The Trouble with Single Women Page 15

  ‘No,’ Fee repeated.

  ‘Good girl,’ Gerry Radcliffe smiled confidently. He was about to pat his employee on the knee, but he remembered himself just in time.

  ‘Watch,’ the man commanded. He pressed a switch in his hand. The room darkened and suddenly the image of a gigantic carton of Pot Noodle appeared on two walls.

  In the dark, somebody giggled.

  ‘Watch,’ the man instructed again.

  This time, a portrait of Babs and Derek, gazing into each other’s eyes, was projected. Behind the couple, the blurred face of Elvis Presley appeared again and again as a recurring motif on the wallpaper.

  The man pressed another switch, the lights came on. The group was in a large study with a panoramic view which included a distant motorway. The décor was all white – white leather sofas, white rugs, two giant brass coffee tables, a small jungle of plants. A massive copper shield hung suspended over an open fireplace. The ‘shield’ consisted of two overlapping hearts engraved with the letters, HAH!

  The man gestured for his entourage, including Fee Travers and Gerry Radcliffe, to take their seats around a glass-topped table.

  ‘Pot Noodle,’ he intoned. ‘And Babs and Derek. What’s the connection?’

  No one spoke. Fee suppressed a smile and Gerry frowned disapprovingly. The man leant back in his white leather chair and folded his hands behind his head, biding his time.

  The silence gave Fee the opportunity to assess her so far brief encounter with the HAH! organization and its founder.

  Harry Macklin, the man who had set the riddle of the connection between instant food and besotted human beings, had a heavily nicotine-stained voice and a Manchester accent.

  He was in his early fifties, a slim man with an incongruous pot belly, as if he’d swallowed a ten-pin ball. He wore white slacks, white loafers and a white cashmere jumper. He resembled an ageing crooner in search of a stint in cabaret.

  He was over six foot tall, self-assured and while Fee couldn’t deny that he was attractive, she was far from enamoured. She guessed that immaturity was probably his worst design fault. And he had a manner that she didn’t take to at all.

  Alongside him was a woman in her late thirties with a hairstyle ten years younger than her face. It was streaked in various shades of blonde and worn loose and long and curly. She wore denim jeans and a matching shirt, both studded with pale-pink diamanteé. On her feet were high-heeled snakeskin mules. Her nails were also pale pink and carefully manicured. She was heavily perfumed and smelt like a tropical fruit salad.

  Fee didn’t like the way Harry Macklin had failed to introduce his female companion or the way in which he was abrupt with the Philippino couple who had served drinks earlier. Nor the way he refrained from granting common courtesies to the two so far mute young men in suits, who now flanked him and who Fee presumed were members of his staff.

  ‘He likes you. I can tell,’ Gerry Radcliffe had whispered almost immediately after their arrival, on the basis of no evidence at all.

  Harry Macklin decided that enough time had been wasted. ‘Well, what a lot of bright sparks we’ve got here,’ he spoke quietly. His two men flinched at the softness of his tone.

  ‘Pot Noodle and Babs and Derek? The connection is simple,’ Macklin announced.

  ‘Springsters, that’s the connection. Springsters! Got it?’

  Those around him looked blank. Macklin was enjoying his little entertainment. ‘Pass out the portfolios, Serena,’ he directed. The woman in denim obeyed his instructions.

  ‘Read,’ Harry Macklin ordered.

  ‘Drinks,’ he instructed one of his aides in the next breath.

  ‘I’ll have a—’ Gerry Radcliffe began, relief in his voice.

  ‘Sparkling or still? Water is all Mr Macklin drinks.’ The aide paused, then added, ‘Now.’

  It took Fee Travers only minutes to digest the information she had been given. First came a potted history of the business and a background to the boss.

  Twenty years ago, she read, Harry Macklin had owned a battery chicken farm. He had set out to find a wife, had no luck employing orthodox methods, and applied to a dating agency. He was appalled at the service. So, he set up his own organization, charging half the then fee. He also guaranteed money back if the agency failed to find a partner within twelve months.

