There was the quiet road half full of writhing shadows (bristly elms all asway in the weather), and there was the phone booth, slobberingly coated in thick red paint, and massively seized into the paving stones. Within, behind the glass, giving silent instructions to the black club of the mouthpiece, was a slender young woman with henna-coloured hair. She wore a tailored business suit – pale yellow.
Taking this in, he walked on for a few seconds, then hesitantly turned back, and stood there, a one-man queue (patting his pockets as if for loose change). She looked out and their eyes met and he made a gesture of reassurance, dismissing the very notion of hurry. From then on he gazed at the trees and the shadows, but he was continuously aware of her shape and mass, continuously aware of the exact space she filled…
He wondered at the strength of the attraction, because slenderness was not in itself compelling to him (the girls he liked usually had a few extra pounds on them – and now and then a few extra stone). She wasn’t beautiful. Was she pretty? He couldn’t quite tell. If good looks had to do with symmetry, as was being widely claimed at the time, then it was a test she failed. She wasn’t ugly-beautiful either. Was she perhaps ugly-pretty? Or something else, something other…
Anyway he realised, with near despair, what he was going to have to do. He was going to have to try…At that moment his confidence fell away, as he readied himself for an interlude of stark vulnerability – but girls, women, very seldom actually laughed in your face, and besides when you feel like this, he told himself, there’s no choice: you’ve got to try, you can’t not try, you’ve got to at least try.
You do it nice, mind – and then you throw yourself on their mercy…
He waited. The breeze had died, disclosing a settled humidity that now crept up into his armpits. Martin seldom seemed to go out with girls from his own niche or echelon (bookish bohemia), but now he felt, with a rush of real glandular daring, that the woman in the booth was very much not like him, was from an alien moral sphere…
She shouldered the door open.
‘Oof.’
Then she paused (to make a note in what looked like a pocket diary). All right: she was lightly bronzed, the auburn hair had been recently and professionally primped (it now lay in moist coils and runnels), and there was the business suit and the business shirt (and the business shoes). But the face itself was not businesslike: not cunning, not even particularly shrewd, just sensible and amused. She took four or five steps in his direction, and her walk, with its looseness and ease, told him something new about her body: she liked it (which was a very good start).
‘Oh I’m so sorry that took as long as it did.’
‘Well,’ he said in a thickened voice (and this wasn’t a line of his – it was helplessly untried), ‘I’ll forgive you if you’ll have dinner with me.’
‘What? Repeat that please?…Yes, I thought that’s what you said. Now why would I mind whether or not you forgive me? What do I get out of it?’
He said, ‘Oh come on, it’s nice to be forgiven. Then you won’t be tortured by your conscience.’
‘Mm, well, that’s an incentive.’
This human engagement was already pleasant, meaning also humorous, and there was a cautious levity in the air between them. For a moment he thought that her eyes were perhaps fractionally misaligned. But it wasn’t that. Her eyes were just unforthcoming, and colluded not at all (it seemed) in the candy-like glow of her smile. The mouth was wide but the lips were economically lean. He said,
‘And it’s your own fault. You’re very compelling.’ Was it her figure? ‘You forced me to find the courage to ask. I mean that. You did. Go on, have dinner with me. I so want you to.’
‘…D’you do a lot of this? Trolling round street corners on the off-chance?’
‘Christ no. It’s much too nerve-racking.’ Her flesh, he decided, was bronzed from the inside, and faintly red-tinged (Cheyenne, Choctaw, Mohawk). ‘That’s all you’ve got to do. Have dinner with me. Then you’ll regain your peace of mind.’
‘…I’m considering it. You’re a bit young. Can you even afford dinner? I’m thinking of the donkey jacket.’
‘It’s not a donkey jacket!…It’s an overcoat.’
‘And the girl-length tresses. And you’re also on the short side, aren’t you.’
‘Yes. And I’ve got a crap name too. Martin. But I can afford dinner. Don’t forget that short men try harder.’
The asymmetry – it wasn’t in the eyes. It was in the mouth. Buck teeth? No. A slight awkwardness in the palate? When she grinned she looked frankly loutish, even feral – which, we’re afraid, awoke some unworthy atavism in him. She said,
‘Martin. Well it could’ve been worse I suppose…Now first and foremost, Martin, what is it you do?’
He felt no vulnerability here. About how he looked, certainly, and about how he dressed, certainly (like all the boys he dressed very hideously in 1976, and the less said on this shaming subject the better), but not about what he did.
‘I’m the assistant literary editor of the New Statesman.’ There was also the question of his two published novels – but he wasn’t going to bother a businesswoman with fiction (not yet). ‘And I write for the papers.’
‘Where were you before the New Statesman? Or is it your first job?’
‘Second job. My first job was at the TLS. The Times Literary Supplement.’
She straightened up. ‘Well I suppose you must be one of those people who’re very much cleverer than they look. Uh, listen. It would have to be tonight.’
‘Tonight is perfect.’
‘You see, tomorrow I’m off to Munich. D’you mind if we make an early start?’
‘The earlier the better.’
‘Okay,’ she decided. ‘I’ll book the place on the corner…So! Come to
