Husband Hunters (18 page)

‘Clem!’ he shouted again.

Clem looked around the street, then dashed over to his car and hissed at him: ‘Jason, what are you doing here?’

‘I heard it was your birthday last week.’ His voice sounded strange.

‘Go home.’

‘I’ve been waiting since seven,’ he said.

‘You can’t just turn up here like this.’

‘Can I come up?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘I’m not leaving until you talk to me.’

Mirabella’s words were echoing in Clementine’s head. Scared a photographer would pop out of the bushes, she hurried into the Saab’s passenger seat.

‘Jason, what are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to see you.’ He reached towards her, folding his arms over her shoulders. ‘I wanted to see you the other day. But things with Amanda are dragging on longer than I expected.’

‘Jason, no!’ She jerked out of his reach. ‘You can’t come here any more.’ Clem’s heart was racing. Every minute in the car was suffocating. It was like being buried alive.

He grabbed her arm.

‘But we were going to be together.’

She wrenched out of his grip.

‘Jason. Control yourself. It’s over. It’s been over for a long time. Go home to your wife.’ She slammed the door behind her and ran back to her apartment.

Clementine opened her eyes and squinted. Dawn. The sadness she had felt the night before had taken on the hard edge that was pinning her to her mattress.

Fight it, she told herself. Fight it.

There was a message from Annabel on her phone:
Looking forward to another round of husband-hunting together soon!
She smiled. For all her bravado and flash, Annabel was a source of bottomless hope and warmth. Clementine threw off her doona and put one leg on the floor.

The hardest part of the day was now behind her.

Clementine’s first appointment wasn’t until ten, so she took a detour to the train station and hopped on a city-loop line. The carriage was crowded with little girls going to a ballet recital. Each had their hair scraped up into identical buns on tops of their heads. They wore loose white tights that bunched around their knees and made them look like they had ostrich legs. The air smelled of hairspray. As Clem stood to get off, she felt a tug on her jacket.

‘Excuse me, missus,’ a little girl in a blue leotard held up a glove.

‘Thank you,’ Clem said, taking it. The little ballerina raised her arm above her head in the graceful arc of a ‘you’re welcome’ gesture. Clem swallowed the lump in her throat.

She headed to the toy store she had passed the night before and bought two kites, then called Will and offered to take the boys for the weekend.

‘I know it’s short notice, but they could sleep over,’ she said, picturing herself serving macaroni cheese from a steaming pot. Afterwards they could camp around her fondue set in the lounge room and dunk marshmallows into melted chocolate.

‘That would be great,’ said Will. ‘The boys love spending time with Aunty Clementine.’

On Sunday, after three sleepless nights, Clem took her nephews to the park. The boys flew kites and ran around throwing handfuls of wood chips at each other until Clementine growled that they would get it in their eyes, and directed them to play on the play equipment. They ran to the slide and started hurling themselves down it, waving as they went. She thought of Jason and Amanda watching their child squeal with delight as he or she sailed through the air on a swing. Jason’s arm would be around Amanda’s shoulder, as they sat watching from a nearby bench, and she would press his knee when she wanted to tell him something.

‘How old are they?’ asked a woman next to Clementine on the park bench. She was reading the
Financial Review
with one eye and had her other eye on a little girl on the roundabout.

‘Two and four,’ Clem said.

‘They have your hair.’

They did have the Crosley hair, inherited from Will, but darker. His was the almost-transparent gold colour of toffee. Theirs was burnt butterscotch, with freckles to match.

‘Jemma is the image of her father,’ the woman said. ‘We got divorced when she was only one. It makes it hard to maintain a rage when the person you hate most in the world looks so much like the person you love most in the world.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Jem, time to go,’ she called.

The little girl leapt from the swing and ran to her mother. She waited obediently while the woman packed Tupperware into a backpack and folded away her newspaper. Then they took each other’s hand and walked to the park gate.

As Clem watched them go, she thought perhaps she could have it all if she stopped expecting it to look how it was on television.

Oscar was barrelling down the slide, shouting ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

She wondered if she was capable of doing it alone. She could investigate IVF or adoption. Countless articles she had read over the years talked of all the unloved baby girls in China. But it was just another of the million fleeting thoughts that flew through her brain at five frames a second every moment of the day, like celluloid through an old-fashioned film projector. Some of these thoughts were grand: Maybe I can have it all. Some of them not: I must try to find that fridge warranty. But almost all centred on things that needed to be done. And that was without a child. No, she told herself. Banish the thought. She could not and did not want to do it alone.

