Lessons in Duck Hunting

by Jayne Buxton

  “That would be great. A skinny cappuccino please.”

  Tom goes up to the counter to order my coffee. He is shooed away by the woman behind the counter, who is obviously going to bring my coffee when it’s ready. Within thirty seconds, Tom is back sitting in front of me.

  We go through the ritual How are yous and Fine thank yous, which at this stage mean absolutely nothing to either of us, we’ve so little knowledge of what might be going on in each other’s lives that might make them fine or otherwise. Then I point to the pad under Tom’s cup.

  “What’s that you were working on?” I ask. The question’s a bit prying but I’m not in the mood for a morning full of inanities.

  “Oh, just some ideas for a script that’s giving me some trouble.”

  “A script? Is that what you do?”

  “Yeah. Most of the time. I’ve not done much for a year because of Grace, and everything, but I’m trying to get back into it. Once you get out of the flow it’s quite hard.”

  “That’s fascinating,” I say. “What kinds of things do you normally do?”

  “TV stuff mostly. A real mix. Do you remember that comedy/ drama series Little Feet? That was mine. And I did a police drama the year before. They love us Americans over here—so long as we know which rules to follow and which ones to break.”

  “Hmm. Makes my job look a little dull,” I joke.

  “And what is that?” he says, leaning forward and smiling.

  “Marmalade. I market marmalade.”

  “No kidding? Well what’s so dull about that? The world needs good marmalade,” he says, still smiling.

  “Anyway,” I say, anxious to steer the conversation away from marmalade this time. Somehow it seems such a trivial topic when I know there are others we need to get out of the way. “How long have you and Grace lived around here?”

  “For three years. Jenny—she was my wife—and I moved here from Fulham just before Grace was born. You think that after you lose someone you’re going to want to run away to a new life, to get away from all the things that remind you of them, but it wasn’t like that for me. I wanted to stay where it felt like home, especially for Grace. I was so lonely for a while that if I hadn’t been able to walk past the same familiar buildings I might have lost it.”

  “It must have been awful for you,” I say. “How did she die?”

  “Lymphoma. She was gone in six months, so we didn’t really have much time. She was thirty-three.”

  His gray-green eyes are looking directly into mine. I return his gaze and smile sympathetically. Then we sit for a moment or two and don’t say anything. I realize, to my surprise, that this feels perfectly natural. There’s no awkwardness this time, and no need to bury the silence in platitudes. When I do speak, it is not out of any panic-induced desire to fill the space, but because I want to know more.

  “And how have you coped, with Grace and work and everything? Do you have help?”

  “Sure,” he says. “My parents live in Maryland, but Jenny’s parents have been good. And her sister tries hard, but she lives in Norwich so it’s not easy for her to be practically helpful. But I can’t complain. Anyway, I just have to get on with it really. I’m lucky I’ve a job that I can do from home a lot. Now I just have to produce something for the first time in a year before I go bankrupt!” There’s a pause before he says, “Anyway, tell me about you. Marmalade can’t be all there is to you. All I know is that you and your husband aren’t together. Jack told me that in the park.”

  “Children are useful, aren’t they? Say all the things we’d rather not. It’s true. David and I are divorced.”

  “Is that difficult?”

  What I can’t quite fathom is how Tom and I have leaped past niceties like where did you go to school and how did you become a scriptwriter, or even how long have you been divorced, and straight to “Is that difficult?” But, like the silence a few moments ago, it feels perfectly natural. In fact, there hardly seems any point in any other sort of discourse.

  “It was very difficult. Less so now, but still not easy.” Now there’s an understatement. “I can’t compare it to losing someone to an illness, but it is a form of death, I suppose. The death of the life you had together, and the life you hoped for. Does that sound too sentimental?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “Sentimental’s good.” There’s that smile again. Wide and warm. Like maple syrup as it oozes across a pancake.

