‘Luke,’ I said, pushing his hand away again, ‘will you please take your hand off my backside before I have to report you to your godmother for sexual harassment.’
Luke pouted at me, drawing his hand back to his lap. ‘It’s, like, not fair to laugh at a man like that,’ he said, looking exactly like a small boy who’s had a toy taken
away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, having to stop myself from patting him on the head like a puppy. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just quite hard to take you
seriously.’
Luke leaned forward. ‘I really think you should take me more seriously,’ he said. ‘I mean, men my age are, like, at their sexual peak. Just like women in their thirties.
It’s the perfect combination.’
‘I’m
twenty-nine
!’ I exclaimed, loud enough that the maître d’ looked over with an expression that said, I
can tell you are, my dear. Whatever do you
think you are doing with that teenager?
‘God, Luke,’ I hissed, mortified. ‘Can’t we just have lunch without you propositioning me? People are looking at us.’
‘Like, saahriously, why are you so afraid of your own sexuality?’ Luke asked, his hand sliding once again towards me. ‘You’re a woman in her prime, I’m a man in his
prime, what are you so scared of?’
‘I’m not scared of you, Luke,’ I scoffed. But I wondered. I wasn’t scared exactly – frankly, Luke was still enough of a scrawny teenager that I reckoned I could get
him into a headlock if I had to. Uncomfortable, though, I would admit to. I wasn’t used to fending off the advances of anyone at all, let alone a horny teenager with wandering hands.
‘Yah? Because I think you’re afraid of what might happen if you let me seduce you.’
I spluttered into my water glass. I felt like a reverse Mrs Robinson. ‘Luke! Seriously. I am not afraid of my sexuality just because I don’t want to sleep with you.’
I had to admire his chutzpah though; it never seemed to cross his adolescent mind that I might be rejecting his advances because I didn’t find him attractive. He was absolutely certain
that if there were any issues here, they were mine.
‘Don’t, like, fight it,’ he urged. ‘Ticks said you’ve been with your boyfriend for ever. Don’t you want to know what it’s like with someone else after
all this time?’
‘Look, Luke,’ I said. ‘I think you might slightly have the wrong end of the stick here. I’m
dating
unsuitable men – just dating. Not having
sex
with
all of them. It’s not about that.’ I shuddered at the idea that I would have had to sleep with Teddy to fulfil my remit.
Luke looked puzzled. ‘But, like, why not?’
‘Why not what?’
‘Why not sleep with the unsuitable men? It’s only sex.’
‘It’s not about sex,’ I said. Our main courses arrived and the waiter raised his eyebrow very slightly.
‘It’s always about sex,’ said Luke confidently, unabashed by the presence of the waiter. He lifted a spear of asparagus into his mouth and sucked on the end lasciviously.
‘If you think I find that attractive, Luke, you are very much mistaken,’ I said, starchy as a schoolmarm.
‘I’d find it attractive if you did it,’ he leered.
I was beginning to get the feeling Luke would have found it attractive even if I’d been eating an egg sandwich with my mouth open while wearing a polyester fleece onesie. Not that I was so
devastatingly attractive that he couldn’t help himself, but because he was so full of hormones that he saw every single action of mine as some sort of sexual come-on.
‘Well, I’m not going to do it,’ I said, sharply cutting my asparagus into small pieces as a warning. A warning he failed to read. It was quite remarkable how he could manage to
shovel food into his mouth with one hand while his other snaked around my rear.
Luke tossed his fringe out of his eyes to better look at me. ‘But sleeping with unsuitable people is like dating unsuitable people – if you don’t try it, how do you know you
won’t like it?’
‘Well, Luke,’ I said. ‘Would you sleep with another man just to discover you didn’t like it?’
‘Oh yah,’ he answered, perfectly confidently. ‘But every time I’ve slept with a guy, it’s made me realize I’d rather be with a girl. See how it
works?’
I gaped at him. I’d thought my argument was watertight – weren’t public schoolboys supposed to be conservative homophobes? Although perhaps that was just to cover up for what
happened at those all-boys schools.
‘Yah,’ Luke continued. ‘Makes sense to try everything at least once, right? Which is why you totes need to be sleeping with the unsuitable men. At least some of them. Just
dating is cheating; you’re not really putting everything into it. If you know what I mean.’
