My Fair Man. Jane Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ I say. I bet you couldn’t redeem that man – as a kind of wager. You can walk into a betting shop and put money on anything from man walking on Mars to England winning the World Cup. I’m prepared to bet you that you cannot change that man. That it wouldn’t be possible to take him off the streets and turn him into someone who could join us at this table for dinner. That it wouldn’t be possible to transform him into a man of worth.’

      ‘A real bet? A financial bet?’ Claire asked, as suddenly interested as Hattie.

      ‘Well, I know money’s not important to Hattie – or you really, Claire – but I’m sure it’s bloody important to that man. So yes, let’s do this properly. Let’s put some money on it. Prove to me that I am wrong about him in – let me see – three months from today, and I’ll pay him £5000. If you don’t then I’ll have this month’s interest from your trust fund,’ he said to Hattie with another of those grins that made her want to hit him.

      Hattie glanced at Claire, unsure whether Jon was sober enough to be serious.

      ‘What is your definition of worth, Jon?’ asked Claire.

      ‘Someone you could pass off in polite society.’

      ‘You mean at the Royal Opera House and a pretentious restaurant? Someone that the chattering classes would perceive as one of their own?’ said Hattie sneeringly.

      ‘Yes. But more than that. He’d have to be employed, or at any rate employable. He’d have to be able to carry out a civilised conversation. He’d have to have an appreciation of the finer things of life and be able to satisfy me that he is intelligent. He would have to look, behave and react as if all this were natural to him. And he would have to pass a test that I would devise,’ said Jon, swinging back confidently in his chair.

      ‘God, you are so arrogant,’ said Claire sharply. ‘It would give me so much pleasure to prove you wrong that I would happily risk losing any amount of money. What kind of test would it be?’

      ‘He’d have to be able to prove to a room full of people like this – the chattering classes if that’s what you insist on calling them, Hattie – that he was the genuine article. A man of worth.’

      ‘Three months?’ mused Claire

      ‘Your chance, Hattie,’ said Jon with a slight sneer, ‘to put into practice all your wonderful theories of nurture ruling over nature. And your chance, Claire, to get back at me …’

      ‘Just twelve weeks,’ said Hattie doubtfully.

      ‘So you don’t believe it’s possible either?’ said Jon with glee.

      ‘Of course it’s possible!’ Hattie exclaimed, glancing at Claire for confirmation that she was still on her side.

      Oh the back of a menu Jon began to write out, in fountain pen, his version of a betting slip.

      ‘I promise to pay £5000 if in three months from this day, 16 May, Claire Martin and Hattie George can transform a tramp into the talk of the chattering classes, signed Jon Riley.’

      ‘Take it or leave it,’ he said.

      ‘We’ll take it,’ said Hattie.

      ‘Then write out your response,’ he said, passing the pen across to Claire.

      ‘Claire Martin and Hattie George promise to pay Jon Riley £5000 if, in three months’ time, they have failed to prove him wrong …’ she said aloud as she wrote the words beneath those of Jon. ‘Here, Hattie, now you sign.’

      Hattie took the menu from Claire and signed it. Then, very carefully, she placed it inside her battered briefcase where it lay nestled against her still damp copy of the Big Issue.

Chapter Two

      The strip of light that had worked its way through the crack in the shutters told Hattie that it must be morning. That and the fast breathing of Toby who had been too weary and drunk to make love the night before and was now attempting to redress his usual balance (it was Saturday after all) with some fairly basic foreplay.

      She wished he would stop. She didn’t like sex first thing in the morning before she had brushed her teeth or showered. But then she probably didn’t like it that much last thing at night either. She was, though, far too kind to upset Toby by telling him that she didn’t want him. Or to break it to him that the earth had never really moved for her, that in fact when it came to sex she was a founder member of the flat earth society, unable to imagine that, even on its axis in space, it could ever achieve motion.

      Claire had recently confessed how she had once told some man, in flagrante, to get off her and go home. He had sat weeping into his wilting manhood at the bottom of her bed. But she had not relented. If Hattie were as honest as Claire she would probably have told Toby on more than one occasion to go away and leave her alone. But Hattie approached her partner in rather the way that she approached her patients. The only kind of passion she really felt for him was the occasional bout of compassion.

      It wasn’t that Toby was unattractive. He was good-looking in a clean, smooth-skinned, bookish way. He wore little round steel-rimmed glasses that had made her think, when she had first met him, that he was sensitive and deep. Now she thought that one of the main reasons she had been drawn to him was the fact that he was physically more boyish than manly – his thin, underdeveloped body was entirely hairless – which made her feel that somehow she would be safe with him.

      How long, she wondered idly, would he go on this time? Aware that he was waiting for some indication of her own abandonment she muttered something he might take as an endearment. Then she went back to making out her imaginary Sainsbury’s grocery list – her own reason for making a strong connection between sex and shopping. When Toby made love to her – at least on Saturday mornings – she would take a mental trip down the aisles of her local superstore: Two kilos of Cox’s Orange Pippins, a bunch of small bananas, one kilo of seedless grapes, butter, a pack of Yakult …

      ‘Yes, yes, yes …’

      She lay still for a few minutes after he had finished. She was always impatient, after sex, to get up and off but she knew that sexual etiquette decreed that she lie for a while panting and looking sated – even if she was, in her mind, just making her way down aisle 10 towards the bakery. She was always amazed when Claire, at the outset of some new affair, would admit to having spent two or three whole days in bed. She didn’t mind sleeping in the bed next to Toby but lying next to him in a conscious state was terribly taxing for her. Particularly when, as today, there was so very much to do.

      It was at this moment, almost as she had reached the checkout in Sainsbury’s with her imaginary trolley, that she remembered the bet. Had Jon really meant it or had he been joking? Grabbing her robe from the chair by her bedside she got up and made her way down the flight of stairs and through to the kitchen, the only closed-off part downstairs of her otherwise open-plan loft apartment.

      And there, at the very top of her Samsonite briefcase, tucked alongside that copy of the Big Issue was Jon’s hand-written wager.

      ‘Do you think he was serious?’ she asked Toby as he joined her.

      ‘The terrible tragedy is that even when Jon’s СКАЧАТЬ