Another date with a younger man is not ideal. But as I only get asked out by men in their 20s nowadays — something to do with evolution, no doubt — I have decided to go with it. So, to drinks and dinner with a very handsome 26-year-old student. Actually, he is retraining to be something artistic after leaving banking, so he is not really a student. More a conscientious objector. But he is still very young. Technically, if I had had a baby at the same age my best friend at school did, I could be his mother.
Perhaps I have been watching too much Cougar Town but I thought this might be fashionable, that I would draw admiring gazes as I paraded around town with my young beau. Not exactly. At the first bar we went to, the maître d’ announced that it was ‘members only tonight because we are full’. This seemed a bit odd. But I laughed it off and we walked over the road to somewhere less posh.
‘Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get the drinks,’ said my polite young date. So I sat at an empty table by the door. Within minutes of him joining me, a flushed-looking waiter rushed over: ‘You can’t sit there.’ ‘Really?’ I said, because there was no reserved sign. ‘Yes. Other people have been waiting a long time for that table.’ And he practically threw us out of our seats. We slunk back to the bar where we huddled in a tiny space as revellers pushed past us, knocking us mercilessly around. I watched the table we had been moved from and no one was brought to sit down at it for a good ten minutes. We sipped our drinks nervously for a while before deciding to move on to the restaurant, where I hoped things would look up.
Things did not look up. At the Poule au Pot we received an ice-cold reception. The owner looked us scathingly up and down and then very deliberately looked away. I stopped a passing waiter and informed him I had booked a table. The waiter said, ‘Oui oui,’ and walked away.
Five minutes later, after another couple who came in behind us had been seated, I stopped the waiter again. I told him I really had booked a table. ‘Oui oui,’ he said, and walked away. After ten minutes, I tried to talk to the owner. ‘Two minuuuutes-UGH!’ he gasped and swept past us. ‘That’s a polite way of saying f*** off, isn’t it?’ said the student, who was learning about life fast.
I felt I was badly letting him down. The only advantage of him being with an older woman was being taken to nice restaurants and treated well and it just wasn’t happening.
When the owner came back, he walked right up to us and said, ‘Please, this way,’ only he wasn’t talking to us, he was talking to a couple standing behind us who had just that second come in.
‘I’m so sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It’s not a problem, really,’ said my date, who I was liking more and more. If I had been here with my ex, he would have thrown a revolting tantrum and probably also a chair and a steak knife at someone by now.
Then it struck me that this was the issue. When I was with a bad-tempered broker in his late-30s, I was used to people handling me with kid gloves. Now I was with a mild-mannered student in his 20s I was regarded as queue fodder. Obviously, women still only get treated as good as a restaurant owner thinks he can get away with according to the age and temperament of the man they are with. Goddam it. There was me with all my fancy ideas about looking after a younger man. I can’t look after a younger man. I can’t even get him seated at the Poule au Pot without a humiliating 20-minute wait.
And when we were seated, we had to put up with a waiter who kept laughing to himself as he served us. When I asked for the bill, he set the cheque down in front of me with a hugely violent flourish that said, ‘Mon dieu! C’est dégeulasse!’
I wouldn’t mind but at the next table sat the most hideously drunk woman in her 40s who was romancing an ancient codger with a puce face by shouting lewd comments that the whole restaurant could hear. Every time the waiter came she hurled herself at him, grabbing his arms or indeed any protruding part of his body and wailing, ‘Isn’t he lovely? Ooooo, I love this one!’ By contrast, I wasn’t doing society any harm at all.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments