Lessons in Duck Hunting Read online

  “I’ll think about it,” I concede disingenuously, anxious to get us off the topic and move on. “Tell you what. I’ll read the brochure over the weekend and tell you what I think. In the meantime, can we please stop talking about it. We’re all intelligent working women. Surely we’ve got better things to talk about.”

  Just at that moment, a man of indefinable age with a helmet of salt-and-pepper hair appears at the side of our table. The kinds of men you meet in bars inevitably being the wrong kind, I look at him with an expression that I hope communicates the right balance between politeness and sod off.

  “Excuse me ladies,” he gushes. “I notice you’re not using your ashtray. Would you mind if I borrowed it?”

  In fact, I have nothing to fear from this man, and my carefully considered expression is lost on him. While reaching for the ashtray, he is doing his best to seduce Clara with his orthodontic smile.

  Clara is not oblivious, but she is uninterested. And she clearly doesn’t think this bloke is worth tossing to me as leftovers either, since she dismisses him with a “Sure” and a wave of her hand. He takes his ashtray back to the bar, shoulders drooping discernibly.

  “Come on,” says Clara. “Let’s go and find some dinner. I’ve had enough of this place.”

  We pay the waitress and put on our coats. I’ve had enough of this place as well. Suddenly, it is no longer full of inappropriate types I’d rather not talk to, but of vaguely attractive sorts with great potential who would rather hit on Clara. It would be very bad for morale to stay.

  CHAPTER 5

  MEETING FRANCESCA

  I was never supposed to be here. I never dreamed that David would leave me with two small children and the mortgage on a three-bedroom terrace to live out his romantic impulses in the arms of other women. It was the furthest thing from my mind when we said our vows in the tiny church in Bishops Sutton, surrounded by forty people who wished us nothing but unending happiness. It was inconceivable as I lay in the maternity ward with a newborn Millie in my arms and watched tears welling up in David’s eyes. I can’t say that it ever entered my mind even when I first tumbled into bed with the dangerously handsome man with the loose dark curls that everyone had warned me about.

  Being divorced was never something I factored into my life plan. My parents have a chocolate box kind of marriage that’s endured more than forty years. My older brother Nick is a funny, kind, and as far as I know, utterly faithful husband who showed me what a proper marriage could be like years before I contemplated it. All my life I have been surrounded by shining examples of marital bliss, and I never had any reason to doubt that I could manage to secure some of it for myself.

  Apparently there’s this psychologist who’s devised a mathematical model that can predict which couples will divorce on the basis of the first few minutes of a discussion about some disputed issue. According to this Dr. Gottman, a couple’s attitudes during an argument are directly linked to their propensity to get divorced. Those with a high “bitterness rating” are doomed almost from the first conversation.

  Well, even Dr. Gottman wouldn’t have predicted the fate of my marriage based on his formula. David and I always argued well, incorporating lots of the teasing, laughing and other signs of affection that Dr. Gottman links with successful partnerships. In fact, my ability to engage David in debates about controversial topics was one of the things that drew him to me, if you believe his account of the courtship.

  The problem with David and me was much simpler than Gottman’s formula would suggest. David loves women, in the way that French men love women. In the plural sense of the word. He can’t resist a flirting opportunity, and can be counted on to be found engrossed in conversation with the only female in the room when all the other men are staring goggle-eyed at the football. He not only loves women, but he loves the whole business of loving women. I just happened to be a woman that he loved a bit more at one time in his life, and we both mistook it for the real thing. When I discovered that I was pregnant at the age of twenty-nine after knowing David just ten months, we both wanted to believe that David could love me forever, and that he wouldn’t need to love women anymore.

  I felt no sense of shame in being unmarried and pregnant. Having been a good girl all my life, I found it exciting. I felt it gave me character, made me unpredictable where I had always been the master of the expected. And in the face of friends’ astonishment at the news that the pregnancy had enticed David to commit to marriage, I felt newly powerful, and flagrantly optimistic.

  And besides, I had no choice in the matter. I loved everything about him. And I loved what he loved about me. Amidst a sea of bronzed, gazellelike beauties on a shoot for a new range of sun-kissed lipsticks, he chose the slightly stroppy five-feet-five-inch woman sitting next to the director with a clipboard on her lap. My brains and determination made me stand out, he said. Models were two a penny, but how often do you meet someone who’s challenging and totally shaggable at the same time?

  I’ll never make that mistake again. There is good reason why people talk about leopards never changing their spots. David was never cruel, heartless or demeaning. It’s just that his love of women could not be stifled. After three brief dalliances, one while I was pregnant with Jack, he decided to come clean. He didn’t want a marriage full of lies any more than I did. Neither did he want to be trapped inside the life of a committed family man. He walked out when Jack was twenty months old.

  I wonder what Dr. Gottman would have to say on the subject of professions as predictors of divorce. I hate to succumb to the power of the cliché, but I can’t help being drawn to the theory that David’s being a photographer might have been a warning to me. Of course, when you are twenty-nine, ripe for settling down, and lying next to a dark haired creative genius whose very being promises to imbue your life with magic, the profession is part of the attraction. Later on, the attraction pales. All you can see is the unsocial hours, the unpredictable income, and the fact that your husband is frequently in the company of young goddesses with legs rising up to meet the bottom of their skimpy belly-tops.

