Lessons in Duck Hunting

by Jayne Buxton

  It’s at times like these that my sacrifice of glamour, glitter and free lipstick samples is rewarded. For the idea of taking an afternoon off to be with Millie would have been unthinkable at Chanel. Even if I might have been able to engineer it by lying—saying I was going out to do a store check at Harvey Nichols for instance—the sheer volume of work awaiting me that evening, not to mention the weight of the guilt greeting me the following morning, would make the whole outing insufferable. I did try it once. A spontaneous afternoon off to take Jack to Tumbletots was ruined by the sound of my mobile ringing constantly and my own resulting snappishness.

  At Cottage Garden Foods it is not nearly so difficult to be human. That’s not to say that you can afford to tell the truth all the time. And certainly, if Anna Wyatt is hot on your tail for some particular reason, you will find it difficult to escape. But most of the time, things just don’t happen that fast in the marmalade game, so one afternoon playing hooky can pass without consequence.

  All I have to do today is write a short diary entry (“meeting with J.M. at T.S”) that gives me lots of flexibility for invention should any questions be asked, and leave a message on my phone saying that I am in a meeting and will return all calls in the morning.

  This I do, having spent the morning reworking the profit forecasts for Pure Gold–Thin Cut to my satisfaction. I collect Millie and Jack from school, deposit Jack at home with Jill, and embark on my outing with Millie. Much to my surprise she chooses the turquoise pencil case, and opts for the chocolate cake over the banana. I wonder if my change of life program is somehow rubbing off on her.

  We don’t discuss the netballs, or the girls at school, but stick to happy topics like The Lost Princess, which we plan to see over the weekend, and the rabbit that I plan to buy her for her eighth birthday. Millie seems cheered by our short excursion. For me it is a welcome break from thoughts about what lies ahead that evening.

  I’ve decided that tonight is as good a night as any to get my baggage burying over with. It’s got to be done, as I’ll surely be asked about it at the next seminar, and I’m not one hundred percent confident of my ability to make up something plausible.

  The last time I tried to bury something in the garden was when Jack and Millie both had verrucas. After I complained that none of the usual potions was getting rid of the little blighters, someone told me about an old Chinese remedy, consisting of placing a fresh piece of raw meat (beef, pork, chicken—anything would do apparently) on the verruca, inside a sock, and leaving it there overnight on each of five consecutive nights. Each morning you were required to bury the used piece of meat in the garden, preferably under some life-affirming plant.

  I followed this advice to the letter. Millie was disgusted by the whole process, but Jack found its slimy aspects absolutely to his liking. I have to say I was with Millie on this one. But I persevered. On day six I inspected Jack and Millie’s feet, expecting them to be clear. There they were. Two verrucas, as large as they’d been the previous week only slightly soggier. Two weeks later I told a chiropodist about the whole episode and he just shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe the kind of rubbish people fall for these days,” he said, obviously failing to make the connection between “me” and “people who fall for rubbish.” He promised me the verrucas would disappear all by themselves if I just left them. And two months later they did.

  I am hoping that Marina’s baggage burying exercise will be more successful. I haven’t yet written my baggage list, and think it may take some time. I know I must have a decent stretch of time alone to do it properly, so my goal is to get both Jack and Millie to bed early. This I accomplish by making tea into a pajama party, to which we all come in our nightwear, me included. We sit together in the kitchen sipping hot chocolate and eating peanut butter toast, Millie in her short-sleeved Barbie nightie (far too flimsy for early March really), Jack in an old pair of Spiderman pajamas handed down from Ollie, teamed with cowboy hat, and me in my favorite pair of blue and white flannels. We all watch half an hour of Jurassic Park 2, I turn the clock ahead by half an hour as a precaution, and they go off happily to bed. Jack only appears at the top of the stairs twice; once to ask if he can sleep with his holster and chaps over his pajamas (no) and the second time to ask if I can give him one more kiss (oh all right).

  Then I sit down to face the monumental task of listing out everything that is wrong with my life and will render me unprepared for meeting the man of my dreams.

