Jane Gordon - My Fair Man

Hattie was quiet for a moment as she took in the flushed face of her friend. It would be just like Claire to mess this whole thing up by bringing sex into the equation.

‘I think you’ll find that we will need a great deal more than soap and water to help Jimmy achieve his potential,’ she said curtly.

‘Oh Hattie, don’t be so prim. In the right clothes, with the right props, with a few very cosmetic changes we could pull off this bet tomorrow. He’s bloody perfect,’ said Claire with a wistful smile.

‘But he is lost, Claire. Can’t you see that? I think he has had a very limited education and if he is to be more than a gigolo or a bloody rent boy he can’t just rely on his looks.’

At this point Jimmy came out of the bathroom dressed in Toby’s clothes. They were too small – Hattie hadn’t realised how tall he was – so that the jeans were far too short and the T-shirt was strained around Jimmy’s unexpectedly muscular body. But the effect, despite the tightness of the clothes (or perhaps because of the tightness of the clothes) was devastating.

‘We’ll have to take him shopping,’ said Claire in wonderment, ‘and he’ll need a good haircut and some radical dentistry …’

The two women continued to appraise him as they all made their way down to the kitchen, Claire making some mental notes on how she might – with her renowned taste and styling skills – effect a transformation.

‘We’ll start tomorrow. I’ll try and clear some space in my diary and make some appointments. I know this wonderful cosmetic dental surgeon just round the corner from Harrods. He’s done them all …’ she named a couple of celebrities, taking command in a way that slightly irritated Hattie.

‘That is, if Jimmy agrees to go along with all this,’ Hattie said, glancing across at Jimmy who was beginning to look more at ease – at home even – in her flat.

‘Will you help me with my research, Jimmy?’ she asked.

‘Aye, man, why not?’ he said as he opened the fridge and surveyed the contents. ‘Where d’ya keep the brown sauce?’

Hattie and Claire spent most of that Sunday afternoon making lists and notes on how Jimmy’s makeover would best be achieved. First of all he had to have somewhere to live. Hattie knew that his continued presence in her flat would agitate and alienate Toby – who had still not returned home – but she was unwillingly to allow Claire to take him back to her own cramped mews house. She wanted to be in control of what happened to Jimmy because she was a little suspicious of the motives of her friend, whose values were not always her own.

They agreed that if they were going to win Jon’s bet they would have to be prepared to invest some of their own money in the project. Hattie agreed to put up half the figure wagered – £2500 – to cover the initial costs of buying clothes and making the cosmetic changes Claire deemed necessary.

But to win the bet it wasn’t enough to have his hair cut, his teeth straightened and to buy him new clothes. If Jimmy were to fit in with Jon’s definition of ‘a man of worth’ he was going to have to be able to make some sort of living. And whilst Jimmy himself was eager to continue selling the Big Issue on his pitch near the Opera House – ‘so I can pay my way a bit, like’ – Hattie wanted more for him.

Rather more, in fact, than Claire, who was even now hooting with laughter as she tried to understand Jimmy’s Geordie idioms.

‘Haddaway, man?’ Claire said in mocking imitation of Jimmy’s pronunciation of his favourite phrase. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

He was clearly shocked by her language. In fact, Hattie had already discovered, he never resorted to using the guttural expletives that commonly punctuated Claire’s conversation. The worst words in his albeit limited vocabulary were ‘shite’ and ‘bugger’.

There was, as Hattie had hoped and suspected, something rather dignified about the man Jon would dismiss as worthless.

‘“Haddaway, man”,’ said Hattie, ‘means “Get away with you” or “Would you ever?” Am I right Jimmy?’

He looked across at her gratefully. She had become an interpreter for him in this strange new world. For he found the language of these women totally incomprehensible. He was fascinated by Claire’s transatlantic accent – and rather disappointed to discover that it was Canadian – but she spoke so fast that he found it difficult to keep up with her words. In fact there was little about either of the women that Jimmy understood. The women in his own life – those in his vast dysfunctional family – were very different creatures and whilst he was at times mesmerised by the attention of two such attractive and confident females, he didn’t trust them.

He was sufficiently worldly, though, to realise that going along with Hattie’s research could be of benefit to him even if, along the way, he had to endure their mocking patronage. And if he had to choose one of them as his protector, then it would be Hattie, even if it meant staying in this odd place and accepting the disapproval and contempt of her man. So he agreed to their plans, and to staying on in her flat.

When Claire departed for home late that afternoon Hattie set about creating Jimmy his own area within the vast living space. Although their home was the height of fashion – what estate agents now described as a New York loft – it was ill-suited to house guests. There were no doors on the ground floor except to the kitchen and just the one big bedroom and bathroom upstairs so that Hattie had to fashion Jimmy a room by putting together two Japanese screens and offer him a foldaway futon to sleep on.

‘There is one thing, Jimmy. Toby really doesn’t like smoking. I don’t mind, in fact I used to smoke before I met him …’

‘Aye?’ he said.

‘So when you want a cigarette, do you think you could go and stand outside the front door … so the smoke doesn’t pollute the flat…?’ she said nervously.

Then she turned her attention to Rex. The dog, she explained, would need to be a little more house-trained if he were to live with them.

‘But he pittles in street,’ said Jimmy.

‘I know he does but he, well, he smells rather dreadful, Jimmy. Couldn’t we give him a bath?’

‘Rex hates water,’ said Jimmy.

Rex, Hattie was beginning to suspect, hated everything apart from food and Jimmy. He growled every time Hattie or Claire inadvertently went near him, and he barked in a shrill, neurotic fashion every time the doorbell or the phone went. Worse, he clearly had a digestive problem which – perhaps aggravated by the sushi he had eaten for breakfast – resulted in regular emissions of offensive ozone-eroding wind. Hattie had grown up with dogs – her father had always had a brace of Labradors for shooting and her mother was never parted from her beloved West Highland terrier – but try as she might she could find nothing about Rex that was remotely attractive. She accepted, though, that the dog represented the closest thing to family in Jimmy’s life and she supposed she would have to establish some sort of relationship with him.

‘We have to clean him, Jimmy. We’ve got to do something to try and remove the bad smell from under Toby’s nose,’ she said, although she doubted if pickling the dog in Chanel No. 5 or Eternity would make Toby more tolerant of him.

Hattie ran a bath filled with pungent bubbles and Jimmy carried the reluctant, whimpering dog and immersed him in the warm water.

There followed a terrible scene in which Rex fought, scratched, clawed and finally bit his way out of the bath, displacing gallons of water over Hattie, Jimmy and the floor, before disappearing back into his favourite place under the kitchen table.