  Suddenly remembering the leaflet that has been stuffed into my bag, I wonder what Marina Boyd would have to say about such matters. Would she have advised me to go out with David all those years ago, then marry him? Or would she have known it would never work?

  Still squinting from sleep, I look over to the chair beside my bed, where I can see a corner of Mel’s leaflet peeking out from my bag, willing me to pick it up. I reach out and extract it, dropping a lip gloss and a plastic replica of Scooby Doo onto the floor in the process. I open it to the list of action steps I’d perused the evening before.

  STEP #1: Planning

  STEP #2: Product

  STEP #3: Packaging

  STEP #4: Prospecting

  STEP #5: Promotion

  STEP #6: Place

  STEP #7: Props

  STEP #8: Perseverance

  Packaging. Promotion. Place. These words are all so familiar to me. I’ve lived and breathed them every working day since I first landed the junior marketing assistant role at Chanel after graduation. When I was sent on my first marketing course I was immediately drawn to the apparent science of it all. I’d always loved a good theory, and now here was a theory that made sense of creams and lipsticks and powder blushers and all the reasons women bought them. The first marketing plan I ever produced filled me with an enormous sense of mastery. Full of predictions and promises about share of market and sales, and exciting ideas for point of sale promotion, it made me feel a bit like a conductor—as though I really could orchestrate anything I’d set my mind to.

  Reality soon set in of course, and I quickly realized that sales predictions were a lot easier to make than actual sales. But I was still a little in awe of the discipline of it all. Combined with the heady atmosphere of the luxury cosmetics world it made for a pretty interesting working life.

  I’ve never really regained my enthusiasm since leaving Chanel. Perhaps I
’ve never overcome my reluctant departure from Coco’s world for the saner but far less exciting world of packaged food. Or perhaps I just tired of dealing in the language of marketing, stopped believing in it quite so much. Whatever it is, I’ve felt as though I’m just going through the motions for a long while.

  I can see that Marina has expanded the original four Ps of marketing to eight, but it’s not immediately clear to me what any of them have to do with romance. Translating Packaging into the dating arena is something I can just about manage; after all, with makeovers gracing the pages of every woman’s magazine on the newsstand, the notion of making the most of your physical attributes isn’t so foreign.

  But Promotion and Props? What do these have to do with finding a soul mate? How on earth would you promote yourself, even if you were inclined to do so? The idea of advertising your attributes like you would advertise a household cleaning product is just repugnant.

  I am forced to abandon contemplation of this weighty matter when I realize that it is ten a.m. and I have to be at the hairdresser in three quarters of an hour. I shower and dress hurriedly, gulp down some juice and a half a muffin abandoned by Jack two days ago, and manage to get myself into the car in under twenty minutes. Moving at this pace, I succeed in relegating Mel’s challenge to the recesses of my mind.

  With new salons opening up every other week, I could easily have settled on a hairdresser within walking distance of home. But I’ve been with George for ten years, and couldn’t possibly surrender him now. He has seen me through at least three versions of the ubiquitous (and always fashionable) bob, one very short cut, the traumatic growing out of the short cut, and four shades of the blond highlights I have been faithfully applying since the age of twenty-one. I would feel unsafe in anyone else’s hands. So about every six weeks I endure a drive to the other side of the city to get to George at The Strand Hair Design.

  This morning I am in luck, my journey being timed to coincide with the nine-to-noon talk show with Julia Stone on City Talk Radio, usually featuring an interesting guest in the studio combined with calls from listeners about the interesting guest. I’m just in time to hear the guest responding to a caller’s question, in a velvety American accent.

  “Well the fact is that the method I’ve developed can work for anyone. I’ve helped women who are twenty-five and sixty-five, women who have never been married and women divorced for the third time. It really is a matter of saying to yourself ‘I am serious about finding a lifetime partner’ and devoting the time and energy to the essential steps of marketing. I believe there are eight of them. What I call the Eight Ps of Proactive Partnership.”

  My God, it’s her. It’s Marina Boyd. I turn up the volume, noticing absentmindedly that Thursday’s buff and polish is not holding up particularly well.

  “So tell us all, Marina, because we are dying to know. What is the secret of the Eight Ps? And let me tell you, listeners, that this lady sitting with me in the studio is charming and lovely, and just happens to be very happily married, so it might just be worth taking her advice.”

  Marina’s voice is smooth as honey. I can almost see her forced half smile and her Botoxed forehead. “The secret to this approach is to apply some tried and tested principles that have been proven in the business world many times over. After thirty, the stakes are raised and the territory gets more challenging, so you have to get serious if you want to find a husband. These principles are practically foolproof.”

