Lessons in Duck Hunting

by Jayne Buxton

  HOT SAUCE

  Knowing that Mel will delight in seeing the results of my first and last dating site adventure, I copy and send the two messages to her. Then, terrified that Nicki or Anna Wyatt will suddenly appear at my desk, I delete them both. I’m about to click on the next one hundred and forty-eight messages and avail myself of the delete all function, when something catches my eye. It’s a message from someone called M, titled simply Hello.

  HELLO FRANCESCA

  I’M ALSO RAISING A CHILD ON MY OWN, SINCE MY WIFE DIED. NOT EASY IS IT? NOT EASY TO FORGET WHAT YOU SHARED WITH YOUR SPOUSE EITHER. BUT SOMEONE TOLD ME IT’S TIME TO START MOVING ON, SO THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING. YOURS IS THE FIRST MESSAGE I’VE SEEN THAT MADE ME THINK “THERE’S A REAL PERSON, SOMEONE I COULD TALK TO.” THOUGHT I WOULD LET YOU KNOW THAT. GOOD LUCK.

  M

  No invitation to ride naked and bareback with my hair blowing freely in the wind. No offer to smother my body in hot sauce. No invitation of any kind, in fact. How clever. How mysterious. I decide to keep this one for a while. The rest have to go, and quickly.

  Seeing M’s message reminds me that I never called Tom. By the time I got off the phone with Angie I’d lost all vestiges of the courage I’d had, as if I’d poured all of it into Angie without first checking that I’d sufficient reserves of it for myself.

  The humming third floor of Cottage Garden Foods is no place to make a call like this so I go in search of a cappuccino with my mobile in hand. Once outside the building I find a seat on the wall surrounding the small courtyard fountain, and dial Tom’s number. It’s ten a.m., so Grace should be at nursery, and he should be . . . doing what? I have no idea what he does. I just hope it has nothing to do with exotic dancers.

  “Hello, Tom here.”

  “Tom,” I say in a strangled voice. “It’s Ally. From the park. And from Waitrose.” For God’s sake. He doesn’t need a rundown of the local amenities.

  “Hi Ally. Thanks for calling. I wasn’t sure you would. It was a bit weird leaving a note, but I wasn’t sure how else to get hold of you.”

  Gosh, he really is so warm and unaffected. No sign of any posing or game playing.

  “Well, you could always have tried knocking me to the ground again,” I say.

  “That’s true. I’ll remember that. Anyway, what do you think? Would you like to have coffee, or maybe grab a bite one evening? It would be really nice to have a friend in the neighborhood.”

  A friend in the neighborhood. At least that makes things clearer.

  “That would be lovely,” I say. “When were you thinking?”

  “Oh, anytime really. What about Friday morning? Are you working?”

  “No. No, I’m not. I have most Fridays off. Let’s meet at Suzzette’s, across from Starbucks. Coffee’s nicer there and it’s less frenetic.”

  “Great. About ten then?”

  “Ten’s good. See you then.”

  I don’t get up from the wall immediately, but sit staring at the mobile in my hands. Right at this moment I’m feeling a little like Angie, paralyzed by fear. Only, unlike her, I can’t really articulate the cause of my fear. Am I afraid I’ll fall for Tom and he won’t be interested in anything more than a coffee mate? Or, is it the thought of getting involved with someone whose heart is bound to be shrouded in grief that’s worrying me? Or maybe my fear has nothing to do with Tom at all.

  I manage to snap myself out of my confused meditation to go in search of coffee when the phone rings. David’s name pops up in the window.

  “Hi David.”

  “Hi, have I caught you at a bad time?” he says.

  “No. It’s fine. I’m just doing a coffee run,” I say. “What’s up? Have you got a problem this weekend?”

  “No, not exactly. Not a problem. It’s just that I was thinking of taking Jack and Millie down to the coast, and wondered if you’d like to go with us.”

  Would I like to go away for the weekend with my ex-husband and our children? To the coast? Is he mad?

  “Why?” is the best I can manage.

  “Why? Because it would be nice, don’t you think? The kids would love it.”

