Love and loss | 2 February 2008

Tom proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. ‘So who’s this one?’ I said. 

‘The first time I woke up beside her, I thought, “Oh no! What’s this?” But I’ve got to hold both my hands up,’ he said, holding both his hands up, ‘she’s grown on me and now I want to spend the next 45 years with her. Jerry, you must meet her.’

Tom is a self-employed painter and decorator. The last time I met him he’d moved in with a customer, a Swedish businesswoman who lives in the sort of Devon cottage one sees depicted on the lids of shortbread biscuit tins. She contracted Tom to touch up her woodwork, one thing led to another, and from Tom’s point of view the essential human requirements of sex, food and a thatched roof were met overnight. 

‘What happened to the Swede?’ I said.  Tom winced at the memory. ‘She was posh,’ he said. He wouldn’t go into detail — it must have been too horrible for words. He would say only that the final straw was the evening they’d argued about the quality of a bottle of wine. Did he realise, she’d said, that her family came from ‘restaurant stock’ and therefore she knew a bad wine when she tasted it. ‘Restaurant stock!’ said Tom incredulously.

But he was dying to tell me about his new girlfriend. She’s called Twirly. She owns and runs a guest-house on the seafront. She’d rung and asked him to come round and give her a quote for some interior decorating. One thing led to another and soon the basic human requirements of food, sex and shelter were being met for Tom here as well, with free use of an Audi A4 thrown in for good measure.