  Julia asks Marina to elaborate and she’s off. Totally unstoppable. Julia takes the odd call from a listener to lighten the proceedings, but the next fifteen minutes are essentially a monologue. Marina starts by describing the Eight Ps in detail, starting with the importance of good packaging ( Basic rule number one: wear your hair as long as you can manage. Men prefer longer hair.) and goes on to explain how the different aspects of promotion, such as direct mail, advertising, and telesales are important tools for the woman seeking a partner today.

  “But the underlying secret of my approach,” she says, conspiratorally, “is the combination of method and moral support. I think of it as the Weight Watchers of the romance world. Weight Watchers works because it gives people a method to follow. By counting points they can be assured of losing weight. It also works because it offers moral support to people. They can go to meetings, get weighed in, get a pat on the back, find out how their friends are doing. These things improve the chances of success. It’s the same in the dating game. People need a method to follow and plenty of moral support along the way. My seminars offer that.”

  Then Marina’s voice softens a little, and she stops talking about her method, and begins telling stories about real people. Women who have bucked seemingly insurmountable odds to find lifetime soul mates using the Boyd method.

  And the funny thing is, the more I listen, the less I dislike this Marina. The more she talks in ordinary terms about “making the best of yourself” and “opening your mind to different sorts of people” and “getting out more rather than expecting Mr. Perfect to just knock on your door,” the more I am taken in. Behind the jargon, there’s a glimmer of common sense.

  Just the faintest glimmer mind you. Marina might be charming and articulate, but she can’t disguise the fact that she’s asking grown women to attend seminars that espouse the application of Eight Ps to something as unmanageable and indefinable as love. It’s still a load of nonsense.

  “Well dear listeners, that is all we have time for. But let me tell you, tickets for Marina’s first series of London seminars are selling like hotcakes. There are only a few left. Keep calling, because we have one ticket worth £500 to give away to the woman who can persuade us why she needs it more than anyone else. In the meantime, thank you, Marina, for being with us. Now, coming up, Hattie Jacob, will be telling us how she survived a year on a bicycle in Africa.”

  I arrive at The Strand and never get to hear Hattie Jacob’s story. My mind is buzzing with Marina Boyd’s advice despite its better judgment, and this unnerves me. I can’t decide whether I’ve lost the plot or seen the light. Even George notices that something is up.

  “Hello, darling,” he gushes, kissing me on both cheeks. “My goodness, you look flushed today. I hope it ees for something nice!”

  “Must be the extra shot in the cappuccino,” I lie, recovering myself.

  “Come, come over here,” says George solicitously, ushering me toward the sink. “I am ready for you. You are going to feel marvelous when I’ve finished with you.”

  George is the only hairdresser I know who washes his clients’ hair himself. He has made it an art form. It’s all part of the deal of being flattered, pampered and indulged for an hour—or three if there are highlights involved. I’ve never heard George pop the much-dreaded question “And where are you going on holiday?” Instead he regales his clients with stories of his own holidays, which, George being a sixty-year-old, single, gay Chilean of aristocratic heritage, are always adventures. Once George runs out of stories, we switch to tittering at the ghastly outfits and badly executed plastic surgery on display in the pages of the latest Hello! or OK, an activity that always passes the remaining time quite nicely. We did once have a three-way conversation (with another woman having a cut and blow-dry) about the Hutton Report, but that was quite exceptional.

  Today I find it hard to concentrate on George’s tale. My mind keeps drifting back to Marina Boyd and her seminars. I am intrigued. And repelled. And not entirely sure what to say to Mel.

  As George’s story comes to a close, and he wraps my hair in a turban before shepherding me over to the bank of mirrors on the opposite side of the room, I take the opportunity to jump in.

  “George, do you know any women who are looking for husbands?”

  George is slightly taken aback by this question. It doesn’t fit the usual pattern. But he copes with it. “Well, of course, darling. There are lots of beautiful women I know who should be married. They just haven’t found the right man yet.”

&
nbsp; “Yes but are any of them actually looking for a husband. You know, really working at it?”

  “Let me think about that one, darling.” This he does while combing out my hair. “Most of the ladies I know are just hoping a prince weell fall out of the sky one day. But there ees this one woman; she ees fantastic. So full of life. Her name ees Francesca. Her husband divorced her three years ago, and she has made it no secret that she weell not be left to seet in a dark room the rest of her life. She ees a shameless flirt. And she goes out all the time. Has a really good time. In fact, I think she ees having a better time than when she was married. She always says that she weell find herself another husband before she ees feefty.”

  “Perhaps I should be a bit more like that,” I proffer. “What do you think?”

  “I think it would be fantastic, darling. You are too beautiful to seet in a dark room the rest of your life also. Now, what are we doing weeth your hair today?”

  My hair has been bothering me lately. It seems to fall lankly into my face all the time when I don’t blow-dry it. And blow-drying makes me hot and bad tempered. I’ve been thinking I should cut it quite short.

  “Let’s go for much shorter today. Sort of short and shaggy, a bit like Lulu a year ago,” I say.

  “Lulu it ees,” says George. “That weell be quite nice.” George has clipped up one half of my hair and is brandishing his scissors when something makes me stop him.

  “Wait,” I shout. “I’ve changed my mind. Let’s go for long and slightly shaggy. Sort of like Lulu now.”