Alice Brown's Lessons in the Curious Art of Dating (3 page)

At exactly 8.30 a.m. Audrey Cracknell swept through the doors of the Table For Two dating agency, her coat billowing behind her. As ever, she was the first to arrive, and she had precisely thirty minutes to mentally prepare herself for the rigours of another day at the front line of matchmaking.

She flicked on the kettle and surveyed the empty office. This was her favourite part of the day, before the office became littered with staff and clients. She ran a finger over the surface of her desk to quality-test the work of the cleaners. Her finger came back perfectly pink. A burst of optimistic January sunshine filtered through the windows and bathed the room in its wash. It was a most satisfactory start to a Tuesday morning.

Audrey turned on her computer and set about tidying her desk. She couldn’t countenance a messy desk. ‘Always start with a clean bottom,’ her father used to tell her. He’d served in the Royal Navy as a chef, and it probably applied to food hygiene but it made perfect sense to Audrey, who liked to start every day with a clean bottom.

At fifty-one years old, and a bracing five foot ten, Audrey
was what was kindly described as solid. Her bosom was a large and heavily bolstered shelf. Sturdy underwear ensured it rarely, if ever, moved. Her rounded shoulders gave way to fleshy arms that wobbled when she moved. Her frizzy, bright-orange hair sat awkwardly next to her farmer-red cheeks, like traffic lights stuck on both stop and wait.

Audrey stirred her coffee and took stock. Not only had last night’s talk at the Holly Bush Hotel swelled the coffers with the admittance fees from a full house of singles wanting to discover the secret to meeting their future spouse, but according to Alice’s text (which had taken Audrey several exasperated minutes to remember how to open), there’d been an exceptionally high number of converts signing up to join the agency too. And not just the online dating function, but the one-to-one optimum-fee-paying premium service! In all, there were fifteen new premium service members. It was probably Table For Two’s most successful night ever.

The Table For Two dating agency was now in its eleventh year, and its eighth of profit. When Audrey’s father died he’d left her a semi in the suburbs and £15,000 in cash. With her mother long departed, no siblings and a stifling job at the city council, the world had suddenly revealed itself – at the not-so-tender age of forty – as Audrey’s dazzling oyster. What had seemed an inescapable path of paper-pushing and spinsterdom had suddenly widened to reveal infinite, sparkling possibility. She could go on a cruise, sell the house, lavish thousands on a chin-lift.

But what she really wanted was to be important. Although
single for her entire adult life, Audrey was nevertheless enchanted with the idea of old-fashioned courtship; of gentlemen who stood up when a lady entered a room. Plus she loved nothing more than a good nose into somebody else’s business. While Audrey’s own life was woefully lacking in gossip, other people’s romantic fortunes were a source of intrigue for her, even if those other people were just the constant friends she found in the characters she watched on her soaps. What better way, she thought, to have an inexhaustible supply of real people’s lives to feel important in than running a dating agency? And so Audrey decided to extend a plump, unmanicured toe into the invigorating waters of small business and set up her own matchmaker’s bureau.

And here she was, eleven years later, still geographically living in her father’s semi, but metaphorically a country mile away from her previous existence. Whereas the old Audrey had sometimes gone from one end of the week to the other without the sustaining fuel of a personal conversation, now she had hundreds of lonely people on her books, all reliant on her. And she got to hear –
first hand!
– the intimate stories of countless clients. Over the years, Table For Two had instigated 6,000 lunch dates that had led to nineteen church weddings and forty-two registry dos. And that didn’t even include the online matches which – frankly – were anyone’s guess. Audrey firmly believed that if you were paid peanuts, it was usually by monkeys. If a client wasn’t prepared to invest in the one-to-one premium service to find a loving partner with whom to spend the
rest of their lives, it stood to reason that they wouldn’t be bothered to reply to a simple emailed enquiry to ascertain whether they’d left the online service because they’d successfully found a love match.

As Audrey scanned her emails, her eye was distracted by a framed photo on her desk. It was of a distinguished-looking man, dressed in a dinner suit. His jacket was open and his arm draped casually on the back of the chair next to him. He was smiling, his striking blue eyes crinkling warmly at the corners. Tied to his chair was a pale-pink balloon, and in the background a large round banqueting table was littered with the debris of a good night. Audrey had taken the photograph at the Dating Practitioners’ Society annual ball years ago, and she’d kept it on her desk ever since. It wasn’t the first Practitioners’ Ball she’d attended with John, but it was the first time she’d taken her camera. She’d been longing for a photograph of him, and she’d finally plucked up the courage. Her hands had shaken with nerves, but miraculously the shot was perfect. Audrey looked at it hundreds of times a day. When the client on the phone described her perfect man, Audrey sometimes felt it was uncanny. It was as if her ladies could see what she was looking at, so often did their descriptions match John. She carefully traced her finger over his photograph.

‘Morning!’ a voice chimed across the office.

