THE HUSBAND HUNTERS (13 page)

‘I
think you have all got some apologising to do,’ Soph said hotly, pulling out a chair for Tash to sit on. ‘It’s not what it seems.’

I raised my eyebrows at Kaz. This had better be good.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Soph, giving Tash a little poke in the ribs. ‘Tell them.’

Tash looked up.

‘It’s not what it looked like,’ she said finally. ‘Mr Beale has been having problems with his wife Hazel and he wanted some advice. He has discovered she’s been having an affair.’ We gaped at her. I thought I was going to hear some ‘round the houses’ explanation from Tash - but not this.

‘They got back together after his affair with me,’ she carried on. ‘And they were desperately trying for a baby for years, which you probably all know about. They ended up trying IVF treatment as nothing was working, and eventually, five years ago, their daughter Lauren was born.

‘
He said that although it had been a really tough five years - which had nearly broken them apart - when Lauren was born, they were both over the moon. All they had ever wanted was to be parents and now they had their daughter.

‘
Then a year later, she fell pregnant again - but this time without any help at all. The IVF had kick-started her body into working again, and she gave birth to their second daughter Rosie three years ago.’

So far it sounded like a wonderful story - I couldn’t think how it had all gone wrong.

‘But then last year she went on a diet. She’d put on four stone since the girls were born and felt enormous,’ carried on Tash. ‘So she decided to join a slimming group and managed to lose five stone, and according to him looked fantastic.

‘
The only problem was, she had also joined a gym to try and shape up and she’s gone and had an affair with the gym manager, which is still going on. He only discovered it two weeks ago and he’s heartbroken. He doesn’t know what to do.’

The story was awful, there was no doubt. But there was one thing that I didn’t understand.

‘How on earth are you involved with it?’ I asked Tash. ‘Your affair finished ten years ago and as far as we knew, you never saw him again.’

Tash looked a bit sheepish. ‘He asked me to join Facebook as his friend a couple of years ago. I didn’t think there was any harm in it,’ she added defensively, seeing our shocked faces. ‘It was only a few emails on Facebook, it’s not as though I was shagging him or anything.’

She did have a point. But she hadn’t told any of us that she was back in touch with him.

‘Honestly it was all innocent,’ she said. ‘I talked with him on Facebook about once every six months, that’s all. Then recently he asked to see me again to see if I thought there was anything he could do to save his marriage.’

‘Hazel would have a fit if she knew that he had turned to you,’ said Rach.

‘I agree, it’s a bit ironic to say the least,’ I added.

Tash looked offended.

‘I know I’m great in bed,’ she said. ‘But I have got a mouth and a brain as well. What do you think we did for thirty days in that bed and breakfast? Even I couldn’t keep it going solidly for all that time. We had some good talks,’ she added wistfully. ‘About what we’d like to do in the future and what type of people we wanted to be, and that sort of thing.’

‘Has she confessed to him about the affair?’ asked Kaz.

‘No, he found out by chance,’ said Tash. ‘She told him she was going round to see a friend for the evening, and then that friend phoned the house that same evening to talk to Hazel, and Rob – that’s Mr Beale - answered the phone. He said to the friend that he thought Hazel had come round to see her that night, and she said no she hadn’t.

‘
He waited until Hazel got back that night and asked her had she had a good time over at her friend’s house, and she said yes, they had. He asked her what they’d done, and she said that the friend had cooked her lasagne, then they had sat in her lounge drinking a couple of glasses of wine and chatting. The more she was explaining, the more she was digging herself into a hole.

‘
He let her describe the whole evening to him, then told her that it was funny, but her friend had phoned the house to talk to her that evening.’

‘I’d have loved to have seen her face then,’ said Kaz. ‘It must have been a real picture.’

‘Well, I
think she went some sort of ghastly green, by all accounts,’ said Tash. ‘She knew the game was up. She confessed to Rob that she’d been having an affair for the last six months and she was in love with this gym instructor.’

‘What’s happened now?’ I said. ‘Has he kicked her out?’

‘Not yet, I think they are trying to work it out - their girls are only five and three - but he’s in bits about it,’ said Tash. ‘That’s why he needed a shoulder to cry on,’ she added sharply, looking around at us all.

She did have a point. Kaz had only seen her talking to Mr Beale in the coffee shop and when we saw her by the pavilion she was only hugging him, not lying flat on her back with her legs in the air.

Tash had then gone on to demand not only a verbal apology that evening around the table, which we all dutifully gave, but she demanded that it be written into the minutes too. So there it was, the following morning.

PROGRESS REPORTS.

* We all apologised to Tash after misjudging her. Tash has behaved thoughtfully and considerately to Mr Beale under the present circumstances and should be applauded for her Good Samaritan-like behaviour. (Tash had demanded that she dictate the full apology to Kaz to be recorded in the minutes. Privately I thought that Tash was taking it a bit too far. With her track record, we had good reason to think she was shagging Mr Beale yet again, ten years on. She was hardly Mother Theresa, after all.)

* We are going to cordially invite Jennifer Aniston into the HHC as an honorary member. Rach had protested she wasn’t leaving the HHC, only trying to get pregnant, so there was no way that Jennifer was going to have her place. So we decided that Jen could be an overseas member. We could link up to her by Skype and email her the minutes. I’m sure she’d love her love life to be sorted out by someone else. Then she could sit back and concentrate on her acting. Bee to source an email address for Jennifer’s fan club and draft the email.

* Soph’s wedding dress has been spotted hanging in the window of the charity shop. Kaz told her that if it didn’t sell, the charity shop might ring her up and tell her to take it back. Soph went white at the thought of it. (I might take pity on her and get one of my mum’s friends to go in and buy it to put Soph out of her misery.)

