In these waking nightmares it was her father who would care for her. And he would know how. He was a veteran of that unhappy art. Will had the boys. His wife, Bec, and Clem had never been close. Melanie Sissowitz would bring red wine and declare it medicinal. She supposed Daniela and Annabel would come and chat with her as she received treatment. If they got sick, she would do it for them. But it wasn’t the same thing as a family member.
She tried to imagine Alistair leaning over her bed to adjust her pillows. Somehow he didn’t fit. Nor did Jason — it was impossible to imagine him standing guard as she lay on her back in a gown. She could see herself, thin and weightless as her mother had been. In her mind’s eye there was a hand reaching out, comforting and melancholy in the pale-blue hospital room. But the face wasn’t Jason’s. It belonged to someone tall and blond.
Clem met Annabel and Daniela in the city at Barossa, for a lunch of their famous pig crackling and to sample their long list of Italian wines. Dani chose a vino rosso from Calabria.
‘How was your date? Is Alistair a potential husband?’ Annabel asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Clem shrugged.
‘Perhaps you should go to bed with him. Rid your system of Jason. An exorcism,’ Dani suggested.
‘Yes,’ said Annabel. ‘A few good orgasms will set you straight.’
‘It hardly seems worth it for one little orgasm,’ Clem said.
‘What do you mean?’ Dani asked.
‘Did Alistair look like he’d be all thumbs?’
‘No,’ Clementine shrank a little. ‘I can only ever have one a day.’
‘How long has this been going on?’ Annabel looked stricken.
‘Always,’ Clem shrugged. ‘I only seem to have enough gunpowder for one. Besides you don’t need to have an orgasm for the sex to be good.’
‘You don’t really believe that?’ said Dani.
‘Obviously an orgasm is preferable. But I have had really feeble sex that ended with a whimper of an orgasm. And I have had great, bed-shaking sex where I just haven’t been able to get there. Usually because I have already had one.’
‘I can’t believe you can only have one orgasm.’ Daniela was horrified.
‘You poor thing.’ Annabel looked as though she might cry.
‘It’s not that bad,’ Clementine said, defensively. ‘I make sure I have one every day. It balances out in the end. Do you have orgasms every day?’
Daniela looked at her lap. ‘Good point.’
‘It’s okay. It’s always been that way. Since my first time.’
‘When I was younger I had always imagined my first time would be with Harry Barchester,’ Annabel mused.
‘Maybe your last time will be with Harry Barchester,’ Clem said. ‘That’s better.’
‘Okay, brains trust,’ Annabel leaned forward. ‘Help me get a second date. Should I message him? What should I say? I know we’re supposed to play coy. But he’s a bit shell-shocked at the moment.’ She looked at them, waiting for advice.
‘Aren’t you supposed to wait to hear from him? Wasn’t that the rule?’ Dani said.
‘What if I don’t ask him out, I just send a message to plant myself in his mind?’
They spent the next few minutes drafting a message to Harry.
‘Make sure you ask a question,’ Clem said. ‘He has to write back if you ask a question.’
As soon as Annabel sent the message, she received a response.
‘Wow, he is keen,’ said Dani.
‘Oh, it’s not Harry. It’s Patrick.’
‘Patrick? Who’s Patrick?’
‘We met him at Mirabella’s wedding. He’s the one who told me about the Eve’s Garden project.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Do you have him in your crosshairs?’
‘Oh no, it’s not like that. Patrick’s too …’
‘What?’
‘I remember him,’ Clem said. ‘The botanist. He was wearing a beautiful flower. He was very interesting. Articulate.’
‘He’s not really my type,’ said Annabel.
‘What? Cultured? Worldly?’ said Dani.
‘We’re just friends,’ Annabel insisted.
‘I thought the whole husband-hunting premise was to find someone just like him. Likable and uncomplicated,’ said Daniela.
Annabel bit her nail and looked at her phone. It buzzed, heralding another message.
