The Men in her Life

much better.
    ‘Tom, come on, we’re going for a walk,’ she called.
    During the day it was too hot and crowded for the beach, but at this time in the evening, especially when the tide was up, the air felt cooler and most of the holidaymakers had gone back for their supper. Clare was pushing Tom’s buggy along the sea front when she heard a man’s voice a few feet away from her head.
    ‘Clare! Hi!’
    Seeing that he had made her jump, Matt leaned out of the ice-cream van. She had not recognized his voice, she realized, because she had never heard him call her Clare before. At first she had been Mrs Drummond, and when Ella had clearly forbidden him to call her that, he had stopped calling her anything, referring to her as ‘your mum’ in conversations with Ella and ‘you’ if he ever addressed her direcdy, which he didn’t, often.
    ‘Would Tom like a comet? On the house,’ he asked, then circling his eyes round his window, added, ‘on the van...’
    Clare laughed and bent down.
    ‘Would you like an ice-cream?’ she asked Tom.
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘What do you say?’
    ‘Yes, please.’
    ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    ‘Thank you,’ Tom repeated dutifully.
    Matt pulled a lever which disgorged a white whirl onto a cone.
    ‘Flake?’ he asked.
    ‘No, he’ll be fine with that,’ Clare said, then on impulse she added, ‘give me one though.’
    He swirled a larger pyramid for her and stuck in two flakes. She handed him a pound coin. It was ages since she’d had a soft ice-cream and there was something sinfully synthetic about it. The taste made her think of childhood outings with one of the au pairs who used to buy her a 99 from the van in the car park next to Hampstead Heath as a bribe to get lost for half an hour while she snogged her boyfriend on the grass.
    ‘So, you’re working here for the summer,’ Clare said, trying to think of something to say. It seemed rude to accept free ice-cream and then walk away.
    ‘I got back from London last week.’
    ‘I thought I hadn’t seen you about,’ Clare said, biting into the chocolate flakes.
    ‘Have you spoken to Ella?’ she asked him.
    ‘No. Is she having a good time?’
    ‘Yes. I think so. She rang earlier.’
    Clare looked at him as his eyes locked onto a yacht with a spinnaker out on the horizon. He was so clearly determined to look indifferent, she felt a little sorry for him. She remembered Ella’s sad voice on the phone.
    ‘I think she’d like to hear from you,’ she said, hoping that she wasn’t betraying Ella’s confidence by suggesting it.
    ‘I thought I’d write,’ he said, looking deliberately over her head as a holidaymaker took up a position behind Clare as if she were the beginning of a queue. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Clare said.
    Joss was working when she came back. Since he’d had access to Ella’s computer, he seemed to write a great deal more than he had ever done before. She could hear the soft rattle of the keyboard as he typed.

    Holly lay on her bed in her underwear wondering how much worse her life could get. Her mother hated her. She’d wantonly betrayed her own niece and lied to her sister. Her best friend was a bitch. Her other best friend was ignoring her now that he had found a woman to bonk. Work was crap, her life was crap, everything was just crap. CRAP she scrawled on a piece of paper on which she had written:
    Work: 5
    Men: 0
    Family: 0
    Friends: 0
    Flat: 10
    She poured herself another glass of wine from a half-empty bottle on the bedside table. And her father was dead, she thought. It was all his fault. If Jack Palmer hadn’t bloody died then Mo wouldn’t have been getting married so they wouldn’t have fallen out, and she would never have met Matt, and work would just have gone on as normal.
    And she was going to be forty. Soon. Four years wasn’t very long. She was going to be forty and at some point soon she was going to turn from Holly’s-a-laugh to Holly’s-a-sad-person. Perhaps she already had without realizing it, she thought, terror-stricken. But no, she reassured herself, Matt would not have been so willing to hold hands with a sad person, would he? The thought of him filled her with more self-pity. He was the best thing that had ever happened to her and she had thrown him out. What was wrong with her?
    It was Mo’s fault, she decided. If Mo hadn’t been there, then the lolly wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Who did Mo suddenly think she was, occupying the moral high ground