Fourteen Months, Four First Dates, and Item One Every Time

She did not meet anybody for fourteen months.

That is the part she thinks people should hear more often, because the version everybody tells is the one where you write the list in March and the man arrives in June and everybody says see.

Fourteen months. Four first dates. And every single one of them failed on item one, which she came to think of as the load-bearing item, because everything else on the list depends on somebody having finished the previous thing.

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The first was a man called Ray, from a walking group, who was eleven months out of a twenty-six year marriage and who told her about it, in detail, for the entire duration of a two-and-a-half-hour walk, including the bit about the caravan.

He was kind, and funny in patches, and he did not ask her one question. Not one. She counted afterwards, in the car, and then felt petty about counting, and then decided she was allowed.

The second was a man called Duncan, who was six years divorced and who had, she thought, definitely dealt with it, right up until the moment at the end of the second drink when he said, “She’d have hated this place,” with enormous warmth.

Fran has been quite precise about this one. She says: “He wasn’t still in love with her. It was worse than that. She was still the person he was talking to. I was there, and I was having a nice time, and he was reporting back.”

The third was a widower called Philip and that was a different thing entirely and Fran will not discuss it beyond saying that she liked him very much and that it was far too soon and that they are now friends and that he came to her sixtieth.

The fourth she does not count, because it was arranged by Bridie and lasted forty minutes.

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“Item one is not about being over somebody,” Fran says now. “It’s about whether they’ve got the room.”

She means, she says, that a person who is still in the middle of it does not have the space free. They have the space, but it is occupied, and everything you say to them goes into a room where somebody else is already sitting.

“And you can’t ask them to hurry up,” she says. “That’s the bit. There’s nothing to be done. It’s not a fault. They just haven’t finished.”

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She was not lonely, exactly.

She was, by her own account, extremely busy being fine, which is a different condition and considerably harder to spot.

She had gone back to work four days instead of three. She had done the whole of the downstairs, room by room, over nineteen months, and had got quite good at cutting in. She had taken a Tuesday class in something she is now embarrassed about. She saw her children — Kate, thirty-one, and Michael, twenty-eight — and she had lunch with Bridie on Sundays, and she went to bed at ten and slept properly for the first time in a decade.

Everybody said she was doing brilliantly. She was doing brilliantly.

She has since described that period as “like being a very well-run building with nobody in it”.

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There was one bad stretch, in the second November.

Nothing happened. That is what she always says first: nothing happened. It was three weeks in which she did everything exactly as normal and found all of it faintly pointless, and at the end of it she rang Bridie on a Wednesday night and said, “I think I might be quite unhappy,” and then could not say anything else for about a minute.

Bridie drove over. Forty minutes, at half nine at night, and sat on the sofa, and did not once mention the list.

Fran has said that if her sister had said I told you so on that night, about item four or about anything, the next four years would not have happened.

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She took the list out of the drawer in the February.

She read it through, at the same table, with the intention — and she is completely honest about this — of taking two things off it.

She sat there for about twenty minutes with the pen.

And what she found was that she could not do it, not because she was being stubborn, but because every time she tried to cross one out she could produce, instantly, the specific evening that had put it there.

So she put it back in the drawer.

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Roy was item six.

They met in the library, which Fran finds embarrassing, because it is such an obvious place to meet somebody in a story, and because for about a year she told people they had met “through a thing at the library”, which is technically true and which she has now stopped doing.

He was returning a book she had been waiting for.

He held it out and said, “It’s not as good as everyone says.”

And Fran said, “I’ve had that on hold for five weeks.”

And Roy said, “Then it’s excellent. Forget I said anything.”