The Matchmaker

You didn’t need to know the house number to know where the party was. Music, loud enough to annoy neighbours several doors down, thumped out through the front door, left deliberately ajar.

There was not much of a front garden. An untended lilac, no longer in flower, bent over the fence. The narrow rose bed stretching along behind the whole, low front wall, did nothing to suggest to a caller that anyone in the house was a gardener.

The house itself, red-brick like the rest of the houses on the street, was probably the largest of them – longer but not in an imposing mansion-like way. Six beds it might say on property details. The door was offset, three large windows to the left, two to the right. Lights were on in all but one of them downstairs, and several upstairs too. Quite a gig!

The hallway was more of a corridor, leading to rooms front and back. People were milling, but none I recognised. I followed the empty-glass brigade, my contribution bottle in hand, through to the kitchen. Sam had his back to me, opening some red with a corkscrew. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Oh, Hi Tom, you got here, then,” he said, continuing the task. I put my cheap wine down on the worktop among all the other bottles.. “Here, take this and I’ll take you through”, he said, thrusting a glass into my hand.

I followed him, and the loud noise regarded as music, into a large lounge. Two huge, lumpy sofas had been pushed back against the walls, their William Morris print cloth loose covers almost undiscernible under a twist of bodies on each. In one corner someone my sort of age was changing the music on a device from which a tangle of cables spewed. He was dark haired and dark eyed with a slightly pinched face, concentrating on hand-written cassette labels in the dim light. Around him people danced in time to the punch-in-the-chest thud of what he had just put on.

“This is Alice,” Sam said over the music, twisting a girl in long crabshell-pink bell-bottoms and a thin billowing floral blouse, away from those she was dancing with. She smiled at me, I thought slightly shyly, and then turned back to the dance melee to get on with the serious business of fun.

Sam and I were on the same course at college, both taking A-levels. We’d become friends because we both travelled in from the same station – a stop on the main line for commuter trains. I lived on the edge of town, he lived on one of those built-at-once estates that can’t decide whether they are now modern villages or still just suburbs. Now the early summer, the party season was in full swing; our end-of-term exams were over. It was best to party now, before our results came out and ruined everything.

He had been busy matchmaking, and was convinced Alice was a good fit for me. He’d obviously told, her that, too - I caught the look on her face.

He and I split up, he going back into the kitchen for another glass of rough red. I stayed among strangers. Lost, I moved awkwardly to the edge of the dancing group, as near as I could to Alice without appearing to be too obvious. I’m not a dancer and never was, nor did I have an ear for the late punk, early Indie, music filling the room. I felt I had failed to even make eye contact with Alice, and was self-conscious about my awkward movements trying to connect to the beat. When there was a pause between tracks, I slipped out of the room. Next door, in what was the dining room, a small group were playing cards, clearly gambling. Their currency was matchsticks. One of the payers I recognised as someone also at college, and he nodded in my direction. I watched for a while, unsure of the rules of the game, and then slinked away back to the kitchen.

Sam was elsewhere now, but the room was busy with people drinking, grazing on crisps and peanuts, and smoking, mainly tobacco. A slightly older man was talking to two women of about the same age about the demise of the Lib-Lab pact and the Thatcher challenge. Immensely political, I chipped in with my own thoughts. “Her poll ratings have really dipped,” I said, repeating press speculation. We batted opinions back and forth, my views clearly being seen as immature, which they probably were. A little too much drink, choking smoke and I what I took to be smugness of the others was now making me too heated for a polite casual conversation and…

“Shall we go outside,” I heard over my shoulder. Alice, clearly rather too warm from all the dancing had a gentle smile which lit up her almost perfectly symmetrical face and she extended an arm towards me.

It is now 48 years later and she has been keeping me out of trouble ever since.

Two children, three grandchildren and another on the way.

Sam now lives in California and for obvious reasons is one of our closest friends…