  Have a Heart! flourished from the outset. It had since married 2 million couples. How many divorces subsequently ensued the official history did not reveal.

  Harry ‘Mr Marriage’ Macklin, was fifty-six and had five children, ranging in age from two to twenty-four, but none living with him. Still, the biography boasted, ‘He is a truly interactive father.’ Married three times, he had recently divorced.

  The portfolio also had details on ‘Lamoor’, the property in which they now sat. An aerial photograph revealed that the swimming pool and every flowerbed were heart-shaped, while a maze had been constructed using the HAH! logo of intertwining hearts.

  Fee noted that HAH! was a private company so there were no details of its profits. The solitary reference to money made HAH! appear almost philanthropic. ‘Under the guidance of Mr Macklin and his accountant Serena Alwyn, several millions of pounds have now been generated in the business of making people happy.’

  Fee raised her eyes and met the interested gaze of the woman in denim.

  ‘You thought I was his girlfriend, didn’t you?’ Serena Alwyn whispered. ‘Lots of people do. I’m not. I’m his accountant and managing director of the company. Not as dumb as other people think I look,’ she added drily.

  ‘I’d never go near Harry romantically, would I, love? Between you and me, what Harry knows about how to make a relationship work wouldn’t fit on this.’

  She raised a long pink talon. ‘Still, the people who like us aren’t bothered about how to make it work, they want to know how to make it happen in the first place. Isn’t that right, love?’ She nudged Macklin.

  Fee could swear she heard him purr.

  Five minutes later, Harry Macklin ordered the drinks to be cleared away, then took up position in front of a large flipchart, which had silently descended from the ceiling. He drew on it, ‘HAH! 2005’, and began to speak with a charismatic style that even made Fee temporarily suspend judgement and take heed.

  ‘So who or what is a springster? Springsters are men and women of thirty plus – and unattached.’ He flipped, revealing phrases that reinforced his words.

  ‘They may have lived with someone in the past or been married. Springsters may come in many forms but one thing they are not. They are not Anoraks. They are no longer Babs and Derek.

  ‘Anoraks have contributed a great deal to our success. Shy, retiring, solitary, less than successful with the opposite sex—

  ‘But now it’s time for HAH! to move on. The future lies with springsters!

  ‘Our new customer is highly motivated. Confident about themselves and their appeal. But they are busy, busy, busy. They have insufficient free time to hunt for a partner and they may be working against their own biological clock,’ Harry Macklin expounded.

  ‘If they decide at, say, thirty-four, this is the time to settle down, they don’t want to hunt for five years to find the appropriate partner.

  ‘Springsters want it now.’ The man was growing more excited as he painted his vision of future profits.

  ‘HAH! will be to the millennium what Pot Noodle was to the seventies – a miracle of modern selling. We want to strip matchmaking of the stigma of shame. It’s no longer a loser’s game. By the time we’ve finished, it will be as common for a springster to come to us, the professionals’ matchmaker, as it will for them to play a game of squash, hire a personal trainer or take out a mortgage.’

  ‘We know what we want,’ Macklin ended melodramatically, leaning with his knuckles on the table and staring intently at Fee. ‘The question is, “Are you the one to deliver?” ’

  Gerry Radcliffe had her out of the front door before she had a chance to answer.r />
  ‘Fee, you’re perfect for this account,’ Gerry Radcliffe insisted. They had stopped for a drink on the return journey. ‘You know exactly what this is all about. You’ve got an instinct for what works and what doesn’t work. Nobody can lift a product off the shelf like you.’

  ‘What you’re trying to say is that since I’m desperate and unattached, I’m the ideal target HAH! client.’ Fee gave her boss a strained smile.

  ‘Well, not exactly, I—’ he struggled to find suitable words.

  ‘Besides, I don’t think it’s natural.’ Fee played with the ice in her gin and tonic. ‘I don’t think it’s a natural way to find a partner by filling in forms, answering ads, going on blind dates. It’s—’

  She struggled to find the appropriate words. ‘It takes away all the mystery and gives the chooser too much control. What I think I want might not be what I really need.’

  Gerry looked at her, perplexed, so she tried again.

