‘Do you know what your problem is? You’ve got square glasses,’ said Harriet.
‘Is that a big problem?’
‘Oh, it’s a massive problem. Because you’ve got a long face. I’ve got a lovely round face, and so I should wear square glasses to give me some gravitas, but you need to wear round glasses to stop yourself looking like a grumpy horse.’
‘So I should get new glasses?’
‘Yes, or maybe just take those ones off,’ and with that she reached over and snatched them from him. This was, without question, a flirtatious act. An aggressive one as well, but the two usually went together – James knew that much.
‘There – now we both look better,’ she said, placing the glasses in the folds of her blouse and essentially making it impossible for him to retrieve them.
There was, he could appreciate, a certain irony here. After all, he had gone on a blind date and as a consequence he had effectively been blinded. And there was a reason why James wore glasses instead of contact lenses and for once it wasn’t just the expense – he actually looked much better with them on. Without glasses, he didn’t look fresh and handsome, but exposed and vulnerable, as if his face had fallen off. But this was no time to get distracted by what he looked like. His main concern, and now that he had drunk all those vodkas he could see what it was with great clarity, was that he badly needed to sleep with Harriet. It was really important. In the medium-term, at least, his well-being and self-respect largely depended on it.
How many girls had he ever slept with? Not enough, obviously, but also, and this was the point – not enough. Fewer than ten, which he understood to be a standard benchmark, but also, more troublingly, fewer than six. And how many girls had he slept with just the once, on a first meeting, and then never seen again? How many – and he was aware how quaint the expression was in twenty-first-century London – how many one-night stands had he had? The answer was zero. He’d never done it before. Every one of the girls he had ever slept with he had known for some time and it had been achieved through the geographic processes he was so comfortable with, through attrition and erosion, the wearing down of surfaces and defences. Well, none of those techniques were going to work here. Instead, he would need to be quick-witted and possibly a bit duplicitous. Plus, as was so often the case, he would almost certainly have to throw money at it.
Harriet returned from the bar with two more glasses. This time they were twice the size, brightly coloured and ominously thick-looking, like little portions of pumpkin soup.
‘I got combinations this time. Vodka Aniseed and Vodka Custard. Apparently if you mix them, then they really fuck you up.’
They held the drinks together and leaning across the table looked closely at one another before swiftly and courageously drinking them. James spluttered for a bit, and she affectionately put his glasses back over his face. He smiled at her amateurishly, she stared into his eyes expertly, and with an impressive lack of ambiguity. He carefully extended his leg forward, so that it brushed against the inside of one of hers. She brought her legs together, cheerfully squeezing his knee. She reached out her hands and he good-humouredly held them – surprisingly, they were almost exactly the same size. There was no doubt it was going really well. He was doing all of the right things, perhaps not all that skilfully, but they were definitely the right ones.
‘I’m going to the bathroom for a bit,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve drunk too much vodka.’
It was pretty clear that Harriet was someone who didn’t believe in planning. It wasn’t as if she had ideological objections like Laura, it just wasn’t what she did. How then did she function? She was probably upper class, that always helped, but it was more than that. There was something else there: she had a worldview. It was difficult to be sure what it was, but she had one – a set of values and personal beliefs that existed outside of Western religion or the free market. Maybe she was a Zen Buddhist, or more likely it was just hedonism – the increasingly uncontroversial belief that the pursuit of personal pleasure should be the underlying rationale for all actions and ethical choices. It also partly explained why she was so attractive.
All of this was instructive and worth discussing with Felix at some point, but for the moment James had more logistical concerns. The principal one was that he lived in Crystal Palace. This was something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, who in their right mind would agree to go there for the night? Even if you lived there, you’d think twice about it, but to travel all the way out there with someone you’d just met that evening? Surely no sensible girl would consider that – although good sense wasn’t Harriet’s most obvious quality. On the other hand, if he did manage to get her there, she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere else, except possibly Kent. It also occurred to him that taking her home via two night buses wasn’t really going to work either.