Unsuitable Men (4 page)

I’d spoken to my old university flatmate Caroline – first-time mother of a three-month-old baby – who had burst into sleep-deprived hormonal tears as soon as she heard my
voice. I didn’t dare make it worse by telling her about Martin. And by the time I hung up I didn’t have the energy to face another rebuff. It seemed that, for all of my defensive
insistence that I had plenty of other people to talk to, Ticky was the only one actually available.

Whatever my reasons, Ticky didn’t seem remotely surprised by my sudden urge to discuss everything with her. She took it as her due; of course it was only a matter of time before I would
volunteer my personal life for her dissection.

‘I think this is, like, raaahlly healthy, Roars. First step to recovery and all that. So, like, tell me about the other woman,’ she said, propping her elbows on her desk and resting
her chin in her hands. ‘Who is she?’

I felt my eyes fill with tears.

‘I don’t know who she is,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’ That was a lie. I was desperate to find out who Martin’s new woman was. I’d already spent an
unhealthy amount of time on his Facebook page this morning, scrutinizing tiny thumbnail photographs of every woman on his Friends list. I had narrowed it down to a shortlist of ten before forcing
myself to de-friend him for the sake of my sanity. But I wasn’t about to share that with Ticky; I was too ashamed of my stalker-like behaviour.

‘Yah, yah,’ nodded Ticky with approval. ‘Totes the right attitude, Roars. There’s no point obsessing over his new bird. You’ll drive yourself crackers. How long do
you think it’s been going on?’

‘Months,’ I intoned glumly. ‘He had a weekend away last month and now I think he must have been with her.’

‘No
way
– the weekend in Wales? But he said he’d gone with his schoolfriends Paul and Al!’

Ticky’s elephantine memory for detail never ceased to amaze me. She could remember everything about people’s personal lives to the most ridiculous degree. If you said that you were
going to a wedding on Saturday, Ticky would remember immediately, although you had mentioned it only once before, that this was the wedding of Annabel and Marcus, and wasn’t she the one whose
father had left his wife for her sister, necessitating some complex extended-family seating arrangements? If she ever focused her uncanny talent for recall on her job, she would be unstoppable.

‘Yes, I’m certain of it,’ I said, although I wasn’t. I felt it was true and that was the same thing. I wanted to think the worst of him. It stopped me from wanting him
back.

‘Utter bastard,’ sympathized Ticky. ‘Did you really not suspect a
thing
?’

She tilted her head to one side speculatively as I spoke, prompting me with the practised skill of a professional interviewer and leaving tactical silences that I rushed to fill with teary
rantings. When I finally ran out of confessional, she leaned forward for a machine-gun burst of sharp questions that, once finished, achieved what I had previously thought to be impossible. It
actually exhausted my desire to speak about Martin. It was as if Ticky had wrung me out like a wet cloth. I knew my sense of release was merely a by-product of her bloodsucking; but the effect was
astonishingly lightening. I wouldn’t have believed that I could actually feel grateful to Ticky Lytton-Finch. Perhaps I had misjudged her all along.

‘So, Roars, you’re twenty-nine,’ she stated briskly, twirling her hair into a bun at the top of her head. ‘My sister says all the good men are snapped up by thirty-five.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.’

Perhaps I had not misjudged her after all.

‘It’s far too soon for me to start dating,’ I said stiffly. The very idea made me shudder. I’d always gratefully skipped over those complicated women’s magazine
articles about dating – when to text, how long to leave it before returning an email, whether or not you should have sex with your new man before you’d had the ‘exclusivity’
talk. It all sounded like a different world to the slow, long-ago unfolding of my relationship with Martin, where our accidental daily encounters in the university library had become less
accidental as that first term went on, until, almost without our having ever discussed it, we were a couple.

‘Well, Goouurd, of course it is too soon for you to, like, start another long-term relationship,’ said Ticky, tossing her thick blonde hair to one side. ‘But raaahlly, if
Spreadsheets Martin is your only boyfriend then, like, that means you haven’t been on a date in eleven years.’

‘No,’ I admitted. I didn’t feel like going on a date for at least another eleven years, to be honest.

‘Thing is, Roars, like, you don’t have time to waste at your age.’ She ignored my glare. ‘Saahriously. I’m not suggesting you, like, try to find your future husband
or anything, but you do need to get out there and get some practice. Try out a few duff ones to get back in the game, you know?’

