I hate this. This looking without seeing. I scan the bar, and then the couches. Walk through one room into another. Out into the beer garden. Half smiling at faces I don't know. Hoping one will smile back. Hoping one, the right one, will light up and open and unfold.
Why did I let Natasha talk me into this?
The beer garden of the Faltering Fullback is tiered, layer upon layer of plants and wood. Pint glasses and twists of smoke.
Why had she suggested this pub for a blind date?
I spy a guy sitting alone with a full pint of beer. I hint at a smile. He grins.
Edging closer, I say, 'Hugo?'
'I could be.'
'What?'
'Sit down and I'll be anyone you want me to be.'
I roll my eyes, turn and push through the door back into the pub. The room is heaving. A guy steps backwards onto my foot.
'Sorry,' he mutters.
'No worries,' I say, pushing past him. This was a bad idea, I think, rounding the bar, making for the front door.
And then I see him from the corner of my eye. A man looking just as lost as me, his eyes darting around the room. Looking without seeing. He's wearing jeans and a t-shirt. A green fleece, unzipped. Thin brown hair, round glasses and two sleeper earrings in his left ear.
He hasn't seen me yet. I could still leave. But there's something that keeps me here. Something in the way he holds himself. Tall and lean, though he's slouching a little. Like he's spent his life trying to appear shorter. It's endearing, this modesty.
I catch his eye. His face lights up, opens, unfolds. And as he breathes a sigh of relief, I feel him come over me in a wave. A warm wash of excitement and awe. The way I once felt entering the ocean, diving down, the water combing through my hair, sweeping it back off my shoulders, so that everything untangles and spreads out wide.
He moves through the crowd, eyes locked on mine. Reaching me, he offers his hand. I take it. We shake.
'At last,' he says.
I smile. 'At last.'
***
We take our wines out into the beer garden, finding a table between palm fronds and knots of ivy. In the cold, we exhale in tiny clouds when we speak.
'So how long have you worked for Natasha?' he asks.
'Almost two years now.'
'Wow,' he says.
I laugh. 'Your sister is not easy to work for.'
'So I've heard.'
'But it's worth it,' I say. 'She's fierce … and fearless. It's very inspiring.'
He smiles. 'I bet.'
I take a sip of wine.
'What about before?'
'Pardon me?'
'I mean, before Natasha, where were you working?'
'In a small commercial gallery in Greenwich.'
'Which one?'
'Willow Gallery.'
'I know the one,' he says. 'Very impressive.'
I shrug. 'I got lucky.'
'What do you mean?'
'A friend of mine opened the gallery with Lindy in the late eighties.'
'Lindy Harrs,' he says. 'Another fierce woman.'
'She certainly is. I actually lived with her when I first arrived in London.'
'You did get lucky,' he says with a gentle smile. 'So who's the friend that introduced you to Lindy?'
'Oh,' I say. 'Margaret Walker.'
'Maggie? You know she mentored my sister, right?'
'Yeah,' I say, 'I know. Natasha came to the first show I helped curate at Willow and we got talking, worked out we both knew Maggie … I think her assistant had just moved to New York or something. Anyway, a week later she offered me the job.'
'Well, I'm glad she did.'
'Why?'
'Because I might not have met you otherwise.'
I feel my cheeks warm. I look away from him. 'You know this was my idea?' he says.
'What? The blind date?'
He nods, smiling sheepishly. 'We sort of met last year, actually.'
'Ha! Really?' I ask, immediately regretting my obvious surprise.
'At an opening at Tash's gallery,' he says, playing with a beer coaster. 'I was home for the holidays.'
'Which show?'
'Kate Ballis.'
'I was there. Of course. I don't think we were introduced though … were we?'
He shakes his head. 'No. But I saw you.' He puts down the coaster, looks up, looks into me. 'I saw you, and I wanted to meet you.'
And there's something in the curve of his smile, in the soft slouch of his shoulders, in the warm edge of this moment, that makes time pass effortlessly. Like I don't have to hold my own. I don't have to hold anything. Because he's opened a space for me to relax into.
***
When I come back from the bathroom, there are two new glasses of wine waiting with Hugo at the table.
'You bought the last round!' I say.
He shrugs. 'I don't mind.'
'Are you trying to get me drunk?'
His eyes widen. 'What? No!'
I take a seat. 'I'm kidding. Sorry. Terrible joke.'
'Yeah, not the finest material,' he says, laughing.
'Tell me about you,' I say, eager to change the subject. 'What's your story?'
'My story? Ha! Well, I don't want to bore you …'
'You won't.'
'What do you want to know?'
'Natasha said you've just come back from the States. What were you doing there?'
'My PhD,' he says, 'at Berkeley.'
'PhD in what?'
'Environmental sciences,' he says. 'I was looking at the way deserts are transforming as a result of climate change.'
'And what did you find?'
'That it's hard to feel good about humankind.' I sit back in my chair. 'What do you mean?'
'Some of us can be incredibly destructive. And what's worse is that the people in power don't seem to care.'
'Some of them care.'
'Not enough,' he says.
I take another sip of wine.
'That's why your work is so important,' he tells me.
'My work?' I say. 'I work in a swanky art gallery. How's that important?'
'Art moves people, Oli. I find the facts, but art communicates it in a way that engages people. After all, if we were purely rational beings, we wouldn't be in this mess.'
I shrug. 'I'm not an artist.'
'Yeah, but you're the one who decides whose work is seen—that's power.'
I finish my wine, look over to Hugo to see if he wants another, but he's barely touched his. 'You don't like the wine?' I ask.
He smiles. Shrugs. 'Just trying to make this last as long as I can.' As if on cue, a security guard approaches the table.
'Sorry, folks. Time to go.'
I check my watch. 'Wow,' I say, grinning at Hugo. 'Time flies when you're having fun.'
He stands up, leaving his nearly full glass of wine on the table and we reach for our scarves.
As I loop my scarf around my neck, one of my dangly earrings gets caught. Hugo helps me to unhook it.
'Thanks,' I say.
He holds the earring up, studying it. 'I like these,' he says.
'I like yours,' I reply.
'Let's swap—one of my hoops for one of your dangly ones.' He grins. 'That way you'll have to see me again.'
I can feel myself blushing. 'I'd like that,' I say. He undoes one of the sleepers and passes it to me, then puts my earring in its place. He shakes his head theatrically so that the earring swishes back and forth, silver glinting beneath a garden light.
Then he takes my hand, and we walk out of the pub together. And I smile, because when our skin meets it feels like we've been here before. Like rain returning to a desert, a landscape remembering. Pale blue sand.
Wildflowers blooming. If only for a day.