‘Just take it easy if you’re going to take up a racquet sport, okay?’ he says, looking concerned. ‘I’ve got a few patients who play. They are constantly battling injury.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. One of my ladies has non-stop rotator cuff problems. Another guy had the worst case of patellar tendinitis his doctor had ever seen.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ he says ominously.
I met Gavin a couple of months ago, on the dating website I’d signed up to with the sole purpose of shutting Jeff up.
I was eventually brought around to the idea that having a ‘man friend’ might be tolerable, like my neighbour Linda has. She’s a widow too, only her companion, Jerry, is a seventy-four-year-old retired civil servant whom she met at a ukelele group, having taken up the instrument at the start of the year. He takes her dancing, accompanies her on cruises and they once went all the way to Mold to see a Phil Collins tribute act. Gavin is my equivalent. And believe me, he was not easy to find.
On the first website I tried, the results were so dire when I searched within a thirty-mile radius for eligible men in my age bracket, I felt like I was inThe Last of Us. And while I’d heard about ‘dick pics’, rather like the Northern Lights, until you’ve seen one, you can’t quite believe they exist. The first sleazebag who tried it accompanied his photo with a message that said: ‘Hey bbe. Now show me yours’. I responded by changing the safe settings on my Wi-Fi, doing a quick Google search and screenshotting the most ostentatiously large penis I could find, before sending it back with the message: ‘Here you go. What do you think? xoxo’.
Jeff insisted I try another company, but that was almost more depressing. This one wasn’t full of weirdos, just genuine people, all looking for that magical, everyday thing that had fallen into my lap when I met Ed aged twenty-three. Love. It reinforced how lucky I’d been – and the sheer impossibility of it ever happening again. I was on the verge of giving up, when Gavin appeared in my inbox.
I’ll admit it, I was flattered. It didn’t take much imagination to realise how in demand he must be, a private dentist in his early forties who is well mannered, solvent and the only person on the whole of Match.com who apparently knows where to put an apostrophe.
These are all good qualities in themselves, but they are not the best thing about him. Rather, it’s the fact that he seems quite happy not to have sex with me, at least for the timebeing. I think he’d like to, but I have given off strong, puritanical vibes that he’s nice or indifferent enough to respect. I’m not sure whether this is because he’s seeing other people, which seems to be the done thing these days, unless exclusivity is explicitly stated. But I’m certainly not going to labour the point because this low-key arrangement suits me perfectly. I’d never had myself down as someone who would tolerate anything less than commitment from a person I was dating. I am Gen X, after all. We just don’t do this sort of thing. Yet here I apparently am.
We see each other a couple of times a week, at the gym or for drinks. I also accompanied him to the annual ‘Excellence in Aesthetic Dentistry Awards’ last month and got to bask in reflected glory when he won the coveted ‘Best Implant-Supported Bridge’prize.Gavin is pleasant and safe company and the fact that he’s in my life proves an important if not exactly accurate point to my family: that, five years after Ed’s death, my grief has finally moved into the acceptance phase they are so determined it must.
‘It’s not just tennis either,’ Gavin is still saying, as we head towards the leg press. ‘Racquet sports in general wreak havoc on the joints.’
‘I don’t think I’d ever be playing that intensely, somehow. I’m probably not going to go back anyway,’ I say.
‘That’s wise. Honestly, you can’t be too careful. There were 28,000 pickleball injuries in the United States last year alone.’
‘Glad I live in the UK then,’ I mutter, as a woman walks by and touches him on the bicep.
‘Gavin!’ She is in her early sixties, bird-thin and muscular, with a deep tan offset by electric-blue fitness wear.
‘Hillary! How are things?’
They have a short chat about the astonishing coincidence that it’s a ‘leg day’ for both of them, before she disappears with a flash of her conspicuously perfect gnashers.
‘One of my ladies,’ Gavin explains.
‘Ah.’
His ‘ladies’ – female patients of a certain age – make for a devoted fan club. I have no plans to let him loose on my own teeth, but I can see how he’d have a nice chair-side manner. He likes to make people feel good about themselves, as I discovered on our third date, when he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Know what I admire about you, Jules? Your upper midline alignment. It’s exquisite.’
I’m sure Gavin’s ‘ladies’ haven’t failed to notice his physique either, which is another example of how he strives to be the best version of himself. He may only be an inch or so taller than me – I’m five foot seven. But he is, to coin a phrase,stacked, with a six-pack that sits on top of an eight-pack and the kind of pneumatic biceps ordinarily reserved for Marvel superheroes and nightclub doormen. There is something admirable about the commitment this requires, even if it’s difficult to keep up with.
I do put in time at the gym, interchanging the elliptical machine with a weights class a couple of times a week. They’re tolerable, occasionally even enjoyable, but more often I’ll glance around at twenty other exhausted-looking women pumping iron in time to a trance track and can’t wait for it to end. As Gavin strikes up conversation with another patient he’s bumped into – a woman called Miriam whose gums he’s worked miracles on – I excuse myself, telling him I’m off for an invigorating ice bath and will meet him in the members’ lounge afterwards.
I get as far as pulling on my swimsuit, walking to the pool area and gazing at the aforementioned tub of ice for several seconds, before deciding that’s as close as I’m prepared to get. Instead, I slip into the main pool for a few lengths. But they’re far from relaxing and my head just fills with thoughts of Frankie, where she might be right this minute and a wholehost of catastrophic things that might happen if she forgets to charge her phone again.
I never used to be this angst-ridden. I like to think of myself as a very pragmatic person, not some spineless, lily-livered scaredy cat and, like every woman I know, I developed an ability to compartmentalise long ago. I had no choice in the year after Ed died, when I ring-fenced a small corner of my brain and devoted it tocarrying on. That was the part that continued to sit in meetings, make packed lunches, deal with suppliers, the one that attended trade fairs and bought sticky-backed plastic at 9pm the night before some art homework was due. But perimenopause seems to have sent my heart aflutter in all the wrong ways. For about a year, I’ve been living with a low level of anxiety that never seems to disappear.
I only do a few laps, before heading to the steam room to see if I can obliterate my worries with heat instead. I go to enter but discover that it’s almost full. Squeezing in is an instantly less enticing prospect, but by now I’ve got the door open and I’m overcome by an illogical desire not to offend anyone. So I step inside, shuffle past several hairy knees and find a seat next to two men droning on about something impressive one of them did on the eighteenth hole.
I stay for about a minute, then consider making a break for it. But as I go to stand, the friction between my thighs and the tiles releases an outrageous wet fart sound. Everyone in the room turns to look at me, and I have no option but to brazen it out and gaze at the walls impassively, to underline that – whatever they think they heard –they didn’t.Four people get up and leave.
I settle into position and close my eyes. After a few moments, the steam makes the knots in my muscles unfurl and all the anguish that’s kept me awake for the last few nights fizz anddrift away. Something else filters into their place. The sight of Sam Delaney clapping from the balcony of the tennis club. I wonder how long he’d been watching us play? And more importantly, whether he’d realised who I was? I start to try and work out how long it is since I last saw him. Twenty-five years? More? God, it must be . . .
Chapter 10