‘Oscar, Finn — come on. Time to go. It’s getting cold.’

She cupped her hands and blew into the cave they made. Her breath condensed and curled like kettle steam. She rubbed her palms together.

Then her peace was shattered.

Her ring was gone.

‘It’s strange being back,’ Harry shouted from the living room. ‘Everything is so … concrete.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Annabel yelled, as the pasta water frothed up and made the saucepan lid dance.

She had settled on a simple meal of chilli prawns and linguine, followed by Eton Mess, a sexy kind of dessert of strawberries, raspberries and cream smooshed together. She hoped the message it sent was: ‘I’m capable and low-maintenance and I just tossed this together’.

‘When I got home everything was caked in rust-coloured dust,’ he went on. ‘Even things that looked clean to the naked eye. I threw them all in a tub and they bled red dirt.’

Annabel took two glasses of wine into the lounge room. Harry was sitting on the couch with his feet set firmly apart on the ground. His skin was dark from hours spent in the sun.

‘It sounds beautiful there,’ she said, handing him a glass. She pictured the two of them together in a rural town at dusk when the sky is starting to turn orange. She, carrying sandals and wearing a long white skirt; he, with a muscular arm draped over her shoulder.

‘Annabel?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘You went all quiet.’

‘Sorry.’ She took a sip of wine, embarrassed to have been caught day-dreaming. ‘I was just listening to the prawns — they should be sizzling … Excuse me.’ Annabel jumped up and hurried into the kitchen.

The pan was hissing. She shook it and gave the ingredients a rough stir with an egg whisk, trying to remember the husband-hunting rules. She reached for the neck of the wine bottle, but put it down. Getting drunk would not help. She lifted the lid off the saucepan and checked her reflection. The steam was making her curls frizz.

‘How’s the wine?’ she called, thinking to herself, you can do better than that.

‘It’s lovely,’ he shouted back.

She heard her own voice giving Clementine and Daniela advice: ‘If in doubt, ask an open question.’

‘Tell me more about the Top End.’ She returned to the lounge room and tucked her feet up under herself, then changed her mind and crossed her legs, so as to put them on display. Harry looked at them.

‘I have some photos,’ he said, digging out his phone. He showed Annabel the faces of the kids he taught and the teachers he worked with, the bare classrooms and the giant grey roos that hung about the school as if they were on yard duty.

He stopped and sniffed the air. ‘Is that gas?’

‘Damn!’ Annabel leapt off the couch.

The pasta water had boiled over and extinguished the flame. Pale noodles had floated to the surface like stick-figure corpses. She prodded them with a fork. They were stiff. Spaghetti rigor mortis. Scared to strike a match to light the stove because of the gas that had leaked into the air, she turned on the exhaust fan and returned to the couch.

Her plan of demonstrating her excellent wifely qualities was failing. She wondered whether there was any way she could have an Italian restaurant deliver some food without Harry realising it. She imagined herself paying a delivery boy as he passed her prawns in the kitchen from a window-cleaner’s rig.

‘Annabel?’ Harry said. ‘I lost you again.’

‘Sorry,’ she blushed. This was going terribly.

When the gas had cleared, she went back to the kitchen, put the heat on under the pasta and inspected the dressing. The spring onions, chilli and slices of garlic looked positively charred but the prawns were still translucent, and, Annabel feared, raw. All of it was cold. She stirred the pasta water. Once the spaghetti was cooked she was supposed to strain it, then transfer it into the pan with the prawns and toss the whole thing together. But the pasta water was starting to look like soup, and when she scooped up a bunch of noodles with tongs they broke and plopped back into their whitish bath.

‘Do you need a hand?’ came a call from the lounge room.

‘No, no, it’s fine. Everything is fine.’ She wondered whether she could put the prawns in the microwave. What she most feared was that they were teeming with some terrible bacteria that would cause food poisoning. She didn’t mind serving up a poorly cooked meal, but she didn’t want to kill the guy. She decided to surrender.

‘It’s such a beautiful night,’ Annabel said. ‘Perhaps we should eat out.’

‘Oh, aren’t you cooking?’

‘It’s a disaster.’

‘I’m sure it’s not.’

