dinner jackets and bow ties. Sometimes couples posed there for wedding photographs, but this wasn’t that – there was no bride in a white dress. A gay wedding? But one of them was seated at a table right in the middle of the bandstand, which had been set with a sparkling white cloth, and the other was standing next to him, rigid, as if at attention, a napkin draped over one arm.
I stopped and took out my phone, looking around me as I did. There was no sign of any single man perched on a bench or a picnic blanket, or even just looking around awkwardly like I was. Apart from the groups scattered around – many, I could see, staring at the bandstand and speculating among themselves about what might be going on there – there was no one apart from the two men and me.
My phone vibrated in my hand.
Is that you, Zoë? Your date awaits!
‘Oh my God, cringe!’ Dani said.
We were at the café next door to the gym, both drinking enormous iced coffees with squirty non-dairy cream on top and eating carrot cake, still in our workout gear.
‘I know! Cringe, cringe, cringe, to the max. I was cringing so hard I almost swallowed my own head.’
‘Who was the other guy?’
‘Paul’s flatmate. He’d got him there to be our waiter. I think his name was Imran. Lovely guy and everything, but…’
‘Cringe.’
‘Yep. So, so cringe. Everyone was looking at us. People were taking photos and everything.’
‘You mean you actually stayed for the date?’
‘How could I not? What could I have done, said, “Sorry mate, your romantic gesture is making me die inside and I’m going to fuck off home to my cat?”’
‘Must’ve been tempting.’
‘Oh God, it so, so was. But at the same time…’
‘Awww?’
‘Exactly. He’d done this mad romantic thing, he was willing to make a total tit of himself in front of loads of people, I couldn’t be like, “Not working for me, soz, bye.”’
‘Yeah, I can kind of see how that would be.’
‘So what could I do? I walked over and he got up and – no word of a lie – he kissed my hand. Like I was the queen or something. I nearly died.’
Dani had a mouthful of coffee and I saw her cheeks bulge as she struggled not to choke on it. ‘He what?’ she spluttered at last.
‘You heard right. And then Imran pulled my chair out for me to sit down and poured us both champagne, and Paul gave me an enormous fuck-off bunch of roses, and I didn’t know where to put them so I sat there clutching them like a wedding bouquet or something, until Imran took them off me and stuck them in the ice bucket the fizz was in.’
‘And you still had your bottle of cheap wine and your packet of nuts?’
‘I did. Oh my God, it was awful. I didn’t know where to put those either. I ended up kind of hiding the nuts in my handbag and putting the wine on the ground by my feet and not mentioning it because here he was with this bottle of Moët that had cost, like, twenty quid.’
‘Oh, Zoë. Is it wrong that I’m really glad it happened to you? It’s, like, once-in-a-lifetime mortifying. What happened next?’
‘So then Imran opened this massive cooler box – what with that and the table and the two chairs and the flowers the two of them must’ve looked like they were going on an expedition to summit Everest when they walked up that hill – and got out a plate of oysters.’
‘Oysters? Oh no.’
‘Oh yes. And I don’t have in my profile that I don’t eat meat because, you know, everyone takes the piss out of vegans for saying all the time that they’re vegan. I thought if we ended up going out for food I could just order what I wanted and not say anything.’
‘But you couldn’t.’
‘I couldn’t. I feel terrible, Dani, but I ate them. I felt too bad not to. I mean, I try to avoid meat but I have to taste it sometimes for work and I told myself this was kind of like that. He had put so much effort in. But it was gross, like swallowing snot, and I read afterwards that the poor things are actually alive when you eat them and I tried to make myself sick but I couldn’t. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, because after he’d opened the oysters, Imran… Oh my