Circus (2 page)

One month is the free-trial period for the matchmaking website run by a London newspaper. While Henry has unshakeable faith in his new quest for love, he doesn’t want it to become an unhealthy preoccupation, nor does he wish to pay the absurd fee of twenty-five pounds and sixty pence per month for the privilege of using a website. He chose the month of October, with its thirty-one full days, in order to get the most out of his free trial. Even in a leap year, February is not a good choice. Then there’s the additional minefield of Valentine’s Day, to be avoided on first dates and in the delicate early days of a relationship. No indeed. October is optimal. There is the added bonus that, this being London, it will probably rain every single day in October, so Henry hopes to have the opportunity to perform some act of gallantry by sharing his jacket or umbrella, or carrying his date across a puddle to save her shoes.

On the last day of September, Henry asks Penny to meet for coffee so he can tell her all about his scheme. She is one friend who has never played the matchmaking game with him. Her first question is a surprise. It turns out that just as in the early days of his dating education he hadn’t anticipated the perils of soggy salad and unruly noodles, he also hasn’t considered some of the basic principles of Internet-dating strategy.

“What are you going to do about a photo?”

“A photo?”

“You need a picture, right?” A thin moustache made of milk appears briefly on her upper lip before she licks it off.

“Oh, I hadn’t really given it any thought.”

“The photo is the heart of the dating profile, Henry.” She pauses to drink her latte and tries not to giggle. “With the right photo you can say it all: are you fun, are you serious, are you handsome, are you thin, are you fat, are you nerdy, are you carefree, are you charming, are you quirky? What are you? It can give you everything or take it all away.”

“Is that not a bit superficial? There are loads of questions, and one even receives compatibility scores. Surely, those are the answers that matter?”

“Not if the photo sucks.”

In the ensuing silence, Henry tries to think of the most flattering camera angles and finds he is unfailingly picturing himself in a trilby hat, although he has never worn one in his life. He takes a slow bite of his croissant and gazes at Penny as pleadingly as he can. She taps his shin under the table with the toe of her boot.

“You know, some people have professional consultations about this stuff. There are services for that now.”

“Honestly?”

“Not that I’m suggesting you need to do that. I’m just saying that it’s a big deal, and what you definitely can’t do, though I can tell that you’re thinking about it, is leave out the photo. Anything they’re left to imagine will be more horrifying than you could possibly ever look in a photograph.”

“Perhaps this is more your domain?”

“I’ll work on it,” Penny says as she begins ransacking her purse in search of something small. “For now, you come up with some witty answers for the personality quiz and decide what you think about open relationships.”

“Daunting, really. All this.”

“No cold feet. I think it’s a perfect idea! All you need is a little practise. Courtship is, after all, an art form like any other.” She extracts her wallet and places it on the table.

“Says she, the Master?”

“Hey! I am very happy, I’ll have you know.” Penny reaches across the table and laces her fingers through Henry’s. “Very happy.” She glances fleetingly down at their hands and then grabs the bill. “This one’s on me.”

When they leave the café it is raining prodigiously and neither of them has an umbrella. Henry takes off his blazer and drapes it over both of their heads, and they lope along, laughing and stumbling, as though they’re in a three-legged race, to the entrance of the underground.

“By the way,” she says, when they get into the station, “you know those trial things are usually thirty days from when you open your account, right? You don’t have to choose a calendar month. The clock could start any time.”

“And, knowing this, you still let me explain my genius October plan?”

“You can still start on the first,” she says, kissing him on the cheek. She slips a sweet she’s taken from the café into the pocket of his jacket as she hands it back to him. They part ways at the turnstile and get on separate trains going in different
directions. In the crowded carriage, Henry looks out the window at the dark insides of the tunnel. For the first time in their ten years of friendship, he wonders if perhaps he was wrong about Penelope. He wonders, that is, if he loves her.

When he returns to the office, Henry changes into a dry shirt in anticipation of his afternoon meeting. Every week, he has the same appointment on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock. With few exceptions he has been in the same place at the same time doing the same thing for seven years’ worth of Thursdays. The person he meets is unfailingly five minutes late and always refuses the coffee he offers. Her name is Alexandra Papadakis, and she comes to meet with him on behalf of the Greek embassy. She is not beautiful, but there is a kind of charming mousiness to her, and in spite of their weekly confrontation, Henry has come to feel the kind of fondness for her that he might feel for a hopeless niece. He doesn’t know quite how old she is, though he assumes – hopes, even – that she is younger than he is. Mostly, he is curious about her life, about what she thinks about when she gets home from work, and what she does with her hair when it isn’t in a bun. He imagines she’s the type of person who knits and reads books about paper crafts and makes fruit preserves and seldom watches television, but has, in spite of these virtuous pastimes, never had a true talent. It is very clear that Alexandra does not share Henry’s platonic affection.

When Ms. Papadakis enters his office at 3:05 that afternoon, he notices she has wet patches on the elbows of her suit jacket
where her small umbrella didn’t quite cover her. As she sits down slowly in the chair opposite his desk, he is met once again by her freakishly large green eyes, which look like those of a Tarsier. He means this comparison to what he considers the world’s most adorable primate to be a compliment, but somehow he’s sure Ms. Papadakis wouldn’t see it the same way. If he has learned nothing else, dating has taught him to keep such thoughts to himself.

Every week she has the same question for him, and every week he gives the same answer.

“Can we have our Marbles back?” asks Alexandra, again.

“No,” says Henry, again.