  “But I think we’re getting there. The children have adjusted, in the best way they can, and David and I seem to be embarking on a new phase of our divorce that looks a little like friendship.” These last words stick to the roof of my mouth, and I take a sip from my coffee to disguise a deceit I feel must be apparent to everyone in Suzzette’s.

  “Kids are amazing, aren’t they? You’re so afraid they’ll break when awful things happen, but they seem to find things to hang on to. I’m not saying Grace hasn’t suffered, because she has. And I’m sure there’s plenty more of that in store. But they have this way of surviving on a day-to-day level. Don’t you think?”

  “You’re right,” I say. Then we engage in one of our comfortable silences. The silence is so comfortable that it emboldens me.

  “Tom, can I ask you a question? Why did you ask me to meet you here?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.” I’m preparing myself for an answer about friends in the neighborhood, and people you can talk to. But I know now the answer I want.

  “I thought there was this connection. Each time I saw you it got stronger. So I thought, what the hell.”

  “What, even over the Waitrose carts?” I say with attempted jocularity.

  “Especially over the Waitrose carts. That was the worst. I ran from that one. Part of me thinks I can’t be doing this.”

  Yes, I know. Part of me thinks I can’t be doing this either.

  “Anyway,” he goes on. “Tell me if I’m wrong. I can take it. I’ve been through a hell of a lot worse.”

  At five o’clock this evening I will be driving to the coast with my ex-husband and our two children, toward what, I’m not entirely sure. We could find ourselves making mature, platonic sandcastles on the beach, or dipping our toes into dangerous waters I’ll regret having ventured toward. But Tom’s not wrong.

  “No, you’re not wrong,” I say.

  CHAPTER 34

  DANGEROUS WATERS

  Tom and I made arrangements to see each other on Monday evening. He first suggested Saturday, to which I mumbled something about taking the kids to see my parents. Then he suggested Tuesday, to which I replied that I had a dinner with a couple of key retailers. I didn’t like having to perjure myself so early on but coming clean about the impending weekend away with my ex-husband followed by a seminar with a relationship guru would have surely strangled the tiny stems of the relationship that we’re nurturing here. So we settle on Monday evening. A movie and dinner.

  I spent most of the rest of Friday washing and packing. In between washing and packing I managed to run off a rather desperate note to the mothers of Millie’s class, pleading with them to support the jam jar effort and apologizing for the horribly short notice. After distributing the note (rather sheepishly) in the schoolyard, I whisked Jack and Millie back home for a quick snack before David arrived.

  Jack has been apoplectic with excitement. He was adamant that he was going to wear his wet suit in the car, and it was only the prospect of being unable to wee at the side of the road that made him opt for jeans in the end. But he remained insistent on keeping the wet suit close to hand, so it now sits on top of his suitcase, waiting to be packed into the car.

  We are taking my car because it’s bigger than David’s. So David, who never has been very good at public transport, arrives by taxi. He seems uneasy as we load the bags into the car. Either he’s preoccupied by work or he’s regretting having suggested this little excursion. Who am I kidding? It’s not a little excursion at all. Looking at it now from my stance behind a trun
k heaving with bags and fishing nets, I can see that it’s a journey of monumental consequences.

  Cornwall was always a favored destination for us, but it’s too far for a two-day trip so we’re headed for Barton-on-Sea, which is just a two-hour drive taking us through the pony-filled moors of the New Forest. It feels mightily strange to find myself seated in the driver’s seat next to David again, and even odder to hear us all playing I spy on the M3. I’m not a huge fan of car games, preferring those moments when each passenger sinks into their own private reverie or gets absorbed by their book tape and stares out the window. After about forty-five minutes on the road, it’s something of a relief when Jack announces that he’s had enough of counting red cars and puts on his earphones.

  Millie and Jack are snapped out of their daydreams when we spot the first foal nibbling grass beside the side of the road, with its mother standing protectively behind it. It is a dazzling sight, I have to admit. Wild ponies dotting the heather-sheathed moors in the fading sunlight of early spring.

  “Mummy, look at that one. She has two babies!” Millie is overcome by awe.

  “And over there, behind the tree, I can see another one!” shouts Jack.

