Unsuitable Men (41 page)

As for the advice-columnist pitch, I’d assumed by her silence that Amanda had nixed that idea. Until I came home from work one evening to find her sitting with Auntie Lyd in the kitchen,
paperwork spread out between them on the table.

It was strange seeing Amanda in my kitchen: a weird collision of my work and home lives, like coming across a photocopier in my bedroom. Auntie Lyd didn’t seem to find it odd at all
– she was regaling Amanda with the continued adventure of her attempts to give up smoking, brandishing the nicotine patches that marched up both of her arms, while Jim paid attentive court to
both of them. It no longer seemed strange to see him there. Even though the work on Auntie Lyd’s house was now finished, he had become so much a part of the household that it was almost
strange if he wasn’t there when I came home from work. He insisted it was a quiet time of year for him, and that he was waiting for things to pick up, but I had overheard him turning down a
job just last week. I think he was unwilling to leave Auntie Lyd’s side until he knew she was restored to full health. It made me feel safer to know that he was there, and we exchanged smiles
as I came into the kitchen. Even though Auntie Lyd’s progress had been amazing, the thought of her collapse, all alone, still haunted me and I was reassured to know she had somebody strong
around the house while I was at work.

‘Rory,’ said Amanda, looking at her watch as I approached them. ‘Is that the time already? Lydia, I’ve kept you for far too long, I must be going.’ She stood up and
smoothed down the nubbly weave of her Chanel skirt.

‘Good to meet you, Amanda,’ said Jim, standing up and offering her his callused hand. She smiled back and shook his hand warmly.

‘And you, Jim. I do hope we’ll meet again soon.’

It seemed an odd thing to say. I wondered under what circumstances they might possibly meet again; unless Amanda had some plumbing work that needed doing. She scooped up the papers on the table
and turned to Auntie Lyd. ‘Please don’t get up, Lydia. I’ll take these contracts back to the office and once they’ve been countersigned by one of the Bettertons, I’ll
send you a copy for your records.’ She held out her hand to my aunt. ‘Welcome to the team.’

‘Does this mean you’re going to have to file your copy to me, Auntie Lyd?’ I asked, taking it all in.

‘Of course, darling, it’s in my contract,’ she laughed. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘Interesting,’ I mused. ‘No chance of late delivery, Auntie Lyd. If only it was as easy to chase everyone as it will be to chase you.’

Amanda pushed her chair back, readying herself to leave. ‘True. But could you really stand to share living space with any of our other columnists?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow by a
millimetre. Wonders would never cease. Amanda had a sense of humour. ‘Rory might I ask you to show me out?’

I translated this as a request to speak to me alone rather than an inability to negotiate the short flight of stairs to the front door, and led the way to the hall with the clack of
Amanda’s high heels following close behind.

She checked her hair in the hall mirror appraisingly turning her head from side to side. ‘Now I see why you wanted to stop writing Unsuitable Men,’ she said, flicking her blonde
fringe out of her eyes.

‘Do you?’ I asked, mystified. Auntie Lyd had had nothing to do with it. It just seemed like something that had served its purpose. I’d thought I’d get over Martin by
dating other men, but in fact I’d got over him all by myself. I didn’t feel the need to bury myself in ridiculous situations any more, either for work or supposed pleasure.

‘Well,’ said Amanda, turning around from the mirror. ‘He
is
rather gorgeous.’

‘Who— Wait, you mean
Jim
?’

‘Of course I do, Rory, who else would I mean?’

‘Oh no,’ I laughed, a little too loudly. ‘Really, there’s nothing going on there. Truly.’

Amanda raised one expensively threaded eyebrow. Well, why ever not? I saw the way you two were looking at each other.’

I flushed. ‘We’re just friends,’ I said, unable to look her straight in the eye even though I was telling the truth. How had he been looking at me? I wanted to ask. How was I
looking at him?

‘If you say so,’ shrugged Amanda. She took her BlackBerry out of her bag and started scrolling through messages as she walked to the front door. ‘Shame. I’d leap on him
myself if I wasn’t already married. See you at the office.’

