Unhurried

Fiction, about two adults over 18. I had assumed for years that it was about age, because that is what everybody told me it was about, and it turned out to be about the speed a person moves at.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

There is one explanation people give me about this and I have heard it from an ex, a hairdresser, a woman at work who was being kind, and once, memorably, from a man I had known for forty minutes at a party in Brixton.

It is that I like older men because they are older. Grey hair, seniority, a bit of gravitas, mystery solved. It arrives with a small sympathetic tilt of the head, as though something has just been explained to me that I had been too close to see, and the person saying it is almost always pleased with themselves.

Anyway. Kenneth.

Fifty-eight. Not a professor, not a consultant, not a silver-haired somebody with a study and a globe that opens. He does something in building control for a council. He has a Ford, an allotment he is slightly embarrassed about, and a dog with an unfortunate face. When I described him to my friend Shreya she said, "So he is just a bloke," in a tone that suggested I had failed at something.

Yes. He is just a bloke. That turns out to be the entire point.

Here is what happened on the first evening, and it is almost nothing, which is why it took me weeks to understand it.

We had talked for a long time before we met, and we had agreed everything, and I arrived at his flat at seven with my stomach doing what it does. He made tea. He asked me about the train. And then, at some point in the middle of the conversation, he stopped talking.

Not awkwardly. He had said the thing he was saying, and it was finished, and so he stopped. There were probably nine or ten seconds where neither of us said anything at all, and he sat there entirely comfortable in it, looking at the window.

I nearly filled it. I could feel the sentence forming, the way you do, some piece of nonsense about the traffic. And then I did not, because he clearly was not going to, and I sat in the silence with him and felt something in my shoulders come down about an inch.

Nine seconds. I have thought about those nine seconds more than about anything else that happened that evening.

Every man I dated in my twenties was in a hurry. Not sexually, or not just that. In a hurry generally. There was always a next thing being got to, a point being made, a gap being filled, an anecdote loaded and waiting. Conversation was a thing you did at speed, and any pause in it was a fault to be repaired immediately.

I did not know that was what was wrong. I could not have told you it was wrong at all. It was simply the water.

What he did that evening he did slowly.

That is all it was. He told me what was going to happen, in about four sentences, and then he did not immediately do it. He moved a cushion. He asked me once more whether I was sure, not anxiously, just checking, the way you check a handbrake. And when it started it started at a pace that I can only describe as somebody who was not going anywhere.

There were pauses. Long ones. A hand resting flat and not doing anything. Silences he did not feel the need to fill with talk, so that the only thing in the room was the fact of the situation, which is unbearable in the best way and which nobody had ever let me have before because they had all been too busy performing.

And I went somewhere. Properly. About twenty minutes in, in a way I had read about for years and had privately decided was other people.

Afterwards, on the sofa, with the dog making its opinions known from the hallway, I said something clumsy about it being the age thing.

He said, "Is it?"

Which annoyed me, because I had been ready for him to be pleased. And then I sat there and actually thought about it, and the annoyance turned into something else.

I went through them, in my head, over the following week. Everybody I had ever wanted like this.

A driving instructor when I was twenty, who was maybe forty-five and who never once raised his voice and who let a roundabout arrive rather than shouting about it in advance. A man at my second job, thirty-eight, who used to listen to the end of your sentence before he started his. A locum GP I saw twice about something boring and thought about for a year.

Then the counter-examples, which are the useful half. My friend's father-in-law, sixty-six, who is exhausting: three anecdotes deep before you have taken your coat off. A man of sixty at that same Brixton party who talked at me for eleven minutes about his own divorce. A man of seventy on a train who could not let a silence live for three seconds.

None of them. Not remotely. Not one flicker.

So it is not age. Age was a proxy, and quite a good one, because a certain number of men do slow down by fifty and stop needing to prove anything at speed. But it is a proxy for tempo, and tempo is available at any age and is absent at any age too.

I told Kenneth this eventually, in a slightly organised way, as though presenting findings.

He listened to all of it, which of course he did, and then said the only thing he has ever said that I would call clever, and even then he said it as though it had just occurred to him rather than as a line.

He said, "Well, I could not have done any of that at thirty. I would have been thinking about how I was doing."

So it is learnable. That is my conclusion, and it is not a romantic one. What I want is somebody with nothing to prove in the room, who is not monitoring their own performance, and who can let a thing take the time it takes. Some men have that at thirty-five. Most acquire it, if they acquire it at all, later, when they have stopped auditioning.

I still cannot say any of this at a party. If it comes up I say I like older men and let the tilt of the head happen, because the true version takes four minutes and the person asking does not want four minutes.

But it is not what they think. It has never been what they think. I do not want somebody older for the sake of it, I want to be in a room with somebody who is not in a hurry, and it took me until thirty-four and a man with an allotment to work that out.