Audrey jumped. Alice was making her way across the room to her desk, her long woollen scarf trailing on the floor behind her. Audrey felt her hackles prickle. There was something about Alice that never failed to get her back up.

‘Did you get my text? Wasn’t it a fantastic evening?’ Alice asked cheerfully as she pulled off her coat and slung it over the back of her chair, creating the day’s first eyesore of mess. ‘So many people, and so nice too! We all chatted for hours afterwards; it was such a shame you couldn’t stay.’ She pulled the lid off her coffee and blew across its steaming surface, her eyes finally resting on Audrey expectantly.

‘Yes, fantastic,’ Audrey murmured, trying to appear engrossed in her emails. This was one of the moments when she wished she’d invested in something more solid than glass for the partition to her office. At the time she’d thought a glass wall an ingenious idea. Not only did it create her own private office, a boss-like distance away from the open-plan area where her staff sat, but the clear pane meant she could still make sure they weren’t wasting time on personal chit-chat. She’d even considered learning to lip-read for those moments when her office door was closed and she was sealed into her see-through kingdom with only muffles penetrating through.

At this particular moment, though, Audrey’s door was wedged open, and Alice was peering through with all the perkiness of a cartoon bunny.

‘Fifteen new premium service clients! That’s got to be some kind of Table For Two record, hasn’t it?’

‘The premium service is the only sensible option,’ Audrey lectured chillily. ‘Anyone who’s serious about meeting their future husband or wife knows the internet’s not the place to find them. All this online dating nonsense is just a silly vogue that will soon go out of fashion. If you want a genuine
love match, you do it face to face with a professional matchmaker. Between the internet and all the other so-called matchmaking bureaus out there, the road to happiness can be a dangerous place. Those fifteen new clients are lucky they found us.’

‘Absolutely!’ Alice nodded vigorously. She seemed at a loss as to what to say next, so she bowed her head and set about her paperwork.

Audrey wondered what it was about Alice that annoyed her so. She wasn’t unpleasant, she supposed, and she was helpful in her own sort of way. But there was just something about her . . . She always claimed to be busy, but was forever staring out of the window in a daze. And then there were her clothes. Underneath the cardigans and corduroy there was probably a perfectly decent figure; it was just drowning in wool. Where was the girl’s colour? Her vibrancy? And that hair! How old must Alice be? Twenties? Thirties? Audrey wasn’t sure. But she
was
sure that, whatever her age, Alice was too old for plaits. It was bad for business. The staff of a dating agency should be attractive, romantically successful individuals. Gentlemen clients should look at her girls and hope to be matched with a woman just like them.

Audrey grimaced and returned to her emails. Today was a good day, she reminded herself. Not only were there fifteen more clients, but there was also the matter of this year’s Dating Practitioners’ Society annual ball . . . and only three weeks away! The ball was the highlight of Audrey’s year, and this one would be better than ever. Table For Two was
finally catching up with Love Birds, its biggest rival, run by the dreadful Sheryl Toogood. The ball would give Audrey the chance to point out that Table For Two client numbers were up twenty-three per cent. She was sure Sheryl Toogood couldn’t come close to matching that, no matter how hard she bluffed it.

And then there was John. She couldn’t wait to have him sitting at her side, attentive and urbane. She’d have to call Geraldine and make sure the date was in his diary. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t done so already. She’d attend to it tonight as a priority.

There was a kerfuffle at the door and in came the rest of the Table For Two staff: Bianca and Cassandra, with Hilary, the website co-ordinator, puffing in their wake. Audrey frowned. Hilary was pregnant again, and getting larger by the day. She’d be disappearing on another stint of maternity leave soon, leaving Audrey with the double inconvenience of having to bankroll her baby-tending holiday
and
having to oversee Table For Two’s online dating service in her absence. She wasn’t sure which inconvenience irritated her the most.

As the morning chit-chat swirled around the office, Audrey noticed Alice staring into the distance in a dream. She bristled. It was time to get her to pull her socks up. There was no room in the world of Audrey Cracknell, Audrey Cracknell told herself, for shirkers. And shirkers who looked like spinsters were even worse.

‘I’m going to do it,’ Kate declared defiantly on the other end of the phone. ‘And you should do it too.’

‘Wha . . . ?’ Lou groped for her watch by the side of her bed. ‘For fuck’s sake, Kate, what time is it? This had better be an emergency. Your mother had better have died.’

‘Five to nine,’ Kate replied matter-of-factly. Lou could hear the muted burble of the office in the background. Kate was an early riser and had probably already been at work for several hours. Lou was not what could be termed a morning person and had chosen a career in bar work specifically for the 11 a.m. starts.

‘Did you hear what I said? I’m going to do it.’

Lou rubbed her eyes and fell heavily back onto her pillow.

‘Do what, you mad, sleep-wrecking cow?’ she yawned. She stretched out her hand to the other side of the bed. It was empty. With a wince she remembered last night.

‘Sign up to the Table For Two dating agency and meet the man of my dreams.’