I gaze across the dining table into my date’s dark, beady eyes, trying to ignore the vulture perched on her shoulder as it picks over my wife’s life and, more horribly, her death.
“How long did she battle against the big C before she died?” asks Monica, who is certainly attractive, but increasingly under my disillusioned gaze resembles her mangy feathered friend. Both flutter excitedly as she pokes her beak harder into Helen’s history.
I dramatise for effect but anyone who has read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy will understand. His clever creation was to give his characters “dæmons”, physical manifestations of their inner self in the form of a specific animal, fixed in adulthood but subject to change in children.
Monica’s vulture I see in hindsight was already hatched in her prying emails; a warm-up for the white-hot heat of this first-date inquisition. We are barely into our mains; fittingly, hers is sirloin served almost rare. My initial upset at her ghoulish interest is becoming a surging wave of anger swollen by the figurative use of “battle” and “big C”, both terms hated by Helen.
“So did your wife suffer much or was it quick at the end?” The wave breaks over me and, for the first time ever, I stand up, toss tenners on to the table and walk out. Looking back, she is flapping her wings in surprise, shrugging to a non-existent studio audience. No doubt, baldy bird hidden safely from sight, she will squawk to friends: “Never date a widower – they’re emotionally unstable and rude with it.”
Blocking her online profile, I wonder whether my bereavement makes it more likely I get hurt, or that I cock up and hurt others? So far, the women I have been matched with and met have been honest in their profiles, save Monica’s omission of “crass”, and “Nicky from Cambridge”, whose profile photos turned out to be years old. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t her size that doomed us – she might have been ill for all I know – rather the inherent dishonesty of it which matters in the micrometre-sensitive, sliding doors world of online dating.
I hope that I have few dating prejudices. With misgivings, I dined with widowed Suzy, despite the fact her profile might as well have been bordered in black, suggesting she wasn’t ready for dating. Sure enough, picking over her lunch, she wanted an informed audience with whom to compare funeral etiquette, costs and grief dimensions. “The price of coffins is ridiculous …”. I have no issue with this – indeed, want to help – but as a first date it was a morose, chemistry-free occasion. Even the cold-eyed whitebait on her plate looked glad to be out of it. I wish her comfort and every joy for the future, albeit not with me.
As a widower, I am drawn to life, love and happiness with all its physical and emotional intimacy. Beyond that, there are no assumptions, despite friend Pete’s jibes: “Adam wants a date to live next door, have retired recently as a swimsuit model, their dad to own a brewery and them to have a PhD in astrophysics.” The fact that a friend can josh me about this suggests I have come a long way and can push back in the same vein and joke: “Wrong as usual, my friend: she could have any science-based doctorate.” A lifetime alone beckons.
I do wonder whether I dived into dating too early, desperate for someone with whom to share my life and huge capacity for love. Looking back, I already see I’ve smothered the early excitement of a new relationship by getting too cosy too quickly, been too needy to be attractive, too self-obsessed to be sensitive and too busy to be bleeding available. Not all at the same time, or to the same woman, but I apologise to all.
Knowing I have Helen’s blessing to be out there counts. Maybe I should have asked her to write my profile as per writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s heartbreakingly beautiful New York Times letter looking for a new partner for her husband, even as she lay dying. Without it, I’ll blunder on, my dæmon’s form still unfixed, although I’m pretty sure it’s furry, gentle and very hungry.
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
