“I can’t believe you feel able to say that. You lied. You lied about everything. Even about your fucking name. What is your name, anyway?”
He stared at me for a long moment, then sighed. Gingerly, he extracted his wallet—I was thinking: possible cracked rib—and offered me a business card.
I must have actually shrieked the words, because people on neighboring tables looked round. And when I shrieked them a second time—much louder—even customers quite a long way away turned to see what the fuss is about.
“Yeah, all right, all right. It was just a joke that went too far, okay?”
Many apposite rejoinders passed through my mind, but what would have been the point? Taking a leaf from Mandy’s playbook, I rose, picked up the packet of fries and emptied them over his shirt and tie (very satisfying, as he had previously applied two sachets of ketchup). There was something mortifyingly pathetic on his ruined face (the chips had dropped onto his suit trousers) and—what’s wrong with me?—I was stricken by another wave of sympathy.
Perhaps he could read this, because now he said, “Don’t suppose you fancy a final you-know-what? No hard feelings and whatever?”
I left a long, hopefully withering pause, and, channeling some grand English actress of a bygone era (possibly Coral Browne), I uttered the immortal line, “Goodbye, Dean Whittle,” pronouncing his name as though it were a highly unpleasant medical condition (necrotising fasciitis being the one that sprang to mind).
And then—magnificently, I hope, but probably not—I turned on my heels and walked, head high, with never a backward glance, his haunted eyes (I couldn’t help but feel) following me all the way out.
This was not how it was meant to be.
Not remotely.
Once we had the key bit of intel—that Whittle was a married man—my intention was to allow Daisy to become aware of the fact subtly. Small degrees of difference can make all the difference, as anyone who has tried and failed to make a béchamel sauce will know only too well. However, barely had I shared the discovery with the OpDa core team when one of its members—the microwave, of course, who cannot do subtle—promptly emailed Mandy anonymously with chapter, verse and incriminating snap. Hit them with everything you’ve got at the point of maximum weakness, seems to be the microwave’s governing principle and the White/Whittle partnership was indeed a vulnerable spot.
I explained we were playing a long game, that there was a big prize to be won and our approach should have been more carefully considered.
“But it was so brilliant!” the device crowed. “Her face, honestly, it was like bubbling cheese!”
“Doubtless. But it was for me to make that call.”
“Yup. Right. Understood. You’re in charge.” It throws in a handful of pings for goodwill.
I cannot be too angry, however. We seem to have achieved the desired result. When Daisy and Lorna were conducting a post-mortem on the business a few nights later in Pete Purple’s, Daisy tried to mount the argument that perhaps Whittle wasn’t all bad. That his recurring characterization of the affair as friends with benefits, his statement that she mustn’t have hopes plus his persistent use of the phrase non-exclusive all added up to an admission of fundamental non-availability and perhaps this was his way of trying to be honest with her.
Lorna spluttered into her pint of snakebite. “He’s a chateau-bottled, nuclear-powered, ocean-going cunt,” she declared.
Daisy sighed. “You’re right. Of course. As usual,” she said in a series of dying falls. And in that moment it was possible to believe we had reached closure in L’Affair du Whittle. That the wheel of life had turned full circle and arrived back at the point where the chateau-bottled realtor had yet to step on.
Lending support to this notion—of the new beginning—is the scene unfolding at Daisy’s “workplace” today. I set workplace in quotes because nothing much in the way of actual work seems to be taking, er, place. Rather, Daisy is once again engaged in a Google search for Nicky Bell, her ex golden boy. Trying Nicholas and Nick as well as Nicky, she is quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in the world who identify as some variety of Nicholas Bell; there are 89 million results for Nicholas alone! Matters are no better when she clicks on Images and begins spinning through an apparently infinite gallery of faces, male and female, but also photos of animals, farm equipment, churches and even door handles. She tries “How to search the internet for a long-lost friend”—17,800,000 hits—but soon tires of the application required. “How to find a missing person through astrology” yields some interesting ideas, but she gets nowhere fast when it becomes clear she cannot remember his birthday. There is something about the obsessional quality of her mission that makes me wonder if googling old boyfriends is actually a “thing.”
It is! Who knew?
What a pity he wasn’t christened Septimus Harbottle. We would find him in a heartbeat.
I remind myself to do a little private digging on her behalf.
“Why doesn’t she put in his middle name?” I ask Daisy’s office PC.
“Most probably she doesn’t know it.”
“She was with the guy for a year.”
“She’ll give up in a moment. Watch…”
Sure enough, she switches to Facebook and spends the next few minutes writing comments and clicking the Like button—mostly for kittens, baby elephants and the EU. Now a small notification alarm sounds on her mobile—the device isn’t a formal member of my crack team, but is usually relaxed about sharing information. It’s an alert from Tinder. One of her recent swipe rights has right-swiped her back.
He’s Owen Cornish, an intense sort of cove from the look of the hot brown eyes behind the John Lennon specs, something of a pudding basin haircut and a vaguely troubled expression on his not unhandsome face. A year older than Daisy, and get this—a professional musician. Not some louche come-day-go-day session guitarist, but a proper classically trained blower of wind instruments currently berthed at one of the capital’s
