The Men in her Life

drinking and smoking far too much and it showed. Matt! She laughed drily. How quickly guilty thoughts about him had been replaced by guilty thoughts about another man. What was wrong with her?
    Holly leant forward, suddenly noticing that there was a long line going down one side of her face in addition to the laughter lines she had become used to at the sides of her eyes. It must be the way she had slept, she told herself, pinching her cheeks, but the line did not seem to go away. It must be the mirror. But if it was the mirror, it simply meant that the line had been there for a while but her own mirror had not shown it up. It was smoking, she decided. She was getting a smoker’s face. She really was turning into Mrs Robinson, which was far more frightening than the idea of her lungs filling up with tar. It frightened her so much, her immediate thought was to have a cigarette. But she couldn’t in this clean house. Even if she stuck her head out of the window, smoke would still blow back and taint the shower curtain and Clare would be able to smell it on her breath.
    ‘Why is my life such a bloody mess,’ she thought, stepping into the bath. From the kitchen she could hear the comforting chatter of Clare and Tom cooking, and the smell of grilling bacon wafted pleasantly up, mingling with the scent of baby soap and then overwhelming it.

    ‘How do you make this, it’s completely delicious,’ Holly remarked, twirling the spaghetti round her fork. She’d once made the mistake of dating an Italian waiter from a trattoria in Soho . Unfortunately he’d become a bit possessive, so she’d packed him in, which was a pity because they did the best pasta in London, but at least she had learned how to eat spaghetti properly.
    ‘The trick is not to use too much bacon,’ Clare said, ‘it’s a flavour really, like all peasant meals, they taste better with less meat, because that’s the way they were created...’
    ‘Are you a cook, Holly?’ Joss interrupted.
    ‘Not bloody likely,’ she said, ‘I’m so useless I can’t even get two ready meals hot at the same time.’
    Holly waited for him to say something, but he did not. He was the sort of man who knew how to use silence.
    ‘When Matt was staying...’ Holly began to babble, ‘there was absolutely nothing in the fridge and so... and so…’ he was always popping out...’ her voice trailed away. Clare was concentrating on spooning pasta into Tom’s mouth. Joss was looking at her intently. She felt herself blush.
    ‘I live just south of Chinatown,’ she hurried on, trying to make up for the accidental hiatus, ‘so I eat out most of the time ‘How convenient,’ Joss said, his slow, lazy voice pronouncing every syllable, filling the harmless phrase with innuendo.
    ‘I told you about Holly’s flat,’ Clare said, rejoining the conversation, ‘it’s like a kind of dream student pad but with designer accessories. It’s wonderful...’
    ‘Not at the moment,’ Holly reminded her. ‘It’s infested with rodents, so I’ve run away to you,’ she told Joss. ‘I hope you don’t mind...’
    ‘Mind? It’s refreshing to have someone new to talk to, isn’t it Clare? We get sick of each other, don’t we?’
    ‘Yes we do,’ Clare agreed amiably enough.
    ‘Clare always agrees with everything I say,’ Joss informed Holly.
    ‘Perhaps she’s only being polite?’ Holly challenged, beginning to see what a bastard he was.
    Joss laughed. ‘How interesting,’ he said, looking from one sister to the other, ‘one cooks, the other doesn’t, one acquiesces, the other doesn’t...’
    ‘I think we’re very dissimilar,’ Holly agreed, undaunted, ‘but Clare thinks we’re quite alike.’
    Clare looked down at the table. It was always this Way when two people who didn’t know each other first met, she thought. The way they got along was by talking about the person they both knew, because that Was the only common ground. It wasn’t personal.
    ‘Salad?’ she asked.
    ‘Clare grows all our vegetables,’ Joss said.
    She didn’t know how it was that he could make that sound like a put-down.

    * * *

    ‘I hate the way that Joss makes me out to be just a little woman,’ Clare said as they pushed Tom’s buggy down to the beach together. Holly was holding a string bag with buckets in it and a long plastic spade that seemed to keep getting tangled up with her legs.
    ‘You shouldn’t let him get away with it,’ Holly said, ‘he likes sparring.’
    ‘I