‘It is. You’ve had a hard enough year without adding my cooking to your problems. There’s a lovely little Italian place just three blocks from here.’

It was a perfect night for a walk. The air was crisp and not too cold.

‘Don’t worry,’ Harry said after they had strolled a little way in silence. ‘Mirabella couldn’t cook either. Our whole marriage, I don’t think she made a single meal.’

‘It’s much the same in my house, I’m afraid. I eat tuna from a can three nights a week. I pretty sure I’m on my way to a severe case of mercury poisoning.’

Harry looked at her blankly.

‘Mirabella’s idea of a hearty meal was a bowl of broth. Indulgence was a second serve of rice cakes. Her favourite food was a Tic Tac.’

‘Oh dear,’ Annabel laughed. ‘Poor Humpty.’

‘Humpty?’

‘Humphrey McRae. The new Mr Mirabella.’

‘Ah.’ Harry went quiet for a moment. ‘You’ve met him, then?’

‘Actually, yes. I know Humphrey very well.’

‘You were at the wedding?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

He winced. ‘Well, she was bound to be snapped up, an attractive woman like Mirabella.’

Annabel ignored the comment and guided Harry into La Traviata. ‘Here we are.’

Over a dish of professionally prepared chilli prawns she answered his questions about Sweet Success.

‘Congratulations, Annabel,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘That’s amazing. Mirabella would never have been able to do anything like that.’

Later when they ordered a plate of pannacotta to share, she told him about the Eve’s Garden account and how she had been lucky enough to get a tip-off about their expansion.

‘My friend Patrick told me about them. He’s a botanist and very clever.’

Harry smiled and shook his head.

‘You’re doing so well. You’ve got so much more spunk than Mirabella.’

It was the fifth time he had mentioned her name. Annabel knew this warning sign — the constant mentioning of the old flame. It sounds as though you are being compared favourably to the former mate, which some women see as a good thing. But he shouldn’t be comparing you to her: it means she is still playing on his mind.

‘Tell me about your thesis,’ she said.

‘It’s an examination of religious education in public schools. RE is offered as an elective, separate class, but I contend, in my paper, that it should be studied by all students. Like history. Religion is a vital pillar of human existence. It has coloured so much of our evolution as a society.’

‘My friend Patrick was saying something similar the other day. He thinks schools need to include more subjects that teach children about the world they live in.’ Annabel smiled, pleased to have something to say about education. ‘Where are you studying?’

Harry pushed the last of the pannacotta towards her. ‘The University of Sydney.’

‘Oh really?’ she said. ‘That’s where my friend Patrick works.’

Harry walked her home and closed the evening with a chaste kiss on the cheek. As soon as his footsteps faded from her door, Annabel called Clementine.

‘Hello?’ she answered in one ring.

‘Clem. Harry just left.’

‘Harry?’

‘Barchester. We just had the dinner.’

‘Right. Sorry. My mind’s not in the game. How did it go?’

‘It went okay. I messed up the dinner, though.’

‘Did you follow the plan? Questions, compliments, no kissing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well that’s good. And are you going to see him again?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Clementine sounded dejected. ‘So he didn’t suggest a second date?’

‘No. But I think he’ll call,’ Annabel said, trying to sound positive. ‘He seemed to have a good time.’

‘I’m sure he will,’ Clem said.

Annabel hung up feeling flat. Why hadn’t he booked a second date? And why had he kept talking about Mirabella? She tried to think of great romances that started with the hero pining for his ex. There were none.

The next morning Annabel took herself to Café Indigo for coffee and bacon. Her table was nuzzled up next to a gaggle of women planning a hen’s night.

‘We must have these,’ the bride-to-be brayed. She was holding up chalk-coloured lollies in a lace bag. Annabel brightened. They were Peyton’s Treats; the product that had launched her career in PR.

One of the last modelling shows she ever did was for the David Jones spring collection. She closed the show in a Collette Dinnigan wedding gown, then changed into a candy-bright Alice McCall swing dress and joined the after-party. She was helping herself to some goat’s cheese when a gentleman in a three-piece suit and a fedora offered her a jellybean from a white paper bag.

‘My mother always told me not to take lollies from strange men,’ Annabel had smiled.

The old man blustered in mock-affront. ‘I’m not that strange, am I?’

Bridge Peyton owned Peyton’s Treats, a family-run confectionary company that had been producing pick-n-mix products like musk sticks and sherbet bombs since the 1920s. They were getting killed in the market, and one of the big conglomerates was lickings its lips.

