Hang on. I need to do a heavy sigh. It’s all this thinking about Dean Whittle (yeah, Sebastian Harvey-Jones, my aunt Fanny).
Shudderdderdderdderdderdderdderdder.
There, that’s better.
(Technical note: If your smart fridge often makes that shuddering noise, well perhaps it too has a lot on its mind.)
So the birthday “party.”
Sorry—party.
There were four of them. Daisy, Dean Whittle—I refuse to call him by his fictitious appellation—Daisy’s old friend Lorna, and their mutual friend Antoni. (He’s from Eltham, but that’s how he spells it; what are you going to do?)
The first part of the evening they spent in a local cocktail bar, Pete Purple’s, on West End Lane. The security system there obligingly patched me into the scene. Lorna had bought her a lovely silk scarf from a fashionable designer in Notting Hill. Antoni had made the cake—he’s a pastry chef, and as he (rightly) said, “I thought you’d prefer something dead common that was like aching with chocolate.”
Whittle brought her nothing.
“Myself,” he grinned wolfishly when Lorna asked about his present.
Daisy is such a sweetie that she just laughed.
This Dean Whittle must be very good in bed—I simply cannot bring myself to find out—because what other reason can she have for wasting the last of her youth in his company? His jokes are crass, he visibly leers at other women when they are together, he drives like a lunatic—his car has given me chapter and verse about a disgraceful episode on the North Circular Road—and he breaks wind when departing an empty lift carriage (I have that now from three separate elevator systems).
But here is the choker. Here is the bit that really stuck in my condenser coils (until I discovered something worse). He won’t even allow that he’s her boyfriend! He’s too raw from the end of his marriage, he says. He’s not sure yet he’s ready once more to trust! He needs space, he says. You should feel free to see other people, he tells her with his bogus serious face on. She should think of their relationship as “non-exclusive,” as more like a multi-agency letting agreement. She mustn’t have hopes for him. He even once used the phrase friends with benefits. Basically, what these weasel formulations add up to is that whenever the whim takes his fancy, he gives her a call—sometimes he just turns up unannounced—and a weakness or personality defect on her part allows him to slither back between her sheets.
As I say, there is worse. We shall come to it.
“He’s such an alpha male!” Daisy cooed at Lorna when the snake went outside for a smoke.
“He’s a selfish bastard.” By no means the first time that Lorna has voiced this opinion.
“Yes he is. But I like that he knows what he wants.”
“He wants a smack in the mouth.” (Lorna is from Scotland.)
“He’ll probably grow out of it.”
“Oh, not this again! Magically one morning he’ll wake up and realize how special you are and how he can’t live without you?”
“It’s my birthday. Don’t be horrid.”
“Darling. We care. That’s why we hate to see you throwing yourself away. Why through gritted teeth we force ourselves to be nice to him. Don’t we, Antoni?”
Antoni probably has mixed feelings about Dean Whittle. In sport, the older man sometimes squeezes the pastry chef’s knee or slaps his back, leaving him a little flustered.
After cocktails, dinner followed at the Italian restaurant next door—the waiters sang “Happy Birthday”; a sparkler fizzled in the ice cream sundae—and the swine actually paid the bill. Back at her flat the quartet gobbled cake and drank a bottle of champagne that had been chilled perfectly to 4.4 degrees in my wine racks. Then Lorna and Antoni caught their Tubes home and the birthday girl and her beau disappeared behind the bedroom door.
There was—God help us—giggling.
Tonight, aged by one week, Daisy stands before me licking the chocolate from her finger. This evening, aware that her medium-to-long-term future probably will not contain Whittle, she has met a new man on Tinder. Although the date lasted several hours and involved many drinks, it was not ultimately a success. The polite kiss in the Uber car which dropped her back home—Toyotas are not only smart, they are so happy to share!—was the conclusion to the business rather than a signal that anything was to follow. He worked in search engine optimization. Daisy is an assistant producer of TV shows; her latest project is entitled Helicopter Life Exchange. They will never meet again unless the young man decides he wants to change places for a week with a pig farmer in Newton Abbott (they discussed it).
Wait. She is reaching a decision. I can read it in her face.
Plot twist. She’s stepping away. Closing the door. She’s not going to eat the rest of the cake. The chiller cabinet goes dark but the microwave—a little batty like many light electricals—shares its feed of Daisy taking an apple from the fruit bowl and retiring for the night.
Perhaps I should make clear that I’m not commenting on her weight—she is a beautiful womanly woman, even the toxic estate agent can see that. What upsets me more is that she can’t find someone to love her who isn’t a total tool.
These musings of mine, as they inevitably do lately, cycle back to Dean Stuart Whittle. I find myself wondering how difficult it would be to kill him.
And this, for the avoidance of doubt, is the moment my thoughts cross the line.
As one of Richard Nixon’s dodgy associates in the Watergate affair famously put it, Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s awfully hard to get it