  ‘For instance, I might believe that I should fancy a six-foot vegan who cares about the environment, only to discover that I have a passion for a very small man who works in an abattoir and who doesn’t recycle so much as a widget. How can any questionnaire compete with the fact that most of us don’t really have a clue what we want until fate takes a hand?

  ‘Or, to put it more bluntly,’ she added, ‘if I discovered that a man I liked had been to a dating agency, I’d wonder what was wrong with him. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I think. The answer is still no.

  ‘I’ve already got five projects on the go. I’m already working all the hours—’

  Gerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘OK, OK, but this is a big prestigious contract. Lots of coverage in the trade press. Make or break time for yours truly and others. So, if you’re going to be uncooperative – and I don’t want to have to do this, mind—I’ll have no alternative but to bring in Diana. And you know how it is.’ He refused to look at Fee as he spoke; instead he studied his beer mat intently as if reading his lines from its design.

  ‘You know how it is,’ he repeated. ‘One seat vacant on the board, and two strong women candidates. Who’s it to be? This could be the decider . . . doesn’t have to be this way, of course, it’s entirely in your hands—’

  Diana Woods was six years Fee’s junior and had been brought into the company eight months earlier to concentrate on expanding F.P. & D.’s interests in the rest of Europe.

  Since Diana Woods’s arrival, Fee had tried to do the right thing, as one sister to another. She had helped her colleague with contacts and ideas and passed work her way.

  Fee would never describe herself as ambitious. She worked as hard as she could in a job, but had never set herself goals. For too many years she had seen the effects of disappointment in her own mother to take the risk of inflicting that on herself.

  In contrast, Diana Woods made it plain from the outset that she was mad about goals – but not so keen to be a team player. Even Gerry, who had hired her, treated Diana with caution.

  ‘So is it yes or is it no? Are you ready for big things? A seat on the board? Or are you going to disappoint me and tell me you just can’t hack it?’ Gerry asked again as he and Fee left the pub.

  Fee bought herself time by pretending to concentrate on buckling her safety belt. Why not say yes? Why not call Gerry’s bluff? A seat on the board had never been mentioned before – now see if he delivered.

  She knew that she could probably make a success of the HAH! project – but did she want to flog the illusion that the best guarantee of happiness was in the arms of another? Not least when personal experience told her that the contrary was just as likely to be true.

  ‘I just don’t want to take this account, Gerry.’ Her words belied the fact that her initial confidence was now ebbing last. ‘So the answer is still no.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t like you at all—’ Gerry Radcliffe responded icily.

  ‘Oh, but it is,’ she corrected him firmly.

  ‘It makes no sense,’ a bemused Fee Travers told herself a little later at her desk, as she packed the day’s work, as yet undone, into her briefcase.

  ‘I’m already manless; in a couple of months, at this rate, I could also be jobless, Claire-less and broke. And all because I’m trying to take charge of my life? How big a price does someone have to pay for trying to take a little control?’

  ‘Hi,’ said a voice at the door. It was Diana Woods. She was wearing a bitter-chocolate suit and her auburn hair was neatly held in a tortoiseshell clip. Diana Woods was always perfectly turned out. While others might spend several hours a day on hair removal, manicuring, coiffuring and various forms of personal irrigation to achieve the same standard of perfection, Diana Woods gave the impression that she was so quintessentially female she probably developed in the womb with eyelashes ready curled and each toenail painted.

  Now, she walked into Fee’s office and raised a hand to lift a hair from Fee’s collar. She was carrying a pile of papers under her arm, including a computer print-out, and was wearing a victorious smile. At least, Fee read it as victorious.

  ‘Gerry told me to let you have a look at this,’ Diana explained.

  ‘Gerry’s not here,’ Fee replied unnecessarily. She knew this was his crude attempt to bring out Fee’s competitive streak. Anything Diana could do – he was continuing to calculate – Fee would try to do better.

  ‘It’s about the HAH! contract. I’ve made up a dossier – a SIMPLE dossier.’

  ‘Simple?’ Fee questioned, then mentally rebuked herself for playing straight into Diana’s hands.