  “No David. Why? Why now? What is going on?”

  There is a pause, perhaps while David tries to understand why, why now, what is going on.

  “Ally, I just suddenly wanted to do this. I miss you. I miss what we had. I just want you to go to the coast with us. Is that so bad?”

  If Sunday’s arm squeeze had dredged up a visceral reaction I’d thought cleverly extirpated, these words of David’s are enough to knock me backward. In fact they do. I wobble precariously as I try to sit down on the wall surrounding the fountain and its pool full of copper.

  “David, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Come on, Al. What harm could it do?”

  A lot.

  “All right. Okay.”

  IT’S TRUE. I really am spineless. I can’t say no to theater with a man I’m not attracted to, and I can’t say no to a weekend with a man I shouldn’t be attracted to. I can see nothing but trouble four days ahead, but I’m powerless to prevent myself from hurtling toward it. What is that thing they say about Elizabeth Taylor? That her eighth marriage represented the triumph of optimism over experience? Yes, quite.

  At the end of the day I’m exhausted. Exhausted not, as I ought to be, by worries over the impending Seville Sunset launch, or the fact that the Pure Gold numbers are atrocious. Exhausted by thinking about David’s call, over and over again. And by the constant deletion of messages from my PerfectPartnership inbox. I’m wading through the last of them, vowing never to use the Internet again, when Lisa pops up at my side.

  “Hi,” she says. The fact that she is whispering is a dead giveaway she’s not about to fill me in on the launch plans for the new red currant and onion chutney.

  “Hi,” I whisper back, trying not to sound selfishly preoccupied by my own affairs, which I can see now are spiraling out of control.

  “You’ll never guess what?” she says.

  I won’t, of course. Who would ever guess that within two weeks of breaking up with her long-term boyfriend, Lisa has met the love of her life? Who would ever guess that she would meet him while sitting at home, or worse, in her mother’s home, sipping Earl Grey tea? At home, which is a fucking four-letter word where you’re never going to meet anyone? Who would ever have predicted that Lisa, who summarily dismissed the idea of using marketing techniques to snag a man, would end up snagging one she adores, while the person using all the smart techniques nearly drowns in a sea of e-mails from cyber-sex wannabes before catapulting herself into the abyss of a no-hope dalliance with her ex-husband and an equally fruitless role as one-woman support group for a recent widower.

  And my brother says I’m the kind of person who could always get what she wanted.

  CHAPTER 32

  DECISION

  Lisa has known Matthew for much of her life. He is, quite literally, the boy next door. His family and her family used to do Sunday lunches and wet country weekends together when Lisa was small, and as the children grew up they would bump into each other at sixteenth and eighteenth birthday parties. Then Matthew went away to university, several gap years, and a stint working in New York, and Lisa was forced to forget about him. She would hear of him very occasionally through her mother, and once came close to bumping into him when he dropped in on her parents the night before their annual Guy Fawkes party.

  Then, two weekends ago, fresh from acquiring a stinking hangover at my house, Lisa is sitting in her parents’ farmhouse kitchen near Petworth, no doubt preparing to douse wounds still raw from her break-up with Mike in a healthy dose of maternal sympathy and home cooking, when her mother announces that Matthew called during the week and will be dropping by for tea. At the time, which is noon, Lisa is sitting in her oldest jeans and shirt with unwashed hair, feeling gray and looking green. But with three hours’ warning she manages to summon some color into her cheeks and some shine to her ha
ir. Matthew comes for tea, and stays for dinner and the night. Lisa’s old room is across the hall from the guest room where Matthew is sleeping, which makes it remarkably easy to consummate the escalating fancy-fest in which the two of them have been engaged throughout tea, supper and two excruciating hours of Scrabble with Lisa’s parents.

  The next day, like teenagers carrying on under the gaze of disapproving parents, they find themselves surreptitiously holding hands under the tablecloth or sneaking kisses behind the hedgerow. Lisa’s parents are apparently mildly curious as to why Matthew has stayed Saturday night and now all of Sunday, but they’re happy to have him there, and seem to buy the story of the call on his mobile canceling the lunch he was supposed to attend in London. When Sunday evening arrives, the two new lovers decide to take the train up to London together, no doubt inflicting their newly discovered passion upon every other person unfortunate enough to have booked themselves onto the 6:10 from Petworth to Waterloo.

