by Jayne Buxton
“Sorry. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting you.” I glance involuntarily at Tom. David looks at me, then at Tom. I can almost see the color draining from his face. He looks down with a heavy sigh, then starts nodding his head as if he’s just understood. I can’t ever remember having seen David looking awkward. At one time, perhaps two years ago, I might have taken some small pleasure in witnessing his awkwardness, but not today. Today it pains me. Part of me longs to wrap my arms around him. It just doesn’t suit him not to have the upper hand.
The awkwardness is infectious. Now Tom has thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and is looking down at his feet as if he’s wishing the moment to pass unnoticed.
“So, I’m guessing you two have introduced yourselves?” I say.
“Yeah,” says Tom, looking up at David.
“Hmm,” says David. “And I’m guessing my dropping in isn’t all that convenient,” he says, laughing that small laugh again. It’s not quite the antidote to his awkwardness that he probably hopes.
Even less convenient is the ring of the doorbell for the second time. All three of us look at each other, then Tom says, “For Christ’s sake, it’s like Grand Central Station in here,” before going out to open the door.
There’s something territorial about the way Tom answers the door automatically, and I can see that David is disturbed by it. But that’s nothing to what I feel when Tom reappears, flanked closely by Gary. Gary of Hamilton and Sons, but thankfully without a nurse’s uniform.
“Hiya,” he says, quickly becoming afflicted by the awkwardness that now permeates the atmosphere.
“Gary’s here. Your lighting man, apparently. Are you having your lights fixed?” says Tom with knitted eyebrows. He glances up at a ceiling full of lights that appear to be in perfect working order.
Everyone looks so deadly serious, including me. And yet there is something terribly funny about this, I can see that. All we need now is for Alan to turn up, just so we could see the fruits of all my efforts arrayed before me in their full splendor. I’m tempted to laugh. I’m sure I will laugh, with Clara or Mel tomorrow. Or with Tom sometime far in the future. But to even smirk now would be to risk too much.
“No. There’s nothing to do here. Everything’s fine now,” I say. “But thank you for coming.”
Gary gives a wry smile and an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “I guess I’ll be going then. Doesn’t look like you need me here.”
“No, not really,” I say.
“Yeah. I should go too,” says David. “I’ll see you when I pick up the kids next week, right?”
“Right.”
This time Tom stays in the room and I accompany David and Gary to the door. I can’t bear to look at either of them, though I feel I owe it to David, so I grab him by the arm just before I shut the door.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Me too,” he fires back without turning to look.
Through the crack in the door I watch David and Gary exchanging polite good-byes on the pavement before heading off in opposite directions. I’m not worried about Gary. I was probably nothing but another potential exotic recruit to him. But watching David walk away without his usual confident strut is almost enough to fracture me.
But I haven’t got a monopoly on fracture. Tom knows all about that. He is suddenly behind me, pressing the door shut. For a minute we both stand there, me with my forehead resting on the door, him with his arms about my waist and his lips gently pressing against my hair.
“I love you too,” I say.
I can hear Jack and Millie and Grace in the garden, their playful voices mingling with the drone of an electric hedge cutter and the faint chimes of an ice-cream van a few streets over.
And it feels right.
EPILOGUE
The sun is unusually strong for September. We are enjoying an Indian summer after a July and August marred by rain. I’ve even lathered Millie and Jack in sunscreen.
They don’t really need it though. They are playing in the darkest, most protected part of the climbing frame, the part with the pitched roof. Some sort of charade is being enacted, in which Jack is pretending to have captured Millie and Grace, who are dutifully cowering in a corner.
Tom has gone in search of coffee and I snatch a moment to sit on the bench in peace. Within less than an hour I will have to be chopping and stirring and marinating in preparation for our last-day-of-summer barbeque. Pudding is sorted at least: Claudia is bringing a banoffi pie, and her Nathanial, of course.
I run through the list of what I still need to pick up at Sommerfield. Wine isn’t on it. We have plenty, because neither Mel nor Clara are drinking much and Dom has cut down as an expression of moral support. Mel would probably have slipped into a glass-of wine-a-day habit by now, but with Clara as both her example and her conscience she daren’t.
Clara isn’t showing much (it’s very early days after all), but Mel is huge. What she isn’t consuming in alcohol she’s making up for in other carbs. Crisps. Doughnuts. Carr’s water crackers. You name it. And pickled onions, which I suppose count as vegetables at least.
Soy sauce. That was it. There are just a few dregs in the bottom of the old bottle. I reach into my bag to find the shopping list and a pen. Rummaging around, I lay my hands on several pieces of paper, none of which turn out to be the list.
I unfold the first piece of crumpled paper, recognizing it immediately as the article from the June issue of Me. Mel’s article. It’s not the whole thing—somehow I’ve managed to misplace the first few pages. I chuckle as I reread Mel’s copy, which walks a fine line between respectful and cynical.
