Lessons in Duck Hunting Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1 - ARE YOU RAISING CHILDREN ON YOUR OWN?

  CHAPTER 2 - WAKE-UP CALL

  CHAPTER 3 - HANDOVER

  CHAPTER 4 - PROPOSITION

  CHAPTER 5 - MEETING FRANCESCA

  CHAPTER 6 - SIGNS

  CHAPTER 7 - BLIND DATE

  CHAPTER 8 - ENTRAPMENT

  CHAPTER 9 - CONFESSION

  CHAPTER 10 - UNDERCOVER OPERATION

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 11 - A BURIAL

  CHAPTER 12 - PRE-PACKAGING

  CHAPTER 13 - THE RESCUE

  CHAPTER 14 - PROSPECTING

  CHAPTER 15 - MAKEUP

  CHAPTER 16 - DUCK SHOOT

  CHAPTER 17 - PROGRESS REPORT

  CHAPTER 18 - BLUEBIRD

  CHAPTER 19 - THE HISTORY OF MARMALADE

  CHAPTER 20 - LIGHTING

  CHAPTER 21 - THE INTERVIEW

  CHAPTER 22 - BRANDING ALLY

  CHAPTER 23 - BUSTED

  CHAPTER 24 - STAR PUPIL

  CHAPTER 25 - CALLING ALL MUMS

  CHAPTER 26 - TIDE POOL CREATURES

  CHAPTER 27 - SOMETHING EXOTIC

  CHAPTER 28 - SHOPPING

  CHAPTER 29 - MAIN SQUEEZE

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 30 - PEP TALK

  CHAPTER 31 - PERFECT PARTNERSHIP

  CHAPTER 32 - DECISION

  CHAPTER 33 - COFFEE

  CHAPTER 34 - DANGEROUS WATERS

  CHAPTER 35 - STRADDLING TWO HORSES

  CHAPTER 36 - TOO MANY HEARTS

  CHAPTER 37 - ANOTHER BURIAL

  CHAPTER 38 - LISTS

  CHAPTER 39 - SPLITS

  CHAPTER 40 - WELCOME HOME

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 41 - GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

  CHAPTER 42 - MARKING TIME

  CHAPTER 43 - CHORUS LINE

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Cal

  Luck is quite predictable.

  If you want more luck, take more chances.

  Be more active. Show up more often.

  —BRIAN TRACY

  It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

  —CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first to Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown, without whose guidance and insights this story would almost certainly never have made its way into print. I’m also grateful to Allison Dickens and In-grid Powell and their formidable team at Ballantine, for their unwavering enthusiasm, guidance, and professionalism, as well as to Christy Fletcher and Kate Cooper for all of their efforts on my behalf.

  Thanks also to Justine Horsman for invaluable advice about necklaces and romantic heroes. To Olivia, Joely, and Matt, thank you for your tolerance and graciousness in the face of an almost permanently empty fridge and bouts of bad humor too frequent to mention. A special mention for Matt, the inspiration for a certain five-year-old cowboy. And finally, thanks to Patrick, who has the whole business of being tirelessly supportive and enthusiastic completely taped.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  ARE YOU RAISING CHILDREN ON YOUR OWN?

  The queue in the post office is twelve people deep. Having expected to sail straight up to the counter, I am reduced to making frenzied calculations about just how late I will be if I wait. Twelve people times approximately one and a half minutes each, divided by three counter assistants—no wait, one has just closed her window so that makes two. I’ll be here for at least six minutes. Probably ten.

  I decide that, on balance, it is worth being a few minutes late at the school gates rather than another entire week late with my nephew’s birthday gift (which is what will surely be the case if I miss this opportunity). So I shift from foot to foot and try to pass the time without appearing overly irritated.

  To my left is a shelf full of brightly-colored leaflets. Their titles are difficult to decipher, as someone has obviously disturbed them and replaced them in a great hurry, and with complete disregard for the original leaflet stacker’s carefully considered system. I can see The Family Tax Credit Made Simple, and a pile of what look to be motoring-related documents. At the far end of the shelf, partially obscured by some leaflets on housing benefits, I spot one that asks, rather nosily I think, Are you raising children on your own?