‘Oh God, I can hardly bear it,’ I groaned. ‘Duff ones?’

‘Yah. You remember Hen Milroy-Pennington?’

‘Do I?’ I asked, uncertainly. It was never easy to keep up with the huge cast of friends that populated Ticky’s social life.

‘Yah, you do. Fashion PR? Tall? Dark hair?’ That narrowed it down. At least 90 per cent of Ticky’s friends, and the female staff of
Country House
for that matter, were
blonde. In my early days at the magazine I had naively believed that there was some posh gene that bestowed blonde hair upon them, along with an inability to speak quietly and a propensity to turn
up one’s shirt collars for no reason. Then I had discovered that, with rare exceptions, they owed their colouring to the hand of an expensive hairdresser rather than nature.

‘I think so,’ I said, not really sure but wanting her to get to the point.

‘Yah, right, well, Hen has just got engaged. Eiffel Tower proposal, baguette-cut diamond so big she can hardly lift her hand, announcement in the
Telegraph
: the works.’

‘Right,’ I said, feeling my face pinch up bitterly. ‘How lovely for her.’ Ticky really was extraordinarily tactless, I thought, bringing up engagements to someone so
recently dumped.

The point is, Roars, a year ago she set herself a proper mission to go out and meet as many men as possible,’ said Ticky. ‘She went on forty-three dates in the year before she met
Hecks. Forty-three!’

‘Hecks?’

‘Hector Armstrong-Calthorpe? Number eleven in Tatler’s Most Invited?’ said Ticky, looking astonished that I didn’t immediately recognize his name. Ticky and all of the
Country House
staff had a habit of assuming that everyone was as intimate with their social bubble as they were themselves. ‘Not actually important, Roars. What is important is that
she met a
lot
of unsuitable men before it all happened with Hecks. A lot.’

‘Unsuitable men?’ I echoed.

‘Yah. Use them for practice, you know? Get used to the whole dating scene by going out with people you’re not interested in – get the crap ones out of the way, right? Teaches
you about what to avoid in future and then you’re, like, all chilled and relaxed about dating when you meet a man you’re raaahlly interested in.’

‘Right,’ I said, hesitantly.

‘Yah, it’s like me and old Fuckwit Farquharson? Totes unsuitable but the bonus is that I absolutely know for future reference that I am not prepared to get down to business with a
man who wants to call me “Nanny” in the sack.’

‘Did he?!’

‘Oh Goouurd, yes. I had to dump him when it escalated horribly one night,’ she shuddered.

‘How?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ said Ticky, looking away as if the memory was painful. ‘Let’s just say I didn’t know until then that they made nappies
in adult sizes. But now I know the signs, I won’t be going there again.’

‘What
are
the signs?’ I said, in genuine fascination.

‘Please – I can’t,’ said Ticky, holding out her hand to stop me prying further. It seemed her appetite for emotional sharing was strictly a one-way affair.
‘Thankfully there is just one Fuckwit Farquharson, but the thing is there are lots of other fuckwits out there and you are bound to encounter some sooner or later, yah? It’s good to get
them all out of the way so you can get on with meeting someone great. I mean, surely there were some unsuitable men before you got together with Martin?’

‘None,’ I said, casting my eyes down to my desk in embarrassment. It wasn’t like I’d been one of those teenagers who wore a chastity ring and swore to keep herself pure
for marriage, but my love of ancient castles and encyclopaedic knowledge of William Morris textile designs were not exactly irresistible to the boys of my youth. When Martin first started talking
to me in the university library I’d been as astonished by his attention as I was flattered.

‘Sorry,’ said Ticky, rolling her eyes. ‘Stupido. Forgot he was your first proper boyfriend. But that is all the more reason you need to go out with some unsuitable men. I mean,
most girls go out with, like, a series of bad boys in their twenties and then settle down with a nice sensible boy when they hit thirty. But you, Roars, you’ve spent your whole adult life in
a relationship with a sensible man. A boring man, frankly. You, like, totally need to get some bad boys out of your system.’

‘Define “bad boy”,’ I said, with some trepidation.

‘Well, have you ever been on a date with a tortured artist, for example?’

‘No.’

‘Guy in a band?’

‘No.’

‘Toyboy?’

‘No.’

‘Married man?’

‘Ticky! No, I certainly haven’t. I haven’t been out with anyone unsuitable at all. Ever.’

