much less procreate with, either of them, but there was something diminishing in having it confirmed.
I was back at those fireworks, remembering that there were females for fun sexy secret times, and then there was good old doughty Ronnie. A minx for spotting a discount deal on Sainsbury’s pain de campagne.
The next day, we met up at our ten o’clock lecture, Ben sliding into the seat beside me, wearing a sly grin.
‘Soooo … how did it go?’ I said, grinning back, chewing on my pen lid.
‘Good,’ Ben said. ‘She loved dinner. Absolutely loved it. Thanks.’
‘You’re seeing each other?’ I asked.
‘Doubt it.’ Ben shook his head.
‘Oh.’ I didn’t know if I should ask any more questions, or if Ben wanted me to. I thought he was turning away from me to bring an end to the topic, then realised he was making sure we weren’t being overheard.
‘She was boring! Christ, she was boring. At first I thought it was nerves, but she’s so dull. And self-absorbed. The weird thing is, I don’t even think she’s that fit any more. The shine’s rubbed off. Nice girl and all that. But … not for me.’
I ignored the lightning-flash of joy that zapped across my insides.
‘Never mind. At least I shopped for dinner. You only wasted a trip to Lloyd’s Pharmacy …’
‘Oh, we still did it,’ Ben replied. ‘Not going to all that effort for a conversation about Hertfordshire prep schools and collecting Tiffany bracelet charms.’
I looked at him. His expression was impassive. I remembered the conversation in MacDougal’s about swordsmanship. There was a strange churning where the lightning had been.
‘What? That’s grim!’
‘Eh?’
‘You don’t like her as a person, but you still had sex? That’s shallow and appalling. Poor Georgina, you’re calling her boring after she’s become a notch on your bedpost? Talk about disrespectful.’ Rachel Woodford, defender of Georgina Race’s maidenhood. This was a new one.
‘Alright, settle down.’
‘I thought more of you than that,’ I said.
‘People do have casual sex out here in the real and imperfect world, you know, it doesn’t have to be seen as an aggressive act,’ Ben hissed.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean, we’re not all lucky enough to be with our soul mates, but we’re not going to be celibate while we wait for them to turn up.’
I could’ve said something here about not harbouring any delusions that he was living like an ascetic monk, but Ben had matched me in righteous anger. I’d never felt so grateful for a lecture starting.
Soul mate. Had I said that? In the Greek holiday blather? Oh God. Maybe I had. I realised now I’d laid it on thick in case Ben had sussed the fact I’d swooned during last year’s kiss. In actual fact, Rhys and I had definitively exited the honeymoon period. Being treated as an equal by peers at university had made me less willing to tolerate the slightly domineering, aloof manner that had felt so Mr Darcy in our early days. In turn, he accused me of ‘getting up myself’. If I was truly honest, I knew Rhys’s surprise holiday stunt was as much about him re-establishing who had the whip hand as it was about summer lovin’ and dolmades.
After a while, Ben pushed his notes towards me so I could see he’d written in the margin: ‘Joking.’
I scowled in incomprehension, drew a question mark underneath it, pushed it back.
‘We didn’t,’ he wrote, underscoring the second word several times to make his meaning plain. ‘What’s the matter?’
Good question. I read it, shrugged, passed it back. Was I really so uptight I expected my single friends to live by my rules?
Lecture over, we had tutorials in different parts of the building. I was out of my seat, down the steps and by the door in seconds. Ben caught up with me, grabbing my arm before I could stalk off.
‘Look, I was being laddish, you usually find it funny,’ he said, under his breath.
I rudely shook my arm free, even though his hold had been gentle.
‘For the record, we didn’t do anything and I didn’t want to,’ he added. ‘I still can’t see why it would’ve been some moral failure.’
‘None of my business,’ I said, haughtily, heart suddenly banging against my ribs as if it wanted to make a break for it and scuttle off to the Victorian Essayists ahead of me. My behaviour suggested I’d be a good fit for the era.
‘I’d have had a better time if you’d stayed,’ Ben said, nailing the source of my anxiety more accurately than I wanted.
‘Why do you say it like that? Like it’s the lowest standard – “I’d have had a better time even if Ron had stayed.”’
‘That wasn’t what I said.’
No, and that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t want you to want to do that, with her. When she’s nothing like me. What was I on?
Ben looked out of the window, back at me, opened his mouth to say something, hesitated.
‘I can cook,’ he said, flatly.
‘What? You conned me so I’d do your shopping?’
He glared at me. I glared back.
‘Pleased to see you two were paying such rapt attention and that the academic debate now rages,’ our tutor cut between us. ‘And I’m certain those notes you were passing were on the rise of the middle classes in the fourteenth century in relation to The Canterbury Tales.’
‘Most definitely,’ Ben said, nodding.
‘Sod off to your eleven o’clocks,’ the tutor said, and we did.
26
In all those fashion features about ‘What To Wear To Meet Your In-Laws’ or ‘What To Wear On A Country Weekend Away’ I’d like them to toughen up and tackle the genuinely thorny issues, such as ‘What To Wear To Meet Your Lost Love’s Wife’.
I know I can’t attempt this dinner party with anything in my current wardrobe. So slim are the pickings – and not in the sense that anything is small – I decide on a scorched earth policy, bundle most of it up and take it to the nearest charity shop.
The altruistic glow dims in minutes as I stand holding recyclable bin bags in the middle of Age UK. The woman at the counter has grey hair in a bun and glasses round her neck on a string, like a wonderful granny from a Roald Dahl story who’d adopt you if your parents were wiped out in the first chapter in some blackly comic manner.
‘Just here?’ I say brightly, hoping for a drop-and-skedaddle.
She makes the internationally recognised – and not entirely gracious – outstretched finger wiggle that means ‘Give That Here’.
I hand it over, thinking, I didn’t know giving things away for free has an audition process. She starts pulling the contents of my bags out in front of me, sniffing a cardigan disdainfully and asking: ‘Are you a smoker?’
Before I can answer in the negative, she yelps in distress as if she’s found a nobbly dildo the size of a Saharan cactus and says ‘We can do without these …’ holding a rogue pair of socks at arm’s length, between finger and thumb. Hmm, my slipper-socks with paw-like rubber grips on the soles.