‘It’s Harry,’ she grinned. And Professor Patrick was not discussed again.
Clementine headed back to her office at 2pm. Lunch with her friends had restored her spirits, but when she got inside her building the positive feelings vanished. Her door was unlocked. She tried to remember whether she had locked it before leaving. She had been distracted lately, but surely not so much that she would leave all of these confidential files unprotected.
‘Hello?’ She pushed the door open slowly.
Leaning against her desk was Mirabella. She was dressed in a burgundy coat, with matching spiked high heels. She was stroking a pelt of fur around her neck.
‘Mirabella, what are you doing here? How did you get in?’
‘Clementine,’ she lunged at her and kissed each cheek. ‘Thank goodness you’re back — I’ve been simply desperate to speak to you.’
‘Is everything okay?’ Clem eyed her warily.
‘Humpty and I have been having awful troubles lately. But I don’t want to give up on the whole thing without really trying to work through our problems. I thought maybe you could help us … with some counselling.’
‘Problems? Mirabella, you’ve barely been married six weeks. I can’t possibly start marriage counselling when you still haven’t unpacked from your honeymoon. It’s just a post-wedding comedown. Very common, I assure you.’ Clementine took Mirabella by the elbow and tried to guide her towards the door, but she resisted.
‘But we need help.’ Mirabella took a handkerchief from her pocket and touched it to her eye. ‘We need an adjudicator. Someone independent to help us work through our differences.’
‘Mirabella, no counsellor in their right mind would begin conciliation with a couple who have been married for less than a trimester.’
‘We need counselling, Clementine,’ she said. ‘Sometimes our differences feel so … irreconcilable.’
Clem eyed her. ‘Mirabella, that’s the language of divorce. Don’t tell me—’
‘But that’s why we need your help, you see.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Clem shook her head. ‘Even if you did start seeing me, I’m hardly an independent third party. I’ve known you more than twenty years.’
Mirabella straightened herself and took a deep breath. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll just have to find someone else. Honestly, it seems nobody values the sanctity of marriage any more.’ Mirabella’s voice changed, and she said each word slowly and deliberately.
‘What do you mean?’ Clementine watched Mirabella tuck her handkerchief away in her handbag and take off her gloves.
‘My dear friend Amanda Ceravic is going through the same thing I am with Humpty. She arrived on our doorstep positively inconsolable the other day.’
Clementine suddenly felt like she was standing on a hotplate and somebody had turned the heat up.
‘She thought her husband was having an affair.’ Mirabella started walking towards Clem.
‘Really?’
‘Bizarre, I know. What man in his right mind would cheat on Amanda Ceravic?’
‘What man indeed?’
‘The thing is, she found this in his car.’
Mirabella held up her hand. Clinging to the fourth finger was a rose-gold filigree ring.
‘The poor thing was hysterical, so naturally I told her it was mine and that I had been looking for it since the day Jason drove us all to Icebergs for her birthday last month. It’s a lovely piece. Antique. An heirloom, I’d imagine.’
Mirabella had her ring. She knew her secret.
‘Anyway, I�
��d better be off. I need to find someone who will help me fight to save my marriage.’
‘Mirabella — wait.’
‘Yes?’ She turned in a swoosh of red curls.
‘I have an opening on Friday,’ Clementine said quietly.
Chapter 17 Annabel
Annabel still had half a dozen emails to read before she met Harry at Hyde Park. She opened the top drawer of her desk and rattled around for her emergency lipstick. Chanel’s Rouge Allure could save any wardrobe crisis. She switched on her computer monitor’s camera and examined the pixelated image of her face it beamed onto the screen. The olive blouse Clementine had loaned her was buttoned all the way up to her neck. Annabel pulled at it. It was pretty, but tight, and a little too prim for her taste. But it made the right impression. She looked at her Rouge Allure. It was vibrant. Probably not the sort of thing an Austrian nun would have worn, she decided, and stashed it back in her drawer. She ran her eye over the subject lines of the remaining emails. There was only one that absolutely had to be dealt with tonight; the rest she would save for the morning. She tried to tussle her hair a little, but it fell back limply to the way it had been.