  Then follow the inevitable questions about why we can’t take one home with us if, after all, they don’t belong to anyone. Could we not put them up at the end of the garden, or if that isn’t big enough, at the end of Mrs. Jackson’s garden, which is a corner plot and therefore much larger? We could take them to the park for walks, and tie them to the poles of the climbing frame when they need to eat grass, offers Jack helpfully.

  We are still talking about the possibilities of keeping ponies on Rosemere Road as we pull into the hotel parking lot. The hotel is a small, family-run enterprise that David discovered through a friend (which friend I don’t want to know). Its white paint is cracked and flaking in places, and the wysteria adorning it’s front has a slightly bedraggled air, but it is sweet. Perfect for a weekend with the kids; anything grander would only have resulted in forty-eight hours’ worth of precautionary admonishments for Jack.

  David unloads the bags while I register our arrival with the owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Jessop. It’s immediately clear that Mrs. Jessop runs the show; Mr. Jessop seems to hover ineffectually like Basil Fawlty, then knocks over the full umbrella stand with one of our bags. Mrs. Jessop ushers in the first of what I anticipate to be a great many awkward moments when she says, “My what a lovely family you are,” immediately after handing myself and David the keys to our separate rooms. She seems far too nice to be fishing for dirt, but I can tell she’s bemused by the setup.

  The doors to our rooms are in a little triangle in one wing of the seventeen-room building. It takes us a little while to get settled in and because Jack and Millie insist on exploring every inch of the three rooms as they unpack, and on counting the little tablets of Toblerone and packets of shortbread biscuits in the baskets on the tops of the televisions. So we make it to the dining room just minutes before the kitchen closes. Jack and Millie aren’t clamoring for food, which probably has something to do with the two large bags of crisps and the family-size packet of wine gums that were consumed on the journey. I’m not that hungry either, but I’m glad of the ritual of the meal, which will help mask my opening night nerves.

  At this late hour, the chef is apparently unwilling to prepare any of the more interesting items on the menu but is happy to whisk us up four omelettes with chips and a tomato salad. That’s good enough for all of us. Jack will only pick at his food in any case, and both of them will be drooping before long.

  We don’t talk about much of anything except the weekend plans, which we decide will include several trips to the beach, a visit to Highcliffe Castle, and an outing to the Motor Museum at Beaulieu. Jack is particularly keen on the Motor Museum idea, but the castle also has its appeal, there being the distinct possibility that he will encounter a real live knight in the grounds.

  All the while, David and I are operating like acquaintances, all our warmth and intimacy being directed at the children, mere politeness reserved for our own interchanges. There is no sign of a look like the one exchanged in the middle of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and no repeat of the arm squeeze. Still, as the meal progresses, I feel more comfortable than uncomfortable, which is saying something after two years in which we’ve hardly been in the same room together. A strange sort of fatalism about the weekend seems to overtake me around about ice-cream time. A very Doris Day-ish “Que Sera, Sera.”

  Here’s what it is: I realize I’m not desperate. I’m not desperate for him to love me like I was when he first left and at so many moments after that. I’m not desperate for him to touch me again, or for him not to. I feel, at this moment, and with an undoubtedly false sense of self-assurance, that I could probably survive almost any of these eventualities. I don’t know if this comes from two years of working at becoming whole again, or the far simpler fact of Tom.

  Before long we are all ready for bed. Millie and Jack have a short squabble about who’s going to sleep on which side of the bed, but their hearts aren’t really in it so it is quickly resolved. I tuck them up into the lumpy double bed, pulling the faded orange flowered eiderdown up to their chins, and reassure them that both David and I will be sleeping right next door with our doors unlocked. We kiss them goodnight, then find ourselves standing outside their room, each of us gripping the handles of the doors to our own rooms, ready to escape the impending tricky moment with grace.

  “Night then,” he says.

  “Night. See you in the morning.” I smile.

  And that is that.

