Would Like To Meet

Truth is relative, and so is happiness, thought Alex as she composed her personal ad. She struck out ‘Keep it simple’ as an opener; visions invaded of men seeking a mentally deficient mistress to clean for them and scrape their feet. She decided to write down all her faults, see herself as her stepmother would, pegged down as she had been by jealously at the frightening Elektra complex of the teenage Alex and her doting father. She wrote: ‘I have a stubborn small belly, my long nose gives me a horsey look, my hair is too fine and my nails are bitten to the quick. I’m pathetically damaged, moody and a spiteful loser.’ Reading it back, Alex felt curiously unmoved. She was old enough to have faced the icy feel of pitiless self-honesty, and ridden unscathed through the death-wish, making her less reflective, not more. She considered putting the ad in as it was, one of these breaths of fresh air that people liked (until that air went stale). The problem with that, amusingly subversive as it would be, was that Alex did actually want to meet a nice man. So she turned it all around, wrote instead about her winning smile, fondness for design, long walks (the obligatory one for women in the ads over fifty, to show you weren’t fat, but also weren’t some Pilates-chewing skin and bones), and photography. The last one wasn’t exactly true; Alex didn’t take any more photographs than anyone else. Then again, she did have a brain emblazoned with stand-out images that stayed with her – she supposed unchanged by time, but details always drifted off into some fuzzy wasteland of memory, until she convinced herself it was a certain way even if the particulars were commandeered from somewhere else. For instance, the image of her mother face down in the pool of a Devon holiday cottage they had rented one summer had rhododendrons crowding to the edge of the tiles that had never been there. What was unmistakable, and unshakable, was the sight of her father at the bedroom window upstairs, fading into the dark as he stepped back when Alex, aged fourteen here, turned from the pool screaming. The artless functionality of death and the naively human rejection of its long hand, lifting the log for just long enough for us to scurry around in excitement at the sudden light, became horribly apparent to Alex. She turned cynical, in the fullest sense. She told people she was damaged by her mother’s drowning, since that’s what they expected, but more she was hardened and made restless. Now her husband was dead, now an orphan late in life, what she wanted was comfort to lose herself to, a pillow of a man to bawl into, someone who loved her. She didn’t care whether she loved him so much; that was how it had been with her late husband, Mack. Sometimes Alex had caught him staring at her with the most helpless affection. And she could not take him seriously. His buffoonery laid in wait and surprised her at odd times. He was the kind of man who watched reports of a massacre on the TV news, whistled through his teeth and went to put the kettle on. Yet his self-awareness, which would fit into a pisspot, was perhaps what made her so fond of him. This was what Alex sought now she was ‘getting back into the dating game’ as her friend Sebastian would say. The last thing she wanted was a philosopher, a man of angst or self-righteousness. Alex was one of those intelligent people who thought that intellectual conversation was self-aggrandisement.

Alex carried on reading the classifieds in her local paper. She snorted at few of them: ‘Seeks zany, wacky F’; ‘Stunning stag seeks delicious doe’; ‘No boy scout, but WLTM a goodish girl guide to explore’. Alex marvelled at how many commented on their solvency – was this to reassure readers or to invite gold-diggers? She really enjoyed ‘Ugly, Bald Bloke, M, 52, barely literate, dodgy social skills, seeks F. Please form an orderly queue.’ Alex thought about getting in touch. She wondered at the defensive ‘emotionally sorted’ in one ad. She immediately rejected anyone looking for ‘friendship, maybe more’. Who had time for that? ‘Tactile’, she assumed, was code for ‘high sex drive.’ Alex was most drawn to the ad headed ‘Peaceful, Kind.’ Peace was probably what Alex most wanted. He was the right age and also listed photography as an interest. Nervously, she called the mailbox and left him a message and her number.

Their first meeting was in a coffee shop in town, the kind of place that had local jam stacked on scuffed shelves, an odd mix of chairs (‘reclaimed’), where comfort was a lottery. Alex arrived first, swapped her chair, and sat facing the door. She’d told him she would wear a red scarf. It was a bit warm to keep it on, but she wanted it to go right. On the phone, he’d been patient, listening carefully and pausing nicely, peacefully, before responding.

When he walked in, he stopped just inside the door and looked around every table in the small place, making sure. Then he smiled a little smile and approached Alex. He proffered his hand.

‘I’m Leslie. Sorry, you were waiting.’

He was quite small; Alex likely had an inch on him. He dressed and moved delicately, in a kind of studied manner that made him seem quietly sure of himself, but without any brashness. The old-fashioned definition of self-confidence, thought Alex. While not especially handsome, he had a sort of grandfatherly warmth about him, bright eyes and neatly combed hair. He was a precise package of a person, seemingly without all the raggedy tentacles of disappointing memories, pent up emotions and missed chances that haloed most people. Leslie was a librarian, and, as it turned out, photography was no casual interest for him. His photo of a trio of swans just taking flight, ideal backlighting making trails of water from their wing tips shimmer brilliantly, was often reprinted in nature magazines. It had won an award some years ago. He didn’t seem put off by Alex’s apparent disingenuousness about her own interest in photography; he was just happy to talk about his own hobby.