  This is the full version of the story Lisa began telling me late Tuesday afternoon. It’s not actually that different from the version she told me the first time, but infatuation seems to have addled her brain so she’s having trouble remembering which bits she’s told me before. Or perhaps it’s just that she gets pleasure from recounting the details, again and again, as if it’s a way of living through what was clearly a seminal twenty-four hours.

  “And you don’t think your parents suspected anything?” I ask dubiously.

  “Well, they might have by the end. But my mother is remarkably insensitive to stuff like that. She’s far too busy worrying about things like fertilizing the back paddock, or winning at Scrabble. Which she did, of course. I was putting down all kinds of low-point nonsense because I couldn’t concentrate.”

  “But they know now, surely?”

  “No, not really. We’ve been up here the whole time. And to be honest, we’ve been together so much I’ve not had much chance to talk to anyone. Did you notice I wasn’t here for three days of last week?”

  This is the second time in two weeks that I’ve heard about two people being so head-over-heels in love that they can’t pry themselves apart for a single evening. I’m getting rather tired of it. Now that I think about it, I didn’t see much of Lisa last week, but I must have been so preoccupied with my own dilemmas that I failed to investigate why.

  “You’re right. I did wonder.”

  “Just couldn’t face it. So I took three days holiday. There wasn’t much going on, so no one seemed to mind. And it was worth it.”

  I really don’t want to know why it was worth it. Last week I might have been in the mood to hear every last detail, but this week I’m feeling rather fragile.

  “Anyway, what about you. How are things?” asks Lisa, making a futile attempt to suppress the joyous glow radiating from her every pore for a minute or two.

  It’s lunchtime on Wednesday and we are sitting over two bowls of tomato pasta in Papa Cicca’s. It’s as good a place as any to sound Lisa out on my dilemma, I suppose. I’m not sure she’ll be able to conjure up the required empathy from the midst of her understandable self-absorption, but it’s worth a try.

  “You know, since that Friday night you were at my house, a lot has happened.”

  “Really, like what?”

  “Well, to cut a long story short, David came over for lunch, looked at me in a funny way, then asked me to go away with him and the kids this weekend. That’s the main thing. I said yes but I don’t know if I should go. Then there’s this guy I’ve been sort of bumping into all over the place. I didn’t think he was interested, but he’s asked me to meet him on Friday. I don’t know if he wants to be friends, or if he’s interested in something else.”

  “Slow down. That’s a lot all at once. Let’s do the David thing first. Why does he want you to go?”

  “That’s just it. I’m not really sure. He said he misses what we had. But I don’t know.”

  “Of course he misses what you had! He fucked it up royally!”

  “I know he did. But what if he’s being genuine? What if he’s learned a lesson and really wants to try again? Don’t I owe it to the kids to try?”

  “Or, what if he’s not learned his lesson but he’s just feeling nostalgic and horny. What if he quite fancies a little comfort love to soothe him through his post-Charmaine phase?”

  “Chantal. It’s Chantal,” I say defensively.

  “Whatever. What if it’s that, Ally? You have to consider that, because it’s a possibility, and you do not want to go there.”

  “I don’t think even David is selfish enough to enter into something for those reasons if he doesn’t think there’s a reasonable chance there’s something in it. He wouldn’t do that to the children.”

  “Wouldn’t he? Maybe he’s not thinking as clearly as you. You always said he was a romantic.”

  It’s funny how Lisa can be so brutally analytical about other people’s personal quandaries when she’s always been so feeble about her own. Now her assertions have the added authority afforded by her apparent conviction that she is party to the inception of the perfect relationship.

  I don’t know what to say to Lisa, so I start twisting another forkful of pasta around in my spoon and say nothing. She’s probably right. I know that. But if there’s the slightest chance she’s wrong, don’t I owe it to myself, and to Jack and Millie, to find out?

