tactics.
‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ said Ian, taking a coin out of his pocket. ‘Heads you go, tails I go.’
I gulped. Surely I wasn’t going to stake all of my future happiness on the toss of a coin? ‘OK,’ I said after a moment. If it was tails, I reasoned, I would go anyway.
Ian spun the coin and caught it on the back of his left hand, covering it with his right. He slowly lifted his fingers, hiding the coin from my view. I saw his face fall. ‘Best of three?’ he said tentatively, but I was already out of my chair, striding after her.
Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that I was some sort of silver-tongued ladies’ man. Quite the opposite, in fact: usually in such circumstances I would be an awkwardly stammering wreck. But this was an unusual situation.
I found the girl standing by the bar. And miracle of miracles, she was alone. I stood next to her, deliberately looking the other way. With fumbling fingers I lit a cigarette. Slowly I counted to five, and then pretended to notice her for the first time. I cocked a cool eyebrow.
‘Hi,’ I murmured, exhaling meaningfully through my nose. Unfortunately I was recovering from a bad cold, and the smoke shot out of my one functioning nostril in a single, lopsided plume.
‘Hello,’ said the girl neutrally.
‘I’m Matt,’ I said.
She looked at me appraisingly. ‘I’m Anna.’
‘Well, hello, Anna.’ I stuck my hand out towards her, pleased with how well this was going. She shook my hand with an amused glint in her eye, which I judiciously decided to ignore. I gestured towards the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘No thanks,’ she answered. ‘I’m not staying. Just waiting for someone.’
She did try to warn me, you see, but I sailed resolutely on past the bank of flashing hazard lights, heroically oblivious. Waiting for someone? Pah!
‘So tell me, Anna,’ I said, ‘what are you studying?’ I leaned back against the bar, neatly sticking my elbow into a puddle of spilt beer.
‘Law,’ she replied flatly, cocking her head to one side as she lit a cigarette. (Anna has always been a fantastic smoker. She smokes in an effortlessly glamorous way, as if it’s still the Sixties. I, on the other hand, just puff away artlessly, with no panache, no drama.)
‘Law? Really?’ I hoped that the crippling intellectual and sexual intimidation that I was now experiencing was not manifesting itself too obviously. ‘Wow,’ I said anxiously.
There was a pause. ‘What about you?’ she asked.
‘Me?’ I shrugged nonchalantly. ‘English, actually.’
Anna nodded, apparently not surprised.
I felt my armpits prickle with sweat. I looked down at my cigarette, and tried to compose my thoughts. ‘So anyway –’
‘Hello.’ Suddenly, the most beautiful man I had ever seen was standing next to us. Dark, curly hair fell over his eyes in a messily random way that I cattily estimated must have taken him at least thirty minutes to get just right. He could have balanced a small sherry glass on each of his cheekbones, which jutted out from a texturally flawless face. He had dark green eyes, and his chiselled jaw-line was more gracefully contoured than the leg of a Rodin nude. He smiled at me, revealing absolutely perfect teeth.
This was bad; but then things got unspeakably worse.
‘Hi sweetie,’ said Anna – and then she kissed him. My fantasy world imploded messily.
‘Having fun?’ said the man in heavily accented English.
‘This is – I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten your name.’
Anna hadn’t just forgotten my name; oh no. She had completely forgotten it. I stuck out my hand towards the man. ‘Matt Moore,’ I said.
‘Jean-Philippe Durand,’ he replied.
‘You’re French,’ I said cleverly.
Jean-Philippe Durand looked at me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is.’
‘Jean-Philippe is here for a year on a scholarship,’ explained Anna brightly.
‘Golly,’ I said hollowly. ‘Congratulations.’ My soul had begun to shred itself into tiny, forlorn pieces.
Jean-Philippe Durand inclined his head slightly. ‘Thank you. Matt.’ Was that a small sneer?
Anna looked at her watch. ‘We should be going.’
‘Off anywhere nice?’ I asked, not wanting to let her out of my sight.
‘The cinema,’ she answered. ‘Jean-Philippe insists that only the French make decent films. We decided to put his theory to the test. Yesterday we saw a Truffaut, and today it’s my turn. We’re going to watch The Third Man, which was directed by Carol Reed. Then we’ll see if he still stands by his theory.’ She grinned archly at Jean-Philippe, who had not taken his beautiful eyes off me.
I nodded, hopelessly out of my depth. ‘Ah, the great Carol Reed. One of my personal favourites, funnily enough. I think she’s wonderful.’
Disconcertingly, Anna frowned at me for a moment, then decided I was joking and laughed politely. ‘We really should be going,’ she said again.
‘Well, it was nice to meet you both,’ I said. ‘Have a great time.’
‘We will,’ said Jean-Philippe Durand with such unflappable certainty that I wanted to punch him on his beautifully sculpted nose.
‘Bye,’ said Anna, flashing me a heartbreaking smile before grabbing Jean-Philippe’s hand and turning to go out of the bar.
And that was that.
That wasn’t that, of course.
The reason why Jean-Philippe Durand will not remember me, why his brow will furrow as he sees my blade swoop down towards him in that darkened side street, is because we never spoke to each other again.
After my humiliation at the bar, I began to brood hopelessly. Anna rapidly developed into a fully-fledged obsession. All other thought or action was suddenly pretty much impossible, and pretty much meaningless. I was hopelessly in love. I spent hours staring longingly out of my window, which gave me a terrific view of the bins at the back of the college kitchens, wistfully contemplating what might have been. Rather than doing the sensible thing and forgetting about Anna by chasing after any of the hundreds of other nubile young female undergraduates, I decided to remain chaste, loyal to the girl of my dreams. I was, rather speculatively, saving myself for her.
In the meantime, I watched Anna and Jean-Philippe parade around the college, holding hands and whispering in each other’s ears. The innocent tenderness that the two of them displayed towards each other