I wondered if he did have a point. Not that I should be shagging everyone who was unsuitable, but was I holding myself at a remove from it all? Hiding myself behind the ‘work
project’ excuse to protect myself from anything real? Although it seemed likely to me that Luke’s argument was less about unsuitable men in general, and more about getting his
eighteen-year-old self laid.
‘Because, like, you’re using the fact that you think I’m unsuitable to stop yourself from really looking at me as a man, yah?’ said Luke. ‘You’ve made up your
mind already about me being too young, you’re just going through the motions on this date. Not, like, allowing yourself to think of me as someone you should deffo be boffng totes
because
I’m unsuitable.’
‘Maybe,’ I said thoughtfully, more to myself than to Luke. Maybe I
was
using the unsuitability criteria to stop myself taking any of this seriously. That way I could convince
myself I was trying to get over Martin while actually remaining as hung up on him as ever. Maybe I did need to get more involved with the unsuitable men than just chaste social encounters in
restaurants.
Luke’s eyes lit up. ‘Captain of Debate Soc at school,’ he said proudly, his chest puffed out. ‘Knew I could turn you. Are you free tonight?’
‘No, Luke,’ I spluttered. ‘I meant maybe I should be taking the dating more seriously, not maybe I should be shagging you.’
Luke folded his napkin up on the top of the table. ‘That’s what you say now,’ he said, smiling with satisfaction. ‘But I can see you’re coming round to
it.’
‘We should be getting back to the office,’ I said, pushing his hand away yet again.
‘Oh yah,’ he agreed. ‘Plenty of time, Rory Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on you yet.’
Like any dreaded appointment, the editorial meeting seemed to come round far more frequently than a mere once a week. It felt like only hours ago that we last sat in this
airless room, looked down on by generations of aristocratic Bettertons from their gilt-framed portraits. Also looked down on by Amanda, but not from within a frame, and for different reasons. There
was something about the room, and the fact that it had remained unchanged for decades, that gave me the feeling that, rather than attending a series of editorial meetings over my years at
Country House
, I had in fact attended just one never-ending meeting, in which the same conversations looped endlessly around and around. The speakers might change, editors might be replaced,
but the
Country House
calendar was bigger than any of them. Even Amanda’s much-vaunted editorial changes, as outrageous as they seemed to Martha, were still constrained within it,
almost unchanged from when the magazine had been founded: every year we had to cover the game season and the Game Fair, have a heated debate about hunting (not much of a debate, of course, we were
firmly pro), find a fresh angle on Henley, Goodwood and the Derby, and provide sufficient coverage of innumerable charity and society events that our readers could feel, even if they were not in
possession of a country home themselves, that they were in some way a part of that world.
So while the very existence of a
Country House
website was enough to have many of our readers clutching at their pearls in horror, our head of IT, Tim, explained to us that it had been
specifically designed to appeal to a generation for whom the internet was still a troubling thing. There were no flashing gifs or unsettling use of terms such as ROFL or LOLZ; it was text-heavy,
user-friendly and presented in a reassuring palette of cream and English racing green. Amanda beamed broadly, if slightly condescendingly, from the home page, welcoming the
Country House
reader with her dog at her side, a spotty Emma Bridgewater mug in her hand.
See
, her smile said,
there is no need to be concerned. The internet is a safe and friendly place. Join us.
Leading up to our soft launch, Tim had written a series of articles for the magazine about how to get online, and which websites we recommended – including our own, of course. I had never
even thought of bringing these home for Auntie Lyd and her house guests, I realized. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that they might have an interest in getting online; in life beyond Elgin
Square? Why had the ridiculous plumber had that realization before I had?
Tim answered anxious questions – reassuring Lysander that his identity could not actually be stolen just by having his photograph and a smattering of his book reviews presented on the
site; promising Catherine that the pieces she wrote under the name of her Irish wolfhound, Nora, would not be pirated (nor indeed read, but he didn’t say that bit); encouraging us all to
think of additional content we could bring to the site – behind-the-scenes chats, photographs that didn’t make the final edit but were too good to be wasted.
I nodded politely, as we all did, hoping he wasn’t going to go on for much longer. Not least because Luke kept making suggestive faces to me from the other side of the table; my spurning
of his advances seemed merely to intensify his determination.