  After an hour staring at the page, punctuated by the occasional stroll around the kitchen to stimulate my thinking, I have come up with nothing. You see, I don’t think I’m too fat. I’m maybe seven or eight pounds heavier than would be ideal if I were appearing in public in a bikini. I wouldn’t mind being thinner but I don’t obsess about it. I don’t think it qualifies as baggage.

  And I don’t think I’m ugly. I’m no Jennifer Lopez, but I know I’m presentable, and there have been times in my life when people have actually called me pretty. The light, the makeup and the mood would have to be right, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone might call me that again.

  I don’t think I’m stupid, or unworthy, or any of the other things Marina Boyd supposes might constitute my problem. I don’t really have any baggage, I think, sitting down in front of the page again, this time with a glass of wine to aid flow of thought.

  Except for one thing.

  My husband left me.

  My husband left me because he didn’t want to be married anymore. He left me having once told me that we would be together forever. He left me with two beautiful children whose eyes remind me of him, and of the fact that we will never raise them together, in the family I grew up believing it was my unquestionable destiny to be part of.

  It is this that makes it so difficult to cook cheesy pasta for Millie in the kitchen with David standing beside me. In the life I had always imagined for myself, the cooking of meals for children, with husband nearby, somehow represented the core of family life. And for a few years it was. We cooked and ate together. And laughed and played and argued. And we will never do that again.

  What’s been harder, I’ve often asked myself. Disassembling, piece by piece, all the love I felt for David? Wiping his touch from my memory? Instructing my heart not to turn somersaults at the sound of his voice? Arming my body against the presence of his? Or accepting that our little family is forever broken? Perhaps it’s all the same kind of hard.

  I take the pen and write on the blank sheet: David left me. The man I loved left me.

  I pause, before writing:

  I will never raise my children with their father again. We will never be a family.

  I then go off to my bedroom in search of a shoe box. I take the picture of David and me with Jack and Millie off the dresser and out of its frame, and put it into the shoe box. Then I go downstairs again, retrieve my coat and sneakers from the hallway, and walk back to the kitchen. I fold the piece of paper with my baggage on it, dropping it into the shoe box on top of the picture. I open the door to our tiny South London garden, trowel in hand, and gasp as the unusually cold March air stings my lungs.

  This will not be easy, I know. The ground is still frozen. And a shoe box is rather too large. It takes me twenty minutes to hack out a decent-size hole under the camellia bush but eventually I manage it. I place the box in the ground, and start piling the dirt back in on top of it.

  And then they come. Torrents of them. The tears roll down my cheeks and drop into the hole; the digging might have been easier if I had cried first. I know I make a strange sight. A crazy woman in blue and white flannel pajamas and sneakers, kneeling weeping on the ground in the middle of a late winter night. But for the time being I cannot stop.

  When my eyes are drier and I have shoveled the remaining soil back into the hole, I stand and turn to face the house. Millie is standing at her bedroom window, staring at me with an expression that is impossible to read in the darkness. How long has she been w
atching me? Was I crying that loudly? Or is it that sixth sense of hers the midwife talked about? For a minute I feel I have betrayed her, and want to turn and uncover the box.

  But I can’t. I know I can’t. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s to go back into the house and tell her I was laying out pellets to stop the foxes from eating my camellias.

  I DO HAVE other pictures of David with me and the children. Lots of them. But they are tucked away in photo albums at the bottom of the hall cupboard.

  That part of my life isn’t lost forever. I’m just not going to have it on display anymore.

  CHAPTER 12

  PRE-PACKAGING

  Although at times I was forced to hide the fact, I was always a good student. From about the age of eight, I was the type to sit down and do my homework the minute I got home from school, before I watched TV. If my parents ever had to remind me to do my homework, I can’t remember it. Even at university, my essays were always handed in on time. Only once did I have to pull an allnighter to get an essay finished, whereas my housemates regularly appeared at the breakfast table with bags and dark circles under their eyes, having worked on essays until dawn and galloped over to campus to hand them in before collapsing back into bed.

  So it’s difficult for me to see a list of homework tasks and ignore them. With baggage buried last night, I turn my attention to the rebranding and packaging meeting I’m supposed to organize for myself. Thanks to a quick phone call to Mel, during which she regaled me with stories she’d heard on Tuesday evening and promised me that the check for £1000 was in the post, I have at least decided who should attend. The Branding Ally Committee will consist of three women and a man, handpicked to provide honest yet balanced feedback:

  Clara (as chairperson, naturally): selected because she never lets anyone get away with anything, and will therefore drive the group to produce something of use to me.

