Cupid's Dart Read Free

you go', and recently, to my chagrin, a couple of times, 'Would you like this seat?' But I couldn't remember any young woman speaking to me as if she was interested in me. Not even Rachel, in all the seventeen months of our sterile and abortive relationship.
    This young woman got on the train at Stoke-on-Trent, and walked slowly down the carriage, looking for a seat. The train was rather full, but I had a table to myself. There is . . . or was . . . something about me that deterred other travellers. The seats near me were always the last to go. That pleased me, but it also hurt me somewhat. I am more sensitive than people imagine.
    She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, on which was the legend, 'Townsend Tissues', below which was a thoroughly off-putting picture of a large man with a beer belly sneezing into a tissue.
    She was carrying an overnight bag, and she gave me a little smile as quick as a snake's tongue.
    Her first remark didn't really count. It was, 'Is anybody sitting there?'
    I looked across the small table, on which some notes for my lecture were strewn, and said, 'I have an uninterrupted view of the frankly rather dull upholstery. I think I can safely deduce, therefore, that nobody is sitting there.'
    I was appalled by my pedantry. What on earth had possessed me? But it seemed to wash over her.
    'Thanks,' she said.
    She reached up to put her bag on the rack. As she did so she revealed a few inches of smooth young flesh below her T-shirt. The top of a tattoo peeped shyly out of her jeans, like a cautious cat.
    There was a jolt as the train started abruptly. She sat down more quickly than she had intended, and gave another quick little smile, but this one had elements of a grimace in it. I found myself smiling back, which surprised me. I'd never been known for smiling. 'There's no risk of anybody ever calling you Smiler Calcutt, is there?' Rachel had once said. Or, more probably, at least twice. Her dry comments on my failings used to come round on a fairly short loop.
    The train slid slowly out of Stoke's suitably sombre station. The young woman . . . girl? (how should I think of her? What age was she? Twenty-five? I had so little experience of judging ages, especially young women's ages) looked out of the window. I found myself doing the same, but I saw nothing, and I soon went back to my notes. I found that I could no longer concentrate. I was too aware of her.
    She sighed, stood up, lifted her bag off the rack, opened it, removed a magazine from it, closed it, and put it back on the rack.
    'A disorganised mind,' I thought dismissively, my first brief interest fading.
    She began to read her magazine. The train gathered speed. I tried to gather my thoughts. I couldn't. It wasn't going well. It didn't really matter, there were several weeks to go before the lecture, but it made me feel uneasy. I was, in truth, just beginning to be gripped by a still distant fear – that, having been given my great chance to show the academic world something of my innate brilliance, I would discover that I had nothing to say.
    I became aware that she had looked up and was studying me. This was extraordinary – extraordinary that she should be studying me, and extraordinary that I should sense it. I had never been intuitive.
    I looked up too and met her eye. That also surprised me. Why on earth should I have looked up? Why on earth should I be interested in her, once it was established that she had a disorganised mind?
    That was when she came out with it, her question, her three monosyllabic words, which she would surely not have bothered to say if she hadn't been at least slightly interested in me.
    'What are you?'
    I was so surprised that for a moment even these three simple words made no sense, but I pulled myself together.
    'Ah!' I said. 'Good question. Funny you should ask me that. I'm a philosopher. I have devoted a lifetime to the painful process of finding it harder and harder to answer even such apparently simple questions