  Casting a sideways glance to make sure that no one is paying particular attention, I reach out to take the leaflet for single parents, grabbing one on tax disks at the same time to put any casual observers off the scent. Leaflet safely in hand, I take a second to regain my composure, avoiding the eyes of the filth-splattered builder ahead of me, who has turned around to identify the source of all the rustling.

  On the cover of the leaflet is a photo of a family, I suppose, though it’s not like any family I’ve ever seen. There is a youngish woman surrounded by four children, each one from a different racial background, all beaming into the camera in apparent delight at the political correctness of their multiracial single-parent family. Boy, she must have been busy, I think, looking for some sign in the woman’s eyes. Tired yet determined. Resigned. Desperate for a lie-in. Anything would do really, other than the bright-as-a-button smile she actually proffers.

  With five people still ahead of me in the queue, I open the leaflet to find a series of headings. I can see immediately that the most important ones are missing. A quick scan reveals that there is plenty of advice about what money is available, and how to collect it, but where, for instance, is the bit about how to adjust to the sudden, vast emptiness of your bed? And the long, hollow days of every second weekend? Where does it tell you how to train yourself not to reach out for that hand you’ve held a thousand times, or about all the different ways you’re going to have to find to say to your children This is not your fault? And where’s the advice about how to fix a blocked shower drain or a malfunctioning waste disposal unit once the person who used to do these things has left home?

  But the most glaring omission is the section about how you ever find another man. Where’s that one? Nowhere, that’s where. Because you’re not going to find one. Unless you are Elizabeth Hurley, with best mates like Elton and David, you’re not going to be invited to parties heaving with handsome men seeking out the singular charms of a single mother. And even Liz didn’t have too easy a time of it at first, if the pages of Hello! are anything to go by.

  No. Once a divorced mother of two, likely always a divorced mother of two. I fold the leaflet in half and stuff it into my bag, just as the bespectacled woman at the counter beckons to me. I would have put it back on the shelf where it belongs, but I don’t want anyone to take me for a desperate single mother on the make.

  CHAPTER 2

  WAKE-UP CALL

  The familiar strident beep brings an abrupt halt to my early morning dream, erasing any shred of memory I might have had of it. In exhausted disbelief (Can it really be ten-to-seven?) I roll over to check the time, reaffirming my longstanding commitment to replacing the graying plastic digital clock with something with a sleeker look and a less intrusive sound.

  I push the snooze button and lie back on my pillow trying to take in the day through the tiny slits in the shutters. I listen for rain, but hear nothing. Good, no need for an umbrella, which is just as well as the chances of finding one anywhere in the house are practically nonexistent.

  My body longs to linger. Seeking to justify my lethargy, I remember the foxes. Their eerie howls, like the wails of cats being strangled, had persisted for what seemed like hours in the street directly below my bedroom window during the night. Knowing little about
the habits of foxes, I’m not sure if they are carrying on in the name of lust or battle, but I do know that they are becoming louder with every passing night. Dad says I ought to write to the council and ask to have them relocated, but that particular task seems destined to remain on the lower rungs of my mental to-do list, somewhere above the note about fixing the cracked tile in the hallway, but well below the reminder to clean out the tumble dryer filter once a week lest it overheat and explode.

  The door squeaks, and Jack pads into the room in full cowboy regalia, as is his habit. Immediately he wakes, he springs out of bed and dons hat, vest, chaps, holster and guns before coming in to see me. He insists on remaining in this outfit until a few minutes before we leave for school, at which point I have to cajole, or occasionally wrestle him into his school uniform. David says I make life hard on myself by not being tougher with Jack, that I should insist on the uniform from the word go. I think the reason I let Jack get away with it is that I sympathize with what I see as his mini-protest. He doesn’t see why he should have to put on a tie and blue trousers and go to school for six hours every day at the age of five; much of the time, neither do I.

