Lessons in Duck Hunting Read online

  “Fantastic, darling. I think that ees much better. Between you and me, I theenk men always prefer longer hair.”

  CHAPTER 6

  SIGNS

  I leave George with my this-year’s-Lulu hair and a burgeoning desire to be more like Francesca, with all her zest for life and unflaggable romantic enthusiasm. But more mundane things await me; I need to make a couple of pit stops on the way home. I’m still debating with myself about going to the seminar as I pull into the Tesco parking lot first, just missing out on a space near the door. I don’t begrudge the loss of the space until I notice the bright yellow “Baby on Board” sticker pasted to the back window of the car that has nipped in ahead of me. Why people bother with these twee little stickers is an unending mystery to me. What do they think, that cars without babies on board are targets for every tail-bumping maniac on the M4? That the truck driver about to accidentally slam into the back of your car will suddenly find himself able to stop once he realizes a small child’s life is at risk? (I once saw a Ford Ventura with a “Twins on Board” sticker on its rear window, which only goes to prove that these stickers have morphed from health and safety aids to family advertisements.)

  Successfully parked about a mile from the door, I make a mental note of the necessary purchases as I admire my new hair in the rearview mirror. Resenting Saturday grocery shopping with a not uncommon passion, I then race around the aisles like a woman possessed. I’ve taken a basket rather than a cart so that I can safely scoot up the inside lane marked “fifteen items or less.” When I reach the cash desk, I notice a row of books with green and white covers arrayed on the bestseller racks below Victoria Beckham’s autobiography and above a shelf full of bodice rippers. It’s called Finding a Mate for Life, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to spot that it has been allocated double the rack space of the other books. Perhaps Clara and Mel are right. Maybe in today’s fast-paced, fragmented world it really isn’t enough to simply hope to meet the right person. Maybe the whole of Britain, or at the very least, everyone who shops at Tesco, is waking up to the fact that you need to work at it.

  Next stop is the library, where I must return five overdue children’s books and explain that the sixth, Whose Bottom? cannot be found. The librarians are usually pretty forgiving, having heard a variation on this story from me several times already. Their customary stance is to renew the book in good faith, and reassure me that it will probably turn up during the next spring clean (which, I infer, is no longer just a springtime activity in most civilized English homes).

  As I hand over the books to the librarian and begin my rehearsed and humble apology about the missing Whose Bottom?, I glance over her shoulders to the “Books of the Month” table and cannot believe my eyes. You guessed it. It is awash with books about finding love. Getting Ready for Love, Taking Charge of Your Love Life, and at least half a dozen others are arranged artfully on the table, offering hope and succor to the single and lonely amongst the patrons of the local library.

  This is ridiculous. If books like these have made it onto the “Books of the Month” shelves in semisuburban libraries, the topic of husband-hunting must have achieved the status of the solidly acceptable. Last month it was Carol Sheilds on that shelf for God’s sake, and before that, Joanna Trollope. What is happening to the English? Perhaps they are not as stuffy about self-help as I thought. Perhaps they are a whole lot more American than they ever thought.

  I am still musing on the unexpected popularity of these books urging us to be assertive in our search for soul mates as I unlock the front door. I make a dash for the phone, which sounds to me as if it’s on its fifth or sixth ring, picking up to hear Millie’s sweet voice.

  “Hi Mummy, it’s Millie,” she says, as if I could ever mistake her for anyone else.

  “Hi darling. How are you? Are you having a lovely time with Daddy and Papa and Gran?”

  “I’m having the best time,” she sings. I feel relieved, and just a little resentful.

  “So, tell me. What have you been doing?” I ask generously.

  “Well last night we got to stay up late and watch Finding Nemo on video. Jack fell asleep, but he did see quite a lot of it. Then this morning we went to the zoo. We just got back. I saw a rare Mongolian bison. Chantal bought me a book about it. Do you want to talk to Jack?”

  There it is. It’s started. That woman is going to compete with me on the “best presents” front on top of every thing else.