  I NEVER GOT to hear Lisa’s opinion on the Tom dilemma. That’s all right. As dilemmas go, it’s not yet much of one. But David and the weekend, that’s a dilemma to be reckoned with. I’ve said I’ll go, but there are two days remaining in which I can change my mind.

  The person I really want to ask about it is Millie. I’m not about to ask her if she thinks David might just be feeling nostalgic and horny, but I’d love to know how she might perceive the whole idea of us all going away together. But tonight may not be the ideal time to bring it up, as she’s overcome with emotion at the idea of a midweek sleepover. Her friend Charlotte from two streets over is coming to stay the night while her parents travel to Bath for some sort of overnight business event. Millie is beside herself with preparations. We’ve already made up a bed on the floor beside Millie’s and she’s now surrounding it with cuddly toys to make Charlotte feel at home.

  On second thought, perhaps with Millie so preoccupied and happy, now could be the perfect time to mention the weekend.

  “Millie, has Daddy mentioned that he’s taking you away to the seaside this weekend?”

  “Yes. He told me last week,” she says, lovingly placing her Angelina Ballerina on the pillow.

  “And did he mention that I might go with you?”

  “No,” she says, looking up at me.

  “Oh. Well, I was thinking of perhaps going with you. I love the seaside and it seems a shame for you all to enjoy it without me. What would you think about that?”

  Millie sits back on her heels and thinks. “Where would we all sleep?” She’s smart, this one. Gets straight to the heart of matters.

  “I think you and Jack would share a room, Daddy would have a room, and I would have another room.”

  Then another question that perforates the protective ambiguity I’m trying to maintain. “Does that mean you and Daddy are getting back together?”

  “No honey. It doesn’t mean that. It means that Daddy and I are friends, and we both love spending time with you and Jack, so sometimes we might spend it together. Like when we had lunch last weekend. Does that make sense?”

  Millie looks disappointed. When do they stop hoping for reconciliation, I wonder. Someone once told me that her son didn’t stop asking if she and her ex-husband would get back together until he was fifteen and her ex had a baby with his new wife. I blame the wretched Parent Trap.

  “What do you think, Millie? Would you like me to go or would you prefer me to stay home and you go with Daddy?”

  “I think you should go too,” she says. “We’ll all have a nice time.” At this moment the expres
sion in her eyes seems more like that of a sage old woman than a seven-year-old girl.

  “Okay then. I’ll go with you.” I kiss the top of her head and leave her there, making a space for Brown Bear between Angelina and Pooh.

  CHAPTER 33

  COFFEE

  It’s funny how things that loom large in your life at a particular moment can seem inconsequential in retrospect. The first time you ever have to stand up in front of fifty people and give a coherent speech you think you’re going to collapse into the overhead projector before you’ve managed to utter three sentences. Five years and several dozen speaking engagements later, you really can’t recall what all the fuss was about. Even the horrors of childbirth are thus glossed over. You can quite happily describe them in clinical fashion to the newly-pregnant woman who asks, “What’s it really like?” but in all honesty, you can’t really remember what they feel like.

  I’m not even looking back on Friday yet but already it’s lost the air of importance I’d attached to it earlier in the week. Preparations— mental and otherwise—for the weekend with David and the children have dwarfed any sense of trepidation I might have had about the coffee with Tom. Compared to the possibilities represented by a weekend away with my ex-husband, a cappuccino with an attractive neighborhood friend who may or may not be interested in me now seems almost a trifling event.

  All the same, there’s a swirling sensation in my stomach when I see Tom sitting at a small round table in the far corner of Suzzette’s, just in front of the speciality cake display. At first I don’t recognize him, then I realize he’s cut his hair. Very short, into one of those cuts that sticks artfully up and out in all kinds of places. Gone are the longish dirty blond wisps that fell over his eyes in the wind, which is something of a disappointment.

  He doesn’t see me approach the table, but looks up from a pad he’s scribbling on just as I sit down.

  “Oh God. Sorry. I was so preoccupied I didn’t see you come in,” he apologizes, immediately turning his pad facedown on the table and placing his coffee cup on top of it. “Can I get you a coffee?”