  Lisa: trusted colleague—witness to my work persona; also single, so knows exactly what it feels like to want to sit around in tracksuit bottoms drinking chablis with girlfriends despite this being surefire route to eternal spinsterhood.

  Sara: married with two small children, therefore knows what it feels like to have three extra rolls hanging over low-slung jeans and weariness akin to that of amateur hiker crawling out of Grand Canyon without aid of donkey. Every day.

  And finally, George: because he must see a lot of women making a lot of mistakes; also because he has an impeccable sense of style.

  I realize that George is a bit of a risk, having on occasion devastated people with his frankness. I remember a rather short, overweight young girl who came in one day while George was finishing off my hair. George asked her what she was thinking of having done, to which she replied that she’d like a choppy, chin-length bob. “Oh no, no, no dahling,” he pronounced. “Your face ees much too fat for that. You’ll have to have something else.” The girl stood up, red-faced and tearful, and marched out of the salon. I’m hoping George will be gentler with me.

  The notes suggest that one of my packaging advisers should be a straight man. A former boyfriend perhaps. I’m really not sure I can pull this one off. I read about this American woman who went back to all her old boyfriends to ask them what they had thought of her and why they’d broken up. The result was an awful lot of bitter feedback she’d have been better off not hearing, and the breakdown of her marriage.

  Ex-boyfriends and husbands are definitely out. So which men does that leave? There are work colleagues, like Daniel two desks over, or Paul Delaney at the agency, but letting them in on my secret rebranding exercise would be unprofessional, not to mention awkward. There is my brother, I suppose, but I’m not sure he’d be much use. He is the world’s most nonjudgmental person, and seems to think I am a knockout who works in advertising. Try as I will, I can’t come up with a suitable straight man, so three women and a gay Chilean hairdresser will have to do. Mel will also have to attend of course, but purely as an observer.

  I’ve still not resolved my quandary as to what elaborate excuse to fabricate for the meeting. Clara and Mel are already in on the secret about the magazine article, but Sarah, Lisa and George are still innocents, and perhaps they should remain that way. As you might expect, Marina is unequivocal about this. In the notes we’ve been handed, she suggests something along the lines of:

  Nancy, I so admire the way you dress and carry yourself. I hope you won’t mind if I ask you something personal. This is the year I am going to find a partner to spend my life with. Before I start, I want to make sure that I look as good as I possibly can and I would love for you to help me identify some changes that I might need to make.

  I consider this option carefully, before scripting an e-mail to Lisa.

  FROM: ALLY.JAMES@COTTAGE.GARDEN.FOODS.CO.UK

  TO: LISA.GIBBONS@COTTAGE.GARDEN.FOODS.CO.UK

  LISA

  I HAVE THIS FRIEND WHO IS THINKING OF CHANGING CAREERS AND BECOMING A LIFESTYLE COACH AND I’VE AGREED TO BE HER GUINEA PIG NEXT FRIDAY EVENING. APPARENTLY SHE NEEDS ME TO BE SOMEONE IN NEED OF FEEDBACK ON HAIR, MAKEUP, CLOTHES, PERSONAL HABITS—THAT SORT OF THING. SHE ALSO NEEDS SOME PEOPLE TO GIVE ME THIS FEEDBACK SO SHE CAN PRACTICE HER “FACILITATION” TECHNIQUES. YOU KNOW THE TYPE OF THING I MEAN. COULD YOU DO ME A HUGE FAVOR AND COME OVER? I CAN PROMISE VAST QUANTITIES OF PINOT AND MY MOTHER’S SECRET CHUTNEY RECIPE IN RETURN.

  I then forward the e-mail to Clara:

  FROM: ALLY.JAMES@COTTAGE.GARDEN.FOODS.CO.UK

  TO: CLARA.WILSON@PETERSANDYOUNG.COM

  NEED HELP DESPERATELY. SEE BELOW. YOU’VE NOT MET THEM BEFORE, SO SHOULD BE QUITE EASY TO PRETEND YOU WOULD RATHER BE POOR WOMAN’S CAROLE CAPLIN SCRAPING TOGETHER MEAGER LIVING RATHER THAN SUCCESSFUL MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT EARNING SIX-FIGURE SALARY WITH RESPECTABLE FIRM.

