on a flight back down here. I’m going to the airport to pick him up. I’ll swing by your flat first. Then we can all go for a walk, clear the hangovers.’
Thanks, Issie. What a darling.
It is so bloody cold that the stag that are, allegedly, in Richmond Park are nowhere to be seen.
‘They’re hibernating,’ suggests Issie.
Josh wraps an arm around each of us.
‘If you think this is cold, you should have been in Scotland. Now that was cold.’
‘How was Scotland?’ As I say this I can see my breath on the air. I pull my jacket tighter round me.
‘Fine. Alcoholic. Tartan,’ he comments non-committally.
‘Gone off her, then?’ The ‘her’ in question is Katherine, Josh’s latest girlfriend. Issie and I quite like her. She’s been hanging around with Josh for a couple of months now. We had high hopes but I can already tell from the tone of his voice, and the fact that he’s back here with us instead of in St Andrews with her and her parents, that I ought to start talking about her in the past tense.
‘I finished it,’ Josh confirms. Issie and I slyly exchange glances.
‘Nice timing,’ we chorus.
Josh shrugs apologetically.
‘How was your night, Issie?’ I ask.
‘Really good, actually. Family all well and I met someone really nice at my parents’ party.’
‘Someone really nice and male?’ I try to clarify. It sounds unlikely.
Issie grins and nods. The cold wind has whipped up spots of colour on her cheeks. I understand why Elizabethan poets used to mither on about their heroines having cheeks like roses. Issie is glowing.
‘You look fantastic, Issie. Did you score?’
She grins sheepishly. ‘I was at my parents’.’ Good point, no opportunity. ‘But I did give him my telephone number.’
‘Home or work?’ asks Josh.
‘Both, and my mobile. And my e-mail and my fax,’ says Issie. This time Josh and I exchange the glances.
‘He hasn’t called yet, though.’ Issie suddenly scrambles for her mobile. She checks her message facility and the text messages. Nothing.
‘It’s far too early for him to call,’ Josh comforts her. Although neither he nor I think that Issie’s chap will call. He’ll have detected the fact that whilst one hand was handing over all her telephone numbers, the other hand was flicking through a copy of Brides and Setting Up Home.
‘Should I call him?’ asks Issie.
‘Do you have his number?’
‘Yes, his mother gave it to my mother.’
I stamp my boots hard on the freezing snow, enjoying the crunchy sound it makes and avoiding confronting the inevitable disaster Issie is driving towards. It sounds to me as though this guy is a social misfit, if his mother has to try to get him dates. I don’t share my theory with Issie. Instead I listen to hers on sexual equality.
‘I mean, it doesn’t matter who rings who, really, does it? I mean we are both adults. We don’t have to play games.’ Neither Josh nor I comment.
We stop and buy hot chocolates from a caravan, marvelling that the guy is open on New Year’s Day. The vendor assures us that he’d rather be freezing in his caravan in Richmond Park than ‘stuck in the house wiv me muvver-in-law and the kids’. We all do our best to ignore this condemnation of family life and sip the creamy drinks.
Issie continues. ‘I’m sure he’d respect me for calling.’
She believes the seventies’ hype that a man still respects you if you call him, that he’ll like you and want a relationship with you. I try to explain that the advice is thirty years out of date. In the seventies, single women would not have accepted the advice of the Land Girls. So why does Issie think that the burn-the-bra brigade have any relevance to how women of the twenty-first century should conduct their romantic and sexual liaisons?
‘Call him if you like, Issie. But he’ll know that you don’t just happen to have two tickets for the opera – no one ever does.’
‘Should I suggest the Turkish restaurant that’s just opened on Romilly Street?’
‘If you want to, but he knows it’s code for “I like you”. “I like you” leaves you exposed and will send him running.’
‘You call men all the time.’
‘I call because I don’t want commitment. They respond because they know that.’ Issie scowls at me. But doesn’t waste her breath arguing. ‘If you want my advice, wait until he calls you.’
Issie gives Josh her phone and makes him promise not to let her ring until 3 January, earliest.