unstoppable.
‘Yes, I’m certain of it,’ I said, although I wasn’t. I felt it was true and that was the same thing. I wanted to think the worst of him. It stopped me from wanting him
back.
‘Utter bastard,’ sympathized Ticky. ‘Did you really not suspect a thing ?’
She tilted her head to one side speculatively as I spoke, prompting me with the practised skill of a professional interviewer and leaving tactical silences that I rushed to fill with teary
rantings. When I finally ran out of confessional, she leaned forward for a machine-gun burst of sharp questions that, once finished, achieved what I had previously thought to be impossible. It
actually exhausted my desire to speak about Martin. It was as if Ticky had wrung me out like a wet cloth. I knew my sense of release was merely a by-product of her bloodsucking; but the effect was
astonishingly lightening. I wouldn’t have believed that I could actually feel grateful to Ticky Lytton-Finch. Perhaps I had misjudged her all along.
‘So, Roars, you’re twenty-nine,’ she stated briskly, twirling her hair into a bun at the top of her head. ‘My sister says all the good men are snapped up by thirty-five.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.’
Perhaps I had not misjudged her after all.
‘It’s far too soon for me to start dating,’ I said stiffly. The very idea made me shudder. I’d always gratefully skipped over those complicated women’s magazine
articles about dating – when to text, how long to leave it before returning an email, whether or not you should have sex with your new man before you’d had the ‘exclusivity’
talk. It all sounded like a different world to the slow, long-ago unfolding of my relationship with Martin, where our accidental daily encounters in the university library had become less
accidental as that first term went on, until, almost without our having ever discussed it, we were a couple.
‘Well, Goouurd, of course it is too soon for you to, like, start another long-term relationship,’ said Ticky, tossing her thick blonde hair to one side. ‘But raaahlly, if
Spreadsheets Martin is your only boyfriend then, like, that means you haven’t been on a date in eleven years.’
‘No,’ I admitted. I didn’t feel like going on a date for at least another eleven years, to be honest.
‘Thing is, Roars, like, you don’t have time to waste at your age.’ She ignored my glare. ‘Saahriously. I’m not suggesting you, like, try to find your future husband
or anything, but you do need to get out there and get some practice. Try out a few duff ones to get back in the game, you know?’
‘Oh God, I can hardly bear it,’ I groaned. ‘Duff ones?’
‘Yah. You remember Hen Milroy-Pennington?’
‘Do I?’ I asked, uncertainly. It was never easy to keep up with the huge cast of friends that populated Ticky’s social life.
‘Yah, you do. Fashion PR? Tall? Dark hair?’ That narrowed it down. At least 90 per cent of Ticky’s friends, and the female staff of Country House for that matter, were
blonde. In my early days at the magazine I had naively believed that there was some posh gene that bestowed blonde hair upon them, along with an inability to speak quietly and a propensity to turn
up one’s shirt collars for no reason. Then I had discovered that, with rare exceptions, they owed their colouring to the hand of an expensive hairdresser rather than nature.
‘I think so,’ I said, not really sure but wanting her to get to the point.
‘Yah, right, well, Hen has just got engaged. Eiffel Tower proposal, baguette-cut diamond so big she can hardly lift her hand, announcement in the Telegraph : the works.’
‘Right,’ I said, feeling my face pinch up bitterly. ‘How lovely for her.’ Ticky really was extraordinarily tactless, I thought, bringing up engagements to someone so
recently dumped.
The point is, Roars, a year ago she set herself a proper mission to go out and meet as many men as possible,’ said Ticky.