James put on his coat and, for the last time that day, checked his email before he turned off the computer. There was a note from Rachel, saying she was sorry she had to run off, and that it would be nice to go for a drink soon. There was also a message from Felix:
Okay, you’re going on a date this Friday. Her name is Harriet. More details to follow. Be brave and you’ll enjoy it, be afraid and you won’t. She’s a lot of fun.
8
22 February
The physical character of a place can help reinforce a sense of meaning and civility.
– The London Plan, Section 7.14
It was Friday night, exactly a week after his date with Laura. But this time it was very different. For one thing, James wasn’t in a pub. London was full of pubs, they were one of its distinctive characteristics, and they were mainly disgusting. They were, as he knew all too well, places where the city’s administrators went to drink beer, eat packets of crisps and talk about all the people they worked with who weren’t with them. No, instead of a pub in Whitehall he was in a theme bar in Soho, which in a crowded marketplace had had to compete through specialisation and stocked two hundred types of vodka. And it wasn’t small and atmospheric and two hundred years old – it had only been open for six months, and would very likely be a Japanese noodle restaurant in a year’s time.
More importantly, the girl he was with was different as well. Harriet was twenty-eight years old, put undue emphasis on star signs and worked at a commercials production company that did things on behalf of Felix’s advertising agency. James had only vaguely understood, but whatever – it was enough to know that he had some kind of hold over her, and that it was in the interests of her career that James didn’t have a completely miserable evening.
Although it had soon become apparent that Harriet didn’t worry very much about her career. Nor did she seem to have any interest in his. This was obviously a good thing – there would be no need to justify town planning to her on the grounds of market failure. Instead, and helpfully, they had talked almost exclusively about her. And what they had talked about was not what she did for a living, but all the things she liked doing. So they had talked about bars, cocktails, India, dance music and famous people she fancied. They had also talked quite a bit about Felix – after all, he was the only person they both knew – and they agreed how peculiar he was. James was sure that he wouldn’t mind. And after no more than an hour or so of this, she had started to share confidences, reveal endearing vulnerabilities and to become mildly amorous. Already, her feet were gently but purposefully knocking against his.
Was dating girls really this easy? James was sure it never used to be this straightforward. But now it seemed all you had to do was turn up in a dark suit, speak pleasantly and with good manners, listen attentively and get them drunk. It was a big help that they were in a bar that only sold spirits. They didn’t have to sit there sipping drinks thoughtfully and maintain structured conversations for any length of time. Whenever James didn’t know what to say next, which happened quite often to begin with, all he had to do was swallow his drink and go to the bar to buy them something else. And, of course, the drinks were a good talking point themselves. Already they had drunk a Vodka Pistachio, Vodka Chilli, Vodka Snickers and Vodka Seroxat. They had also had a Vodka Oxygen, which had been a bit disappointing, and a Vodka Vodka, which was a great deal more expensive than just a double vodka, but neither of them had been able to work out why. He couldn’t remember ever going to a bar like this in Nottingham.
Another good thing was that Harriet was at approximately the right level of attractiveness. She didn’t, for instance, look anything like Laura. She wasn’t tall and blond, and she didn’t have the kind of aristocratic good looks that made you feel conscious of the fact that you had an A level in Business Studies. Her hair was a reassuring, nothing-special dark brown and her eyes weren’t a calculating blue but an unreliable green, with a cluster of small freckles naively arranged around her nose. But her most important feature, the thing that had probably always, and only slightly inaccurately, defined her, was her mouth. A wide, entertaining mouth that was too big to be pretty, too big for her small, disorderly teeth, and which was often getting her into trouble – not for the things it said, but for the things it did.
And thankfully, of course, she wasn’t an economist. She had about two-thirds of a degree in Art History from a higher education institution that he had never heard of, and which she was meaning to get back to one day but for the moment had too much else going on. She took pride in her rudimentary arithmetic and limited powers of logical reasoning. She read widely, however, and dressed with an erotic crudeness and primary-colour stupidity that could only mean one thing: she was highly intelligent. So James would have to be a little bit careful.