Perhaps that was my doing. When she asked me what I thought of the whole Proactive Partnership business in the end, I couldn’t decide what I thought. Picking on its most ridiculous aspects was easy. Anyone with half an ounce of sanity would have concluded that creating a brand and outlining it in a brochure is madness. But the rest, she asked me, was it really all that bad?
No, I told her. Not bad exactly. Good in some ways. Good for galvanizing people, getting them going, creating possibilities. But dangerous, I said, in the end. You have to be careful not to use too many of Marina’s tactics too often or with too much vigor because, taken to their extreme, they’re just a kind of maniacal manipulation by another name. And no man is going to be comfortable with that. It could end up costing you the very prize you think you’ve captured.
I laugh at Mel’s last line. You can pay £500 to learn how to bury your past and create your very own brand if you like, ladies. Me? I’ll stick to simply following that fit specimen to the park and hope he notices me.
Under Mel’s article is the other piece of paper, which is even more crumpled and has a giant coffee stain adorning its center. The coffee has seeped into the paper and makes reading the text difficult, but not impossible if you squint hard enough and use your imagination to fill in the gaps. The solitary M at the bottom of the text immediately identifies it as the last message I received from him and printed with the intention of putting it somewhere safe. I must have looked at it at least twenty times in the two weeks after Tom got angry and I left his house and it looked as though I’d blown everything.
DEAR FRANCESCA
YOU WERE RIGHT TO TELL HIM EVERYTHING. HONESTY ISN’T ALWAYS THE BEST POLICY, BUT WHEN YOU’RE DEALING WITH SOMETHING YOU THINK MIGHT BE QUITE SPECIAL, IT ABSOLUTELY IS. IF HE IS READY TO GET OVER JENNY, REALLY READY, THEN HE’LL FORGIVE ALL THAT OTHER BUSINESS. JUST GIVE HIM TIME. DON’T CHASE HIM. DON’T RUSH HIM. LET HIM REALIZE. HE’S TAKEN AN ENORMOUS BASHING IN HIS LIFE BUT IN SOME WAYS THAT COULD MAKE HIM CLEARER THAN EVER ABOUT WHAT HE WANTS. AND HE SOUNDS LIKE THE KIND OF GUY WHO, IF HE CHOOSES YOU, WILL CHOOSE YOU FOR GOOD.
Actually, this wasn’t M’s last e-mail to me. Feeling elated after Tom came back, I e-mailed M one last time.
HE CHOSE ME.
And he wrote back.
EXCELLENT CHOICE.
That time he’d signed off with his fu
ll name, Michael Ellis, and given me his real e-mail address, saying he’d tired of the PerfectPartnership. com game but would be happy to hear from me anytime. To be honest, I had harbored vague suspicions that M might turn out to be Tom, so similar were their circumstances. But I was relieved rather than disappointed to discover his true identity. There would be no more uncomfortable revelations and confessions to jeopardize the beginnings of the lovely thing Tom and I had fallen into. No more lumpy bits in the marmalade. And in Michael I’d found a friend.
I can see Tom now, wandering back with two coffees. I shield my eyes from the sun and watch him. When he reaches the small circle of silver birch trees about twenty yards away from me he suddenly disappears from view altogether as a beam of sunlight shoots through the tops of the trees and bursts around him. For a split second all I can see is a splash of yellow and white light punctuated by tiny silver sparkles.
Then he’s there again, smiling at me and holding up two venti cappuccinos triumphantly. When he reaches me he bends down to hand me my coffee and gives me a kiss that tastes of sugar and chocolate and cappuccino foam.
And I think, this must surely be the sweetest thing on earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAYNE BUXTON is a consultant and spokesperson in the field of work-life balance. After her nonfiction book Ending the Mother War was published in 1998, she became a regular contributor to press, radio, and conference discussions about working parents and workplace change. She cofounded Flametree, a specialist work-life balance consultancy and interactive Web-based community for working parents. She now lives in London with her husband and three children and is currently working on her next novel.
Lessons in Duck Hunting is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2006 by Jayne Buxton
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published as Lessons in Duck Shooting in Great Britain by Arrow Books, an imprint of The Random House Group, Ltd., London.
Permission for the quote on page vii has been generously granted by Brian Tracy, The Psychology of Selling.
Permission for the quote on page vii has been generously granted by the Association Chaplin.
Marmalade facts are from C. Anne Wilson,
The Book of Marmalade, Prospect Books, 1999.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buxton, Jayne.
Lessons in duck hunting : a novel / Jayne Buxton.
p. cm.
1. Divorced mothers—Fiction. 2. Working mothers—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3602.U96L47 2006
813’.6—dc22 2005049862
www.ballantinebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-41582-0
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