‘He was simply lovely,’ Alex told Sebastian on the phone, later.

‘He sounds a little humdrum for you Alex. A librarian, you say? You couldn’t make it up.’

‘And part-time photographer. He was just nice. And Simple.’

‘Divorced?’

‘No, Leslie never married.’

‘Perhaps you ought to wonder why?’

‘Hadn’t met the right woman. I did ask.’

‘No one really believes in right do they? Not at our age at least. Just what you’ll settle for.’

Conversations with Sebastian often went this way, a sort of arch look at everyone else’s blinkered foolishness. This was when he would just editorialise for a while, and Alex doodled on the pad.

~

Alex saw Leslie many times over the next two months; they did go for long walks, they had coffee, lunch, dinner and went to an exhibition of wildlife photographs. Leslie looked at them for far longer than most visitors, who spent more time on the captions than the pictures. Alex was realising that he wasn’t much like Mack, but that he was more considerate, poised, quiet; he did possess that uncomplicatedness she wanted.

One day he bought her a gift. It was a photograph, framed. The image was a very dark silhouette against a late dusk sky. Trees in the foreground, nearly black, gave way at one side to a high rise block, with lights on in some windows making no particular pattern.

‘It isn’t beautiful, but it is magical,’ he said. ‘Most people I’ve met wouldn’t like it, but you can see.’

Alex, until now a little unsure of how it was going, was cautiously flattered by the crediting of her intellect. It was hard to stay objective when someone noticed what she took to be her best asset. This is when anyone becomes helpless and impressionable: a compliment on your chief source of pride.

After that, not to say due to that, she took him back to her place. Alex ran her own business; she’d done it since her husband had died, prompting all the talk about his holding her back, in their lazy psychologising. People said she’d flourished; as though success was a product of a reckless death. Alex lived above the shop though; she’d sold the house, the big, indifferent house, to fund the business. The children never materialised, like the two of them had just forgotten somewhere along the way that there was a plan. So she ditched the place, went into kitchen design and fitting. It was a premium place; she’d built a proficient reputation. Some of the older kitchen fitters flirted with her, but they were all married, with teenage kids or older, never a hope in handsome hell.

Alex led Leslie upstairs, gave him peppermint tea at the counter. They slept together; he was considerate, slow, closed his eyes when he should. Afterwards, he smiled, and he waited for her to go to sleep before he did. Mack always went straight to sleep after sex, a thick, blank sleep, devoid of form.

Leslie took his turn and asked Alex back to his house after a delightful bistro dinner.

Alex felt enlivened – she felt full. 

Leslie lived in a maisonette. It was unfussy, clean, elegant in décor. There were no tropes of bachelordom, no black leather sofas or stainless steel. His eye for colour and framing, there in his photographs, was present in the rooms. Leslie opened a bottle of port; he did not ask whether Alex liked it, which she appreciated. It was nice to have refined taste assumed.

They settled in the lounge, which was lined with shelves on two walls. There were books on one, photograph albums on the other, more than a hundred probably.

‘I have been more or less obsessive for most of my life,’ Leslie confessed.

‘Show me the highlights.’

Leslie smiled and pulled down two or three albums. He sat beside Alex on the sofa and she shuffled close to him. She loved listening as he set the scene for selected shots, talking about the time of day and the weather, and how long he had to wait for the moment he wished to capture.

‘Photography is about patience,’ he said.

He showed Alex beautiful wildlife photos, from birds feeding in his garden to shots of deer on holidays around the British Isles. There were landscape pictures, but frequently a little unusual, a strange juxtaposition.

‘You’re very talented,’ she declared.

He just smiled and went on, accepting the compliment that way. The port kept going down, vivid and sweet, and Alex could feel it on top of the wine with their roasted and glazed chateaubriand.

‘Excuse me,’ Leslie said, and slipped to the bathroom. Alex stood to try to clear her head. She studied the photo albums. They were all the same, splendid leather-bound volumes, made to last. At the bottom corner of the bookshelf, one stood out by how creased the spine was, and how it was pulled away at the top from being lifted out so many times. Curious about what made this one special, Alex took it out and seated herself again. She opened the book; this was different to the ones Leslie had shown her so far. Alex looked at the pictures in the first few pages slowly, then sped up, racing to the end, heart fast, horror pouncing as a repellent realisation set in. All the photographs were of children, different children. In parks, at the beach, leaving school gates. On beaches and at swimming pools and in fountains on sunny days, there were naked children, boys and girls, all young. Alex became inert, looked aloft, felt absent while the album lay frightfully open on her lap, and Leslie walked back in.

He paused, in his way, at the doorway. Then he fell heavily into the armchair, opposite Alex. She stared. Leslie’s head was in his hands, his shoulders began to shake as tears, thick with salt, started to fall.

‘I’ve never hurt anyone. I don't ... touch children. I don’t have a computer. I would never … act on how I feel. But I couldn’t help just …’

‘Don’t,’ Alex interrupted. ‘You can’t …’

She looked at hopeless Leslie, down to the album, and over to the phone, trying to work out what to do, what it was worth.