Tonight would be the third time she had seen Harry since he had called her, and he still hadn’t kissed her.
Annabel pulled out her lipstick and looked at it again.
No, she thought, tossing it aside. If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got. She slammed the drawer shut and turned off her light.
The last meeting with Harry had come about as a result of her efforts to let him know she was ‘there for him’. They had driven around antique stores looking for a bed frame. He had mentioned Mirabella only once. Annabel was wearing flat Moschino riding boots, and he had complimented them, saying that Mirabella wore high heels everywhere they went. Even to the beach.
‘It was ridiculous,’ he said.
As they strolled between wrought-iron bed heads and dusty lampshades, Annabel tried to keep the conversation to topics that wouldn’t be connected to Mirabella. She picked up an ivory pill-box.
‘My grandmother used to have a silver pill-box that she wore on a chain around her neck. It was embossed with a twisting fleur-de-lis pattern.’
Patrick had told her that the fleur-de-lis was modelled on an iris, and now she wondered if her grandmother had known that. She examined pieces of china, yellowed books and hats grey with moth dust.
‘What do you think?’ Harry said, sitting on the wire base of a cast-iron bed. He bounced up and down, making it squeak suggestively. Annabel giggled. He looked stern.
‘Mirabella kept our bed,’ he said.
That was a statement of fact, so Annabel didn’t count it as him mentioning her. ‘It just needs a clean and an oil,’ he said. ‘That will stop the racket.’ He paid cash and arranged for the store to deliver it to his dingy bachelor pad. Afterwards, Annabel drove him home.
‘Well then,’ she said, as her Alfa Romeo idled by the entrance to his apartment block. He was wearing a rumpled shirt, open at the neck. A cobweb had gotten stuck in his hair. Annabel wanted to reach forward and pick it out, but she was afraid of how he would respond.
‘Thanks for your help,’ he said, and jumped out of the car.
When Annabel got back to her apartment, she went into the kitchen and ate an unholy amount of cheese.
She waited three days, then sent a carefully drafted message asking how his bed was. He called the next day and invited her to join him at the Hyde Park food festival.
Annabel had a new strategy. She figured husband-hunting was about being pragmatic. If this was a business proposition she would be direct. As her heels clacked on the footpath and the park came into view, she rehearsed what she was going to say.
‘I always liked you, Harry. Ever since that first kiss.’
She’d finesse it a bit, but the intent would be clear. She figured if he told her he just wanted a friend, it would save her wasting weeks strategising over a lost cause.
She saw him as the gate came into view. He was facing away from her. He had common, caramel curls, but she recognised the slope of his shoulders.
‘Hi.’ She reached out and touched his shoulder.
He turned, relaxing into a smile.
‘Hi,’ he said, leaning in for a kiss. His hand went to her waist where it rested protectively on her hip. He held her in place; close. Annabel let her cheek sweep against his as he put his other arm around her neck for a hug. His skin was coarse, like very fine sandpaper.
‘Hi,’ she said again.
‘Shall we?’ he offered his hand.
‘We shall,’ she took it and smiled as they walked together through the park gate.
The trees were laced with strings of lights. Paper lanterns hung from the branches. They lined up for noddles, then found a place at the foot of a tree where they ate Pad Thai on their laps in the dying dusky light.
‘I had a dream about you the other night,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’ He raised an eyebrow at her as he dug through his noodles.
Mirabella had been in the dream, too, but she didn’t tell him that. Instead she described how he had been playing football and she had gone to watch and barrack.
‘What do you think that means?’ he asked.
She had a pretty good idea. Right at the end, after Harry had scored the winning goal, Mirabella had burst onto the field and leapt into his arms. He smothered her with kisses, even though Annabel had been standing on the sidelines the whole time, cheering him on.
