Isabel Wolff - The Trials of Tiffany Trott

‘Are you feeling tense, Tiffany?’ he suddenly asked me.

‘Tense? Oh, no, no, no. Not at all. No.’

‘It’s just that you do seem quite, well, tense. And nervous. I think you are tense and nervous, aren’t you, Tiffany?’ he persisted as the bottle of house red arrived.

‘Mille grazie, Rodney,’ he said. ‘You see, I do have that effect on women,’ he continued. ‘I’m told I make them nervous. I can’t help it,’ he added as he poured wine into his glass tumbler, and then mine. He looked up at me. ‘I seem to have this … power over women.’

Neville was wearing a checked shirt with no tie, the top three buttons undone. And in the hairs on his chest was a white, pus-filled boil, like a tiny electric lightbulb. I found myself staring at it, wondering if it was about to pop. To distract myself I asked him about his academic career, and it turned out he wasn’t a professor of cytogenetics. He wasn’t a professor of anything. He wasn’t even a lecturer. He was still a student – at thirty-six!

‘Still trying to get those O levels?’ I quipped as the wine kicked in.

He looked offended. ‘Actually, I’m doing a PhD.’

‘Wow! What’s it about?’ I enquired, chewing the end of a breadstick.

‘It’s about the influence of Breton ballads on early nineteenth-century Quebecois poetry. It’s really fascinating. You know, you British really have no idea how vibrant Canadian culture is.’

‘On the contrary,’ I replied. ‘I’ve read all Margaret Atwood’s novels. They were jolly good. And I’ve got three Glenn Gould CDs.’

‘You’re all so insular,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘I mean, there were local elections in Winnipeg last week, but there was nothing about it in the British press. And the Quebec problem hardly gets covered at all, despite the fact that the potential break-up of the Canadian federation is an issue of enormous international concern.’ By this time I couldn’t have cared less if Canada became the fifty-first state in the Union.

‘Don’t mind me,’ he suddenly said with a little, low laugh. ‘I’m very pugilistic. I like to provoke. I get in a lot of fights. I get in a lot of fights over women.’ He shifted in his seat, then hooked his elbows around the back of his chair. ‘Sometimes, I just walk out of tutorials, right in the middle of them – bang! – just like that. My PhD supervisor says I’m a mixture of charm and war.’ Charm and war! Gosh. Charm and bore more like.

He looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m gonna level with you, Tiffany,’ he said. ‘I’m very … complex. I’ve done a lot of drugs and I’ve had a lot of women. A whole string of them. It’s been pretty easy for me.’ Why, then, the need to advertise his charms in the personal column of a national newspaper? ‘But I’m tired of womanising,’ he added, by way of explanation. ‘I want kids. Lots of them. But only with the right kind of woman. Hence my ad. Now a lot of really gorgeous women have written to me, Tiffany. And one of them is going to be the mother of my children. Maybe it’ll be you, though frankly I think you’re a little bit old for that. But I thought your photo was cute.’

Suddenly he leant forward and said, ‘Guess who holds the world record for break-dancing at high altitude?’

‘Er, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘That’s rather a tricky one. Um, let me guess … not … you?’

He nodded slowly, with a lop-sided little smile.

‘Gosh!’ I said. ‘And how often do you play ice-hockey?’

‘Tiffany.’ He was staring at me intensely again. ‘Enough about me. I want you to tell me all about yourself. You haven’t told me a thing.’ He hadn’t asked.

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘It’s half past eight, and I’ve got an early start tomorrow. But it’s been very interesting meeting you,’ I said truthfully, putting down a fiver for the wine. ‘And, well … ’ I groped for some definitive valediction. ‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Ciao.’

I’m going to try the small ads again! You see, I’m beginning to get the hang of it now. But no more weird, superannuated students thank you very much – Eligible Successfuls only from now on! And I must say I rather like these Twin Souls telephone ads, where you don’t have to write off to some anonymous post box and then wait weeks for a reply. You just dial a number, listen to their recorded voice-mail and leave them a message of your own. It’s brilliant because, let’s face it, voices are pretty important. I mean, on paper a man could look fantastic, but then the ‘Successful City Professional, 44’ could, in reality, be a ‘Successfuw Ci-ee Professionaw, Fawee-fawer’. And that wouldn’t do at all, would it? So these answerphone ads are jolly good. Expensive, of course. But then what’s fifty pence a minute compared to my future happiness?

Anyway, having listened to – what? – forty or fifty of these earlier on today I’ve found one I really like: ‘Adventurous, Seriously Successful Managing Director, 41, 6 foot, slim, attractive, amusing, urbane, WLTM unforgettable girl in her 20s/30s who doesn’t mind being spoilt a little, or even a lot.’ His voice was so nice – neither horribly posh, nor obviously plebeian. Smooth without being smarmy. Cultivated, but not cut glass. Perfect. Wonder why he’s still single? Anyway, he can spoil me as much as he likes, and I’ll spoil him right back – with interest. Of course, leaving the reply’s a bit of an ordeal. I felt quite shy actually, and had to have a couple of goes at it, but then hell! We’re all in the same boat here, so what’s the problem? We’re just people who are too busy, too dynamic, too successful, too eligible, too desirable and too bloody attractive to find the time to stop being … um … alone. So we’re just being really sensible about our completely puzzling lack of a life partner and resorting to a little artifice.

‘Hellooooo,’ I whispered into the receiver in the most Felicity Kendalish voice I could manage. ‘My name’s Tiffany. Tiffany Trott. Now, I know you’ll have heard from about seventeen million unforgettable girls in their twenties and thirties, but you don’t need them – you need me! Why? Because I’m happy and busy, and I like jokes and I’m thirty-seven, single, and um … desperate – ha ha ha! No, but seriously … I’m short, blonde, on the fat side and quite jolly. Ummmm … so there we have it. That’s me, Tiffany. Tiffany Trott. So please give me a call soon. PS: I hope you don’t like golf. PPS: Isn’t this fun?’

Wow! That’s it. I hope he gives me a ring – preferably one with a big diamond on it, lozenge cut. On the other hand a large square emerald would be nice or – and this is dead trendy – a right knuckleduster of an aquamarine. Yes, according to this month’s edition of Brides and Setting Up Home magazine, aquamarines are the stone of choice. In the meantime, there’s dinner with Angus and Alison this evening. I suppose I’ll be the only single woman – as usual. And as usual they’ll have invited along some dreary, physiognomically-challenged, halitotic ex-army chap for me, who will have absolutely nothing to say. And seeing me struggle to extract conversation out of him over the curried avocado will make Alison and Angus think how lucky they are to be married, and thank God for that Young Conservatives do in Croydon in 1982, otherwise they’d never have met each other and they’d have ended up sad singles too, like poor, poor Tiffany.

Got that one completely wrong. On several counts. I wasn’t the only single woman – Catherine was there too, thank God. And my ‘date’ was OK-looking-bordering-on-the-almost-acceptable. A GP in his early forties. And he certainly wasn’t dreary. Oh no. He had plenty to say.