The Love Market (6 page)

It’s usual for clients to refer friends to me, but it’s almost always people I’ve already successfully matched who will refer a friend, usually one of the same sex. So this is a bit different. Before taking on new clients I will meet the women for lunch as well as talk to them a lot on the phone. I always make the men meet me in a restaurant for dinner, in a fake date situation so I can see them the way a female date would see them, and iron out their kinks before I put them on The Love Market. Manchester is a bit out of my net, but Trish all but begged me to help him.

My train’s at twenty past ten, so I drop Aimee off at school at ten to nine, then plan to run a few errands around town before heading to the station. Just as I’m pulling out of the school drop-off area, I see Rachel’s mum’s shiny white Range Rover pulling in behind me. I put the car in ‘park’, wait until she has waved off Rachel, and then I get out of my car just as she is about to pull off.

‘Sorry,’ I tell her, when she gets out. ‘I didn’t mean to flag you off the road like a policeman, Sandi!’ We exchange a bit of friendly chatter and I try not to imagine her cozying up in bed with her husband and them talking about me and Mike and assuming one of us must have had an affair. I tell her that Aimee is sad she hasn’t been invited to Rachel’s party when every other girl in her class has.

As she listens, nothing moves except for her blonde hair blowing around her face in the early April wind. Then her expression hardens. ‘I’m sorry, Celine, I wasn’t really aware… They don’t really tell you things any more, do they? They think they’re so independent now.’ She blushes, avoids my eyes, and holds onto her hair to stop it blowing—something I think she wants me to know is irritating her, to communicate that it’s going to be a short conversation. ‘You know, it’s not really up to me to tell her who to be friends with.’ She tries a smile, her hand up by her ear, her Rolex gleaming from under her jacket’s sleeve. ‘They go through phases, don’t they?’

I feel my spine elongating and try not to come off as though I’m growing myself to doff her on top of the head with my cheap handbag. ‘You know, Sandi, Aimee’s been very down since her fall. Not being able to compete for the gymnastics trophy after the months of hard work she put in—’

‘It wasn’t Rachel’s fault she had an accident! Aimee didn’t have to make her feel so bad for winning!’

‘I was going to say, it absolutely devastated her.’ This outburst stuns me for a moment or two. Then I add, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that Aimee made Rachel feel bad. I thought Aimee rang and congratulated Rachel?’

‘She did. But Rachel could tell she didn’t really mean it.’

Rage pounds in me. ‘Well…Sandi, Rachel should have accepted the congratulations and tried to see where they were coming from. If Aimee wasn’t squealing with excitement for Rachel it’s because she was just so gutted that she hadn’t been able to compete! Can’t you understand that? Can’t Rachel? My daughter was genuinely happy for Rachel and genuinely sad for herself.’

Sandi gives me a withering look. ‘Well you have to teach her that it’s no way to behave.’

I open my mouth to say: Well maybe you could try asking Rachel to imagine how she would feel if her parents had just split up, then she falls off her bloody bike and is laid up with broken limbs. Then she can’t compete in the one competition that meant so much to her!

The words are bursting out of me, but instead I look at her Hermes scarf neatly fastened around her neck, and remember that in life you can’t expect everyone to behave and think and feel as you. If I haven’t managed to change her position now, I’m not going to. I’m just wasting my breath. So I say, ‘You’re right. And you know, if you and Rachel think it’s fair to invite every girl in the class except Aimee, well, if you can live with that, then I suppose I’ll have to.’

Our hard stares last two beats of my rattling heart, then Sandi Bradshaw says a snooty, ‘Good heavens!’ and starts walking back to her car. Then she gets into her supercharged petrol-guzzler and drives off.

~ * * * ~

I got into the matchmaking business mainly as a hobby when Aimee was little. Going back to my job as a recruitment consultant after my maternity leave, while Mike worked nights and looked after Aimee during the day, wasn’t really working out. I was spending so much time at work and travelling the twenty miles to and from Newcastle that I rarely saw my daughter, and Mike never had time to sleep.