  ‘SIMPLE – Single Independent Mature People Looking for Encounters – Macklin’ll love it, don’t you think?’

  Diana Woods didn’t wait to hear her rival’s reply.

  Only on her way to her car did Fee remember that Claire and Clem were due to arrive at her flat in ten minutes for supper. It would take her at least half an hour to drive home, another twenty minutes for shopping – ready-made fish soup, ready-made chicken breasts and frozen fruit salad she could defrost in the microwave.

  On her car phone, Fee dialled Will Evans’s number. He never worked late; he left that to his conscientious female colleagues. He was, as she expected, at home. He agreed to let Claire and Clem in and give them a drink but he would have to leave soon after as he’d arranged to meet someone at the cinema.

  ‘I now realize the role that I have in your life,’ he had joked. ‘I’m the keeper of the keys. By the way, that woman was on your doorstep again when I got back an hour or so ago.’

  ‘Rita?’ Fee’s irritation came from nowhere with a ferocity that she found unsettling. She’d dumped a prospective fiancé, only to be saddled with a woman who had all the persistence of an unwanted spouse. How ironic.

  ‘She didn’t ask to be let in. She said she happened to be passing but never mind, she’d give you a ring. Something about Thursday. . .?’

  Fee groaned. She’d have to invent an excuse to avoid Rita’s night out. Perhaps an unexpected business trip? As her car joined yet another lifeless queue of evening traffic, Fee gave a wry smile.

  She’d given Will an earful about personal honesty and here she was contemplating practising exactly his kind of deceit. Why not tell Rita Mason the truth?

  ‘I don’t want to be your friend because you remind me too much of what I could become.’

  It sounded idiotic. It was idiotic.

  Chapter Twelve

  BATHS.

  Imogen Banks was indulging in one of her passions. She adored abluting, soaking, steaming, sponging, soaping, basically any activity that involved sitting in a great deal of water for a lengthy period of time.

  Her own bathroom was large with a vast copper tub on legs in the middle of it. The room also had wooden shutters, copious cupboard space, a comfortable armchair, a sound system, television, a shelf of books, and lights that could be dimmed at whim.

  Now, Imogen lay in the bath, her face the colour of spearmint green, the contents of a face pack.
In front of her, on a specially designed bath tray she had bought in Hong Kong (if she was ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, Imogen intended to name this little gadget as her one luxury), she had deposited a half-bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, a dish of smoked mussels and a bowl of pork cracklings, a personal weakness.

  She reread the report propped up on the tray. The news was mixed.

  Simon Booth’s sperm count was excellent – but his financial situation was not. Imogen had it on good authority that, by this time next week, he would find himself redundant. Imogen was relieved. She would have taken the news of Simon’s infertility very personally indeed.

  Probe-a-Partner, the source of this information, was an organization she had come to depend upon. It had been set up five years earlier and Imogen Banks was now a regular customer. As its name implied, it specialized in checking out the credentials of potential partners. Probe-a-Partner was more expensive than a condom but, in Imogen’s experience, as preventative measures went, it was infinitely more reliable.

  Its help had meant she had been able to tweak out a dozen or more fantasies – lies would be too cruel a word – from potential lovers before the dissembling had become too damaging. An invaluable asset when dealing in the world of married men.

  Imogen turned on the hot-water tap to top up the bath. Simon’s imminent joblessness was less of a problem than the fact that he was already becoming surprisingly time-consuming.

  ‘After all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a wife and family to go home too,’ she told herself grumpily.

  If Simon remained unemployed for long, she would have him on her hands even more. This was a worry.

  She placed Simon’s reports in the waterproof ‘Pending’ box by the bath and turned her mind to Fee Travers. Imogen’s requirements were simple. On film, Fee should be able to talk eloquently and with conviction about why she had decided to remain single. Permanently single.

  ‘Permanently’ was, of course, as relative as everything else in these modern times. Once the programme was broadcast, Fiona Travers could engage in serial matrimony until the end of her days for all Imogen cared – it was the next several weeks that were crucial.