Unsuitable Men (11 page)

I blinked at her. It had never occurred to me that Ticky, with all of her swishy-haired, expensively educated privileges, might consider herself to be hard done by, either in life or at
Country House
. Surely she knew that class was what counted – here and everywhere? That Martha and I, armed only with what Amanda called ‘native cunning’, could only get so
far. Also, her uncle was a
baron
? I didn’t even know barons existed outside of fairy tales.

‘You
are
smart, Ticky,’ I lied. Perhaps I wasn’t lying, perhaps she
was
smart; how was I to know, since she pretty much never did any work? Perhaps, I realized, I
too had treated her like a posh idiot, and just let her get away with doing little more than filing her nails in between social appointments.

‘You, like, raaahlly think so?’ she said, her chin wobbling. ‘Mummy always used to say, “Suffolk-born, Suffolk-bred, Ticky’s thick in the arm and thick in the
head.”’

‘That’s just a silly saying,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that a million times before – she doesn’t really mean you’re thick.’

‘And I only got a third on my degree,’ she sniffed. ‘Mummy said they only passed me at all because Daddy made such a big donation to St Andrews.’

I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Ticky; Mummy sounded like a right witch. At least my mother’s approach to childcare, while scatty, amounted to nothing more shocking than a
benign sort of neglect as she ignored me to focus on hunting her latest husband.

‘Ticky, plenty of people who are very smart don’t do well academically,’ I said consolingly. ‘You just need to work with your strengths.’

‘But what
are
my strengths, Roars?’ she sighed, slumping on to my desk.

‘Well, networking is one,’ I said, thinking that this was a polite way of mentioning the endless social appointments that kept her from her desk.

‘But Roars, I am, like, fucking running out of relatives to milk for Maaahn, and half my old schoolfriends won’t invite me to their houses any more in case I try to use them in a
magazine feature.’

‘Don’t they want to be in
Country House
?’ I asked; it had never occurred to me that people weren’t lining up to show off on our pages. There certainly never seemed
to be a shortage of them.

‘Roars, duh! They’re all way too young. They want to be in
Tatler
or
Vogue
, or get a wodge of cash from
Hello!.
The only time people actually, like,
want
to be in
Country House
is if they’re trying to flog the family pile. Or if they’re like,
ancient
,’ Ticky said.

‘What about all of Noonoo’s friends? They’re not ancient.’

‘Noonoo’s friends are just, like, total nouveau publicity whores. They’d appear in Readers’ Wives if they thought it would get them a bit more attention. No, Roars, the
non-nouves, the old-school country house types that Maaahn would kill for, don’t want to be in a magazine at all. I totally dread asking them every time.’

I wondered why Ticky and I had so rarely talked properly before. Was it because I was always rushing home to Martin? Because I always had half of my brain tuned in to what he might be doing,
what he might need or want? This was the first time since she started at
Country House
that I had even considered that Ticky’s diary dates were actually work for her; she no more
thrilled at the thought of begging her great-aunt for a favour than I did at copy-editing more of Noonoo’s friends’ reminiscences.

‘Well, aside from networking, you’re also very good at getting people to talk,’ I said. ‘You got me to talk about Martin when I really wasn’t sure I wanted
to.’

‘Thanks, Roars,’ said Ticky with a sniffle. ‘I guess I’m not entirely useless.’

‘You’re not at all useless,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry for not crediting your idea about the unsuitable men. If it’s any consolation, I wouldn’t have done
it unless I was desperate.’

‘Yah, like
totally
desperate,’ agreed Ticky, launching herself off my desk and returning to her own with renewed vigour. ‘Like, your middle name is desperation. Rory
Desperation Carmichael. Desperation, thy name is Rory.’

I rolled my eyes and turned back to the layouts. I pretended to work, but actually I was mostly panicking about the Unsuitable Men column. Ticky was right: to have suggested it at all reeked of
desperation. What had I been thinking? Of course, I reassured myself, it was unlikely that anyone but Amanda would read it. But that itself was terrifying. What if I completely cocked it up now
that her attention was focused on me for once? You didn’t have to attend the management lunches in Old Mr Betterton’s fusty old club round the corner to know that redundancies were
looming. Advertising was down, other magazines were folding every month. We were protected, for now, by being privately owned – no massive magazine conglomerate was going to axe us in favour
of a more profitable stablemate, but the Betterton funds couldn’t support us for ever. I had always hoped that I would avoid redundancy by being so far beneath Amanda’s notice as to be
entirely forgotten about. No longer, it seemed.

