She's pleased to see me and bristling with barely suppressed glee.
'Spill,' I tell her, not actually meaning the further contents of my handbag which she kicks with her feet as she settles herself, her holdall, her book bag, her bicycle bag, and a large red umbrella.
'I'm being a bit ridiculous,' she confesses.
Oh heck. Sinking Feeling. Prickling Neck. I know what's coming...
'Not the website for young men?' I ask with dread, remembering a recent conversation we had after Liz, another friend of mine, wrote an article in the Evening Standard about, I kid you not, the Toy Boy Warehouse.
'Yes.' She says and she throws her head back and laughs delightedly. The car lurches at the traffic lights. Alice is many things, but she's not small and sudden movements tend to have considerable impact, something that her prospective suitors may well have to factor in.
'I've had fifteen replies.'
I keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes firmly on the traffic on Praed Street as I cross over Edgeware Road.
'And I'm going to meet one of the men tomorrow.'
'Men. Are you sure you're using the right noun?'
'Oh I haven't answered any of the really young ones. None of the twentysomethings. This one is a writer. Mind you,' she muses, 'He has about three spelling mistakes on his profile, so he can't be much of a writer.'
'And so you've told him you're in publishing...' I'm shaking my head like Claire Rayner at a Family Planning Convention in Tower Hamlets. 'Do you have any idea what you're doing?'
'I'm going to have fun, that's what I'm doing. Look, I've done marriage, I've done kids, I've done business. Now I just want to enjoy myself. All the other women on the site are very successful, high achieving women, just like me. He sounds nice.'
'Nice?'
'Well you'll see him for yourself tomorrow at the book launch.'
'You haven't told him where you work have you? You can't be serious. You've asked him along to a work thing? Isn't that a bit... I mean, what if he's a nutter?'
'I know,' she says cheerfully. 'He might murder me in my bed.' She chuckles. 'Guess how old he is?'
I am afraid to. 'Please say he's thirty fiv...'
'Yes, he's thirty.' She interrupts, deliberately not looking at me as I turn the ignition off in a parking space on Marylebone High Street. 'A bit chubby, but nice looking. He's sent me about a hundred texts.' She snaps open her phone and proceeds to read some of them to me. Modesty permits me from repeating them. Sadly, it did not have a similar effect on Alice.
'Alice, you know he's only interested in one thing.'
'So am I.'
'...plus dinner and possibly cash gifts. It's a sugar momma, he's after.'
'Don't worry, I'm not planning on paying for anything.' She protests.
'Remember that guy we met a couple of months ago at the South Bank who told you about his son who lives at home in his spare room and spends all his time on the internet before taking off for weekends all over the country to rendezvous with older women? You might meet someone like that.'
'No, mine has "roommates in Chiswick"' She says.
So you are going to have a date with a boy who lives in a shared flat? Haven't you "done" that too? I'm still bloody living it at home with my kids.. If I started sleeping with someone like that it would be like being 21 again, but not in a good. way.'
'Oh that's the other funny thing. You'll never guess! His name is Dave.'
Dave is her son's name. The two are seven years apart. They may have gone to school together.
"Freudian much? You haven't even met him and you're already letting him walk into the middle of your life. And what possessed you to ask him along to a ruddy book launch? What if he introduces himself to people and tells them how he knows you?'
'That would be embarrassing,' she allows. 'You will come along tomorrow, won't you, and check him out?'
'I can't. I've got pub quiz. And first I'm going to IPC to have a drink with some people.'
'Which people?'
I remind her about Stacey on the picture desk of a magazine I sometimes do the odd article for, who I thought was a girl, but turned out to be a boy.
'Isn't he very young too?'
'He's thirty eight, darling, but I didn't find him on Toy Boys' Warehouse, he is a work colleague.'
'But he liked your picture.'
'No he didn't. He's just being polite. You know, that's what young people used to show when they spoke to their elders. Politeness. Not a list of their sexual fantasies. And we've had this drink planned off and on since Easter. It's not a date. It's a meeting. He has a wife, for goodness sake. And a kid.' I'm shocked at the suggestion. Poor Stacey, suddenly demoted from picture editor to chancer trawling the internet for cougars, which - let's face it - working for a woman's magazine with the demographic of ABC women between 45-55, he has a large sample group of better looking well-preserved women than me to choose from. I have a look in the rear view mirror, and see my hair a waving sea of frizz. Disheveled old cougars would not make the final cut, I'm sure.
'Bring him along to the book launch with you.'
'What, so they can play together while you and I go off and do important grown upthings? Don't be daft.'
'They can talk about bands,' she says and then bursts out laughing.
By this time we are settled in our seats near the front of the hall as 'ilary sails down the aisle and sits on the dias next to Will Buckley. It's very, very warm and I begin fanning myself with a copy of Dante's Inferno (which I failed to return to the shelves afterwards, sorry Daunt's). Will's face goes flame red. I feel like I'm going to spontaneously combust. The woman next to me nods off. Alice squints around the room. 'Everyone here is so old. Is this all we've got to look forward to? Is this what you do when you've had the menopause, go to bleeding readings?'
I remind her that she was the one who got the tickets, and that since we are both, ostensibly, in the publishing business, we luuuuuuuuuuuuurve the book buying public in all their many forms. She sniffs.
I tell Alice that Mathilda in the office thinks that in order to meet quality, well-heeled men you should hang out at bookshops or in University Libraries. I met my husband in a University Library so I don't necessarily agree with this, and certainly Daunts, even with the draw of Hilary Mantel, does not seem to be much of a haven for the quality and well heeled single man. But given that I'm sitting next to a woman who shops at Toy Boy Warehouse I can hardly claim the moral high ground for women of a certain age.
Hilary stops talking when the geriatric audience are sufficiently tired of the sound of their own voices to cease airing their own opinions in lieu of asking questions, and some of us knock over the people in Zimmers to get to the top of the signing queue. The man after me (sweet, under fifty-five, perfectly presentable and disarmingly modest) says 'I feel a bit wet doing that, but I just couldn't resist it.'
'Don't worry, I actually work in publishing and I came with the express purpose of getting my book signed.'
'Me too,' said Alice, with her enormously fat copy of Wolf Hall on page 22 where it has been for the last month. ('I can't get on with it,' she had confessed earlier.)
He smiles in relief and we and other autograph hobbyists stand in a huddle and compare dedications. I take my own book from its exile on the shelves and put it out on the top of a pile of The Secret History of Bees which, I confess, did nothing for me, before we get on to the more serious business of the evening of deep fried egg (a dish of utter and complete deliciousness, trust me) and ham hock and squid salad at The Tapa Bar. Fabulous, zingy, interesting and different food - almost my favourite place in London. Why don't I come here more often, I wonder? Alice takes the bread from the basket (£2.20 a portion) that we didn't eat, and wraps it in her napkin to take home with her.
I guess we know that what the chap from Toy Boy Warehouse is going to get for breakfast. I wonder if she cuts off his crusts for him.
