For months now I’ve had an intermittent dating site conversation with a Spanish man called Tony. He is a wealthy business owner who can’t believe how difficult it is to find a wife. He’s awful – that’s almost certainly the reason – but hilariously awful. I’ve been the woman he has moaned to about the failure of womankind to recognise his great qualities. He dates a lot and occasionally said outrageous things about women he’d met, and I slapped him down, and he enjoyed my outrage.
Last week, suddenly, he got in touch asking to meet. I’ve decided you’re the only person I really like on the site, he wrote, I think we should have lunch. I said I didn’t think so. I thought we’d disappoint one another in reality. Oh come on, he said, it’s just lunch, for God’s sake. Don’t take everything in life so seriously. Still, I dithered. Give me your number, he said, so we can speak to one another. I gave him my mobile number and he rang. Unfortunately, he was incredibly good company on the phone, in that way that so few people are, and he had a sexy accent. Dammit, I thought, I’m tempted to have lunch with this awful man who says outrageous things about women; this won’t do at all.
The next evening he rang again. “I’ve been thinking about you today,” he said. “I like your deep voice – do you smoke?”
“I don’t,” I said. “Do you?”
“Of course,” he said, “though I’m down from 40 a day to 30.”
“I couldn’t kiss a smoker,” I told him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I do use toothpaste.”
“I’m not kidding,” I told him, “there’s probably no point having lunch.” The following evening he rang again and kept me talking for over an hour. I was beginning to think I ought to have lunch with him. He was undeniably charming and he seemed to think I was a catch, which was an unusual enough situation to warrant consideration. And he hadn’t referred to my body once, or mentioned sex once, or hinted there might be Skype nudity in the near future. It was refreshing just to be courted a bit.
There are hypnotists for ending smoking addiction, and perhaps Tony’s openly judgmental streak was really just a kind of social coping, a way of getting a rise out of people. Maybe he had a tendency to be a wind-up merchant and might drop it once I knew him better.
When Tony rang the following night, I agreed to lunch. He named a place and a day and a time and I agreed. I told him I’d heard a good joke that day and told him, but he didn’t really get it, which wasn’t a great sign. He said he had one for me, and then the terrible thing happened: he told me a racist joke. I couldn’t believe it: a joke that hinged on the supposed stupidity of Africans. I couldn’t believe my ears. “I don’t want to have lunch with you,” I said.
“What,” he said. “Why?” He knew why. The joke had been a test.
“Don’t ring me again,” I told him. “Don’t contact me again.” I felt guilty about finding his previous awfulness funny.
I went to the coffee shop looking for Andrew, wanting to talk to someone I like. He was there, reading an article about George Osborne, and we blundered straight into a huge argument about austerity. Andrew thinks we need to slash the welfare budget further. How did I not know this fundamental thing about him? How can we get to know people, new people, in middle age, without issuing a 1,000-question questionnaire?
I went home and rang Bill, and told him what Tony had said and what Andrew and I had argued about. Bill was horrified, which was reassuring. “I think you and I should meet half way,” I told him.
“I have news,” he said. “I’ve started seeing someone.”
Disheartened, I got in touch with a man called Kieran. He messaged me back in the spring, while I was besotted by Peter. He was still on the site, and seemed winningly normal in every way. I wrote apologising for turning down the offer of dinner during the Peter debacle. I told him I was sure at the time that I’d found someone, though the road had turned into a cul-de-sac. Kieran replied saying, in effect, that I’d had my chance. If I didn’t recognise his value then, I wasn’t going to value him now, and so no, he didn’t want coffee.
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
