The Switch(29)

I look rather warily at the screen, but this time it’s a smiling face staring back at me. It’s a very handsome gentleman, actually, with silver hair swept back from a heavy, important brow, and excellent teeth. The photo looks like it might be professional.

‘Is he real?’ I say. You hear all about these people on the Internet who turn out to be strange ladies in Texas.

‘Good question, especially with a headshot like this.’ She taps away on the keyboard for a while. ‘OK, I’ve searched by image and the only other place this picture is used is here. Same name, the bios match up … He’s an actor, I guess!’ Bee shows me a website for a theatre; the picture appears beside a description of Tod Malone, apparently playing the role of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at the St John’s Theatre. ‘Hmm, he sounds fun. Shall we message him back?’

‘What’s he said?’ I ask, peering over Bee’s shoulder.

‘Hi there, Eileen! It sounds like you’re in London on an exciting adventure – I’m fascinated to hear how that came about …’ Bee reads.

‘May I?’

Bee pushes the laptop my way; I start typing.

‘My granddaughter wanted a break in the countryside, and I wanted some excitement in the city,’ I write. ‘So we swapped lives …’

‘Ooh, I like it,’ Bee says approvingly. ‘That dot dot dot! Very mysterious.’

I smile. ‘Why, thank you.’

Bee clicks to send the message. ‘Now we wait,’ she says, reaching for the wine again.

‘Why don’t we look at your dating profile in the meantime?’

‘Mine? Oh, God, no, you don’t want to see that.’

‘I’ve shown you mine!’ I point out, taking a sip of my drink. I’ve not drunk wine for a very long time, but it seems to be a feature of life in Leena’s flat. There’s a stack of bottles underneath the television, and always at least one white wine in the fridge.

‘I use an app, actually, not a site like this one,’ Bee says, nodding at the laptop. ‘So it’s on my phone.’

‘I can cope with looking on a phone,’ I say patiently.

Bee makes an apologetic face. ‘Yeah, sorry.’ She chews her bottom lip, then, after a moment, pulls her phone towards her across the counter and types in a series of numbers. ‘Here.’ She scrolls through the pictures of herself. There’s a short description underneath: Busy working mum. Short on time, low on patience, high on caffeine.

Oh, goodness. If I thought Bee was intimidatingly glamorous in person, it was nothing on how she looks here. All her pictures look like they’re from a glossy magazine – ‘Oh, yeah, I did a bit of modelling work last year, just on the side,’ she tells me airily – and her description of herself could not be much more uninviting.

She shows me how to swipe left and right, and the page where she can message all the different men.

‘There are so many!’ I look closer. ‘Why haven’t you answered them? That one’s very handsome.’

‘Ah, that guy was one of those super successful CEO types,’ she says dismissively. ‘Not my scene.’

I frown. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like dating guys who earn more than me,’ she says, lifting one shoulder. ‘It’s one of my rules.’

‘What are the other rules?’ I ask, mulling this over.

She ticks them off on her fingers. ‘Must be sporty, can’t work in consulting or finance, got to be a good dancer, must be exceedingly hot, can’t have a weird surname, must like cats, can’t be posh or have rich parents, mustn’t have boring man hobbies like cars and playing darts, has to be feminist, and I mean properly feminist not just when it suits, must be open-minded about Jaime – my kid …’

‘Oh! Tell me about your daughter,’ I say, distracted despite myself.

‘Jaime,’ Bee says, flicking around on her phone so fast I lose track. ‘She’s with her dad tonight.’ She’s scrolling through photos now, and eventually settles on a picture of a young girl with dark-brown hair cropped short, beaming at the camera through a pair of wide-rimmed glasses. ‘Here she is,’ Bee says proudly.

‘What a lovely girl!’ My heart squeezes, not so much at the child – though she’s ever so sweet – but at the expression on Bee’s face. The woman has melted. She loves this child more than anything, you can see it in seconds.

‘She’s going to be a world tennis champion,’ Bee says. ‘She’s already top in her age category at the club.’

‘Gosh.’

‘She also likes dinosaurs and reading about brains,’ Bee adds. ‘And she’s vegan. Which is really annoying.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say sympathetically, ‘my friend Kathleen has that.’

‘Has what, sorry?’

‘Veganism.’

Bee giggles. She has such a charming laugh – hearing that, and having seen her face when she looked at Jaime, I suddenly feel I know her an awful lot better, and like her much better too. That’s the trouble with dating on the Internet, I suppose. There’s no way for anybody to hear your laugh or see the way your eyes go dreamy when you talk about something you love.

I watch Bee as she flicks through more pictures of her daughter, and think to myself: I may not know anything about online dating, but I think I can do a better job of finding Bee a man than Bee can.