THE HUSBAND HUNTERS (5 page)

‘When you reach thirty, and are still unattached, you can come across as desperate,’ I explained to him, carefully. ‘So by having my friends monitor my progress they can make sure I don’t come across as some mad old witch who is desperately trying to clamber off the top shelf.’

Nick nodded, but he still didn’t look as though he really understood. And when he had a nubile twenty-two-year-old waiting for him at home, I can’t imagine he really cared what a dried up crone like me was doing to try and bag herself a man.

***

‘Right,’ said
Kazza importantly as we sat down at the usual round table that our favourite waiter had saved for us that evening.

‘Has everyone managed to do some dress research?’ We all nodded like obedient schoolgirls and pulled folders out from our bags.

We had decided that we had to choose wedding dresses for each other, so I had chosen for Soph. I’d spent the last few nights poring over bridal magazines trying to find out what suited Soph and had almost cracked under the pressure of her being the first bride destined to walk down the aisle. It was all right for the others, Soph had to say ‘I Do’ before their dresses would even be needed.

‘Calm down, Bee,’ said Scarlett, when she had walked in the lounge last night to see me madly flicking through magazine after magazine and hurling them on the floor in desperation. Eventually with Scarlett’s help, and a couple of brandies to help me see the dresses in a more relaxed way, I finally settled on five possibilities. I carefully cut round the designs and pasted them onto sheets of paper. It was 3 a.m. when I finally finished. ‘C’mon,’ I’m going to bed,’ Scarlett said, yawning. ‘I’ve
got to be up in three hours.’

I displayed my choices on the restaurant table.

‘I like that one,’ said Rach, pointing to my first one, a white column of lace with a matching little bolero jacket. One by one the girls approved my choices for Soph, until they got to the last one. It was bright red with black fuzzy netting jutting out underneath. The girls stopped and looked at me.

‘What the hell is that?’ demanded Soph. I had to admit it, it was a little bizarre, but I seem to remember after a few decent double brandies I was starting to think that Soph needed to wear something a bit alternative.

‘No, Bee
- unless we issue every guest with a pair of brandy goggles as they enter the church,’ said Kaz firmly, screwing up that dress and lobbing it at the bin in the corner.

‘I like the first choice,’ said Soph, looking at the column of lace. It was unanimously decided that the dress was perfect for Soph.

‘Thank God I’m last in the bride order,’ said Tash. I couldn’t have agreed more. It was going to be a difficult job to get her down the aisle. Tash and convention didn’t go together.

‘Yes, it’s
going to be difficult,’ said Rach. ‘After all, we can’t do the impossible - unfortunately bigamy is still illegal in this country.’

I can still remember the day when Tash first walked into our sixth form common room at school. Rach, Kaz and I were sitting on one of the tables by the coffee machine, swinging our legs and talking about whether my history essay was long enough. The double doors at the end of the common room opened and in walked this stunning girl. The entire room of sixth formers had stopped talking and stared at the newcomer. Tash was of oriental origin - we later found out that her dad had married a former Asian beauty queen and the result of their union was quite simply striking. She had the blackest silkiest hair you could imagine, cut in a bob with a fringe, which framed huge liquid brown eyes and olive skin. And right from the beginning, she oozed attitude.

Three months later, she caused the school nearly to grind to a halt when she had an affair with the married geography teacher Rob Beale. We were all shocked to the core. The most racy thing any of the three of us had ever previously done was when Rach sent one of our teachers a Valentine’s card.

After a month in a bed and breakfast with Mr Beale, who then went back to his wife, Tash never came back to school. Instead she got a job down at our stable yard, mucking out all the horses. She had never done it before, but she’d charmed the pants off Steve into giving her a job on a trial basis. And even though she’d never been one to get her hands dirty, she surprised us all by taking to the job like a duck to water.

‘Did you ever hear from Mr Beale again?’ asked Rach now, as we pushed our plates back and scraped our chairs away from the table for more stomach space. I had eaten so much pasta I looked about nine months pregnant. I undid the top button on my jeans and hoped the girls wouldn’t notice.