‘Well, Goouurd, of course the ultimate irony is the one man you do go out with for eleven years turns out to be unsuitable anyway,’ Ticky said, sitting back with a satisfied smile.
She was too pleased with her neat conclusion to consider that it might be painful for me to hear.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said, wincing slightly.

‘So you
have
been out with an unsuitable man, Roars – you can tick cheater off your list now.’

‘Great.’

‘But don’t you see this is a good thing?’ said Ticky with earnest enthusiasm. ‘Getting unsuitable men out of your system is, like, progress. I mean, every nutter and
loser you encounter brings you closer to realizing who is really suitable for you.’

‘You’re not really selling this to me, Ticky,’ I said.

‘Sahhriously, Roars,’ she urged. ‘The thing is, everyone’s a little bit mental – even the good ones. Even you. But if you don’t know what sort of mental is
your
sort of mental, then how will you recognize the right man when he turns up?’

‘It’s a nice theory, Ticky,’ I said, looking at my watch to try to terminate the conversation. ‘I’d probably better be getting on with things.’

‘Oh faahrk, is it really twelve-thirty?’ exclaimed Ticky, grasping my wrist to check the time. ‘There’s a Stella McCartney sample sale just off Bond Street; I’d
better get a faahrking wriggle on. Laters, Roars, and chin up. It could be worse. You could be nearly
forty
.’

She collided with Martha Braithwaite, our formidable features editor, on the way out. A lady whose age, while undisclosed and subject to much office gossip, was certainly well over a decade
north of forty. ‘Sorry, Marth, no offence,’ Ticky carolled as she barged past.

Martha frowned darkly. ‘I just came to see how you were doing on the April layouts,’ she said, peering into the office.

‘Fine, Martha, just fine,’ I said, completely untruthfully. I hadn’t even looked at them and I could tell from Martha’s gimlet-eyed stare that she knew it. ‘Getting
on to it right now.’

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. She had always been an exacting boss, but ever since she had been passed over for the editor’s job she had become even more demanding. Amanda had been
parachuted in above her thanks to a bulging contacts book, impeccable breeding and a private income which allowed her to overlook the relatively impecunious salary. Middle-class Martha, for all her
hard-won experience, simply hadn’t been able to compete with a glamorous society blonde who was more used to staying in country houses than writing about them.

Even three years later, Martha seemed to feel the need to prove her superior journalistic credentials by leaping on everyone else’s errors, as if the Bettertons might belatedly recognize
her eye for detail and appoint her to her rightful role. As that was yet to happen, the more insecure she felt, the more she micro-managed the rest of us. Or tried to. Ticky and Noonoo were equally
impervious as Amanda and just ignored her. Lysander had little time for her, and nor did Flickers. Which meant that the focus for most of her dissatisfaction was me.

I hadn’t helped myself by failing to spot that our art director Jeremy had switched, after a long and drunken lunch, two captions in the proofs for the December issue, so that a Christmas
cake was referred to as ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ while our future monarch was labelled ‘A nutty organic fruitcake’. The resulting press furore, and numerous
cancelled subscriptions, had been probably Martha’s happiest time at
Country House
since Amanda’s appointment. Jeremy and I had shared the blame, while Martha grabbed the
triumph.

These days I checked everything three times and now, under Martha’s watchful eye, I bent my head over the proofs once again.

Auntie Lyd’s two remaining PGs appeared to have a complete inability to sleep beyond the first glimmer of dawn. Despite my being the only person in the house who needed
to get up for work on a regular basis, in my short time there I’d discovered I was the latest riser by several hours. I would wake most mornings to the heavy clunk of the water pipes as the
boiler warmed up for Percy Granger’s usual 5 a.m. shower. This early alarm call told me I had two hours until I needed to get up, but I found I rarely went back to sleep. Although rolling
myself back up in the duvet should have felt decadent and lazy, instead I felt trapped in a cocoon of obsessive thoughts about Martin. I found I could whip myself up into a frenzy of fury by
remembering everything he ever did to hurt me or betray me; I replayed scene after scene in my head until the repetition made me weep at the very tedium of my own thoughts. I imagined him romping
with his new girlfriend in the en suite bathroom – a scene which I enjoyed ending by having them both slip on a fat slug of her Herbal Essences shampoo, injuring themselves horribly. But it
was no comfort from the awful truth, which was that the clanking of the pipes woke me, each morning, from dreams in which Martin and I were still together.