Alice Brown's Lessons in the Curious Art of Dating (6 page)

‘Well,’ Kate started awkwardly. She could sense everyone in the office listening in. ‘You know how they have farmers’ markets in front of the Corn Exchange?’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘Well, I thought we could stage a gourmet pet-food festival there instead,’ Kate said tentatively.

‘Go onnnnnnnnn,’ Julian drawled pensively.

‘Pedigree Pooch could take over the square for the day, and set up lots of stalls with chefs – real chefs in hats and chefs’ whites – cooking up delicious organic feasts, all for dogs.’

There was a pause. Kate stumbled on.

‘So we’d have lots of woks and top-of-the-range barbecues, all cooking different things. For instance, one chef could be cooking an organic doggy lamb stew, and the dogs could come along to sample it – once it’s cooled down, of course. The chefs could talk through the recipes as they cook, so the owners could see first-hand the kind of ingredients that Pedigree Pooch use – which would all be fresh and locally sourced. And another stall could do doggy fish dishes: blackened cod, maybe? Or salmon fishcakes? And another could do doggy desserts: not sugary ones . . . They’d have to be healthy and good for dogs’ teeth. So I was thinking of a doggy cup cakes, with hidden grated courgette – and instead of icing they could be topped with Philadelphia/apple puréé mix. It’s much lower-fat, especially if you use Philadelphia Light. I saw it on a diet cookery programme . . . For humans, obviously,’
she added hastily, realizing the office had gone deathly silent. ‘I don’t think they do diet cookery programmes for pets.’

Julian was uncharacteristically quiet. There was a long pause. The air prickled with tension. Kate meekly added her final idea.

‘And at the end of the day the dogs could go home with a bag of samples from the stalls . . . You know . . . a doggy bag.’

Someone sniggered. Kate’s stomach sank.

‘I don’t know what you lot are laughing at!’ Julian snapped back into life, eyeballing the staff aggressively. ‘Katy, my darling, it’s total bloody genius!’

Kate went weak with relief.

‘Genius!’ he whooped as he started jigging around the office. ‘The Pedigree Pooch lot will expire with excitement!’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘Quick! Write it up and set up a meeting with the Pooch posse asap. They’re going to love it!’

And he waltzed off into his office.

Kate felt almost giddy with praise. Julian liked the idea! She couldn’t believe it! She looked at her watch. Maybe she’d get home at a decent time after all. She really hoped so. Tonight she wanted to finally nail down which outfit she was going to wear for her Table For Two meeting –
and
plan out the accessories. Her appointment with Alice was a few days away yet, but she liked to be prepared. After all, she had a lot riding on it: an end to Friday nights in on her own and a potential lifetime of loved-up happiness, no less! It
had
to go well.

Smiling, she turned to her computer and opened a new document.

One of the many forms that new clients at the Table For Two dating agency had to fill in contained the questions, ‘What is your ideal Saturday night out?’ and ‘What is your perfect Sunday morning?’ While Alice could never be sure of her ideal Saturday night out, she was very clear on her version of Sunday morning Utopia . . . a leisurely browse around her local garden centre.

There was something very liberating about slopping around Greenfingers in a tatty jumper and her oldest jeans. The mere sight of the orderly rows of plants – immaculately laid out like disciplined soldiers, yet rebelliously unsymmetrical like naughty schoolboys – would make Alice’s spirits rise. She’d lose an hour or two wandering up and down the aisles of baby clematis or azaleas, imagining the riots of colour they’d soon burst into. As Alice looked along a row of rangy hellebores, the thought struck her that garden centres were really centres of hope. You didn’t buy bulbs, you bought little bundles of optimism, courtesy of Mother Nature. All you had to do was plant them and water them and you were rewarded with beautiful explosions of colour.

Alice wheeled her pushbike up the driveway to Greenfingers and padlocked it to a railing. It was five minutes to ten, and she was the only impatient gardener waiting for the doors to open. She looked at her reflection in the glass door. Her hair was all over the place (she must have forgotten to brush it again) and she was wearing an old pair of jeans she’d got from a charity shop. Her jumper had a big hole in the front from an accident with a branch. She looked, as Audrey would say, like something the cat dragged in.

Dudley, the security guard, peered through the glass of the door and smiled at her. She beamed back at him. She and Dudley had had many Sunday morning chats before the rest of the world arrived. Like her, Dudley loved the tranquillity of the outdoor section of the garden centre. Neither of them liked the indoor area, with its piped music, bored kids and harassed parents. But outdoors, where it was cold and quiet, and the only noise was the babbling of the water-feature displays – that was what made Alice leap out of bed on a Sunday morning.

