On Saturday, I had coffee at another cafe with a girlfriend, and told her about Bill, who wanted us to meet half way, after a 100-mile journey each, and have a date that starts with sweater-buying in Marks & Spencer. I hadn’t yet replied. I couldn’t decide. Go, she said. You always need a new sweater.
Cycling home, I spotted Andrew walking towards me along the pavement and stopped to say hello. He told me the bike looked like new, and I told him it was. He looked particularly alluring in the cool sunshine, in good jeans, a white shirt, a tan tweed jacket. His eyes looked very blue.
“Nice jacket,” I said. “I do like tweed on a chap.”
He raised his wrist and smoothed his cuff with the other hand. “Meeting someone – a woman – so I’m dressed up a bit.” My heart sank. He hadn’t wanted a date with me. He was having a date with someone else. It wasn’t that he wasn’t dating.
“Hope it’s fun,” I said, pulling my bike straight and preparing to ride off again. “Got to go. Newspaper waiting at home.” I rode off with a merry wave.
On Sunday morning at the cafe, I ignored him and sat elsewhere. I wasn’t in a great mood and didn’t care whether he talked to me or not. I went to a sofa, got out a book and began to read it. The friend had advised me to appear passive in my pursuit.
This works like catching a reluctant horse does: sit in the middle of the field with a rustly bag and eventually it will come to you. Half an hour later, Andrew got a second coffee, sat at my table and asked me how I was. I didn’t seem myself – was anything up? He touched my arm as he asked me.
We got talking about people who pretend they take exercise, and I admitted to being one of them. I got over-excited and gestured wildly. I could feel sweat forming on my upper lip and mascara settling under my eyes. Water began to drip off the ends of my hair.
Andrew had to go. “Let’s have a proper catch-up next week sometime,” he said.
How was his date, I asked him. Oh, he said, it was fine. It wasn’t going to be repeated, though. They hadn’t had anything to talk about. Nothing to talk about? No marathon conversations that collapsed time and space? I wanted to leap to my feet. Could he see me, the woman he’d spent hours talking to, who’d told him she was online dating and had given him her mobile number? It was plain that he wasn’t attracted to me. Andrew thought of me as a buddy, and that was that. Having nothing to lose, it was time to push him a little. I asked him what it was that he felt guilty about? All sorts of things, he said. I haven’t treated people very well. In what way, I persisted. Just not very well, he said.
There were some things he was never going to talk about. I went home, and when I looked at myself in the mirror found I had a huge smear of newspaper print across my cheek and lipstick on my teeth.
Meanwhile, I’d had another email from Bill. “Let’s do this sweater-buying trip,” he wrote. “And have lunch afterwards. It’ll be fun. Let’s both look at train times and figure it out. Maybe next weekend? The one after this? I’ve got football this Saturday.” Football, I queried – do you play? “I watch it,” Bill said. “I’m a live sports fan. I travel to see certain tournaments. Golf. Cricket in the summer. Wimbledon always.
“But don’t get me wrong. I like BBC4 science docs, and French films, and read history and other proper books. I’m not a goon or a jock. I’m an Oxford graduate and not an idiot. But I find going to sports events relaxing.”
Bill is 10 years younger than me, and thinks my age is a plus point. He’s more or less given up going out with younger women, he says, because he kept finding that they were looking for sperm donors.
“I know I live far away, and distance relationships are even more challenging than usual, but I’d like to buy a sweater with you, at the least,” he wrote.
• Stella Grey is a pseudonym