* Soph said that she had contacted a few old school friends through Friends Reunited, and there was one hopeful, a guy called Ben who had been in her form and who now worked in the local garden centre. Soph said he’d just been moved up into the potted plants section from the seedlings department, so that was promising. We all got a bit excited at this. It was the only bit of news we had from Soph for months. Green-fingered Ben could be the start of something good.

* Kaz reported a little gloomily that James and Caroline were currently on a week’s holiday in Portugal. Tash told her to hitch the skirt up a little higher, and Kaz said that she couldn’t as it would resemble a belt, not a skirt.

* Kaz took the beauty flash balm pictures and announced that she thought Bee’s skin now looked the most promising. (Hurrah! At last! I think Kaz has finally put the cellulite argument behind her.)

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

CHAPTER SIX

Kaz came through the doors of the model agency looking like she had just won the lottery - but had accidentally flushed her ticket down the toilet.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, picking up my handbag. We were going to Saleros for some lunch, and it had been Kaz’s idea. Now she looked like I was dragging her there by her hair. ‘On second thoughts tell me when we are on the way,’ I added, as Nick was sitting at his computer and had pricked his ears up when Kaz came in.

Nick asked me about the HHC every week, usually when he had just finished a picture shoot and had lots of time to kill. Because my friends’ love lives were a lot more interesting than any model bookings I was making, I always felt compelled to stop and tell him the latest news - although obviously an edited version. I don’t know why, as he invariably took the mick out of us. But I did enjoy talking to him about it, to get a male point of view, even though I had to sometimes pretend to be offended at the things he said. It even secretly made me laugh when he called us the Has-Beens, Hags, and Crones, even though I never let him see me laughing at that one. I had to keep some dignity.

But I had to draw the line somewhere. Kaz was obviously upset, so I didn’t want Nick eavesdropping on her problems.

She waited until we were sat in Saleros before telling me her news.

‘Do you remember Pete?’ she said. ‘The guy who beat me up a few years ago.’

As if I could forget that name. All of us had wanted to go and rip his testicles off after we’d heard what he’d done to Kaz..

‘My mum’s dentist’s daughter is now going out with him,’ said Kaz. ‘I found out by chance. She was telling mum about her daughter Lisa having met this guy Pete. She isn’t happy about him because she told my mum she thinks he looks like a rough sort – but she doesn’t know the half of it.’

‘How do you know it’s the same guy?’ I said.

‘She showed mum a picture of Lisa and Pete together at a wedding recently, and mum recognised him.’

‘He might have changed,’ I said, encouragingly. ‘It was a few years ago. He may have been sorry after what he did to you and changed his ways.’

‘That’s not all,’ carried on Kaz. ‘I was on my way to work this morning and I walked past her near the school gates. She has a son who goes to our school and she was dropping him off. When I walked past her I could see that she had this huge black eye. It looks like he’s been at it again already.’

Her lip started to quiver. ‘It’s all my fault.’ Kaz put her head down on her arms at the table and started to cry.

‘Even if he had been banged up for a while, or even got a suspended sentence, it may not have stopped it,’ I said, reassuringly. But Kaz wasn’t convinced.

‘I’m going to have to do something about it. Before it gets worse. He could murder someone next,’ she said, her voice rising hysterically.

I was worried about Kaz. I went back to work and brooded about it all afternoon. We had wanted her to report him at the time, yet she had wanted to put it behind her and start afresh. Now her past was coming back to haunt her.

A few hours later, my phone bleeped with a text. It was Kaz. ‘I’m going to see Lisa,’ it read. ‘I want to talk to her.’

I rang her straight away. She had left school for the afternoon and she was driving straight round to see Lisa.

‘I want to get to the bottom of that black eye,’ she said.

‘Ring me as soon as you have seen her,’ I instructed.

Every time my phone rang that evening, I jumped, expecting it to be Kaz. Finally she rang me just after 10pm. She had been with Lisa for the last five hours.

‘What did she say?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Had he hit her?’

‘Well she tried to deny it,’ said Kaz. ‘I knocked on her door, and I had to knock twice as she didn’t answer at first. When she opened the door to me, it was obvious she had been crying. When I asked her how she had got her black eye, and she told me she had walked into a door. So I said to her ‘that’s what I told people when he hit me.’

‘I bet that came as a shock to her,’ I said.

‘She looked at me in astonishment. She never knew that I’d gone out with him too, in the past,’ said Kaz. ‘So I dug out some photographs of my handbag and showed them to her. It was a picture of me with my bruised face.’

‘I never knew you’d taken any pictures,’ I said, in astonishment. ‘You never told any of us.’

‘I’d taken them at the time, before the bruises faded, and hid the pictures away in a drawer,’ said Kaz. ‘I nearly didn’t take any, but something inside me told me to take some, just in case I ever needed them. I hid them in the bottom of my underwear drawer. I’ve never looked at them again, until now.’

‘What happened when you showed the pictures to Lisa?’ I asked.

‘She took one look at them and broke down sobbing,’ said Kaz. ‘She knew I was telling the truth. I asked her if it was the first time, and she had shaken her head. She kept saying over and over again that he had hit her in front of James, her six year old son.’

Kaz sounded drained with exhaustion.

‘I tried to persuade her to report it to the police,’ she said. ‘I told her I’d hadn’t done, and regretted it so much as she was now standing in front of me and I felt I’d hit her myself. I told her that if I had gone to the police at the time, then I may have spared her this anguish.’