At least she had been pleased with the Seaton Hall piece. Although it had been nearly unrecognizable once Martha had fiddled with it, it still carried my byline, along with a few pictures in
which I made my unaccredited hand- and hair-modelling debut. I’d proved I was responsible enough to handle a major feature and, in a gesture of kindness that made me almost tearful with
gratitude, the duke had personally written to Amanda to say what a pleasure it had been to host the young journalist from
Country House.
Thankfully he had made no mention of my embarrassing
outburst to Lance; perhaps the inherent homophobia of the upper classes had made my indiscretion less terrible in the duke’s eyes. Or perhaps Lance had been good enough not to mention it to
His Grace at all.

I hoped Lance would also be good enough not to object to my offering him up as the first unsuitable man for the column. No, wait: it wouldn’t work if the men in question knew about it.
I’d have to keep it from them that they were deemed unsuitable and use pseudonyms for everyone. Even a pseudonym for myself, just in case any of my dates read a copy of the magazine. Though,
come to think of it, what man in his right mind, unless in the business of selling private houses worth over a million pounds, actually read
Country House
? It was hardly of interest even to
the most unsuitable men I could think of. And even if they did – perhaps they idly flicked through a copy while visiting Nanny in the retirement home – they were hardly likely to go
seeking out its website for extra thrills. Still, it was probably safest to keep it all anonymous just in case someone Googled my name and got an unpleasant surprise.

Even as I pored over the magazine layouts, I began drafting my first column in my head. I didn’t imagine that
Country House
readers would have heard of fauxmosexuals either. Perhaps
my lack of dating experience was going to be a virtue when it came to the unsuitables; it wasn’t like I was writing this for a bunch of urban sophisticates. The genteel readership of the
magazine would want to be entertained and informed without encountering anything in the line of what Martha called a ‘marmalade-dropper’. Nothing scandalous, just good clean fun. And
that meant I was surely safe from any expectations that I had to take any of this seriously. It was just a good way of getting noticed by Amanda.

Ticky interrupted my thoughts. ‘Roars, I’ve, like, been thinking. Since you’re starting this whole dating thing, do you think maybe it’s time to do something with your
hair?’

‘What about my hair?’ I asked. I’d always considered I was one of the lucky ones – my thick red hair may have been a little messy, but I had the kind of curls that could
do their own thing without hours of styling. A hairdresser had told me, many years ago, never to brush my hair. I suppose he hadn’t actually said never, maybe now I thought about it
he’d said only to brush it once in a while, but I had taken his advice to heart. I ran my fingers through the tangled curls – it wasn’t like I had a head full of matted dreadlocks
or anything, but I believed my hair looked its best when I let it be free and loose and natural.

‘Well, like, when did you last get it cut?’ asked Ticky.

I twirled the nearest curl around my fingers, bringing it up close to my face. ‘Er, six months ago?’ I confessed.

‘Six months?’ asked Ticky in horror. With her high-maintenance highlights, she could hardly imagine a life that didn’t involve a monthly visit to a salon to have her head
wrapped in foil like a Christmas turkey.

‘My hair doesn’t really need that much attention,’ I said. ‘Curly hair’s pretty low-maintenance.’

‘Oh, like, beg to differ, Roars,’ said Ticky. ‘I mean, I totally get the whole natural thing you’ve got going on, but there’s a bit of a diff between, like,
Pre-Raphaelite tumbling curls and a head full of frizz.’

