it that, heart hammering, I hung up. Gillian hissed from her desk beside me.
‘And?’
‘I hung up.’
‘Did you get his address?’
‘No.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’
Gillian, pushing forty, still lived at home with her parents. This fact I repeated to myself so as to get up the courage to ring the receptionist back.
The second time I asked simply for the Zoology Department’s address. But then I couldn’t resist lying again in my letter to Matthias. I wrote saying that I would be visiting Cambridge to meet a friend (though I knew no one between Mill Hill and the Scottish borders). Could he do tea?
I arrived at Cambridge station to find he was late, jogging up the street towards me, wearing, this time, I’m fairly positive, his purple T-shirt.
I often say to myself and to others that Henry was the significant factor in my falling in love with him, which overlooks an obvious truth. That Matthias is a man worth falling in love with.
What he remembers is the ducks on the Mill Pond. Although I have only the vaguest memory of ducks, my diary entry speaks of them too. It is the moment he recognised that I might be what he was waiting for. I am less tender, moaning on in my diary, and to anyone who was prepared to listen, that despite the fact I was carrying a spare pair of knickers and a toothbrush, he put me on the last train home.