In Bed With Lord Byron

I asked.
    ‘Er – I’m going to have a flat in Mayfair,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty nervous, to tell you the truth. It’s a work thing – they’ve set up a London
office and I’m going to head it up.’
    We kissed some more, and then, in that dreamy, hazy way postcoital chats can leap from subject to subject, he asked me what my favourite thing in the world was.
    ‘Chocolate,’ I said, without hesitation.
    ‘I know a place where they make
the
best chocolate in the world,’ he said. ‘I flew there once on a business trip.’
    ‘The best in the world?’ I mocked him, secretly wide-eyed.
    ‘I’m serious. It’s this place in Paris. When I’m next there on business I’ll pick some up, and then you’ll be eating your words . . .’ He caught
himself. ‘Only you won’t, will you, because this is just a . . .’
    A long silence.
    Suddenly he got up and unzipped his briefcase. I tensed, panicked: this is where I find out he’s a weirdo, I thought. There was a video and a TV in the corner of the room, and he switched
them on and slotted a video in.
    ‘I want you to know I’m not just a boring computer guy,’ he said edgily. ‘I don’t want you to remember your one and only one-night stand like that. I want you to
see my hobby.’
    ‘Uh huh,’ I said, hardly daring to breathe, convinced the fuzzy screen was about to transform into an image of a pneumatic blonde sharing a bed with three well-endowed men.
    And then: a ball of sun rising slowly above a loch.
    ‘I like photography and videoing things,’ said Anthony. ‘You know – just capturing life, beauty. I was in Scotland last year and I got up every morning and videoed the
dawns.’ I was too surprised and moved to speak, so I just reached out and clutched his hand and we sat and watched different types of dawn – fiery dawns rippling red across water; dawns
creeping up slowly like a child wanting to surprise the world with a sudden flash of brilliance; sad watercolour dawns with tearful yellows and pinks that wept from the clouds – and he
squeezed my hand tight and then we were kissing again and the dawns rose without us . . .
    ‘What a terrible morning,’ I observed the next day, in a jerky voice. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to video this.’
    We had put on rumpled, jetlagged clothes and were standing outside the hotel. The sky was gloomy, tendrilled with grey. We kissed one last goodbye on the cold pavement. I was about to go when he
pulled me oh-so-tight and rubbed his stubbled cheek against the top of my head and whispered, ‘That was the best one-night stand I ever had . . .’
    Back in my flat, I lay down on the bed, feeling too exhausted and exhilarated to sleep. I could still taste his kisses, feel the echo of his touch on my body. I needed a shower, but I
couldn’t bear to wash away the sheen of his presence that seemed to have formed over my body like a fragile, translucent skin.
I’ll never see him again
, I kept telling myself,
dropping the expression into my heart like a stone into a well.
And that’s why it’s so perfect. If I ever do marry, in twenty years’ time I’ll be bored and fat and grey
and I’ll remember this night always.
Then, hazy with tiredness, I began to play the ‘If you had to
marry
any man in the world, who would it be?’ game, and Anthony,
surprisingly, won. Not that I would ever marry, of course. But in a parallel universe, where I did want to marry, and it was a law that all women had to marry by the age of thirty, then he would
do.
    The next day I moped through work as though I had flu, and when I came home there was a message on my answerphone politely asking if I would like to meet him for another one-night stand.
    ‘This really, really has to be the last time,’ Anthony insisted, the moment we met.
    I agreed: ‘Two commitment-phobics like us can’t start building habits.’
    Even so, our second one-night stand was even more rapturous than the first.
    For our third one-night stand, he took me out for a meal at the deliciously expensive Odins, where we got drunk and became gigglingly romantic and he annoyed the waiters by asking for all the
lights to be turned down. Our fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh one-night stands took place on a romantic long weekend in Barcelona; our eighth was in his flat, a glorious three-bedroomed,
spotlessly clean apartment in Mayfair. Our ninth was to celebrate his birthday, following a meal with his adorable, debonair father, a high-flying