THE HUSBAND HUNTERS (10 page)

‘Imagine that you are living in Pemberly with Mr Darcy - and it’s like a bedpan,’ consoled Rach, who had come with me to the event. ‘That’s what they had to do every night, and they didn’t moan about it.’

‘I don’t think that Mr Darcy would have wanted to see my fat ass hanging over a bucket each night,’ I snapped back. ‘I wouldn’t mind swanning around in front of him with my heaving bosom. But I draw the line at crouching over a bedpan.’

So the thought of no amenities, not even running water, would be my idea of a hellish holiday, I thought, as Soph’s mum started to gather up her skirts and arrange herself comfortably at the side of the couch.

Rach scrambled awkwardly onto the silver throw and lay down, looking petrified. She was rigid, with her arms clamped by her sides. Maria reached out and picked up the scary eyeball pendant from the table and started to swing it in front of Rach’s eyes. She started to talk in a slow soft voice, and we all sat there absolutely mesmerised, wondering what was going to happen.

Slowly, after a long five minutes, Rach’s eyes started to close and Maria asked her where she was.

‘In a sandpit,’ said Rach, sleepily.

‘Who are you with?’ asked Maria.

‘With Bee and we are playing with a slug,’ said Rach. I choked back a laugh at that one. I hoped she stopped right there, before she remembered that I stuffed the slug in her mouth.

‘Now go back even further,’ instructed Maria. ‘You are in a room and you have a line of boxes in front of you. They all have numbers in front of them. Open whichever of the boxes you are drawn to.’ Rach’s hand reached out in front of her and fumbled with an imaginary box. That was a bit freaky. ‘Now which year are you in?’ asked Maria, softly.

‘I’m in 1867,’ said Rach. Oh no, I was hoping this wasn’t going to happen. I hope I don’t appear in this. She started to cry softly.

‘What’s
the matter,’ asked Maria. ‘Who is making you upset?’

‘It’s Robert. Why won’t he come with me as he promised? He said we would be together. What have I done wrong? ‘whimpered Rach, still with her eyes closed. We all looked at each other. What was happening - what was she remembering?

‘What are you wearing?’ asked Maria gently.

‘A white apron that is tied at the back. A thick skirt and a white cap on my head,’ said Rach. ‘I don’t like the skirt though, it’s really itchy. I’d like to take it off, but I don’t have another one.’

By the sounds of it, Rach was a servant girl. We all leant forward in our seats, desperate to hear more.

‘Robert, Robert,’ she called out fretfully. ‘Wait.’

‘Who is Robert?’ said Kaz, a bit loudly.

‘Shhh,’ we all said, turning on her.

‘Who is Robert?’ asked Maria, softly.

‘He’s
the landowner’s son and we have lain together,’ wept Rach. ‘Oh, there
she is, oh no!’

I didn’t like the sound of this one. Who was the ‘she’ that Rach was referring to? I started nervously fiddling with my bracelet. Rach’s arm suddenly lashed out. I was glad I’d not sat by the side of the couch.

‘Who
is there? Who is with Robert?’ asked Maria.

‘It’s Annie. He’s got his arm around her. This can’t be happening to me,’ said Rach.

‘What’s happening?’ carried on Maria, gently.

‘He wants to be with me, not Annie. But I can see him with her through the window, with his arm around her, and they are talking to her father. It can’t be true. He loves me, not her.’ Rach broke out into wild sobbing, and Maria reached forward and grabbed her hand.

‘Rach, it’s time to come back. Go back to the boxes and close the one you opened.’ Her hand reached out again in front of her. ‘Good girl,’ now slowly open your eyes because you are back here.’

Rach slowly opened her eyes and blinked a few times. Then she struggled upwards and sat up, looking around at all of us. It was a bit spooky to think that she had remembered a past life.

‘That Annie was obviously you, Bee,’ said Tash accusingly, when Maria had stood up and switched on the light again. ‘You’ve obviously got off with people that she fancies in previous lives. Pete Griffiths clearly wasn’t the first one.’

