Sunday 26 February 8st 13, alcohol units 2 (excellent), cigarettes 7, calories 3,100 (poor). 2pm. Oh why
hasn't Daniel rung? Hideous, wasted weekend glaring psychopathically at
the phone, and eating things. I cannot believe I convinced myself I was
keeping the entire weekend free to work, when in fact I was on permanent
date-with-Daniel standby. On
top of everything , I open the papers to find the bloody Cones Hotline
is being scrapped. Who else am I supposed to ring up late at night when
I feel lonely? I love the lovely Hotline idea: whisking you straight to
the heart of Cone World on a fast track. In my experience there is
always some bored chap at the end of it at any hour of the day or night,
only too happy to moan a little about people ringing up at 2am to order
a 99 or Cornetto ("I know, I know") then move on to your own
problems. Maybe they should re-name it the Cones Chatline or the Cones
Supportline. That would be more Nineties, I feel. Right:
work. Beginning on Ash Wednesday: "I will not fantasise about or
behave ridiculously regarding Daniel Cleaver, boss of my publishing
house" is to be relaunched along with the other New Year
Resolutions: I will not smoke, I will get down to 8st 7, I will not
recycle items from the laundry basket, I will not bitch about Perpetua
but work positively with her. 8pm. Phone
call alert, which turned out just to be Tom asking if there was any
progress. Tom, who has taken, unflatteringly, to calling himself a
Hag-Fag, has been sweetly supportive about the Daniel crisis. (He has a
theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural
bonding; both being used to disappointing their parents and being
treated as freaks by society.) Last
Tuesday, at the Cheapskate's Wine Guide launch, weeks of flirtation
appeared to climax. When the others were boring on about Stephen Fry
("Understandable, I mean, everyone has their breaking point",
"...size of Kent", "...pathetic, I mean, we all have to
learn to take criticism", "Actually, Stephen's a rurely good
friend of mine"), Daniel moved behind me and murmured, "So...
will I see you?" and then, more quietly, "I mean... see
you?" - so horny. Then he wrote "Bridget" and my home
number on a cigarette packet and said "I'll call you". 11.15pm. No
call. At breaking point I dialled the Cones Hotline. No reply. I
understood. All those months of relentless criticism and now the press,
but then, after 14 rings, came a kindly voice. We had a cursory chat
about cones and then moved on to Daniel. Maybe he had lost the cigarette
packet? The Hotline man, I must say, very tactfully, raised the question
of directory enquiries. "He doesn't know where I live," I
replied, "and there are 25 B. Joneses in the directory."
Should I call him? The Hotline man thought no. "The essence of
alchemy is release," he said. Monday 27 February 9st (irreversible slide into obesity), alcohol units 4, cigarettes 29,
calories 770 (v.g. but at what price?). Nightmare
day. I arrived in the office, to find Perpetua in hysterics. Usually, on
Monday morning the smug witch is in full telephone autowitter to
Hermione or Piggy about the weekend's dizzzy social whirl, and the
latest pounds 500,000 Fulham flat she's buying with Hugo. "Yars,
yars, well it is north-facing but they've done something frightfully
clever with the light." Flats were off. The whole flat thing,
apparently, was based on the job Hugo was about to take up with Barings.
"Darling! Go home," the whole office cooed. "Everyone has
their breaking point." I
watched the door for Daniel all morning: nothing. By 11.45am I was
seriously alarmed. Suddenly, I saw it all. He had broken, of course:
he'd been too successful, clever, witty, and good-looking for too long.
Should I raise an alert? Go round to his flat? Quickly I was immersed in
a Daniel- in-emotional-crisis fantasy: me, him, talking late into the
night: "I have never, never found anyone I could say these things
to before. Oh, Bridget..." "Daniel?
He's at the sales conference in Croydon. He'll be in tomorrow."
Perpetua, coat on, suddenly bellowed and sniffed into the phone.
"God, all these bloody girls ringing him up." A
French cook's knife cut through me as I reached for the Silk Cut. Which
girls? What? Somehow I made it through the day, got home, and in a
moment of insanity left a message on Daniel's answerphone saying (oh no,
I can't believe I did this), "Hi, it's, er, Bridget here. I was
just wondering how you are and if you wanted to go out sometime, like we
said." The
second I put the phone down, I realised it was an emergency and rang Tom
who calmly said leave it to him: if he made several calls to the machine
he could find the code and erase the message. Eventually, he cracked it,
rang to do the deed and Daniel answered. But instead of saying,
"Sorry, wrong number", Tom put down the phone. So now, Daniel
not only has the insane message, but will think it's me who's rung his
answerphone 14 times this evening and then, when I did get hold of him,
banged the phone down. |