‘Perhaps that I’m interested in what you’re doing with your work and that I want to be supportive.’
After dinner they lingered on the footpath until Annabel flagged down a taxi. She hadn’t told Harry she liked him. As they said goodbye, he closed his eyes and planted a kiss on her face. Another chaste, friendly kiss. As she leaned away she felt his hand go to her hip again. He pulled her in and kissed her properly. Now is the time, she thought. They stood for a moment locked together before she pulled away.
‘Harry—’ she began. His phone hummed, cutting her off.
‘Oh!’ he said, startled. ‘I’d better take this.’ He gave her another quick cheek peck, then put his phone to his ear. ‘Goodnight,’ he said, and turned his back.
‘Bye,’ Annabel said, a little stunned, and climbed into the cab. She waved as the car pulled away, but Harry was talking intently into his phone and didn’t see.
Annabel was sitting alone in the conference room trying to concentrate on the Eve’s Garden proposal. She had two large, hardback art books featuring images of Adam and Eve that she hoped would spark some inspiration.
She leafed through the colour-plate pages. The ruby-red apples were overused, and the snake wasn’t a right fit. She had thought the style of the paintings might work for the label. A painterly picture of a garden would convey that the product was natural; made the old-fashioned way. The scholarly undertones would also appeal to the city sophisticates who so enjoyed the current line of products. But it lacked simplicity.
The second book was erotic art that had several listings of Adam and Eve, including a painting by Tamara de Lempicka. Her Adam and Eve were as sleek and modern as the skyscrapers in the background. Their bodies had an engineered hardness. De Lempicka had painted the male in the foreground. His round bottom was the focal point. His muscular arm was wound around the woman’s body. His face rested against hers, a nose to her ear. A perfectly round breast, like half an orange, pointed forward. Annabel stared at the painting. She flicked the page to find more drawings and etchings of naked men and women lazing in a garden. She slammed it shut and walked to the main office space where there was more air.
In the months since she and Hunter had split up she hadn’t had a proper lover. She had dated a handful of men and slept with a smaller handful of that handful. Mostly she concentrated on work or her friends, or, in rare moments of energy, exercise. But sometimes she became aware of a gnawing, nameless desire. Li
ke lust, but not for a particular person. It was more a general need to be touched. It wasn’t sexual frustration either, rather than a sort of physical loneliness.
She sat at her desk and opened a Word file. The curser blinked at her, awaiting a command. But nothing would come. The only images in her head were the upturned nipples and the ripple of the muscular stomachs from the books in the conference room.
Picking up her phone, she keyed a message to Patrick: How do you inspire students when they aren’t being productive?
A reply came back straight away: By exercising their imagination.
She didn’t know what to say to that. Another message appeared. Eve’s Garden? :)
I have PR-block.
What do you think of when you drink Eve’s Garden?
Annabel walked to the fridge where she had a couple of bottles.
I don’t know, she clicked back. There’s something nostalgic about it. It reminds me of the last few days before the summer break.
From university?
I didn’t go, she tapped slowly.
But before sending it, she hesitated, embarrassed. She wasn’t naturally academic. Sitting in the rows of bright girls raised by doctors and teachers and lawyers at Lampton Ladies’ College, she became aware of her limitations. Their brains were hungry for literature and theories; they loved to figure out quadratic equations. She had trouble grasping abstract concepts, and had to read passages from their school texts over and over again — her lips moving ever so slightly — to be sure she had grasped the meaning of the poet’s medieval-sounding phrases. If Pride and Prejudice hadn’t been on the English syllabus in Year 12, she didn’t think she would have done very well at all. She didn’t want Patrick to discover her weakness.
A buzz arrived from him.
It reminds me of taking off my socks and walking through grass on a hot day.
She smiled.
It reminds me of high school. Those last days in December. Knee socks and cotton pinafores. Drinking ice tea while waiting for the bus. Water fights.
Husband Hunters Page 21
