Jane Gordon - My Fair Man

She indicated that he should sit down – something she had noticed he didn’t like to do when he ate – and he slipped onto one of the steel chairs next to Toby. Rex, who followed his master like a particularly distorted shadow, slunk beneath the table.

‘Christ Almighty – he’s got my fucking clothes on!’ exclaimed Toby, who had, until now, not focused on the newly cleaned up and beautiful Jimmy. ‘That’s the last fucking straw …’

‘Eee, man, I’m sorry,’ said Jimmy, his wonderful face blushing with embarrassment.

‘Don’t be sorry, Jimmy,’ said Hattie shortly. ‘Toby has got at least a dozen pairs of jeans and, to my certain knowledge, over fifty plain white Paul Smith T-shirts—’

‘That’s not the point, Hattie,’ said Toby, who was experiencing, Hattie suddenly surmised, stirrings of what was probably deep sexual jealousy.

His eyes ran across the face of the unwanted intruder and down his torso to the crotch of his tight Tommy Hilfiger jeans.

‘Besides, Toby, they look much better on Jimmy – even if they are a little too small,’ Hattie added with a merry laugh.

There was an awkward silence during which it seemed as if Toby might leave. But something – the idea of this beautiful stranger sleeping so close to Hattie, or the delicious aroma of the pasta – made him stay and eat.

Jimmy – who had been studying the food with a wary eye – watched Hattie and Toby begin to eat, in the mannered way that they did, with just their forks in their right hands. Picking up his own fork and his butter knife he began gingerly to taste the pasta on his plate.

Alone with the two women Jimmy had been far more relaxed, but in the presence of this hostile stranger he was obviously intimidated. He stopped eating, switched his fork into his right hand and slowly attempted to imitate the way they so expertly ate their food. Very carefully he managed to prod his fork through the pasta and lift it to his mouth. His progress was slow, painful and noisy.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said Toby, pushing his half-empty plate away. ‘I think I’ll watch some television and get an early night.’

‘In the bedroom?’ enquired Hattie.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to intrude on our guest’s space,’ said Toby, moving to get up. ‘JESUS CHRIST! That bloody dog bit my leg!’

‘He’s a wonderful guard dog,’ said Hattie defensively.

‘It’s probably bloody rabid,’ Toby said, moving quickly out of Rex’s way. ‘It should be muzzled.’

It occurred to Hattie that Toby and Rex had a lot in common right now. Both were behaving in a territorial fashion that was positively primeval. They both needed muzzling, growling and snarling as they sought to demonstrate their supremacy.

Toby’s exit up the stairs had a liberating effect on Jimmy, who jumped up, reached into the cupboard and returned to the table clutching a jar of crushed sun-dried tomato paste, the closest thing to ketchup he had yet found in this strange, foreign kitchen. Standing up, with the plate in his hand, he began to eat the food – now covered in the rich, red sauce – with more enthusiasm while he walked up and down the room.

Hattie suspected that long before he was reduced to squatting on the streets Jimmy had got used to eating wherever and whenever he could. And almost never at a table. He was happiest, she had already noted, pacing up and down while he ate.

‘Why don’t you finish that in front of the television, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘while I go and check up on Toby?’

Putting her own plate on the sheet steel work surface she left him alone and went upstairs.

Toby was lying in bed channel hopping in a slightly less furious fashion than Jimmy had done earlier. He looked up at her with a cold hard face.

‘How long is this going to go on, Hattie?’

‘Well, I’ve got just under three months to achieve the transformation,’ she said gaily, ‘so I suppose till about August.’

‘That’s ridiculous. I’m sure Jon wasn’t really serious about that bet. He certainly wouldn’t expect us to put up with this kind of upheaval for some bloody wager about a brain-dead bum like that.’

‘It was you who said that Jon is always serious about his bets. And anyway, what makes you think he’s brain dead?’

‘Those teeth for a start.’

‘You mean no orthodontic care when he was a child might indicate a low IQ?’

‘Low life, Hattie. He’s low life. Anyone with any sense could see that. Christ, he eats like a pig. He can barely speak, for Christ’s sakes. And what he does say is virtually unintelligible.’

‘He’s limited by his education, Toby. He didn’t go to Charterhouse—’

‘It’s more than that, Hattie. He’s on the same evolutional level as his bloody dog. He’s not even house-trained. He pees in the sink, he smokes and he can’t sit still to eat. And it’s quite clear from this evening that he’s rarely come into contact with a knife or fork before.’

‘You are so fucking bourgeois, Toby. All you are saying is that he is not what you would classify as civilised. But that’s just conditioning. You can teach people to eat with a knife and fork and to pull the chain on the loo – which incidentally you forget to do every morning when you pee – but what you cannot teach anyone is sensitivity. It’s insensitivity that makes a man into an animal, Toby …’

‘You really are serious, aren’t you? You’d really put that animal before anything else in your life – our relationship, my happiness. Can’t you see it’s intolerable for me to have to live with him in my home?’

‘It’s my home, Toby …’

‘You always used to say our home, Hattie.’

‘Oh Toby, you know this means a lot to me. It might strike you as absurd and selfish behaviour but actually I am trying to help Jimmy. To take the animal – as you call it – out of the man and give him a chance to be something else than a creature that skulks around the streets and sleeps in shop doorways.’

‘Fine but not here , Hattie.’

‘Do you know something, Toby, this boy has awoken something in me. Oh, I know that I have always had what you and Jon sneeringly used to refer to as a social conscience but I have never before been able to make the difference in the way I can with Jimmy. Every day I see people who are so damaged by what has happened in their lives that it is almost impossible to help them. But I can only do so much for them. With him I have the chance to really achieve something. I believe that beneath that animal you see there is a fine human being with the potential to achieve great things. It’s as if he were new, do you understand, raw, waiting to be transformed into something special? If you don’t like it you can go back and live in your flat for a while.’

‘He could turn out to be Frankenstein’s monster.’

‘Oh, I hardly think so, Toby. Look at him. He has, apart from those teeth and tattoos, a quite extraordinary beauty.’

‘So that’s it then? That’s what you see in him?’

‘Don’t be so stupid, Toby. I am not the slightest bit interested in him in that way,’ she said with a giggle as Toby confirmed the jealousy she’d earlier suspected. ‘I am just saying that he has outstanding natural grace and beauty. And more than that, he has got – I don’t quite know how to express it – something .’

Toby’s face softened as his fear of Hattie’s attraction to Jimmy receded. His insecurity – so rarely expressed by a man who carefully controlled all his emotions – touched what was left of Hattie’s love for him.

‘Is that your only objection, that I might find him attractive?’ she said, laughing and reaching a hand out to hold his in the comforting way you might take the hand of a small, unsure boy.