‘Why didn’t you mention this stuff before I made my profile?’ I ask Lucy, as I get on with clearing the cups. I have to do something with all this agitation.
I can tell Fern’s flown into a panic. She’s standing and signalling to Shell they should leave.
‘And you’re already on these apps, Luce?’ I say, clattering about and pouring the dregs from the pot into the compost bin. ‘It sounds like a nightmare.’
‘Not any more,’ Lucy says. ‘I told you I was using Bumble to network.’ She’s adamant when she adds, ‘I’m happily single.’
‘Romanticise your own life,’ Shell says, pulling on her uni women’s basketball team jacket. ‘That’s what you always say, isn’t it, Fern?’
I look to the girls, wondering what this might be young-person code for. I’ve already had a whole education tonight.
Fern takes pity, casting her big, soft eyes over me. ‘For some people,’ she says, ‘it’s good to be single and romanticise your own life, rather than being left on read for days by some random who isn’t interested.’
‘Left on read?’ I sigh wearily, the teatowel scrunched in my hand, knuckles on my hip.
‘You know, when they’ve read your message but they don’t reply. They’ve left you on read.’
My eyes flit of their own accord to my phone abandoned on the table where Rusty’s handsome face grins out at us.
There was a little tick beside the apology I sent Patrick this morning. That means he read my message hours ago and he hasn’t replied.
‘And that’s a bad thing?’ I say, and my voice comes out pitchy. ‘Who said we have to reply to messages instantly? We don’t have to be available twenty-four hours a day. We’re not the Samaritans.’
‘But if someone really cares, they reply, don’t they?’ Fern says, perfectly innocently, with the air of a girl who always gets a reply from her lovely, dependable, simple Shell. They smile at each other with crumpled lips and make for the door. ‘Thank you for the tea and cake,’ Fern says. ‘Can I have the recipe?’
‘Oh, uh,’ I mumble, wrestling with my thoughts. ‘It’s Izz’s late mum’s. I’ll copy it out for you through the week.’
Lucy lets the girls out into the dark of the night, waving after them until Shell starts her car engine.
Once they’re gone, and I’m wrapping up what’s left of the cake, I’m faintly conscious of my niece stopping by the table and lifting my phone to her face, turning her back on me, presumably having one last look at the men’s profiles. Then she exaggeratedly says she’s tired with a yawn and a stretch and slopes off to bed.
‘Night night, darling,’ I say.
When I’ve wiped round the kitchen and put the clean cups away, thinking all the time about Patrick making the choice to ignore me – his annoying, mad old colleague on the gingerbread committee – because I chose to offend him instead of congratulating him on finding work, I click the lights off.
As I’m putting my phone on charge for the night by the bread bin – I don’t understand the urge to keep a phone by your bed like Lucy does – I notice the status updates.
You have accepted two dates, it tells me.
‘Have I?’ I scroll in alarm.
There, underneath, are pictures of Kenneth and Rusty, the con man and the catfisher, joined to my profile picture with overlapping pulsing hearts and the wordsClick here to chat with your datein gaudy pink.
I shut my phone off as quickly as I can and head to bed.
Chapter Eight
Thursday 7 December: Kenneth, 69
A date at Christmas. It should be romantic, right? Only Fern, Shell and Lucy’s advice the other night has freaked me out, and I’ve come to think of the app as little more than a who’s who of murderers, weirdos and pathological liars.
But, as Kenneth approaches me in the restaurant at the back of The Cotswold Lass pub (chosen because it’s a twenty-minute taxi ride from Wheaton where The Salutation is doing a roaring trade on Lolla’s pie, peas and pub quiz night, so there’s little chance of anyone I know spotting me), I’m relieved to say he looks sort of normal and not at all murdery.
Glasses, closely cut and tidy salt and pepper beard and a moustache, a dark navy suit like he’s just come from work, open collar. He’s stocky and about the same height as me when I stand to greet him, all very unintimidating. So far, so good.
Only, I sort of fumble an air kiss beside his cheek because I’m not sure if he’s expecting a kiss or not. He’s thrust out a hand to shake but because I was lunging forward for the kiss, his knuckles end up squashed against my ribs in a weird way, and I have to laugh it off.
He doesn’t laugh. Is he disappointed already?