Dudley pulled back the doors and Alice headed through the shop, past the aisles of creosote and Baby Bio, and out into the courtyard. She sighed happily, drank in the atmosphere and delved into the first row of greenery.

When Alice had bought her one-bedroom garden flat on Eversley Road she’d discovered a love of gardening. It had come as quite a surprise. The flat didn’t have much of a garden, just a square of paving stones and a scrawny yew tree. But the garden had two very important things going
for it – it was totally private and totally hers! It became Alice’s sacred space – a place for peace, quiet and daydreaming. It was where Alice could really be Alice.

Within a few months the paving stones had come up, the yew tree was coaxed into life, and borders had been created, stuffed with vibrant cascades of flowers. A friend had helped Alice haul home a two-metre free-standing window box and she’d filled it with fragrant flowers and herbs. In summer, when the French doors in her bedroom were open, Alice could lie in bed and breathe in the warm scent of lavender.

Alice spent a contented hour humming amongst Green-fingers’ bedding plants, filled her bike’s pannier basket with greenery and headed home. As she cycled along she felt happy. She loved her job at Table For Two, and had some great clients. She believed in good karma and happy endings, and that nice things happened to nice people. It wasn’t often that she got a client she didn’t like – weirdly, Audrey always seemed to want those clients for her own list – but when she did, she found them very hard to match.

Alice turned into Eversley Road and pedalled hard to get up the hill to her flat. She grimaced. She was embarrassed to admit it, but Audrey intimidated her. She knew Audrey didn’t like her. Alice did her best to be friendly, but whenever she spoke the words seemed to die in her mouth. She’d witter, desperately trying to fill the yawning silence whilst Audrey eyeballed her with derision. It had always been the same, and Alice had been at Table For Two for years. Six months into her job, she’d considered leaving. But she liked
her clients too much. Clients come and go – or they should if she matched them successfully. The problem was that Alice
always
had clients she liked. She didn’t want to abandon them before she’d fixed them up. And as fast as she fixed them up new clients would come in. Before she knew it all thoughts of leaving had been forgotten.

Alice reached her flat, dismounted her bike and carried the plants inside. She looked at her watch. Good – she had enough time to potter in the garden before cooking the Sunday roast. Ginny was coming round at three with Dan and the baby. Happy in the knowledge that she had a couple of hours of green-fingered pleasure ahead, she stepped into her garden with a smile.

Monday morning had finally arrived.

Kate took a deep breath, smoothed down her brand-new Reiss skirt-suit (nothing she already owned was quite right, she’d decided), and walked purposefully through the doors of the Table For Two dating agency. Inside was an open-plan office with several women talking busily on the phone. There was no nice, safe reception desk to walk towards, so Kate loitered awkwardly by the door, rocking unsteadily on her new heels.

Eventually the woman at the nearest desk put down her phone and smiled.

‘Yes, love. Who are you here for?’

‘Alice.’ Despite her best intentions, Kate’s voice still came out sounding nervous.

The woman twisted and looked across the office. As she moved, Kate noticed her belly. She was pregnant: hugely pregnant! Good, Kate thought excitedly. This was exactly the result she’d be paying for: a fast ticket through the games and nonsense. She’d obviously entered an arena of success. This was a place where women found boyfriends
who became husbands who became fathers. She hoped this success was infectious – ideally, airborne and immediate.

The woman turned back.

‘She’s on the phone. Pop yourself down on the sofa and make yourself comfortable. She won’t be long.’

She pointed towards a seating area that Kate hadn’t noticed before. Kate backed awkwardly into the sofa and tried not to look nervous.

The pregnant woman immediately immersed herself in another phone call. Kate peered surreptitiously around. She’d been wondering what a dating agency would look like. Last night, just as she’d been drifting off to sleep, she’d been struck by the sudden, terrifying thought that it would have huge mugshots of its clients on the walls – like a giant police line-up of the most desperate people in town. The thought had kept her awake for hours. But there was no such gallery of shame. In fact, it looked disappointingly normal.

Suddenly the door swung open and a delivery man burst in, brandishing a super-sized bouquet of flowers. He loitered, his head and upper body almost entirely obscured by the enormous, cascading blooms. Seconds passed. And then a loud knock made Kate jump in her seat, and the bunch-of-flowers-on-legs headed over to an area separated from the rest of the room by a glass wall. Rapping imperiously on the pane was Audrey Cracknell. Barely pausing in her telephone conversation, she ushered the walking flowers in, accepted them without so much as a blink and dismissed the delivery man with a wave of her hand. Kate felt a
momentary sense of relief that she wasn’t signing up with Audrey today. There was something utterly terrifying about her. But the relief was immediately followed by awe. This was a place where women were sent bouquets of flowers from their admirers:
even women like Audrey
!