  YOU WOULDN’T EXPECT perfect weather on an English beach in late March, and we don’t get it. We sit huddled over our enormous sand castle, David and I turning our faces greedily toward the sun every time a ray sneaks through the cloud cover. When it does, you’d swear it was mid-July in the Riviera. Then it’s gone again, leaving us shivering in its wake. The sporadic bursts of light rain just add to the variety.

  This morning there was none of this fickleness, just drizzle and gray skies. So we opted to visit Highcliffe Castle and hoped for better weather in the afternoon. The brochure described the attraction as “the most important remaining example of Romantic and Picturesque architecture,” which got David’s juices flowing. Unfortunately, years of underinvestment under council ownership and the rows of bungalows that have been allowed to creep up to the castle walls have robbed the once great building of much of its allure. We lasted less than an hour, much of which was spent with Jack shouting, “Knight Stuart, I know you’re here somewhere,” every time he turned a corner.

  Still, the castle’s romantic style furnishes plenty of inspiration for the afternoon’s sand castle construction effort. Millie carves lacelike detail into the sides of one tower with a stick, while Jack, suitably clad in his wet suit, attempts to fill the moat. David’s job is overall design; mine the collection of multicolored rocks to sit atop the walls.

  At no point during the afternoon am I completely convinced that David will end up in my bed. Not as we kneel side-by-side placing rocks on turrets under Millie’s considered direction; not when we all sit huddled under an umbrella with our picnic waiting for a particularly forceful shower to pass; not during our pathetic attempt at family rounders. Not even when the children are in bed and David suggests a late evening stroll in the hotel grounds, during which he confesses to have tired of finding himself with women like Chantal.

  I don’t know it until a few minutes after we’ve said our good-nights and I open the door of my room to find David leaning against the door frame, his gray T-shirt having worked its way loose from the top of his jeans. He just stares at me without smiling or speaking. Then he reaches out and pulls me toward him, and gives me the gentlest of kisses on the tip of my nose.

  Well, would you be able to resist that?

  I’D LOVE TO say that we fall asleep in each other’s arms, but I hardly sleep a wink, so conscious am I of needing to get David
safely back into his room before the children wake up. But he does sleep, and I watch him. When he is facing away from me I study his hair, still thick and wavy, but shorter than it used to be. And his shoulders, broad and smooth-skinned, and glowing slightly in the narrow stream of moonlight that has slipped in through a gap in the curtains. When he is facing me I contemplate the rhythm of his chest, and the movement of his eyes under his lids.

  And that flimsy sense of calm and self-possession I’d felt the previous evening vanishes. I think, with astonishment, how easy it would be to slip back into loving him. How easy to let him back into my life.

  And what a waste of time digging that hole under the camellia bush turned out to be.

  CHAPTER 35

  STRADDLING TWO HORSES

  You’re straddling two horses and you’re in danger of doing the splits,” admonished Clara when I told her. Mel was less condemning. “Hell of a result if you ask me,” she said. The journalist in her probably revels in the twist it could add to her story.

  Me, I’m in something of a state, and have been from the minute David’s lips made contact with my nose. It’s all been quite well disguised, since I was forced to camouflage my inner turmoil in the outer garb of parental contentment through a visit to the motor museum, a pub lunch, and a three-hour car journey on Sunday. I felt a little like Lisa, carrying on under her parents’ noses. Only the carrying on has been mostly in my head; David and I were the model of discretion, only allowing ourselves one kiss behind a nineteenth-century tram and the gentle brushing of our fingers as we passed the road map between us in the car. When we arrived home he didn’t even come inside, I think for fear that the bed just upstairs would prove to be a temptation neither of us would have the resolve to resist. And we absolutely can’t go there. Not yet.

  On Monday night, as I waited for Tom to arrive, I alternated between bemusement and self-condemnation. Because I wanted to see Tom. I really did. But I wondered how that can possibly be, when in the back of my mind, even as I was helping Millie with the last of her long division, I was thinking of David. The way he looked before he came into my room, his eyes hinting at the thing that was to follow. And the thing that followed.