  Jack sits beside me in the bed making “pching poing” noises and taking aim at a photo of the smiling couple with two small children on the dresser.

  “Mummy, do I have to go to school today?” he whines. “It’s sooo long before you pick me up. Do you know how many worksheets they make me do? Do you?”

  “Jack honey, you have to go to school. Everyone has to go to school. It’s the law. And anyway, it won’t be too long before I see you,” I say somewhat disingenuously, knowing full well that today is one of the days I have to work, and that he will be collected by Jill, our babysitter.

  “Ohhh,” Jack moans. “Archie’s mummy lets him have a day off when he doesn’t feel well. I don’t feel well.”

  “You can have a day off if you’re really ill,” I say. “But today you don’t look particularly ill to me, so you’re going to school. Now, come here and give me a big cuddle before I have my shower.”

  Jack relents and sinks into the pillow beside me, his honeyed sleep-breath warming my cheek. For an instant I am completely in the moment, drinking in the plump softness of the tiny hand clutching its prized pistol, without a thought for the rest of life. Then the thing I have been trying not to remember rushes to the forefront of my mind. Now that it’s here, I can’t shift it. Not even the gloriousness of this little man beside me can banish it.

  Today is Thursday. Tomorrow the children’s teachers have a staff-inset day (a challenge periodically thrown out to working mothers by the educational establishment) so tonight David is coming to collect Jack and Millie for the weekend. They are going to meet David’s girlfriend Chantal and I am going to spend the weekend more or less alone.

  David is my ex-husband of two years and three months precisely. Chantal is David’s girlfriend of four months, give or take a week. Clearly, Chantal is not the woman David left me for. Caroline was the woman he left me for. Though she and David were only together for three months, in my mind she will forever be the woman responsible for breaking up my marriage.

  In between Caroline and Chantal there have been too many women to count, and more than one or two inappropriately young girls. I heard about a Madison (American), a Suzanne ( Scottish) and a Jessica (perfect English Rose, apparently). I think there was also a Cynthia, though she was spoken of so fleetingly that I can’t be sure she was anything more than a mere rumor.

  The fact that David seems to have successfully shagged his way through the past twenty-seven months while I have been out with just two men has ceased to bother me. That’s not strictly true, but after the initial sting of the separation, the gruesomeness of the divorce, and the strange hollowness of the first few months after it, learning of David’s romp across the London singles landscape began to lack impact. I soon became accustomed to it.

  In a funny way, thinking of David hurtling from one woman to another has been vaguely comforting. I have chosen to see it as a sign of just how misguided and rootless he is, and perhaps even of how regretful he might eventually become. Not that there is the slightest chance of my ever accepting him back, after what he has put me through. But I have drawn some solace from the fact that having thoughtlessly discarded someone he once referred to as his “forever girl,” he has so far not succeeded in finding a suitable replacement.

  But Chantal is different. Chantal has lasted beyond the customary eight weeks, and is now well into her fourth month. She looks suspiciously as if she might stay. David speaks in warm, admiring tones about her, mostly to our friends and very occasionally to me, suggesting that he thinks of her as something more than a means of whiling away the hours between midnight and seven a.m. Worst of all though, is the fact that David wants her to meet the children.

  None of his other women ever met Jack and Millie. It was never even suggested. David would see Jack and Millie at my house (formerly our house) while I disappeared for a few hours, or take them for supper at Pizza Express, or a weekend at his parents. If they went to his flat, he assured me that his girlfriends were never there. I think that even at the height of his self-centered self-indulgence (from which it is arguable that he has not yet descended), he knew that they were never going to be permanent fixtures, and that it would be cruel to allow Jack and Millie to become attached to them.

  I am saved from my thoughts by the sight of Millie peeping around the door. Jack hears her and pops his head and shoulders up from the pillow, delivering a swift blow to my eye with his elbow in the process. I resist the urge to scream, managing to hold myself to a restrained grimace.