  “That’s great, sweetheart. Yes, put Jack on for a minute.”

  “Hi Mummy. I’ve got a new gun. Chantal bought it for me,” says Jack. I can picture him with his cowboy hat tipped slightly forward, cradling the new weapon.

  “Well, aren’t you the lucky one,” I say, now rather weary. These sorts of conversations are always a little unsatisfactory, small children being immensely self-centered and not yet having mastered the fine art of telephone diplomacy.

  “And, this afternoon Dad and I are going to play soccer in the garden, and Papa is going to build a boat with me. ’Bye Mummy. I love you.”

  And then he is gone, no doubt having left the phone dangling. I wait for a few seconds to see if an adult is going to rescue the receiver and fill me in on any crucial details about arrangements, but no one does. Finally, Millie comes back on.

  “ ’Bye Mummy. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. You didn’t see The Lost Princess did you?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m saving that for you. Now, give my love to everyone and have this big kiss from me.” I give the receiver an enormous smooch, and listen for the one that comes back. Then I hang up. It never does to prolong the good-bye bit.

  I SPEND THE AFTERNOON getting to grips with some household tasks I’ve been putting off for months. These are the sorts of things I can’t really do with the children around, so today is an opportunity not to be missed. I sort out old clothes from the backs of cupboards to make room for neat stacks of sweaters like those in Ikea catalogues; I find and then screw on three knobs that have been missing from Millie’s drawers for at least six months; and I finish the afternoon by applying a rich, cherry-colored wood stain to the shabby, graying step below the doors to the back garden. The truth is I quite like these sorts of jobs, when I’ve got the time and the mental space in which to complete them. The worse truth is, sometimes when the children are with me, I’d rather be doing these sorts of jobs than playing Guess Who? or Operation for the umpteenth time, or shivering in an unbearably crowded and noisy public swimming pool.

  It’s a terrible thing to admit: that you’d rather spend the afternoon with a paintbrush and a tin of wood stain than playing with your children. It’s particularly terrible when you don’t have your children with you every weekend. I feel as though I ought to cherish every moment spent with Jack and Millie on my weekends. But of course that is the trouble. Every moment is spent with the children on my weekends. It’s all or nothing. There’s no popping down to the shops while your husband builds a Lego tower with them, or lying in bed while he takes them swimming. Everything’s up to you, from the minute they wake up until the moment they choose to close their eyes. There’s no light relief, no grown-up with whom you can share a joke or a moan. No one to whom you can turn and say “Wasn’t Jack clever to swim to the other side like that?” or “Millie’s behaving rather strangely. What do you suppose it is?”

  Early on, I remember feeling so guilty about not wanting to spend all my time with my children that I went into the chat room of a website called mumsworld.com. I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to about these sorts of things as I was the first of my close friends to have children. But once I confessed to mumsworld I discovered a vast community of women who admitted that they didn’t feel the way you were supposed to feel. With the anonymity of the chat room to protect them, these women weren’t afraid to divulge that hanging around children’s playgrounds filled them with quiet despair, or that they found the stretch of time between Teletubbies and tea interminable, and could never think of en
ough ways to fill it. Or that when they were with their children they often drifted off into a reverie, or made complicated mental plans for something, rather than suffer the peculiar kind of insanity that can come with the endless building of Lego towers with a two-year-old. I haven’t really used chat rooms since, but if I ever had a serious question I might. For a few short weeks, mumsworld was something of a lifeline to me. Made me feel I wasn’t such a bad mother after all.

  Annoyingly, all through the afternoon the question of Marina Boyd’s seminars keeps reasserting itself. Applying the third and final coat of the cherry stain, I’m struggling to establish what it is, exactly, that makes me want to reject the concept outright. After all, taking advice from someone standing on a podium wouldn’t be all that different from taking it from a book. And I’ve done that plenty of times. There was the time Clara thrust Divorce with Grace into my hands two years ago, insisting that if I overlook the psycho-babble and the chronic American over-optimism, I would find a few gems that would save my life. Actually, she was right. The gems were very, very hard to find, but once found they proved to be indispensable.