‘Hey, that’s not fair. You don’t know it was me,’ I protested, but privately agreeing with Tash that this Annie character probably was me. The daughter of a wealthy landowner. I liked the sound of that. I knew I wasn’t cut out for camping - and this had just explained why.

The girls were a bit funny with me for the rest of the night, thinking that I had doubly done the dirty on Rach. Luckily she couldn’t remember any of it. Oh well, there was nothing that I could do about it now, I thought, as I walked into work the following morning. Actually there was. I could track down Pete Griffiths to see what he was like now.

If he was nothing like the footballing sex machine we had both remembered, then that might settle things once and for all. If Rach was harbouring deeply repressed ‘if only’ thoughts about Pete Griffiths, then it might cure her. I made a mental note to suggest it at the next meeting.

A few days later Rach rang me up at the agency. I tentatively said ‘hi’ when I saw her number come up on my mobile. I almost held my breath after answering, as I hadn’t spoken to her since the hypnosis session. If all her past life had come back to her overnight, I was for the high jump.

‘We need to call an emergency meeting,’ she said, her voice shaking a little. ‘Mike has just called round completely out of the blue and asked to meet up.’ I gulped. The last time Rach had seen her ex-boyfriend Mike he was completely naked on her sister Sarah’s bed - and she hadn’t clapped eyes on him since.

‘Rach, he’s a complete rat,’ I reminded her sharply. ‘You should have just thrown one of your expensive Jimmy Choo’s - if you had any, but those strappy silver sandals from Topshop would have done the job just as well - right at his two timing cheating face.’

‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘But I still felt something for him when I saw him on the doorstep. My stomach just flipped over.’

‘I know, that’s completely understandable, but you haven’t been with another man since him, so you haven’t got him out of your system, that’s all,’ I reminded her. ‘But you’re right, we need another meeting. I’ll call all the girls and let them know.’

‘What’s happened - has one of the Crones had a crisis?’ said Nick, chuckling as I put down the phone to Rach. I swung round on my swivel chair to see him trying not to laugh.

‘I didn’t see you come in,’ I said accusingly.

‘
Anyway, tell me how did your date with Paul go the other night?’ he asked, coming over to sit on my desk. ‘Am I allowed to go and buy a hat yet?’

There
was only one thing for it: I had to tell Nick the truth. Being a photographer at the agency, he knew Scarlett and her crowd of friends, so it was bound to get out sooner or later. And I didn’t want to look a bigger plonker than I already felt if I lied to him and he later found out the real truth.

‘Actually, he stood me up,’ I said, looking Nick square in the eyes. ‘He wanted to get his revenge on me for giving him the boot a year ago. He left me standing for nearly an hour in the rain and never showed up.’

‘Whaaat?’ Nick’s mouth fell open so far I could make out the gold filling he’d had done at the dentist last month. ‘I thought that only women did stupid things like that.’

‘Apparently not,’ I said, taking a sip of my coffee.

‘Well, I
think he’s daft,’ said Nick. ‘Who in his right mind would stand you up - especially not in that hot dress you were telling me about?’

‘What, an old crone like me,’ I said, jokingly, pulling a stupid face at him. ‘He obviously can’t see past my wrinkles.’ Nick laughed and walked towards the door, with his camera bag slung over his arm.

‘You knock spots of most of these models here,’ he added over his shoulder. I smiled to myself. Nick wasn’t usually too forthcoming with the compliments, so that made me feel slightly less humiliated about Paul.

That evening we had an emergency meeting at my flat as the restaurant was full. We had to sort Rach’s head out - and fast.

She arrived first, followed by Soph and Kaz. We sat and waited, and thirty minutes later Tash came flying through the door.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she panted. ‘One of the horses was ill at the stables and we had to get the vet.’

We poured Tash a large glass of wine, and then we all sat around my dining table to discuss Rach’s situation.