‘Remember when you’d go to the milk bar and get a scoop of milk bottles and a scoop of freckles for 60 cents?’ Mr Peyton asked. ‘We produced almost all of those.’

‘I used to love that,’ Annabel said, her mind filling with memories of smearing glass counters with her fingers as she pointed to chocolate buttons, bananas and clinkers.

‘Yes, but you hardly ever see it nowadays, do you?’

Over a glass of champagne, Mr Peyton told Annabel of his family’s misfortunes. In the past decade the company had moved into producing family bags for supermarkets and lunchbox fillers like jersey caramel bars. But they just couldn’t reclaim their market share. As a last resort they had sunk a heap of cash into a re-branding effort. Annabel remembered the ad campaign. Some clay-brained marketing executive who obviously fished his degree out of a cereal box had even come up with a rap song that ran on commercial radio.

‘I’m about due for retirement anyway,’ Mr Peyton said.

‘What a shame. Isn’t there anything you can do?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said sadly. ‘We’re an old-fashioned business and we just can’t compete.’

Annabel said goodbye to Mr Peyton and collected her bag from the changing room. She walked over to the running-rack of clothes and looked at the tulle-and-pearl dress one more time. It was made from layers of fabric and lace in a vintage style. As she touched the floaty material an idea began to form. She called Mr Peyton first thing in the morning and asked if she could buy him lunch. He was hesitant, but she won him over.

‘It’s not every day that a supermodel asks me out to lunch,’ he chuckled.

She gave him her pitch and said she wouldn’t charge a thing until his sales picked up.

‘You say you’re an old-fashioned company, let’s capitalise on that. These days there is a great hunger for boutique products. People want to feel like they have something that’s one of a kind; something crafted from real ingredients, not pressed together from a vat of chemicals in a factory.’

Mr Peyton was intrigued. He promised that if Annabel was able to achieve the turn-around she predicted, he would pay a handsome fee.

‘What have I got to lose?’ he shrugged.

Annabel commissioned brand and packaging designs in old-fashioned pastel colours. The images were Art Nouveau designs in the style of Alphonse Mucha, Klimt and Toulouse-Lautrec, tinted in a wash of blush and rose. The beautiful artwork enabled her to push up the price point. Soon Peyton’s Treats were all the rage for hen’s parties, high teas, christenings and bridal showers. Musk sticks were sold by the bunch, wrapped with ribbon. As Annabel had predicted, women gaily paid $6 for a bag of lollies they would have bought at the milk bar for 60 cents when they were little girls. What they were really paying for, of course, was the crimped ribbon and an idea. Peyton’s produced a range of vintage treats dyed white for weddings, levied the bridal surcharge and made a killing. True to his word, Mr Peyton presented Annabel with a cheque and a generous bonus. Then he commissioned her to do ongoing PR work for Peyton’s. That was the start of her business.

She watched the bride-to-be and her girlfriends cooing over the cutely packaged lollies.

‘They’re so classy,’ they were telling each other.

I can do this, Annabel thought. If she could convince people to pay $6 for musk sticks just because they were wrapped in ribbon, she could convince Harry Barchester to fall in love with her. She swallowed the last of her coffee and called for the bill.

Her mind whirred as she walked home. If Harry was a prospective client and she was trying to sell him the product of Annabel Summers, wife extraordinaire, what would she do? She thought about what she knew about Harry: he had given up a high-powered, high-paying job to teach, so he wasn’t materialistic. But he was attracted to women like Mirabella who were very glamorous and sexually powerful. He had recently become involved in religion. He would respond to kindness and compassion. Annabel decided she needed to be strong but also warm and modest.

She would channel Julie Andrews circa Maria von Trapp. Simple straight hair and low hems. She looked at the gold-tipped manicure she’d just had done at her favourite salon. That would have to go.

Some proactive client management was needed. She sent Harry a text message:
Thank you for joining me for dinner last night, Harry. I enjoyed hearing the stories of your adventures in the Northern Territory.

She debated adding an ‘X’, but in the end left it off. After sending the message, she immediately regretted not adding the text-kiss. It looked cold without it.

Again, she considered the advice of Jane Austen in
Pride and Prejudice
: if a woman conceals her affection from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him. ‘There is so much gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself,’ were the words of Charlotte Lucas.