Blind Date by Frances Fyfield

Author:Frances Fyfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter ELEVEN

“You should be careful about the effect you have on people, Joe,” the Owl said in a hectoring tone.

“My devastating charm, you mean.”

“I was thinking more of your size. It makes it all the more insulting when you aren’t listening.”

“Sorry,” Joe said, sincerely. “I’ve had a nice day. I wasn’t paying attention.” He liked the Owl, even though he wished he was elsewhere himself. Of all his old-time friends, (were they really friends or merely habits?) he rated Owl highest, for his sheer, bewildered integrity. An old mate. A remnant of a tribe which grew and then diminished.

“Well, I thought you might want to know the latest,” Owl said. Even to Joe’s distracted mind, Owl was hedging slightly around some preoccupations of his own. “Rob’s been to that introduction agency. Shaken, but not stirred, old Rob. Says it was like being put through the mill, whatever that means. Michael’s been too. Says he thinks the woman in charge is very thorough, smooth bastard. Your turn next. We agreed, remember? You’re a mate, remember? We all promised.”

Yup, an old mate. There were old mates agreements to climb the Matterhorn and get killed; drink sixteen pints of ale; take E; race to the North Pole; risk death, disfigurement and disease and run over cliffs like lemmings. Old mates agreements were bad for the health. They were crap.

“I haven’t got the money,” Joe said. “But I’m on my way.”

“Even though you’ve got a girl? The one who wouldn’t let you in?”

“Oh, her? Come off it. I’m a sort of uncle to her. She’s not a prospect, more of a liability, but she might have nice friends. I do her garden. Got to make ends meet when the photography work’s slow.”

“I’m sure they’d have you back in the firm, you know. Michael always says so.” Owl was always sweetly anxious about other people’s income, or lack of it.

“Thanks but no thanks.”

Owl did not know if he was on the brink of confiding in Joe because Joe was so damn feckless, so insecure and so open about it—not a man to gossip, either—or because, even though Joe teased, he never scorned: he was the one who called off the dogs, rather than set them on. He could not confide in Michael, because Mike was so suave, nor in Rob, because Rob would laugh.

“You gotta go to that introduction agency, Joe. Check it out.”

“Course. I’ve said. C’mon, fella, what’s up?”

Owl’s face crumpled. Joe wondered why it was always thus: a man going all the way round the houses and two thirds of the way down his second pint before he got to the point with a massive clearing of the throat, as if the words were hidden in there, waiting to be forced out.

“I did. As it happens. Dated a dead woman, didn’t I?”

Owl took off his new tinted glasses with less than a flourish, not sure after all if he managed the gesture with Michael’s kind of panache.

“And now I’ve got another one, to compensate.

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