Ignoring Luke, who was now mouthing something I didn’t want to translate, I focused pointedly on Tim, who was telling us how the website could help shape the direction of the magazine,
going forward, by studying the page views to find out which features got the most traffic and therefore resonated most with our readers. He smiled back at me, rather nonplussed by my sudden
interest.
‘As we’ve already seen, Rory, with your dating column,’ he said.
I opened my eyes wide. Apart from the emails Tim had forwarded to me complaining about the fauxmosexual piece, I’d hardly heard a thing about a response to the column, either inside the
office or outside. I strongly suspected Amanda hadn’t even read it.
‘How so?’ said Amanda, and for once I was totally in agreement with her. How so indeed?
‘The dating column has by far the most page views of anything on the site,’ said Tim. ‘And we’ve had more than twenty emails about the latest piece this week
alone.’
‘You have? What – what do they say?’ I asked nervously.
‘Mostly they’re women who want to know how they can contact your rich landowner.’ Tim smiled at me slightly apologetically, little realizing this had been exactly my hope in
writing up the date with Teddy. ‘I’ll forward them on to you after the meeting.’
‘Excellent,’ said Amanda, but I didn’t know if she was directing this at me or at Tim. ‘Thank you, Tim. Now, moving on.’
As soon as I escaped from the meeting I flew back to my desk and opened up my inbox. As promised, there was a message from Tim collating all the emails they’d received about the piece.
Fifteen of them offered their contact details to be forwarded on to Teddy, with gentle barbs about how a young filly in her twenties could not expect to appeal to a gentleman of mature years. Of
these, seven claimed to be from women within a hundred-mile radius of the Scottish Highlands – two actually resident there. Three complained that a dating column was out of keeping with the
Country House
ethos, but I found it hard to care too much about these, since our readers had an extremely proprietary notion of what the magazine stood for, and a positive mania for pointing
it out to us staffers. As they saw it, they were the true keepers of the
Country House
flame, and we the dangerous renegades who couldn’t be relied upon not to put out the fire with
our incompetent ways. A golden two emails complimented my writing and said they looked forward to hearing about more unsuitable men. Neither appeared to be from anyone I knew, which made them all
the more precious. I read them often enough that I could have repeated them, word for word, to anyone who asked; though of course no one did.
I forwarded the emails to Lysander – not to show off about my two complimentary readers, I deleted those first – but to suggest that he might want to send the contact details on to
Teddy. I wasn’t sure how Lysander would explain away the fact that I’d written about my date for public consumption – although I’d been careful to write it in a way that
wouldn’t offend Teddy – but it seemed that if there was a silver lining to the date at Wilton’s, it might be that Teddy unexpectedly found love as a result. I hoped he would.
Martha swung by my office unexpectedly, claiming to have read my latest column and declaring it ‘not bad’, which, given her opposition to its very existence, I felt to be high
praise. She even went to the trouble of reading, over my shoulder, all of the emails from readers, which was a level of interest that I hadn’t anticipated. I wondered if she might be
beginning to see the benefits of working with Amanda instead of against her. Of course I’d rather be writing Behind the Rope than Unsuitable Men, but the point was to get Amanda’s
confidence in me established, and then use it to work the things I was really interested in. I was playing the long game, and Martha would do well to try it, I thought, if only to make her own life
easier.
Although I still hadn’t heard from Malky, I wasn’t going to be able to wait for his promised ‘next time’ before writing up our date. I’d found it easier to tackle
the column about Luke, even though he seemed to think our romantic adventure was far from over; it wouldn’t be published until later in the month, but the fortnightly schedule meant I needed
to crack on with the write-ups while also finding new men to date. I’d have to end the Malky piece, for publication in early April, by the pub dustbins, just as it had ended in reality.
Still, I told myself, that just made him better material for the column: The Man Who Didn’t Call. Thinking of him as mere material made me feel a little less despondent. I had been so sure he
would
call; so sure that I would see him again. Had I really mistaken the look in his eyes that night? It had actually made me feel hopeful for the first time in weeks; like he was a real
prospect. I guessed this was what Auntie Lyd meant when she said that dating was a battleground. I fiddled with the text a bit more, but the piece wasn’t coming together. The quiet fizzle
into nothingness was a lot less satisfactory than Teddy’s gentlemanly rejection, on the page as in life.