Jane Sigaloff - Name and Address Withheld

She left a few seconds after the buzzer went before sauntering over to the intercom while her stomach looped the loop a couple of times. There he was. Fantastic. She grabbed her keys and cast a quick glance over the radiators. All set for a possible post-lunch coffee. The sitting room was a knicker-free zone.

As she opened the door she wondered…to kiss or not to kiss? Awkward moment number one, and they hadn’t even said hello yet. Dating hell had begun. This was, she reminded herself, why recently she had opted for the being single option. That and the fact that there hadn’t been a long line of eligible or desirable suitors to hand…not even a short line.

‘Matt.’ She was bright, breezy, and hoped her choice of perfume wasn’t too overpowering. Nothing worse than burning your first date’s nasal hair within seconds of meeting. He seemed unfazed, and didn’t sneeze. All good signs. To her disappointment he resisted the urge to kiss either her cleansed and toned cheeks or her freshly moisturised and glossed lips. She pretended not to care.

‘Lizzie, hi…you look great.’ She really did. In actual fact ‘great’ really didn’t do her justice. Matt could feel his good intentions slipping away. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late. I had to shoehorn my car into a tiny space up the road.’

He had driven. So he wouldn’t be drinking much. Lizzie wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

‘What do you drive?’ Lizzie craned her neck to look at the row of wing mirrors jutting out into the pavement at waist height.

Matt resisted the urge to answer ‘a car’. Sometimes the oldest lines were not always the best.

‘A Karmann Ghia….’

‘Wow.’ Not Lizzie at her most articulate. But definitely one of her favourite classic cars of all time. Very stylish. A sign? An image of Clare shaking her head appeared. Of course not. Just a car.

‘It’s one of my weaknesses, I’m afraid. I spent my last bonus on having her resprayed.’

‘Convertible?’ Lizzie knew the answer before she’d even asked the question.

‘Of course. Vital for the approximately thirteen sunny days we have every year.’ He grinned, proud of his male logic.

Lizzie laughed. Excellent. He could tease himself, and hadn’t even tried to drop engine statistics into the conversation.

‘Such a great shape. Obviously designed when wind tunnels hadn’t been invented to ensure maximum fuel efficiency.’

Matt nodded. ‘We’ll have to go for a spin in it some time.’

A spin? A spin? Matt’s cool temporarily deserted him. No one had gone for a spin in forty years. Was embracing your parents’ vernacular all part of the ageing process?

‘That’d be great.’ Lizzie hadn’t registered ‘spin’ per se, only the allusion to a follow-up outing before they’d even left the doorstep. Excellent. ‘So where are we off to, then?’

Lizzie managed to sound much calmer and more offhand than she felt. She could feel her blood coursing through her veins and was trying to breathe deeply and slowly without it being apparent to anyone but herself. She didn’t want Matt to think she was about to break into an aria as they were walking along.

‘I’ve booked a table at that flash-looking restaurant on the river. I thought we could probably walk from here. It’s a perfect day.’

‘Fab.’ A man who felt happy eating somewhere that wasn’t a pub, a Café Rouge or a Pizza Express. And he was right, it was a perfect day. Lizzie inhaled deeply as they walked down the road. It smelt like December. That fresh, clear, cold and slightly smoky smell which even in London made you think of log fires and snow-covered copses.

Winter was probably Lizzie’s favourite season. On the days when the pale yellow sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky and frosty grass crunched underfoot, life was good. There was something ethereal about wrapping up in jumpers and fleeces and walking until the tips of her ears and toes froze only to be rewarded with a steaming mug of hot chocolate, or lunch with a mysterious new man…

Matt broke into her reverie. ‘I love days like this. All we need is a bit of snow and a few Alps…’

Yippee—same wavelength.

‘An open fire…logs crackling…and blankets.’ She had meant it innocently enough. Only out loud it had overtones, under-tones and double entendre at every turn. Matt fortunately hadn’t picked up on it. He was happily chatting about the positive effects of sunshine on the UV-challenged British public.

As they strolled down towards the river Lizzie sighed contentedly. It was at times like this that she felt the relief of finally being an adult without all the hang-ups and put-downs that had dominated almost every conversation on dates in her twenties. So her dates were further and fewer between these days—at least they had some potential when they did happen. A complete contrast to the grab-any-guy-to-prove-I’m-still-attractive approach that had kicked in after her last serious relationship crashed and burned. No one was going to tell her who she was and what she wanted any more. Love me, love my CD collection. Gone were the days of hiding The Best of Erasure in the depths of her underwear drawer. It might have taken a while, but it seemed she had finally learnt her lessons well.

Lizzie managed to eat her herb salad without splashing her face with balsamic vinegar or resorting to the Ermintrude display-a-leaf-between-your-lips approach, and didn’t spill anything on herself or the tablecloth during the other courses. From their table by the window they watched rowing crews glide past, a reminder of halcyon days when sportsmen hadn’t felt the need to don shiny sportswear plastered with the marks of their sponsors. The tranquillity was interrupted intermittently by the idiosyncratically speedy and noisy afterbirth of fibreglass bathtub launches and loudhailers as the coaches tried to keep up with their oarsmen.

The distraction was welcome as they hadn’t drunk nearly enough to move onto the searching questions round, and so their conversations were dominated by dissections of work and Friday night. Lizzie was doing her best to fill any silences, and it was due to this, coupled with an over-attentive head waiter who appeared silently to check on them at inopportune intervals, that Matt hadn’t got round to mentioning his marital status. He’d now decided to wait until there weren’t people sitting at tables only a few metres away desperate to eavesdrop on other people’s lives because their own were so dull. He didn’t feel the need to provide a floor show. Nor was he impatient to ruin the moment.

The light was fading rapidly by the time they’d finished their coffees, and it was Matt who suggested that they cross the bridge and go for a walk in Bishops Park. He took a deep breath as he followed Lizzie out of the restaurant. It was now or never.

He was just rehearsing his confession in his head when he realised that Lizzie must have asked him a question and was, as is customary in a conversation, now waiting for an answer. Her eyes were glistening, and to his amusement he noticed that perfect crimson circles had formed on her cheeks, which were now rosy in the style of Noddy Goes to Toytown. He smiled slowly, stalling. It was no good; he was going to have to admit that he had been thinking about something else instead of hanging on her every word.

‘Well?’ Lizzie was getting a little impatient.

‘Sorry, Liz… What did you ask me?’

‘I just wanted to know if you do this often.’

‘What?’ Matt wondered if the word had come out as defensively as he thought it had. Lizzie didn’t seem to have noticed anything strange. But then she didn’t have a guilty conscience screaming silently at her.

‘You know—pick up women on a Friday night, play the chivalrous man, whisk them home in a cab, send them a basket of cakes, and then do a Sunday lunch date?’