“I like him,” says the toothbrush. “Do we like him? I think I do like him. His upper left one and two look poorly occluded, but, you know, hey.”
“Early days,” counsels the television set, wisely. “If this gets boring, by the way, Arsenal/Birmingham City’s about to kick off.”
“So tell me,” says Daisy. “Wind instruments. That must be. Actually. To be honest, I’ve no idea what that must be like!”
As Owen embarks on an account of life in the symphonia, Daisy’s lips close around her straw and siphon away a long slow dose of cocktail. Clarinet is what he mostly blows down, it turns out, but also flute, cornet, French horn and occasionally oboe. The job involves a lot of practice, many hours of rehearsal and additionally there are projects where they work with schools and gifted young people. It’s hard to tell whether Daisy is intrigued or bored, the facial signatures of each being not dissimilar.
“Would you say her pupils have dilated?” I ask my colleagues.
“Not really,” says the microwave, “but his have. See the way he’s looking at her?”
Daisy is telling him how she played the recorder as a child. And it’s true, as she recounts the tale, his whole being seems locked on her, eyeballs prominent behind the round lenses, his entire manner—well, the only word for it is—rapt!
“It’s one of my earliest memories,” she is saying. “A Christmas concert at primary school. The recorders were playing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and I could see Mum in the audience, head down, shoulders shaking. A few other parents were doing the same thing; I actually thought they were crying. Moved because we were playing this melancholy carol so beautifully. It turned out they were laughing! Because we were so utterly awful!”
“Cretikos has scored,” says the TV. “Cross from Kierkuc-Bielinski. One–nil Arsenal.”
“So have you met a lot of people like this?” asks Owen.
“Men people? On Tinder? Yeah, one or two. How about yourself?”
“Actually. Well, you’re the first.”
Owen sips a little of his cider—he’s not much of a drinker, this muso—and now he seems to be in the process of devising a second sentence to complement the one he just came up with. His brow furrows beneath the pudding basin thatch and he opens his mouth to speak, but nothing much emerges in the way of words or even punctuation marks.
To cover the gap in the dialogue, Daisy says, “Gosh.”
Finally: “I was in quite a long relationship with a woman, but it ended a while ago. Would you call four years a long time?”
“Oh, definitely. Practically a lifetime!”
“How about yourself?”
“I want to hear about you first!”
“Well.” Long pause while a lot of blinky stuff goes on behind the specs. “We met at music college although we only, we only got together years later.” More blinking. He takes off his glasses and holds them up to the light, inspecting for dust or finger marks, one supposes. “She was a cellist. A very fine one. Still is, I imagine. Well, I know she is.”
“Listen, Owen. If this is all too recent, we don’t need to talk about her. Failed relationships take time to—to reset from. Sometimes longer than the relationship itself. To be honest, I read that in Metro on the Tube to work this morning.”
Owen’s fingers tighten around his half pint of cider. “The relationship didn’t fail.”
“Ah.”
“It ran its course. Four movements plus an overture. It ended because—well, because things end.”
“He sounds a bit effing loopy, this one,” says the TV.
“Deep,” says the microwave. “I like the barely concealed intensity!”
Daisy looks a little stricken by the maestro’s commentary on the doomed affair.
“That’s sad,” she says. “Things shouldn’t end. I’m against it.”
He smiles. “Tell me about your romantic history. I’m guessing there won’t be that many exes.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why? Because who—who in their right mind—would let you go?”
There’s a long pause while Daisy decides whether or not Owen is taking the peepee. “Silly,” she says—and squeezes his kneecap.
But the effect on the musician is electric. He spasms as though crocodile clips have been attached to his genitals. Aspall Waddlegoose Three Berry Cyder splashes over his brown corduroy trousers.
“Bit of a hair trigger on him,” says the television.
“Shows he’s fired up,” says the microwave. “Fired up, ready to go!”
There is a good deal of apologizing on the part of both parties—Daisy for squeezing, Owen for overreacting—he explains he has always been highly sensitive slash “insanely ticklish.”
“It’s not a good look in a grown man, is it?” he says.
It’s hard to think of this character as a grown man, somehow—the hot eyes, the silly haircut, the spilled cyder with a “y.” To move on from the moment, Daisy embarks on a rapid tour of her own dating history, highlighting three individuals, beginning with the loathsome Shittle and ending with the Golden Nicky, who she describes in a throwaway fashion as “a posh boat bum.” This version that she purveys to Owen we know to be scandalously abridged and highly sanitized, and we are all amused—and not a little impressed—at the skilled editing job she has done.
The date with Owen continues into a second drink, but the musician declares he has to return home soon to practice a piece for a private concert he is taking part in later in the week—and would Daisy like to come?
“Will she?” jibbers the toothbrush. “I think she will. Maybe she won’t, though. Those poorly occluded incisors.”
“Yeah, she will,” says the telly. “What else has she got on? Woolford just missed a sitter.”
My feeling is also that there will be a second date. There is something between these two—the way they’re looking at one another—that suggests mutual interest. He, like all these young men, is hypnotized by the feminine aura which radiates from Daisy like a magnetic field; a strange thing for a fridge-freezer to write, you may think, but it’s hard to miss the way the male gaze is drawn to her as though it were a compass needle.
And she? Well, she