They sit for a moment without saying anything, and then Alexandra stands and runs her hands over her skirt, smoothing the creases. She blinks too often, and she has an unconscious habit of biting her bottom lip repeatedly.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Bottlesworth. I will see you next week. We might have a new proposal for you then.” She always says something like this, some cold promise designed to show her professionalism and seriousness. Perhaps some day she will get a promotion.

“Have a lovely week, Alexandra,” he says as he stands and extends his hand across his desk.

In reply, she shakes out her umbrella onto Henry’s carpet and leaves the office without saying goodbye. Henry sits back down and fiddles with his email. Despite the long-standing nature of their predicament, Henry and Alexandra have never once made a joke about their situation. They have never commented on the predictability of the exchanges, as each week they earnestly say
their lines, act their parts, and then exit the stage. The Marbles they’re disputing are the Elgin Marbles, priceless classical Greek sculptures that once formed part of the Parthenon. They were plundered by English collectors in the 1800s, when looting the precious goods of other cultures was commonplace, and now exist in a purpose-built gallery in the British Museum. Keats wrote a poem about gazing at them, and Henry has the little piece of verse pinned to his office bulletin board, as if the Romantic poet had somehow claimed English ownership of these Marbles better than anyone else ever could. Better than Henry himself. Greece wants the Marbles back and England will never, ever give them up, partly on account of the bespoke museum gallery and partly as a matter of national pride. Finders keepers, and so on. But it is Alexandra’s job to keep asking, and it is Henry’s job to say no.

Henry doesn’t tell many people about this side of his work, because there is a part of him that is embarrassed to admit that his job could be done as well, or perhaps even better, by a note pinned to his door that says “NO” in bold, aggressive lettering. Sometimes, after a couple of drinks and when he is feeling particularly confident about his place in the world, he is able to pull off the story as a party anecdote, but usually that involves a lengthy explanation about the history of the Elgin Marbles, which is, Henry has learned from sad experience, very few people’s idea of a good time. He had denied Alexandra’s sole request several times before he actually went to see the Marbles himself. He couldn’t quite muster Keats’s sublime feeling about the passing of time and the imminence of death, but the Marbles were quite impressive, it was true,
and somehow tragic. Alone in the gallery, Henry did feel a little “like a sick eagle looking at the sky,” but then that particular phrase from the Keats poem described his entire way of being in the world, and not just how he felt when confronted with exquisitely old things in a museum. He had walked the length of the gallery, hoping to discover what the carved faces and the surfaces of the stone could tell him, to figure out what he was working to protect. What he wanted more than anything was to touch them, as though he were a little boy encountering the bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex for the first time. He didn’t touch anything at all, of course, for fear of setting off an alarm, and instead made his exit, leaving the Marbles to their eternity.

Henry does not consider himself a literary person, and hasn’t read a poem since he was forced to read them at school. The Keats, however, he memorized and contemplated and tried to understand until he could hardly bear to think about it anymore. He believed it was part of his duty, although no one at work had told him so. He recited the poem to Penny one day and a funny expression came over her face, as though she was sorry for something. She hadn’t said anything afterward, had simply stayed quiet. He wasn’t sure if she was having big feelings about art and mortality or just acting appropriately reverent at the sound of the sonnet. Although he had not said the poem out loud again, sometimes “the rude / Wasting of old time –” ran through his head without warning while he polished his shoes.

As Henry leaves the office on the first day of October, after spending the afternoon sending a dozen useless emails and filling out some forms, he prepares himself for the task of writing his online profile. What will he do about a likeness? He hadn’t been worried about it initially, but now that he knows professional services exist to fashion ideal profiles, perhaps he ought to make more of an effort? Though he continues to ponder suitable haberdashery for a good first impression, he is sure anyone who is interested in his appearance alone is not to be trusted.

When he arrives at his flat, Henry makes himself a cup of tea and sits down at the computer. The first questions are easy to answer, such as his name, age, gender, and sexual orientation. On the next screen, Henry is confronted with a list of seventy-eight questions, his answers to which will, apparently, give him a score and generate a personality profile so that he can be matched with individuals who have given compatible answers to the same questions. Henry drinks his tea and prepares to be assessed. He types:

Angry Birds.

Not likely.

A weakness for strong cheddar.

To Canada once, when I was a boy.

Twilight
. I just needed to know what the fuss was about.

Half full.

Winston Churchill.

The questions appear to be in a perplexingly random order. Still, he works his way down the list, answering quickly, honestly, and instinctively. Some of the questions are covertly intimate and sexual (Q: “Rough or gentle?” A: “Gentle.”), and some
are frivolous and seemingly irrelevant (Q: “Have you ever been to the London Aquarium?” A: “No.”). What kind of person is he, based on these answers? He begins to regret his hasty approach.

He uploads a photo Penny took of him during a winter stroll in Kensington Gardens. In the snapshot, he is wearing a winter hat and a duffel coat and laughing, his eyes wrinkled at the corners, while glancing slightly away from the camera. He suspects that the photo will at least attract women who like happy men, and he will come across as what he might describe – if he were writing an old-fashioned personal ad – as carefree and fun-loving. When he eventually hits “submit,” the webpage takes a minute to load before presenting him with a series of compatible matches. Henry gets up and goes to the kitchen to warm up his tea as a measure of procrastination. When he returns to his computer, he sees an overwhelming number of smiling, thumbnail-sized women. The highest compatibility match is 63 per cent, and Henry has no idea if this is a good or a bad sign. He opens up the first profile on the list: Robin Kendry, a librarian who has four cats and lives in Devon. His allergies rule that one out, so he scrolls down, browsing the coquettish poses and made-up faces. He picks up the phone beside his computer.