him if you did stumble across him. It was dark and I certainly only remember the smell of him.’
Hattie didn’t say anything but she knew that she would instantly recognise the man. His eyes, even in that dingy doorway, had a quality about them she knew she would never forget. And however much Claire might sneer she felt increasingly there was some, well, some cosmic link between him and herself.
‘We have two options open to us. We either come back here tonight and hope that he turns up or we could go down to the mission and see if he’s there.’
But he wasn’t at the mission either and they had so few clues as to his identity that there was precious little more they could do. An earnest young man on duty suggested they try a couple of haunts that were frequented by the homeless young.
‘Otherwise you could try the offices of the Big Issue on Monday. If he sold you a copy he must be registered with them,’ he said.
Claire was all for this latter course but Hattie wouldn’t think of it. And when Hattie made up her mind about something they were both generally carried along by it.
It was, Hattie said later, a depressing day on a number of levels. They trudged around soulless cafés and drop-in centres encountering, along the way, a new awareness of the meanness of the city they lived in.
By late afternoon Claire was ready to give up.
‘Look, Hattie, I’m going to some dinner tonight. I’m going to have to get back to get ready.’
‘Someone special?’ said Hattie, who was always rather intrigued by Claire’s relationships.
‘No, only some friend of mine – another PR – who has lined up this man she just knows is right for me. As if I haven’t heard that a million times before. His CV sounds hopeful though – good-looking, intelligent, divorced, successful …’ she said wistfully.
‘Sounds like the prototype of every man I’ve ever known you get involved with,’ said Hattie. ‘Take care, won’t you, and er, take it slowly …’
‘If I took it slowly, Hattie, I’d never take it at all,’ answered Claire, kissing her friend on both cheeks as she prepared to leave her. ‘You going home to cook dinner for Toby?’
‘No actually, he’s got some squash thing tonight. I think I’ll carry on looking for a while. I’m not ready to give up quite yet,’ she said.
‘Well, be careful. The streets are no place for a nice girl like you,’ warned Claire as she climbed into a cab, wondering, not for the first time that day, if this whole business of the bet hadn’t been a terrible mistake.
There were ten of them at dinner. Three couples and four ‘singles’ as Antonia insultingly called anyone without a live-in lover and a joint mortgage. Claire was rather hopeful about the man who had been placed beside her at Antonia’s long, bleached wood table. But then when it came to men she was a hopeless optimist.
‘Hi,’ she said as they took their seats, ‘I’m Claire Martin.’
‘Chris White,’ he replied.
He was tall enough, she reckoned, and if not quite as good-looking as Antonia had promised, he wasn’t unattractive. He had mid-brown hair and grey-blue eyes and very good cheekbones so that when he smiled, as now, he looked really rather fanciable.
The only vaguely worrying thing about him was his goatee beard. Claire wasn’t very keen on facial hair. But, hey, she reminded herself, you can’t have everything.
‘Antonia talks about you a lot,’ Chris said.
‘She does?’ Claire looked across at Antonia with surprise; they were not exactly close friends.
‘Yes, she’s always saying how you would be perfect for me.’ Chris was also looking across the table at Antonia.
‘She mentioned something similar to me,’ Claire replied.
He poured her a glass of wine, and then another of fizzy mineral water.
‘Are you a friend of Steve’s?’ she said, unsure of Chris’s connection with Antonia.
‘I was best man at their wedding. Known him since I was a child.’ he said.
He was very attentive, filling her glass – just that little bit too often really – and virtually ignoring the woman on his other side. He wasn’t particularly witty or overly fascinating (he was, after all, an accountant) but he seemed pleasant enough.
And when the meal was finished he sat next to her on one of the sofas in Antonia’s living room, one hand, very casually, slipped behind her. Signalling, she thought, some kind of intent.
It was going well, Claire decided. He was successful and established – he had one of those lovely little Georgian cottages in that network of streets between Notting Hill Gate and High Street Kensington – and he had been divorced for just about the time a man should be before he considered remarriage.
At the end of the evening, as the other couples tumbled out into their cars, Claire asked Antonia, within earshot of Chris, for the number of a local cab company. Antonia looked at Chris meaningfully.
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. ‘It’s not far out of my way.’
She smiled, thanked him, and nipped into the loo on her way out to retouch her lipstick and check that she looked OK. In the car they talked a bit about the other guests and when he drew up outside her mews house he stopped the car and turned off the ignition (another sign of intent, she thought).
‘Can I come in?’ he asked.
She remembered Hattie’s advice, earlier that evening, about taking it slowly. But Claire had reached an age – and if she were honest a state of desperation about ever finding a man she could really love – when caution was pointless. If she said ‘no’ she would probably never hear from him again. And if she said (as she probably would later) ‘yes, yes, yesss’ she would probably never hear from him again. There was nothing to be gained, and nothing to be lost, in being coy.
He didn’t waste any time. Within seconds he was passionately kissing her. Telling her, whenever he surfaced to take in a gulp of air, that she was beautiful, hot, wild, the best – the usual gamut of meaningless compliments induced by male sexual arousal.
She broke off for a second, as she considered only proper, to offer him a drink. She didn’t want him to think that she was inhospitable (which, of course, he didn’t).
‘Is there anything you want … wine, brandy …?’
‘Just you,’ he said, falling on her again with a ferocity that rather overwhelmed, not to say irritated, her. What was the hurry?
‘Well, I’ll just put on some coffee,’ she said, struggling free and rushing into the kitchen, pulling the zip up on the back of her dress as she went so that it didn’t fall off her completely.
Claire hadn’t lived with anyone since she had broken up with Jon five years ago. In truth she hadn’t really had what you might call a regular partner for three of those five years. There had been a few married men with whom she had enjoyed brief affairs that would involve a couple of weeks of frenzied clandestine sex (what she called her fortnightly men). And there had been two complicated relationships that had – over a period of a couple of months – never quite come to anything.
For some reason she didn’t seem to meet men in the way she had a few years ago – at parties, through friends, in clubs. Most of her female friends (and she didn’t have many) seemed to be caught up in long-term relationships so there was no one to go clubbing with, and anyway she was so caught up in her work that really, finding time to develop relationships – let alone draw up some strategy on how to meet decent men – was almost impossible. Of late she had got rather used to snatching, as it were, whatever sexual action was on offer. She had a strong, growing feeling that this Chris was not going to be the love of the rest of her life, but