I stared at her with frank dislike. If she had set out to craft the insult that would wound me the most, she could not have done better than this. Ever since, as an unconfident teenager, I had
first encountered the painted heroines of the Pre-Raphaelites, I had felt an affinity with them. For once the abundant red curls with which I had been cursed, usually scraped by my mother into two
tight plaits, were portrayed as beautiful; even as Millais’s ‘Martyr of Solway’ was chained to a rock, the tide slowly rising up to drown her, her unashamedly red hair was
gloriously free, falling in thick ropes around her shoulders. Of course, when I was inspired by this painted vision to wear my own hair down, everyone at my new school accused me of having had a
perm and I couldn’t cross the playground without someone calling me Mick Hucknall and breaking into a rendition of ‘Stars’, but I took the teasing as my own personal martyrdom. It
seemed to me that the look of pained acceptance that I adopted in the face of these philistines only served to increase my resemblance to the tortured heroines I so admired.

Even when I felt that my legs could have been longer or that my hips could have been smaller, I had reassured myself that the glowing beacon of my spectacular hair compensated for all. It was my
only claim to beauty and my security blanket, all at the same time. It would be no exaggeration to say that my decision to study History of Art at university, and therefore my entire career (such
as it was), was based on my teenage belief that if I stood close to a Pre-Raphaelite painting someone might point out the flattering resemblance (though admittedly no one ever had). And now, it
seemed, Ticky was saying that what I had regarded as my crowning glory was in fact a bit of an embarrassment. A head full of frizz?

‘I guess I could get some serum or something,’ I said, glumly looking at the curl in my hand as if it had personally betrayed me in its fluffiness.

‘Look, Roars, don’t take this the wrong way, but you are, like, beyond John Frieda Frizz-Ease right now. You actually need, like, John Frieda himself. And probably a team of
assistants.’

‘Jesus, Ticky, don’t spare my feelings, will you?’ I sniffed, pulling my hair back into a knot at the back of my head, as if I could hide it away for ever.

‘Look, Roars, this is the first time you’ve split up with anyone, so you don’t even know the golden truth I am about to pass on to you. It is a female rite of passage to do
something major to your hair when you break up with a boyfriend, yah? Sahhriously, new hair, new you; works every time.’

‘But I don’t really want to have a haircut,’ I said. ‘I like my hair long.’

‘Nothing drastic, Roars, just a good old trim and a blow-dry. It’ll make you feel, like, a million times better?’

‘I suppose I could go to that place round the corner,’ I said resignedly. I could tell Ticky wasn’t going to let up on this one.

‘No, leave this to me,’ said Ticky. ‘I’m going to sort it all out for you.’

‘Thanks, Ticky,’ I said, allowing her to call her hairdresser (‘He’s not actually John Frieda, but as good as’) and make me an appointment for that very
evening.

As she did, I stared at the reflection of my hair in the computer monitor. Even though I had pulled it back, a halo of frizz surrounded my head like a force field. With just one conversation my
hair had turned from my pride and joy into a source of shame. In much the same way that I appeared to have gone, in the space of two weeks, from happily settled girlfriend of Martin Peters to
cheated-upon frizzy-haired dater of unsuitable men whose closest confidants were an entitled Sloaney office-mate and a bunch of geriatric thespians.

At least it couldn’t get any worse.

I am sure I need not say that the hair appointment was a disaster. If this was the new me, she was even worse than the old one. Ticky had, of course, been absolutely correct in
saying that a haircut is a tried and tested part of the process of getting over a break-up. What she had neglected to say is that so is sobbing over the resulting haircut, believing that you have
never looked more hideous, and actually trying to scoop the hair trimmings into your handbag to fashion some desperate homemade extensions. I knew I wasn’t really crying about my hair. I was
sobbing about Martin and my single status and the way my settled life had slipped out of my grasp before I could do anything about it. But when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a haircut;
I saw loss. And a bizarre shoulder-length triangular bob where once there had been waist-length curls.

To compound my misery, Ticky’s hairdresser had decided to twist my curls into individual heavily gelled ringlets, which had left me looking uncomfortably like the famous sixteenth-century
Albrecht Dürer self-portrait, if only Albrecht Dürer had had the blotchy flushed face of one who was suppressing hysterical tears. I could have told the hairdresser from bitter experience
that the immaculately smoothed ringlets would last about as long as it took me to encounter a solitary molecule of water. Even if it hadn’t been raining that night, I managed to produce quite
a lot of water by bursting into tears as soon as I stepped out of the salon.