I was lunching with some friends the other day (I don’t lunch for every column, incidentally, but these happened to be friends from abroad whom I hadn’t seen for a while). I took them to a restaurant and we began catching up on our news over the gazpacho.
‘How’s so-and-so?’ I asked of a girl my age, who lives in America. This girl, let us call her Lucy and hope she doesn’t recognise that it’s her I’m talking about, is a good friend of mine (in a way we grew up together). Recently, though, we haven’t been in touch so much as she has been moving round the States.
Anyway, I was expecting the usual answers to my question — new flat, got married, having a baby, split up with boyfriend, etc. Instead, one of the people at lunch said, ‘She’s become a lesbian.’
‘What?’ I said stupidly.
‘She’s become a lesbian. She’s fallen in love with another woman and they’re living together.’
You will be shocked by my antediluvian attitude towards this piece of news. ‘But that’s not possible.’
One of the reasons for my astonishment is that this girl is very pretty. A Sex and the City type but more feminine. And in my experience she is certainly interested in sex with men. She was even married, briefly, while I was still at university. In the years after that, whenever we met, she always had a man in tow. More men than most girls.
The person at lunch said, ‘Not all lesbians are bull dykes.’
‘Yes, I know, I know, but not her.’
Then I realised I had begun to take this as a personal insult. Had she been faking all these years? And, if not, had my ultra-heterosexual influence been so ineffectual? And why hadn’t she told me if she had suddenly decided to go all Sapphic on me?
‘Maybe she had a bad experience with a man,’ said the person.
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