Stella Newman - Pear Shaped

It’s 6.24pm. Two hours and twenty before I have to leave the house to meet him. I perform all ablutions as carefully as possible but I’m in such a panic that I cut my leg shaving. This happens to me about once every three shaves. I’m clumsy and impatient, but I have the added bonus of having Factor XI deficiency, a harmless but irritating disorder I inherited from my dad that means when I bleed, I take a while to stop bleeding. I once cut myself shaving before I had to get on the Eurostar to Paris for a choux pastry seminar and by the time I got to the Champs Elysees, I had a shoe full of blood. Pas très chic.

It will bleed for at least twenty minutes now, but I don’t have time to sit with my leg up and wait for it to stop, so I end up Sellotaping a wodge of toilet paper to my ankle while I go about drying my hair, flossing, and moisturising.

7.59pm, I remove my makeshift tourniquet and my ankle proceeds to drip blood like a slow-leaking tap. I was planning on wearing tights anyway – it’s freezing out – but I can’t just put them over the wound. I settle for two giant plasters and take a spare pair of tights in my handbag – I’ll have to pop to the loo in the restaurant as soon as I get there and change these, and clean up the blood stains from my foot … sexy stuff.

I put on my soft, slinky Topshop black dress and notice with a hiccup of delight that it has never been this loose on me. Final touches of make-up, perfume, a spritz of fig room spray in the hall, and I’m off.

James is sitting nursing a gin and tonic, chatting to the barman, when I walk in. He grins when he sees me and the barman gives me the once-over too. I have made an effort – high heels, earrings, the hair is behaving well. Or maybe the barman checks me out because there aren’t that many younger women in here – the clientele seems to be 60% gay men, and the rest are middle-aged fashion and media types sporting faux spectacles, frowns and unseasonal tans.

‘Have a drink,’ says James, handing me the cocktail list.

‘I don’t need that, I’ll have an Old Fashioned please, Maker’s Mark,’ I say to the barman, who winks his approval.

James immediately rests his hand on my knee. ‘A girl who knows what she wants.’

‘Well, it took me years of research in the field, but I finally found a drink that I love.’

‘And you never drink other cocktails?’

‘Sometimes. But an Old Fashioned has all the qualities I look for in my booze. Not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard for a barman to mess up….’

‘And what about men, what qualities do you look for in a man?’

I stop myself saying ‘not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard …’ -it’ll sound cheap. Instead I run through the essential criteria that twenty years of dating has reduced me to:

Kind

Funny

Clean

Not mentally ill

Tall, big nosed, and a thick head of hair is a bonus. James appears to tick most of these boxes so far (you can’t judge mentally ill after just two dates). If I say anything on this list, I’ll look too keen.

‘I’m looking for a grown-up,’ I say.

He makes to get up from the bar and leave.

‘And someone thoughtful. What about you?’ I say.

‘I’m looking for someone warm and smart. Feisty. Reasonably attractive …’ he grins.

I wonder if his definition of ‘reasonably attractive’ can encompass a woman with a few stretch marks and a light smattering of cellulite.

‘Would you go out with Nigella?’ I say. Such a good test of a man’s shallowness – can he appreciate a gorgeous woman with a real body.

‘Far too old for me!’ he says.

‘She’s near enough your age, you cheeky git!’

He shrugs.

‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ I say.

‘She’s nice looking. Anyway, looks aren’t everything.’

The maître d’ beckons us over, and as we stand, James reaches under his bar stool and presents me with a bag.

‘I got you something,’ he says.

‘Really?’ I say, shocked. Inside the bag is a large bottle of Aromatherapy Associates Rosemary Bath Oil that he must have bought me in Duty Free, wherever he has been.

‘I know you like rosemary,’ he says. I do? ‘The pasta you ordered at the Italian …’

Bless him, I love the taste of rosemary but I don’t want to smell like a roast lamb. Still, extremely thoughtful and sweet of him.

‘That’s lovely of you, James Stephens. Thank you.’ I kiss him briefly on the mouth and feel his eyes on the back of me as I walk to the ladies’ room to check whether my ankle has stopped bleeding.

The ankle is fine, but I change tights anyway as I have to take off the old ones to dab a slight blood stain on my foot.

When I return five minutes later, there is a bottle of decent red on the table.

‘One of the chefs at work was telling me that this place is famous for its mince and potatoes,’ I say, looking at the menu.

‘I knew you’d be a good woman to go out with,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat.’ Men always say this. It is often bullshit and means ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat but neither can I stand girls who show signs of having eaten’. It is invariably the same men who say ‘I like girls who look natural’, but actually mean girls who only wear foundation, cover up, pressed powder, blush, a bit of eye pencil and a lot of mascara.

‘Oh, and save room for The Queen of Puddings, it’s meant to be amazing.’

‘Queen of Puddings, isn’t that your job?’ he says, smiling.

‘I wish, I’m only a junior developer,’ I say.

‘Still, it sounds great. I think it’s brilliant what you do for a living … Queen of Puddings. So you just sit around stuffing your face with cake all day, do you?’

‘There’s a little more to it than that. You have to think of new concepts, follow market trends, brief suppliers, work out if a product’s manageable in budget, there’s all the microbiotics, health and safety, shelf life, packaging, travel testing …’

‘So you do, you basically get paid to eat cake,’ he clinks his glass against mine in congratulation.

‘Sometimes I bake cakes all day …’

‘You cook at work?’

‘Great job, huh?’ I say.

‘Is that why you don’t paint your nails?’ He makes it sound like I have half a finger missing that he’s been too polite to ask about, but has been dying to know the story behind – did a squirrel bite it off?

‘No,’ I say, tucking my hands away on to my lap. ‘I’m just not always a full hair and make-up kind of girl. I don’t have the time. Why, do you like painted fingernails?’

‘A little red nail polish never goes amiss …’ he says.

‘You really did have your teenage sexual awakening in the 80s,’ I say, shaking my head.

He laughs and fills my glass, then rests his hands on the table. My hands spontaneously float up from my lap to be beside his.

‘God, you don’t see many women out like that anymore,’ says James, as a six-foot, heavily made-up twenty-something in a full-length fur walks in, flanked by a tubby man of around fifty.

‘Bimbos with sugar daddies? London’s full of them!’

‘No, I mean the coat. That’s Russian sable!’ he says admiringly.

‘– I think it’s a bit tacky,’ I say.

‘The coat?’

‘No, them – he looks like he’s paying her by the hour. – How do you know it’s a Russian sable?’

‘The bluish tinge. Do you know that the mating ritual of the Russian sable can last up to eight hours?’ he says, leaning forward, a huge smile breaking across his face.

‘Sounds like Sting … anyway, how do you know all this?’

‘My grandfather was a furrier – Stephanikov Furs, in the East End. Do you like fur?’