  Glancing up from my crouched position over the back step, I can just make out the dark green cover of Divorce with Grace on the bookshelf next to the fridge. It is squeezed in between a well-thumbed copy of Cooking for Toddlers and Siblings Without Rivalry, the latter also given to me by Clara in response to my complaints that Jack and Millie were tearing chunks out of each other. I remember how it immediately improved my outlook, being full of examples of squabbling siblings far worse than my own, and of mothers confessing to wanting to strangle their offspring for some peace and quiet.

  Clara has never purchased a self-help book for herself, and none grace her shelves. Instead, she scours the bookshops for titles that she can offer, like throat lozenges retrieved from the depths of a handbag just as a sore throat becomes unbearable, to her struggling friends. I am not the only one to benefit from her largesse. Her sister has been sent books by the dozen, and even Jonathon received one in his Christmas stocking the year he decided to make a career change and start illustrating full time: What Color Is Your Parachute?: A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers. Everything is so clear to Clara. Perhaps this is the best way she can think of to make things clear for the rest of us. It must be all those years she has spent in management consulting, finding the solutions to seemingly intractable client problems in two-by-two matrices and glossy PowerPoint presentations.

  No, the idea of taking advice, from a book or a seminar, doesn’t strike me as odd. The thing that fills me with more trepidation, I think, is the thought of sharing the experience with people. I’m not that big on group moral support; I’d much rather struggle away at things on my own, which is why Weight Watchers never really worked for me. My mum has always sworn by Weight Watchers. Insists it is the only sane way to lose weight in a world awash with diets that forbid fruit, or banish meat, or punish you for eating fruit and meat in the same twenty-four-hour period. At her instigation I started the program six months after Millie was born, hoping to shed the ten pounds that seemed to be clinging resolutely to my stomach and hips. But I only ever managed one meeting. Everything about it put me off, from the elderly woman with thick Wheatabix-colored knee-highs collapsing around her ankles who weighed me in, to the group leader’s talk about the cooking of winter squash without oils and the importance of planning ahead for bikini season.

  But the thing I found most unbearable was the rah-rah, we’reall-in-this-togetherness of it all. I didn’t want to share my weight-loss successes and failures with people I hardly knew, or get pats on the back from a room full of fellow fatties. The rolls hidden under my sweater were, I felt, a matter for me and my mother to know about. No one else. Not even David, if I could suck in my stomach sufficiently at crucial moments.

  All that public struggling just isn’t for me. Mel’s going to have to find another guinea pig for her underhanded little plan. I’ll ring her and tell her tomorrow. In the meantime, with sweaters stacked, handles in place, and a step robbed of its filthy grayness, I feel I deserve a treat. It’s already dark, so I know exactly what it will be.

  After putting away the tin of cherry stain and running the brush under the tap I go to the fridge and fish out the bottle of pinot grigio from the back. It’s two-thirds full, which is perfect. Then I empty a tin of tuna onto a plate, sprinkle it with pepper and encircle it with the entire contents of a family-size bag of cheeseflavored tortilla chips. I take the whole feast into the sitting room, where I root around in the cupboard under the TV where the videos live until I find the cover for Sleepless in Seattle. It takes a few more minutes to locate the actual video, but once I have found it, I put it in the machine and settle comfortably into the sofa, the pinot grigio located within easy reaching distance.

  I might not be up for a course in husband-hunting with a hundred classmates, but I can still dream.

  CHAPTER 7

  BLIND DATE

  On Sunday morning I am awakened by a call from my brother.

  “Ally, it’s Nick. Did I wake you?”

  “Of course you woke me, it’s eight o’clock,” I reply, only a little gruffly. He is my brother after all.

  “Sorry. It’s just that I wanted to catch you before you went out anywhere.” And where might that be on a Sunday morning when I don’t have the kids and I do have a chance to lie in?

  “Kate and I were just thinking, we’re having a small lunch party today, and as you’re on your own, if you’re not doing anything, why don’t you pop up and join us?”

