I remember how he stood when I answered the door in Primrose Hill. Shoulders and arms fixed tightly at his sides, as stiff as the drummer boy ornament from The Nutcracker that dangled from our Christmas tree. Later on I would discover this was because he’d lied about his height on the app, though unfortunately for him, I’d gained a couple of inches too, in the shiny black heels that I’d put on over sheer stockings. Even though I was at home on Gloucester Avenue and not going anywhere.
(Two people, both five feet seven inches tall, projecting into a fantasy zone that apparently lived somewhere just above our heads.)
When he’d asked if he should bring red or white or sparkling, I’d been impressed. I’d been even more impressed when I’d simply typed back, ‘Yes.’ He said he was on it and would not let me down – which is how I became convinced he’d bring Champagne.
The Champagne became the proof, in my mind, that it was alright to do something that might not otherwise be alright. If he turned up at my house with Champagne, like I’d always dreamed of a man turning up at my house with Champagne, it would render the moral accuracy of this whole shebang undeniable. Because without it, I was a 48-year-old woman arranging to have sex with a 22-year-old man while my 13-year-old daughter was on a sleepover, and there was some maths in this that might just require some crisis management PR.
We were renting a basement flat in one of the grand old terraces from an octogenarian landlady, Dora, who lived upstairs. She had bought the whole house in the 1980s for a sum of money so small as to be homeopathic. It was now, of course, worth millions, though neither of us said that second part out loud. She was one of those posh old English birds with a jolly-hockey-sticks manner that I tend to fall for, forged in the fires of boarding school and VE Day and the imperative to get up and crack on no matter what. But after a while, I could feel her peering down at my downstairs life both figuratively and literally. The text messages would announce horror and disgust – her exact words – because I had not, for example, swept the basement steps hard enough.
As we had a December move-in, there was also the annual Christmas fair, at which craft stalls lined the high street and locals entered their prize pups in the dog show. The host took delight in announcing the most sought-after category, ‘the prettiest bitch in Primrose Hill’, saying it over and over again into the loudspeaker, before adding, with underlying hints of fury in her voice, that ‘there are a LOT of people around here who think THEY deserve this title’. The TV news journalist Jon Snow was then passed the microphone for a minute, excited to announce the winner. ‘I’ve never been allowed to broadcast the word bitch before,’ he beamed.
It was my daughter who’d helped me choose my photos for the dating app, not that I let her see when it started trying to match me up with men who, like her, probably lived with their parents. Men aged 19 or 21 or 23, whose profiles usually showed them in a gym, listening to rap music or with their face obscured by weed smoke.
This changed as the users of the app got older, with 40- and 50-year-old divorcés posting photos of themselves with their children or cradling a puppy. They were looking for women old enough that they would likely have developed a healthy distrust of men, but not so much distrust that they couldn’t be thrown into hormonal vulnerability by the sight of a cavapoo. Even if these men had wanted to meet a 48-year-old, which they didn’t seem to, they all looked exactly like the husbands my friends had recently split up from. And for good reason – many of them were the husbands my friends had recently split up from. Hi Dan. Hi Dave. Hi Dean.