‘No way are you to start seeing him again,’ said Kaz, banging her pen down on my table. ‘He was a complete shit to you, and you would spend the rest of your life not knowing whether you were going to come home and find him shagging the nanny, the pizza delivery girl, or the next-door neighbour. You wouldn’t be able to trust him as far as you could throw him.’

‘I know that. But it was so difficult seeing him there after all this time. He hadn’t changed a bit, and I still fancied him,’ confessed Rach.

‘Yes, but
we all fancy people that we don’t do anything about,’ I said, logically. ‘Look at me. I would turn myself inside out if it meant having Colin Firth as my husband. But I don’t start stalking him and sitting outside his house, do I?

‘Yes, but
that’s only because you don’t know where he lives, Bee,’ Tash pointed out. ‘If you did, I’m sure you would drive past his house a few times, and then mysteriously your Mini would break down outside.’

I admitted that yes, I would, and perhaps using Colin Firth as an example wasn’t the best idea.

‘Anyway, Rach, the club has decided that for your best future interests, you are not to allow Mike a second chance,’ Tash declared. ‘And what’s more. I think we should think of some form of revenge on him. You ran out leaving him naked in Sarah’s bed sheets, and you didn’t even get to throw a drink over him or anything. He got off scot-free.’

‘Yes, you’re
right,’ said Rach. ‘I never thought of that. I would have loved to have thrown a drink over him.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Kaz, a slow smile starting to creep across her face. ‘I have got the best idea. Why doesn’t Rach agree to see him again, go round to his house and sew prawns into his bedroom curtains, and then leave? I’ve always wanted to do that,’ she added excitedly, looking round at us all with her eyes gleaming.

‘Why would she want to put prawns into his curtains?’ asked Soph, looking puzzled. ‘What good would that do?’

‘Well, idiot, when the prawns start to go off, they will stink out his bedroom,’ explained Kaz. ‘Can you imagine when he next brings a girl home and all she can smell are dead rotting prawns. She will run a mile from him.’

We all started to laugh.

‘It’s a great idea,’ insisted Kaz. ‘There is none so deserving as that shithead Mike.’

We all looked at Rach, who was laughing as hard as the rest of us.

‘I’ll do it,’ she declared. ‘It will serve him right.’

And there it was, right on top of the minutes the following morning.

PROGRESS REPORTS.

* Rach to buy the cheapest crappiest prawns she can find – preferably past their sell-by date. We told her she needed a dry run to test it out on an old pair of curtains at home beforehand to see how long it would take her.

Rach still has a spare key to Mike’s house, so Rach to phone Mike and arrange to go and see him, but go half an hour early, sneak into his bedroom and sew as many prawns as she can into his curtains before he comes in.

* Bee to track down Pete Griffiths. I had explained my idea to the girls, and they all thought it was a great idea. Rach protested that she didn’t hold any grudge against me, but Tash said that she clearly did as I had popped up in her past life nearly two hundred years ago and I had done exactly the same thing, and Rach was quite saintly in fact in even still having me a friend. I thought this was going a bit too far, and tried to defend myself. But the girls were adamant. I had to track down Pete Griffiths to try and end centuries of deep-seated damage to Rach. Kaz suggested I try Facebook first of all.

* Kaz reported that she had worn the skirt again in front of James and this time he had offered to carry her hockey sticks out to the field for her. She said he did keep looking in the direction of her skirt, but there was also a year twelve football match going on behind her, so she wasn’t sure whether he was looking at her legs or the ball. Rach said that knowing men and football, he was probably looking at the ball, which didn’t please Kaz.

*************************************

CHAPTER FIVE

I called Rach the next morning. She had already put her plan into action. She had called Mike and told him that she was going to come over to see him in three days’ time.

‘He thinks that I’m prepared to give it another shot,’ she said. ‘Can you believe his arrogance? I’m so pleased that you lot made me see sense. Can you imagine anything as wimpy as going back to a man like that? I’d prefer to have no man at all in my life than one like that bastard.’