  “Up” means to Belsize Park, North London.

  “Uhm. Let me think,” I mumble. Do I have anything I need to do today? Can I be bothered to drive up to North London for lunch?

  Then one of Marina Boyd’s little gems from yesterday’s radio interview suddenly pops into my head: Home is a four-letter word. You’re never going to meet anyone there. I might not be a candidate for one of Marina’s seminars, but it doesn’t mean I have to ignore such obviously sensible advice.

  “That would be lovely,” I decide. “What time should I be there?”

  “Oh, you know. Noonish. Give us time for a G and T before lunch,” says Nick.

  “Noon it is,” I say, now wide awake and able to be chirpy.

  The day now mapped out, I sit up in bed and muse upon what to wear. Of course, it’s a pretty academic question until I determine what is actually clean, as opposed to lying squashed at the bottom of the overflowing linen basket. Needing to shed some light on the crucial task of outfit selection, I go to the window and open the shutters. Peeping out into the morning light (dull, gray, typical February), I spot a man walking by the house pushing a small child in a stroller in that unmistakably nonchalant way men have. You know. Walking slightly to one side of the offending vehicle, pushing it with one hand as if to say, “I am not really doing this. I am actually stepping out to do something incredibly masculine and this stroller insisted on coming along for the ride.”

  Poor bloke, I think. Fancy having to be out with a baby and a stroller at this hour.

  After fifteen minutes flitting back and forth between my closet and the linen basket, I ascertain that the best option open to me is the jeans with the black V-necked Max Mara sweater with the jagged sleeves (purchased in the sale, of course). This I put on after showering, all the while trying not to ruin the remnants of yesterday’s cut and blow-dry with either water or static electricity. As it’s still only eight forty-five and I have heaps of time before I have to leave, I reluctantly decide that some laundry must be done.

  Of all the godforsaken domestic tasks in the world, the worst has got to be sorting socks freshly scrambled by a tumble dryer. I am not expecting to have to face this particular task this morning, but there is a surprise lying in wait for me. I open the washing machine, ready to stuff in the great pile of whites I have heaved downstairs, and discover that the machine is full of wet clothes. To make matters infinitely wo
rse, I open the dryer to put the wet clothes in, and discover that it too is full, of socks and underwear. Three people’s worth of socks and underwear all tangled together. I am incensed that, having planned to simply throw a few clothes in the washing machine, I now have to pair up socks before I can even begin.

  This whole episode puts me in a foul mood, which I remedy by eating a bacon sandwich in front of Frost on Sunday followed by the last ten minutes of a Will and Grace rerun. Thus revitalized and renewed, I feel able to tackle the pile of bills that have been staring at me accusingly all week, and before I know it it’s time to set off for Belsize Park, land of the luvvies, the intellectuals, and the bohemians. I’m just about to walk out the door when the phone rings.

  “Ally?” It’s Clara, but it doesn’t really sound like Clara. My Clara’s voice is strong and sure. This Clara sounds decidedly shaky.

  “Clara, what is it?”

  “I got my period this morning.”

  “Oh Clara. I’m so sorry. It must be so hard to go through this every month. To tell you the truth I wasn’t really sure that you were still trying. I thought maybe you’d decided to wait until, you know, the time was better or something.”

  There’s a brief silence, then the unmistakable beginnings of sobbing, which goes from contained to gutteral within seconds.

  “I just don’t think I can take this anymore. I know people do, lots of people. But I can’t. I want a baby!”

  “Honey, I know. Is Jonathon with you?”

  “He’s just gone out to get some papers. I don’t think he can take any more either. The awful thing is, I’m afraid he blames me. All those years he spent saying we should have a baby and I kept saying no. Now look what’s happened!” She blows her nose before adding, “I’m thirty-eight years old Ally! I have old eggs!”

  “What about IVF? Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes. And no. We’ve decided that’s not for us. All that torturous business and a very low likelihood of a baby even then. We don’t want to go through all that.”