I shut the door behind her, leaning my back against it. Although I knew Jim couldn’t have heard our conversation without having hung out on the stairs with a hand cupped behind his ear,
which seemed unlikely, I felt a sickly wash of shame and embarrassment that stopped me from going down to the kitchen. Whatever Amanda thought, Jim had made it clear that he wasn’t interested
in me like that. I’d told myself that was fine: we were best as friends, united in our concern for Auntie Lyd. I’d been careful to suppress any thoughts of Jim that weren’t
strictly platonic. I’d not allowed myself a single daydream about our kiss in the kitchen. No, not one. I averted my eyes from his muscular arms in those terrible T-shirts. I certainly never
thought about how it would feel to have those arms wrapped around me. Well, not often, anyway. Oh God, who was I kidding? I thought I’d hidden it from everyone. I thought I’d hidden it
from myself, even. And yet apparently it was clear to a casual visitor to our home that I was drooling after him like a lovesick teenager. What if Jim had noticed all along?

He’d tried to talk to me a few times this week, his expression unusually serious, but I’d made excuses to rush away. I didn’t need to hear him tell me again that nothing was
going to happen between us. That it had just been a drunken kiss. I mean, there’s facing up to reality and then there’s masochistically putting yourself in a situation where you know
you’re going to be told something unwelcome. Why would I do that?

I heard steps coming up to the hall, and shrank back into the shadows in case it actually was Jim, come to close match in person like one of the unsuitables from My Mate’s Great made
flesh. But it was Auntie Lyd who appeared at the top of the stairs. She stopped to catch her breath and I coughed before I stepped forward, in case the sight of me emerging unexpectedly from the
shadows made her jump. But she pressed a hand to her heart anyway.

‘Oh, Rory, what are you doing skulking there? Honestly. Anyone would think you were trying to give me another heart attack.’

‘How else am I going to get my hands on your millions?’ I teased.

‘If you don’t watch it I’ll leave every penny to a charity for cats. Won’t I, Mr Bits?’ She bent down to stroke the cat, and started up the next flight of
stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘Upstairs to my bedroom, not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Why are you going to bed so early?’ I asked, immediately anxious. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘I’m not going to bed, darling, I’m just getting ready to go out.’

‘Out?’

‘Aurora, please stop giving me that look as if you are my mother. Yes, I am going out.’

‘Where?’ I demanded. ‘Who with?’

Auntie Lyd stopped halfway up the stairs and turned round to look down on me haughtily. ‘Not, again, that it is any of your business, but I am having dinner with Lysander
Honeywell.’

‘Lysander!’ I shrieked in a strangled voice. Lysander the pink-shirted gossipy roué of the
Country House
office? And my aunt?

‘Honestly, Rory,’ she huffed. ‘Please don’t make a scene. I’ve spoken to him a few times about the books he kindly sent me and we agreed to meet for a quiet dinner.
It’s nothing to get excited about.’

This was becoming ridiculous. How much more was my work life going to infiltrate Elgin Square? Was Noonoo suddenly going to appear on Percy’s wrinkled arm? Would Flickers be seen squiring
Eleanor down Clapham High Street?

‘But – but—’ I sputtered.

‘If you’re about to tell me he’s an unsuitable man, Rory, I might have to remind you that you are hardly one to talk.’

That silenced me. She turned to go up the stairs. ‘Oh, one last thing. I said to Jim that you’d take him out to dinner tonight – on me, of course; I’ve left some cash on
the kitchen table. We owe him a bit of a thank-you, don’t you think?’

‘You said what?’ I asked. If I’d been worried about how I could hide my feelings from Jim in the kitchen, with the constant chaperoning presence of my elderly housemates, it
was as nothing to my horror at the idea of sitting opposite him, alone in a restaurant, with no escape from his scrutiny.

‘I’m determined that you two will be friends,’ said Auntie Lyd. ‘It means a lot to me. Anyway, you wouldn’t ignore the advice of a professional agony aunt, would
you?’

‘But Auntie Lyd, I—’

She interrupted as she continued up the stairs, ‘I already told him you’d do it. He’s waiting downstairs. Have fun, darling.’

She rounded the corner up to the next floor. Mr Bits offered me his usual look of disdain before he followed her, although this time I wondered if it might in fact be a look of feline pity for
the evening ahead. Of all the dates that I had endured with unsuitable men, this would surely be the most excruciating.

