The Men in her Life

forever blowing bubbles’ just as the fairground organ had done.
    Deliciously unhurried, she spreadeagled her limbs to the four corners of the sofa bed, and yawned, and then froze mid-stretch as she became aware that a figure was standing in the kitchen door-frame watching her. As his face emerged from the half-light, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming, or had stepped into a fairy tale, because when he smiled at her, his eyes glinting with amusement at her surprise, she had a feeling, like a premonition, that he was the One.
    Bizarrely, her first instinct was to take a quick look under the sheet at her chest, unable to remember whether she had taken all her clothes off before getting into bed.
    ‘Hello,’ he said, stepping forward. There was a mug in his hand.
    ‘How long have you been watching me?’ she asked him.
    ‘A while,’ he said, sitting down on the foot of the bed, ‘did you know that you laugh in your sleep? It is... enchanting...’
    His voice was like Alan Rickman’s. A low drawl so lazy that each word build up expectation for the next. She liked lying there listening to him, feeling his weight dipping the mattress beside her feet.
    ‘So, you’re Holly.’
    He made it sound as if a fortune-teller had told him long ago that he would meet and fall in love with a woman called Holly, and finally she had appeared.
    ‘You’re Joss?’ she asked, as her brain kicked into gear.
    He was not meant to look like this. She had thought he was a shortish, grumpy man with thinning hair and, if not exactly a beard, then certainly sandy stubble on his chin. Joss was tall, slim, had dark, dark eyes and fine black eyebrows. His dark curly hair was threaded with silver. He looked intelligent, charismatic, like Byron or Shelley or someone, she thought, not the old Labour, Liverpool type of poet she had imagined.
    ‘Is that for me?’ She pointed at the mug.
    ‘Oh, yes...’
    He looked at the mug, then at her, his eyes lingering on hers, as if the sight of her had driven mundane thoughts from his head. Trembling with the intimacy of his gaze, she lay for a moment, letting him look at her, then shimmied herself up and took the mug from his outstretched hand, desperate to inject a sense of normality before the fantasy got out of control. She took a sip of the tea. It was still very hot.
    ‘Where’s Clare?’ she asked.
    She had meant it as a straightforward question, but somehow it came out sounding guilty.
    He smiled at her again as if he knew what she was thinking.
    ‘She’s gone to the superstore with Tom. She didn’t want to wake you...’
    He made it sound as if she would be gone a long time. Holly suddenly felt vulnerable, having lain asleep unaware that she was being discussed and watched over, and now having to make conversation with a man whom she suspected she had just fallen in love with.
    ‘So, you’re a poet...?’ she said, reminding herself that she hated poetry, particularly poetry written by men. It was nothing more than the socially acceptable expression of misogyny, she had told Robert, the last time they argued about it over the coffee machine.
    ‘Yes,’ Joss replied, ‘I write poetry.’
    She heard a voice that sounded a little like hers saying, ‘I’d love to read some of your work.’
    ‘I’ll leave you to get up,’ Joss said, ‘if you need anything, just shout, I’ll be in my office.’
    Holly lay for a while, trying to let the shock of meeting him filter away. Through the open back door she could see her jeans flapping on the line. Eventually she got up and went to retrieve the least damp pair, aware that Joss was watching from the window of the back room upstairs as she unpegged the washing in her underpants and vest. She waved at him, foolishly, and his face disappeared as the sun came out from behind a cloud and the little square of glass became a mirror of the sky. Then Tom appeared in the garden, running down the path and hurling himself at her legs. She was relieved to see Clare back.
    ‘I thought we’d all have lunch, and then we’ll take Tom down to the beach,’ Clare said, cracking eggs into a bowl, ‘spaghetti alla carbonara?’
    ‘My favourite,’ Holly said, folding up the sofa bed, ‘is there time for me to have a bath?’
    She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, annoyed that she had not had a haircut before coming down to Cornwall . She was beginning to look like a ginger version of Ruud Gullit. Since Matt had left she had been