‘No,’ said Tash. ‘I saw him once on the other side of the road and waved to him, but he pretended not to have seen me. I can’t blame him really - it could have really wrecked his life. But I’m not all to blame,’ she said hurriedly, leaping to her own defence. ‘He didn’t have to come away with me, did he?’

None of us actually answered her question. I picked up my fork and looked intently at it, Soph picked up a salt pot and studied it as though it was the most interesting thing she had ever seen, and Rach and Kaz looked away. Tash chose not to notice our lack of response and ploughed on.

‘Well, I’ve
not always been attracted to married men,’ she reminded us. ‘What about Neil?’

Tash had been in a normal functional relationship for twelve months when Neil popped the question. She had met Neil a few years ago whilst on a girls’ night out in Manchester. He was very ordinary. He had a sales rep job, drove a Vauxhall Vectra and had seven identical blue shirts - one for every day of the week. We were shocked when Tash announced that she had started dating him.

She had always walked on the wild side - so what was she doing with conventional Neil. But Tash said she was tired of having wild and exciting relationships, and for once she wanted to settle with someone ordinary.

And for twelve months she did just that and they even got engaged. But then he took her to Paris for the weekend two months later. They ended up having a massive row on top of the Eiffel Tower - actually it was only the middle level as Tash claimed afterwards he had been too mean to pay the extra few euros to take her right to the top - and in the middle of their heated row Tash had taken off her engagement ring and hurled it off the tower..

‘You should have seen the speed of him running back down those stairs,’ said Tash now, chuckling. ‘He could have qualified for the Olympics.’

‘Well, it
was your one chance to get married and you blew it,’ I said, shaking my head at her. ‘Here’s us all desperate to get down the aisle - including you now - and you had the perfect opportunity.’

‘But he was so boring,’ said Tash. ‘If that’s what married life was going to be about, spending the next twenty years sitting across the table from him, asking him to pass me the salt pot, I’d rather scoop my own eyeballs out and eat them. I’ve got to marry someone really exciting, else I’ll get bored.’

‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘So not only have we got the difficult task of making sure you find a husband that isn’t already married, but it’s got to be one that is funny, clever, interesting, and as fit as George Clooney?’

‘Absolutely,’ smiled Tash. ‘And I won’t settle for anything less.’

‘Anyway, how was your blind date?’ asked Kaz. Tash rolled her eyeballs - she’s always been quite good at that, they really go right up and round.

Tash had been out the previous night with her blind date Chris. She had been reluctant to go in the first place, but her friend Harry had persuaded her to give it a try. ‘He’s got a really floppy fringe,’ he had said desperately, when Tash had been on the verge of saying no. And that had lured her in. But the date had turned out to be an utter disaster.

‘Basically, Harry had completely lied to me,’ she said indignantly. ‘His hair resembled a hedgehog and there wasn’t a single hair flopping over his forehead.’

Tash had cut the evening short saying she had to go and visit her mum, even though her mum had moved back to Hong Kong two years previously, and she had left the bar.

‘I did try,’ she added lamely. ‘At least I went and gave it a shot.’ We all shook our heads at her. It was a good job Tash was last in the bride order - we would all be at least ninety before we made it up the aisle if we had to get her hitched first.

The minutes of the meeting came winging in the next morning.

PROGRESS REPORTS.

* Soph’s wedding plans are coming along nicely. Kaz to ring up the shop and arrange for Soph to have a dress fitting with the design we had chosen for her. (The girls are starting to fight over being bridesmaids for Soph now, so we decided that we would all be bridesmaids for each other’s wedding and all wear the same dresses for each one. So Rach was nominated to try and source five identical bridesmaids dresses.’

* Unfortunately Tash’s blind date didn’t go according to plan as the aforementioned blind date had an unfortunately short hair cut. Possibility of sourcing a hairpiece in the form of a floppy fringe on the internet, which Tash could keep in her handbag and give to future blind dates.