  “Hello darling. Did you sleep well?” I say, patting the empty space in the bed. The upside of having been left by your husband is that your bed can accommodate at least two children without becoming intolerably uncomfortable for all concerned.

  “Mummy, I had a bad dream,” says Millie quietly as she crawls into bed beside Jack.

  “Really darling, what about?”

  “ ’Bout a witch. She kept banging on my window. She looked like Mrs. Williamson.”

  Mrs. Williamson is the resident battle-ax at Millie and Jack’s school. Millie is normally quite adept at avoiding her steely glare, but has recently had a nasty run-in with her over an incident involving four seven-year-old girls, some missing hair clips and one unduly irate mother. I’m absolutely sure that Millie had nothing to do with the theft of the hair clips, but Witch Williamson seems to have decided that it is better to cover all bases and apportion blame evenly rather than seek out the true culprit. Millie and the two other suspects were forced to spend break time writing “I will respect the property of others” two dozen times while their classmates were happily cavorting in the playground.

  “Well don’t worry, sweetheart, there’s no witch going to get in through your window, not even one who looks like Mrs. Williamson. The windows in this house are completely witch-proof,” I reassure her. “Anyway,” I attempt brightly. “Guess what today is?”

  “What?” Jack and Millie ask in unison. “Half day at school?” adds Jack hopefully.

  “No, better than that,” I say, with now heroic levels of cheer. “Daddy is coming to collect you for the weekend after tea tonight. You’re going to stay with Papa and Gran, and visit Barwell Zoo on Saturday. And best of all you’re going to meet Daddy’s friend, Chantal. She’s going to go with you to the zoo.”

  “I don’t remember Chantal. I never heard of that name,” says Jack.

  “What kind of a name is Chantal?” asks Millie.

  “Chantal is a French name, and you have heard of her, Jack. I told you about her last week, remember? She is Daddy’s very good friend, and she really wants to meet you, because you are the most important things in Daddy’s life.” I got this little number from Divorce with Grace: Helping Your Children Deal with Marriage Breakdown, a book at which I had loudly scoffed before finding myself repeatedly referring to it.

&
nbsp; “I hope I like Daddy’s friend,” says Jack warily.

  “I’m sure you will, sweetheart. You love Daddy, and Daddy wouldn’t like anyone horrid.”

  Thus satisfactorily fobbed off, Jack bounds out of bed, guns in hand, and runs to his room. Millie and I lie still for a minute or two, listening to the “pching, poing” noises emanating from the other side of the hall. Then she sighs, and in her most concerned voice asks, “What will you do without us, Mummy?”

  I could have told you this was coming. Even after more than two years’ worth of weekends spent with her father, Millie never fails to express a touching concern about leaving me behind. Initially I might have been guilty of inviting this worry, having been unable to muster the appropriate levels of mature nonchalance required of me in the early days. But I was pretty sure that I had managed, for the better part of the past year, to feign just about the right amount of delight at the prospect of my solitary weekends. But Millie refuses to be fooled. She has always been the kind of child who can spot fear, sadness or weakness at fifty paces. The community midwife who visited me in the weeks after she was born used to insist that Millie had an unusually acute ability to pick up on people’s hidden feelings, and that if I wanted a calmer baby I was going to have to do a better imitation of tranquillity myself.

  “I will miss you, Millie, you know that. But because you’re not here, I’ve organized a really nice weekend. I’ll see Mel and Clara tomorrow night, and have my hair cut on Saturday—you know how much I love those head massages that George gives—and probably see a movie on Saturday night. I will be fine, Millie. You forget about me and enjoy yourself.”

  “Don’t see The Lost Princess, will you, Mummy. I really want to see that with you.”

  “Deal.” I say, sensing her cross-examination mercifully drawing to a close. “I’ll see something you absolutely do not want to see. Now, we need to get going. Scat,” I say, pulling back the duvet and nudging her gently.

  Millie scampers to her room just as the alarm goes off for the second time. I roll out of bed, knowing that my favorite moments of the day have just gone. It’s all one big sprint from here.