  PLEASE DON’T LET ME DOWN.

  Clara doesn’t respond for three hours. When she does she makes me feel like a small child.

  FROM: CLARA.WILSON@PETERSANDYOUNG.COM

  TO: ALLY.JAMES@COTTAGE.GARDEN.FOODS.CO.UK

  ANYTHING FOR YOU HONEY. BUT AM OF OPINION THAT YOU ARE BEING A LITTLE FEEBLE. REMEMBER, SELF-IMPROVEMENT IN NAME OF FINDING MAN SUITABLE AS ESCORT TO EXPENSIVE RESTAURANTS AND SWANKY HOTELS IN VENICE IS NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF. PEOPLE DO IT ALL THE TIME, HENCE HUGE POPULARITY OF TRINNY & SUSANNAH.

  P.S. JUDGING BY WAY AM FEELING OF LATE, MAY SOON NEED TO CONSULT LIFE COACH RATHER THAN PLAY ONE. (KIDDING. AM NOT THAT DESPERATE YET.)

  Clara is probably right. I am being feeble. But it’s too late now. The lie is out there, and must be repeated. I pick up the phone and call George.

  “Hi, its Ally James here. Can I speak to George, please?”

  “Oh, certainly, or I can make an appointment for you?” says Emma, the receptionist and occasional hair washer for everyone in the salon except George.

  “Actually, I’d rather speak to George if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine,” says Emma, putting me on hold. George materializes in seconds. He can’t be very busy.

  “Hello, dahling. What ees the matter?” he says, his voice heavy with concern. “Don’t you like your new haircut?”

  “Oh, no, no. It’s perfect,” I say. “It’s just that I need a favor from you.” I then give George the same rigmarole that I have given Lisa, except that we have to dwell on the concept of a life coach for a while because George isn’t sure what it is. When we have cleared that up, he is effusively willing.

  “Well, eet sounds like the most marvelous fun. I can’t wait. Shall I breeng anything?”

  “Just yourself George. I’ll provide the rest. About eight all right?”

  “Perfect, dahling. I’ll see you then.”

  The call to Sara is easy. She always jumps at the chance of a night out without Charles, it being far easier to leave the house with him in charge of tea, bath and bed than to try to justify the costs of a babysitter and organize one. By two-thirty in the afternoon everyone has agreed to come and I am feeling quite proud of myself, des
pite Clara’s telling off. I am enjoying a brief wallow in self-satisfaction at having organized my own meeting when the phone rings and summons me to another I’d rather not attend.

  “Mrs. James? Hello, it’s Mrs. Davis here, from the school.” I’m always called Mrs. James by the school, though James is my maiden name, not something I picked up at the altar. The English don’t cope particularly well with the idea of a Ms. Anything, despite the fact of it now being a box on every official form we are asked to complete.

  “Oh. Hello. Is everything all right?” I defy any mother not to stiffen momentarily on receipt of a phone call from her child’s school. Either there will have been some ghastly accident requiring an immediate journey to casualty, or you will be asked to help escort twenty five-year-olds on a one-day outing to the science museum.

  “Don’t worry,” says Mrs. Davis, leading me to believe that this call is science museum related. “It’s just that there has been a small incident at the school that I thought you should know about.”

  “Really, what’s that?” I ask warily.

  “Mrs. James, it’s Millie. It seems that some of the other girls have soiled her gym kit. It seems they have put a squashed banana and some chewing gum and honey inside it, and I’m afraid a lot of it is ruined. I’m awfully sorry.”

  Mrs. Davis and I both know that we are not sorry about the ruined gym clothes. The issue here is Millie, and the humiliation she must have experienced on taking out her sticky, stinking gym kit, and knowing that people she ought to call friends were the ones who’d trashed it. The issue is these girls in her class, and why they are so intent on traumatizing Millie on what I now see is an almost daily basis.

  “Well, that’s pretty serious. I’d better come in, hadn’t I?” I say somberly.