Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Well.” What would they have done? “We went for a cup of coffee, and then we went to see a French film at the cinema in Russell Square, and then… That was it, really.”

“What happened at the end?”

“The woman found out her husband had been sleeping with a poet and she moved out.”

“No, at the end of the date, stupid.”

Typical Linda: she’d missed the admittedly mild witticism, but she made Annie seem like the idiot.

“Yes, I…”

Oh, what did it matter? It was all ridiculous. She had invented an Internet date, and the Internet date had been invented to replace another date that she was beginning to feel might have been half fantasy anyway. Why not continue on the same path and give Linda something to goggle at?

“We just said good-bye. It was… It was all slightly awkward, actually. He brought his girlfriend with him, and I think he was hoping…”

“Oh, my God!”

“I know.”

If the story she was telling were ever to be published, she’d have to thank Ros in the acknowledgments, maybe even offer her coauthorship. According to Ros, that sort of thing would almost certainly have happened, if she had really met somebody over the Internet.

“It happens more than you think,” said Annie. “The stories I could tell.”

She was beginning to feel like a real novelist, suddenly. Her first fiction was semiautobiographical, but now that she had some confidence she was pushing off into deeper imaginative territory.

“Have you been doing a lot of Internet dating, then?”

“Not really.” It was harder than it looked, storytelling. It involved chucking the truth out altogether, something that Annie clearly wasn’t prepared to do just yet. “But the couple of dates I’ve been on were so weird that I could probably tell you five or six stories about each one.”

Linda shook her head sympathetically. “I’m so glad I’m not out there.”

“You’re lucky.”

This last sentiment wasn’t a reflection of Annie’s true feelings. The time she’d spent with Mike had led her to believe that Linda was one of the unluckiest people she had ever met.

“And Duncan?”

“He met somebody else.”

“You’re kidding me. I don’t believe it. My God.”

“He wasn’t so bad.”

“Oh, Annie! He was ghastly.”

“Well, he was no Mike, true, but…”

Was that overdoing it? Surely even Linda could see that she was being satirical. But no. Linda just allowed a faint, smug smile to scud across her face. “Anyway. He met somebody else.”

“Who on earth did he meet? If that’s any of my beeswax.”

“A woman called Gina who teaches with him at the college.”

“She must be desperate.”

“Lots of lonely people are.”

It was a gentle rebuke, but it did the trick. Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness—it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded. She’d never have stood for an hour outside the Dickens Museum like that if she hadn’t just been coming down with it.

Annie’s cell phone rang just as the papadums were being served. She didn’t recognize the number, which was why she took the call.

“Hello?”

The voice was deeper than she had imagined, but weaker, too—tremulous, almost.

“Is this Annie?”

“Yes.”

“Hello. This is Tucker Crowe.”

“Hello.” The first word she had ever said to him, and it came encrusted with ice. “I hope you have a good excuse.”

“Moderately good. Mildly good. I had a mild heart attack, pretty much as soon as I got off the plane. I wish I could tell you that it was more serious than that, but there we are. It was enough.”

“Oh, my God. Are you okay?”

“I’m not so bad. Most of the damage seems to be psychic. Apparently I’m not going to live forever, as I previously thought.”

“What can I do?”

“I’d welcome a visit from somebody outside my own family.”

“Done. And what can I bring you? Do you need anything?”

“I could probably use some books. Something English and foggy. But not as foggy as Barnaby Rudge .”

Annie laughed a little more than Tucker would have understood, got the name of the hospital, ended the call and blushed. She was always blushing these days. Perhaps she was literally getting younger, shooting all the way backward to prepubescence. And the whole terrible business could start all over again.

“And was that one of your stories?” Linda asked her. “It looks like it, from the color you’ve turned.”

“Well. Yes. I suppose he is.”

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

Nobody, she discovered the next morning, ever waited impatiently outside a bookstore for it to open. She was on her own in the cold. She’d got to Charing Cross Road at eight-fifty, only to discover that none of them opened their doors before nine-thirty; she went for a coffee, came back, and at nine-thirty-one she was watching through the plate-glass door as the staff fiddled around with the displays in the front of the store. What were they doing? Surely they must have worked out that she wasn’t hopping up and down because she needed a celebrity cookbook. It was just as well that nobody could die of a thirst for literature: these people would just leave you gasping on the sidewalk. Finally, finally, a young man with stubble and long, greasy hair unlocked the door and slid it back, and Annie wriggled through the gap.

She’d had a few ideas overnight. Tucker would never find out, but the truth was that she’d been unable to sleep, because she’d been constructing a reading list in her head. At two in the morning she’d decided that ten books would be enough to cover his wants and her enthusiasms, but when she woke up she could see that turning up with a teetering tower of paperbacks would provide Tucker with all the evidence he needed to prove that she was unbalanced and obsessed. Two would be plenty, three if she really couldn’t decide. She ended up buying four, with the intention of ruling out two of them on the way to the hospital. She had no idea whether he’d like them, mainly because she knew nothing about him, other than that he liked Dickens. The hospital was somewhere near Marble Arch, so she walked up to Oxford Street and got a bus in what she hoped was a westerly direction.

Except… surely everyone who liked nineteenth-century fiction had read Vanity Fair ? And was a book titled Hangover Square an appropriate gift for a recovering alcoholic? And then there was the sex in Fingersmith … Would he think that was some kind of come-on? And wasn’t the sex mostly of the lesbian variety? Would he think she was trying to warn him that she wasn’t interested in him in that way? When in fact the whole idea was that she was trying to indicate the opposite? Plus, he’d had a heart attack, so maybe no book containing sex of any variety was tactful. Oh, shit. She looked out the window of the bus, saw a chain bookstore and got off at the next stop.

At the entrance to the hospital, Annie found herself stuffing four brand-new paperbacks that she couldn’t afford into a trash can and feeling sick with guilt. She was throwing the books away because she’d bought too many and didn’t know where to hide the ones she didn’t need; also because he might decide that some of her choices were overobvious and patronizing; also because she hadn’t read one or two of them, and she should have, and if he asked her what they were about she would stutter and blush. She was in a panic, of course, she could see that. She was nervous, and when she was nervous she overthought everything. She caught sight of herself in the mirrored door of the elevator on the way up to his room: she looked awful, tired and old. Maybe instead of worrying about Victorian novels she should have worried more about her makeup. And she wished she’d slept better; she never looked good when she’d had less than seven hours’ sleep. He probably wasn’t looking so great, though, which was some consolation. Maybe that was the Annie Paradox: she could only appeal to men too sick to do much about anything. She flicked uselessly at her hair and walked out of the elevator and down the hall.