* Kaz’s voodoo doll has now made it on top of her desk in the staffroom, despite the advice of the HHC that it might look slightly mad. Kaz had proudly reported that James actually walked past her desk and stopped to admire the doll. ‘Is it a pin cushion? It’s really cute,’ he had said, on his way over to the head teacher’s office. (I privately thought that James was either really nice or really stupid as the doll didn’t look anything like cute. Despite Soph’s best efforts it still did look like something that would scare children at a hundred paces.)

* A date was set for Rach’s hypnotherapy session with Soph’s mum who was actually quite excited at the thought of doing some hypnotherapy on a real live person. Soph had produced the rather odd-looking necklace that she’d rooted out of her attic, with a huge plastic red stone dangling on the end, like some big scary eyeball.

* Bee reported that she hadn’t heard back from Paul Hardman and was given until the next meeting to get through to him on the phone, else she would have to go round to his house and smoke him out. (I really didn’t like the sound of that one, so I vowed to keep him on redial for a whole week until he answered.)

* The first set of pictures were taken on Kazza’s camera to monitor the progress of the beauty flash balm. (I’d cheated and put on some tinted moisturiser.) Kaz said she was going to take pictures every week for the next eight weeks then see what a difference it had made.

Heck, I’d better get on with trying to phone Paul, I thought as I clicked the email closed. My time was rapidly running out. With all the effort I was putting in, he had better turn out to be The One, I thought crossly, dialling his number. The least he could do was return my call.

The reception door opened and suddenly there was Rach. She had a huge plaster across her nose. I couldn’t believe it.

‘You’ve had a nose job,’ I gasped at her. Rach was always threatening that she was fed up with being a ‘hair trap’ and she was going to get her nose sorted once and for all. I never thought she’d actually go ahead with it, but she had just proved me wrong.

‘No, I walked into the glass door at the supermarket,’ she told me, grimacing. ‘I wish I’d had a nose job, I think it would have hurt less.’

I sat her down and promised to make her a cup of coffee, when my phone vibrated on my desk.

And there it was, Paul Hardman’s mobile number flashing up on my screen. ‘Oh my God, it’s him,’ I yelled at Rach, starting to hop from one foot to another. I felt like I was about to have a cardiac arrest at any moment. What on earth was I going to say to him?

‘Answer it,’ hissed Rach, pushing the phone towards me. I pushed it back to her like it was a hot potato.

‘I can’t,’ I said, feeling as though I was about to pass out, I was that flushed and sweaty, with my heart thumping against my chest.

‘It’s only Paul Hardman,’ she said, pushing the phone back towards me again as if we were playing some bizarre game of tennis. ‘You’ve spoken to him before.‘

‘Yes, but that’s when we were actually on a date,’ I hissed back. We both looked at the phone. It had stopped ringing. I looked at Rach and we both burst out laughing.

‘It’s not funny,’ I said, trying to glare at her. ‘Now I’ve got to ring him back.

‘Oh Bee, just do it and get it over with. You’ll have the HHC to answer to if you don’t.’ She had a point. The thought of explaining to the others that I hadn’t had the guts to speak to Paul was actually more terrifying than phoning the man himself. So I picked up the phone, pressed redial and took a deep breath. He answered after two rings.

‘Hi, Paul, it’s Bee,’ I said. ‘Remember me?’

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

CHAPTER THREE

Kaz wouldn’t look at anyone unless he was filthy stinking rich. I’d always thought that limited her choices, but Kaz was adamant. She had been brought up on a council estate with her mum and five brothers, and she’d vowed that she would marry well.

It hadn’t been the best decision. She went out with Pete because he drove a Porsche, but then he’d given her a black eye and shortly afterwards she had ended up in Casualty with three cracked ribs. We’d tried to get her to press charges against him at the time, but she clammed up, and said that she wanted to get on with the rest of her life, try and forget about it.