‘So, Dawn, is this going to be one of those unsuitable-men thingies then?’ Jim asked, nudging me with his elbow as we left the square and turned up the dark alley
towards the restaurants of Venn Street. I got the impression that he thought our enforced dinner date was all rather amusing. ‘You’ve done the pensioner, the teenage sexter, the dossy
musician – now it’s time for the plumber?’

Oh great, he clearly thought I’d put Auntie Lyd up to this; begged her to get the plumber to go out with me so I could use him for my column as an excuse to pounce on him again. I cursed
myself for looking like such a cliché: just another middle-class girl getting her kicks by slumming it with a manual labourer. He probably got this kind of thing all the time; from his
relaxed attitude it seemed he was quite used to approaches from women, taking it all in his stride as one of the hazards of the job. Probably went home and laughed with his friends about it. I
burned with embarrassment, glad that we were walking side by side so that he couldn’t see my face flaming scarlet.

‘I’m not writing that column any more,’ I muttered.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘I liked reading them.’

‘You read the columns?’ I asked, glancing up at him. I don’t know why I was surprised. Auntie Lyd had probably forced him, Percy and Eleanor to read every one.

Jim shrugged. ‘Well, since your aunt bought a laptop and went online purely to read it, I thought it was probably going to be interesting. It was. You’re funny. Crap taste in men,
but funny.’

‘They were
meant
to be crap,’ I said. ‘That was the whole point.’

‘So I suppose it’s a compliment that I didn’t make the grade?’ teased Jim. ‘Bit of a shame I don’t get to be immortalized in prose though, isn’t
it?’ He nudged me again. Even though the alley was narrow, it seemed that he was walking very close to me.

‘Oh so you’d like to be, would you?’ I laughed. ‘Is that what this is about? You’re annoyed that I’m not going to write about you afterwards? I will if you
like.’

Yeah? What are you going to say?’

‘I won’t be able to avoid mentioning your T-shirts,’ I said. The latest declared, charmingly,

‘Well, if I’d known we were going out, I’d have got changed,’ he said, plucking at the fabric on his chest. ‘It’s not like I wear these for anything other
than work.’

‘Where do you even get them from?’ I asked.

‘Horrible, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘My sister’s an air hostess – she gets them for me from all around the world. I’ve never had the heart to tell her
they’re not really my thing. She gets offended if I don’t wear them though. What else are you going to say?’

‘About your T-shirts?’

‘About
me
,’ said Jim.

‘Well, that rather depends on how you behave this evening,’ I retorted. Strange as it was to be heading out to dinner with Jim, and uncomfortable as I’d felt when we left the
house, I had to admit that he had a way of making me at ease with his silly banter.

‘Christ, Dawn, I’d better not hold my knife like a pen or anything, had I? What
would
the readers of
Country House
think?’

‘I know what the editor of
Country House
would think,’ I said leadingly.

‘Amanda? She seemed all right.’

‘She thought you were more than all right,’ I said. ‘She told me she thought you were gorgeous.’

‘Did she now?’ Jim chuckled. Again that easy acceptance that he was attractive to women. He wasn’t even slightly embarrassed by it. He probably had them throwing themselves at
him all the time. No wonder he’d so easily dismissed our kiss in the kitchen; he must be so used to repelling unwanted advances that his pursuers all merged into one single predatory
female.

The alley opened out into the bottom of Venn Street, where a handful of restaurants clustered around the cinema. Auntie Lyd had left a generous pile of twenties on the kitchen table, which meant
we could afford to go anywhere we liked. Attempting to reinforce in Jim’s mind that this had been her idea rather than mine, I said that he should be the one to choose where we went; this was
his thank-you after all. I hoped he wouldn’t choose the cocktail-bar-cum-restaurant that was usually full of couples. There was something very date-y about it that made me cringe a little
when I imagined us there. I was going to be bright and breezy, I had decided. Keep up this banter and let him be in no doubt that I wasn’t going to pounce on him. This was just a completely
platonic dinner between friends.

‘I like the look of this French place,’ he said as we approached the restaurant where I’d sat and drank wine while, unknown to me, Auntie Lyd was being driven to hospital in an
ambulance. There was no need to share this information with Jim. Perhaps going there again would be a sort of catharsis, now that my aunt was better. Now that my aunt was going out for dinner with
Lysander
, I remembered.