I had loved my recruiting job initially. With my degree in Human Resources, and my own flair, I was good at the business development side of attracting new clients, the relationship-building. But best of all I loved searching the market for suitable candidates, the interviewing, and the psychology of evaluating their personality tests—seeing how they might react in certain situations and using it to determine if they were the right fit with a certain corporate culture. I loved the whole exploration of who a person really was, compared to how they saw themselves—and saving them from ending up in jobs they weren’t suited to. Then, in my mid-twenties, two things happened around the same time. I had recently headhunted an accountant called Sharon Gillespie for a new position that was being developed in credit control for an international retailer based in Gateshead. It was the only case I’d been involved in where the fit was wrong. But I had gotten to know Sharon quite well as she’d tried and failed to settle into her new role, and I also knew that she was single and wanting to meet someone. I had an inkling she might get on well with another client of mine, who also worked in the financial sector and was having a career crisis of his own. They were similarly educated, similarly attractive and both quietly spoken. I introduced them, and love bloomed. Two years later they were married—Mike and I attended their wedding—and Sharon ended up returning to the job I had headhunted her away from.

Around that time, I read an article on how Internet dating was set to go mega. So I started to put my mind to a business idea. After a lot more research into the market for personal introductions, I reasoned that I could apply my existing skills of people-fitting while offering a high-end matchmaking service, the likes of which wasn’t really being done in the north east of England. Mike and I had already decided I should leave my job and stay home until Aimee was school age. So I decided to run some ads in the right magazines, to treat it more like a hobby at first and see what happened. I came up with a name—The Love Market, which felt like an obvious choice—bought a Mac computer and designed my own website, drew up my business plan, all this while Aimee took naps or played beside me. After the first six months I had eleven clients and growing. After the first three years I was successfully matching more than fifty per cent. Now, I have a manageable portfolio of eighty: fifty women to thirty men, and a success rate of seventy per cent. Is it a bad life? Well, sometimes it’s frustrating. But it can be entertaining and rewarding. Occasionally it puts me on a such a high that it renews my faith in the concept of their being ‘the right one’ for all of us. That’s more than you can say for most jobs.

~ * * * ~

James Halton-Daly is everything that Trish said he is. I can tell this the moment I catch sight of his handsomeness as he sits at the table. He looks up from the menu, and sees me striding towards him. He stands to greet me, beams an honest, warm smile, and gives me the quick and shameless once-over.

It strikes me that I’ve never been on a fake date since Mike walked out, which makes this feel more like a test-run than a business-meet.

The Instant First Impression. Hair: blond and shaggy, like a Wheaten Terrier’s. Handsome, in a Sebastian Flyte meets Hugh Grant way. I already know he went to one of the top public schools in England, then Oxford (where he met Trish), and now at thirty-eight, he’s a partner at a top Manchester law firm. A charming, likeable toff. “A” for style. The tweed blazer with the turned up collar. The pink, striped, dress-shirt, open at the neck, and the dark jeans with the turned-up cuffs.

‘We could forget that I’m about to hire you to find me a girlfriend, and you could be my girlfriend,’ he says.

‘I’m taken.’

‘Are you?’ he lays a hand on his heart. ‘Well, I imagine it must be one of the leading credentials of being matchmaker, right?’

I hope not.

‘How do you become a matchmaker, anyway?’ he asks, as I sit down. ‘I mean I thought you’d have to live in New York and look like Cher.’

I tell him how I wish I looked like Cher. Then I tell him how I got started, and what it is about the business that gives me a buzz. He seems fascinated. We chat easily. He is shamelessly checking me out, but I’m flattered. I like his boldness. I like the thick silver ring he wears on his left index finger and the way he corrects the waiter by reminding him he should be taking the lady’s order first.

I finally get him onto the topic of women.

‘Well, the last ten I went out with—’

‘Ten?’

