Low life | 27 November 2010

After swapping emails for three days, Cow Girl sent me her mobile number and I rang it, and we agreed that I should drive up to north Wales and meet somewhere. Meeting for a coffee, the usual drill, seemed a bit pathetic to us, so I booked us into a country hotel and spa for the weekend.

I arrived at the hotel first. As I signed on the dotted line at reception, I had a text from her saying she was minutes away. Somewhat apprehensive, I wandered out to the car park to wait. I was apprehensive for two reasons. One, I’d lied about my age on my profile. Forty-five seemed to be the upper age limit specified by most women on this particular dating website, and I’d put that, instead of my real age, which is 53. Would the discrepancy be obvious to her from the moment she saw me, and a great disappointment? Very probably.

My second anxiety was that, although our respective profiles had carried a photograph, mine from the waist up, hers from the neck up, as everybody knows the camera lies. Neither of us really knew exactly what we were going to be sharing a hotel room with for the next two days and nights.

The woman in tight white jeans who leapt nimbly out of the VW Golf to greet me had long, lustrous black hair and the sort of shape you see on supermodels. Long thin limbs, broad shoulders, a hint of muscle definition in the upper arm, not an ounce of fat visible. Fit, in every sense of the word. I was staggered and appalled. Looks-wise, she was in a completely different league from what I was expecting.

She betrayed no sign of disappointment, however. I carried her case up to the room and before we did anything else we got into a clinch and had a roll around on the bed, and I bit her quite hard about the face, neck and body, which seemed the best thing to do, not wanting to appear forward. (In her emails she had warned me that she hated vulgar talk and lewdness in all its manifestations until she felt close to someone, in which case she could be as coarse or as lewd as anybody.) She shoved me off her and went into the bathroom, cried out with approval of it, and carefully checked herself in the mirror for teeth marks. Then she took her five-inch heels out of her bag and put them on and carefully measured herself against me to make sure that I’d still be taller than her when we went out. This was crucial, apparently.

Over the next two days, Cow Girl and I got to know each other well, I’d say. And each time we went through the hotel foyer, we passed a snowy life-sized tableau of Santa Claus and his reindeer. This had been put there, I imagined, to underline the impression of the male guest in room 221 that Christmas had come early this year.

Once, we walked through woods after dark to a pub close by, and a brilliant full moon, I noticed, discreetly followed us all the way there. At the pub, an old cat with an open flesh wound deeply unsettled her, but after the landlady had assured her the leg had been looked at by a vet she relaxed. We drank red wine. She didn’t want me to call her Cow Girl, she said. She wanted me to call her Brouilly, which is a Beaujolais Cru, she said, best drunk in three to four years, though exceptional ones might last ten.

Though a late developer, as she put it, she’d ‘been around the block a few times’, she told me. She’d lost her virginity, aged 17, in her parents’ bed, to a 6ft4ins rugby player called Rory. She had laughed most of the way through the experience because Rory kept hitting his head on the overhead light bulb. Then there was a photographer, Tim, originally her landlord, who was a very considerate lover and possibly the best she’d had. Then there was a policeman who put the cuffs on her, and then an accountant whom she liked as a person, and then she went a bit man-mad for a couple of years and took anything that came along until she met this businessman, with whom she lived in some splendour for the next eight years. But he developed a taste for filming her with other men and that rather spoilt things between them and eventually she decided to leave. About all of this she was excruciatingly funny and we laughed until it hurt.

As we came out of the pub, last to leave, I noticed that the brilliant moon was still there, like a friendly dog that had been waiting there all evening to lead us back through the woods to the hotel.