A kindly old charge nurse once took me aside after I’d appeared before a psychiatric hospital’s disciplinary committee accused of drunken behaviour. ‘Get yourself a good woman, old son,’ he counselled. ‘That’s what I did. Then you can take her to the pub, have a nice conversation, and learn to drink in a civilised fashion.’
Cow Girl enjoys a drink in a civilised fashion. She likes wine and knows a bit about it. When I’d told her, prior to our first meeting, that I was a pint of lager sort of a person and didn’t much like wine, she said she’d educate me. So whenever we’ve stayed at the hotel we’ve gone to the bar in the evening and I’ve had a lesson.
The main bar at the hotel is a great barn of a place called ‘The Champagne Bar’. We always choose the same high table, and sit facing each other on the same high stools. Cow Girl peers intelligently through her oblong designer frames at the wine list. Whatever else she knows or doesn’t know about wine, she always knows exactly how much the same bottle of wine would cost if bought over the counter at Majestic.
The chosen wine is then brought to our table in a cooler sleeve if red, or in an ice bucket if white. If the wine glasses accompanying the bottle aren’t the largest and most fragile the hotel possesses, she will send them straight back. She always drinks water with her wine, at a ratio of two glasses of water to one of wine. This means we always ask for a carafe of tap water, no ice. Cow Girl won’t stand for any old carafe, either. If one of inferior manufacture appears in front of us, it is refused point-blank. Ditto the water glasses if they look anything like tooth mugs.
Cow Girl runs ten miles across arable fields three times a week whatever the weather. She walks the dogs for three miles twice a day. She lane-swims one and a half miles three times a week. (She does a fast, efficient front crawl with explosive tumble turns.) And she does sit-ups with weights every evening before she goes to bed. The savage attention to detail with which Cow Girl orders wine, water and four glasses comes from roughly the same turbulent place in her psyche, I’ve always imagined, as the daemon driving the exercise regime.
One bottle lasts an evening. This is an entirely new experience. I would never have believed how pleasant it can be to sit and talk to one person about anything and everything and make a bottle of Chilean red last all evening. I would look across the table at Cow Girl and think, ‘I can do this!’ And, always on the alert for anything that smacks of sentimentality so that she can stamp it out right away before someone gets hurt, she’d say, ‘And what do you think you’re looking at?’
And then I went and blew it.
We didn’t see each other over Christmas. The catteries were full, or she couldn’t bear to leave Bobby Cuddles and Sammy Jack on their own, or something. I never got to the bottom of it. Then she said she’d changed her mind about marrying me. She liked life well enough on her own. She was loath to jump out of the frying pan of a control-freak multimillionaire businessman and into the fire of an impecunious hack who probably couldn’t afford to keep her in vitamins. But she would still like to see me for sex if that was OK.
So I drove up again after Christmas, in a stew of conflicting emotions, for another go on the merry-go-round. And, as usual in the evening, we went to the champagne bar for my wine lesson. We were being recognised now; the hotel owner sent over another bottle; and for the first time in our relationship we polished off two.
The extra alcohol reacted badly with the emotional stew, I think. I became petulant, then angry, then aggressive and finally nihilistic, ordering and knocking back Cosmopolitans as fast as they could make them. I remember whacking my nut on a low beam on the way back from the gents and seeing blood on my hand. And the next thing I knew it was morning. I was back in the room, lying on my side on the bed. My glasses were standing up in a pool of sick next to the bed. Cow Girl was gone. Everything of hers, including the duvet, was gone. It was as though she’d only ever been a figment of my imagination.
Then a text arrived. Cow Girl. She’d never experienced anything like that in her life before, she said. She still wanted to be friends, but needed to recover first. This might take months. In the meantime she suggested I go back online.
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