‘Well obviously not all together. Over a period of…’ He pulls a thinking face, ‘…a year and a half maybe, went from bad to catastrophic. There was, in no specific order: the smoker, the inferiority complex, the one that was more interested in my friends, she who thinks all lawyers get murderers off, Jen who was obsessed with Tango dancing, then there was Miss Religious, Miss Missing Front Tooth, the one that was only fourteen years older than her daughter, then Frannie Fat Fingers—’ he recoils, squeamishly ‘—and then the one who compulsively checked her mobile for messages.’

‘Whoosh! That’s quite a list of fatal flaws. Especially the compulsive checker of messages.’ I tease him, sipping on the Kir Royale he insisted I have.

‘It seems that every single woman in her late thirties has issues. Desperation issues, confidence issues, ex-issues, chips on the shoulder…’ He shrugs.

‘Fat fingers and chips aside though, what is it that you’re looking for?’

He seems to think about this, lolling back in his chair, totally at ease. ‘Well, an independent, free-minded brunette, who doesn’t take life or herself too seriously. Who likes to travel, be spontaneous, is perhaps unsure if she wants kids. She’d be a fabulous mother if she had them, but she’d feel just as complete in an exciting, child-free marriage.’

‘Don’t you want kids?’

He looks at me candidly. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ve not met anyone yet that I could see as the mother of my children.’ He looks up at the ceiling. ‘Oh, and I don’t want any golden retrievers.’

I dip some French bread into the poached egg and bacon appetizer on frisée lettuce that the waiter has just set down. ‘What’s a golden retriever?’

‘Blonde. Beautiful but generic looking. Always needs brushing and grooming. Eager to please but suffers from separation anxiety. Destructive when she gets bored.’ He chinks his spoon off the edge of his escargots dish.

‘Plus, I don’t want a lawyer.’

‘Why not?’ I glance him over, totally taken with his confidence and charm.

He leans across the table to whisper. ‘Generally I don’t find them very interesting.’

I study him. ‘What about Trish?’

‘Trish?’ he frowns. ‘Well, Trish is definitely not your typical lawyer. But she’s a mate. I’m hardly going to have a romantic relationship with a mate, am I?’

‘Aren’t you? Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ he narrows his eyes, as though he thinks I’m testing him. ‘Did she tell you, by the way, that she and I are in competition? We’re curious to see which one of us is going to find our soul mate first.’

‘Are you? No, actually, she never mentioned that.’

He nods, studying me now. ‘So what were you asking? Oh, yes, if I was going to have a romantic relationship with, say, Trish for the sake of argument, then I wouldn’t be here, would I? Hiring you?’ He leans across at me. ‘No, frankly, I don’t want a lawyer for practical reasons more than anything. The balance of work and home life. I just don’t think lawyers get the concept of balance very well.’

‘So you don’t want any woman who has a demanding career?’ They never do. Even though most of them don’t want dead-heads and dingbats either, or women with no interests or ambition.

‘Not true. I’d love a woman who had an absolutely fascinating headache of a career. I just want it to be different to the headaches I have in mine. And I want her to work to live, not the other way round. You can’t have two people doing that in any one household. And if we ever did want kids…’

‘You’d want her to stay home to take care of them.’

‘Politically incorrect. But true.’ He pops the last of his six escargots into his mouth then quickly adds, ‘But only if she wanted to. I’d prefer it—the kid—my child—didn’t get brought up like I did, by a parade of nannies.’ He watches me put my napkin on my side plate. ‘I’m in the bin now, aren’t I? Did Trish warn you you’d go off me this fast?’

‘Not at all,’ I smile. ‘If I put you in the bin, then I don’t know what that would mean I’d have to do with some of my other clients. Cremate them maybe, then bin their ashes?’

He laughs. ‘That bad eh?’

‘Actually, no. I’m just joking. I have lovely clients.’

‘So what’s with this personality profile thing you had me fill in?’ he asks over his steak frites, and my Roquefort-stuffed free-range chicken breast. We have talked about his university days, his travels, his social life and his last proper relationship that lasted six years. ‘Can you really match a person with another person based on their answers to those particular forty questions?’