London is a village sometimes. Tonight at Eva's gallery Flow there was an opening for a bookbinding exhibition and single friend had pitched up with an entourage of not one, but three men (though not, if you're a regular reader - the sort you would expect to find wandering round a field of Henry Moore sculptures). There was a chap in a paint stained shirt whose name I didn't catch but who had startlingly bright blue eyes in a tanned face and who, I imagine, didn't get the dabs of white on his plaid shirt from painting the ceiling, darling, but rather had the air of one wrenched from a canvas in his studio somewhere in Trustafaria. Another, I think, was a Guardian Soulmate who she thought she might palm off on one of us, and the third was the, not nearly ubiquitous enough, Silver Fox type who wore his glasses on the edge of his nose the way I do myself and was, I realised as we were introduced, someone I had met before. I even remembered his name.
Archie.
I was introduced to him at Justin Marozzi's book launch last year (but don't bother reading the blog entry - he wasn't the poet I mentioned) after I recognised his girlfriend as a mother from the school gates. As single friend said later, she realised that one of the few, legitimate (I'm wondering what the illegitimate ways are - swinging soirees, tupperware parties? - oh, yes, Giles and I met over the salad crisper...) ways to make friends in London is to have kids. The girlfriend, a tall striking ash blonde who once educated me in the effects of illegal substances on her love life, had, at that time, an equally tall striking husband who I used to admire as we ushered our respective offspring in their Eastern European forced-march raincoats down St Quintin Avenue to school. And then he left her and along came his coked-up - subject of many an anecdote - replacement. I wondered if Archie was the one. Not really what you want to be thinking when you are shaking hands at a Gallery opening.
In any case, I reminded him that we'd met before. He congratulated me on my memory which is what men do after a certain age when they meet you at parties, no matter how low cut your frock is. It's the writer in me, I insisted, so that he wouldn't just think I was a sad old dame who remembered men with white, mad hair that I met at parties because I was a rabid stalker.
I also noted that I didn't know anyone at Justin Marozzi's book launch, and so, naturally, the few people I did recognise stuck in my mind. Total rubbish. I'm a walking encyclopedia of faces. You could use me as a police artist. I remembered him because he was good looking.
We chatted and he told me that he was going to write. This was one of the few instances where I might have stopped my eyes crossing and offered up that I worked in publishing while erroneously alluding that I had the power to put him into print - because he was cute - but he didn't ask what I did for a living. Readers, I am that interesting. Instead he said he had bought a new dictaphone machine that one simply plugged into the computer and, using voice recognition, it did all the typing by itself. It had previously been owned by a Brummie so was attuned to a specific accent, so he would have to reacquaint it with a little RP before it would recognise his voice, however, the first hurdle was that he couldn't turn the damn thing on. Before I could say anything even vaguely and unwisely salacious I found myself clutching his small machine and offering to turn it on myself. I've very, very good with electronics.
Five minutes later I returned having found the on off switch, a task helped by reinserting the battery the right way round. Men. How did they ever conquer the world?
When I repatriated his dictaphone ('You are an angel,' he said - 'an angel' you hear!) he was telling my friend Nel how he had driven Mary Killen in a Bentley to Aix en Provence where his girlfriend had a 'wonderful' house. No man over 40 should have a girlfriend but, that aside, it was obvious he moved in rather different circles from those that I did myself, despite the fact that we had both ended up at the same party. League and well out of it came crushingly to mind.
'We had sat nav. I literally typed in Aix-en-Provence in Sloane Square and it almost drove itself to France. It's the first thing I'm going to write about with my brand new dictaphone.'
I quashed the thought that this was a man with a somewhat overeager fondness for the DIY in both dictaphones and driving which did not bode well in other areas of life, and wondered what the voice in the sat nav of a Bentley sounded like. Did it harrumph like a public school headmaster: 'One should drive for a hundred yards and not expect any deviations until one finds oneself perpendicular to a public house when one should turn left, not stopping for traffic because of course, in a Bentley, one always has right of way.' Or would it purr fruitily like Joanna Lumley: 'Come on now Darling, pay attention, you need to turn left up ahead, after the little jewellers on the corner with the frightfully nice rings.'
He claimed not. He said it was very common and said 'Pardon' instead of 'What'.
Sat navs talk back to you these days? I should get one. It would be one up on the ex who never said a word in the car.
'Pard...' I began before wisely picking up another glass of wine from the circulating tray. He went on to tell me that he had found an estate in Scotland for a French family who wanted their children to go to summer camp in the Highlands, and since no such thing existed, had hired two teachers from Gordonstoun to teach them about fly fishing and deer stalking. I tried to interest him in hiring my beautiful, bluestocking, arty, Oxbridge educated eldest as a tutor who has just come back from Montpellier, fluent in French and impoverished in Euros.
He was very keen to meet her. But not, I fear, in her conversational French.
The term 'girlfriend' began to make sense.
