The Men in her Life

They kept showing the clip of the Princess and the hoys on the water chute at Thorpe Park . She looked so animated by her laughter and yet she was dead. The Royal Family looked dead, ossified in another time with different values, and yet, ironically, they were alive.

    * * *

    Holly was walking along the near-deserted sea front when she heard a muffled cry of her name. She looked around and saw Tom and Joss, their faces pressed up against the glass, sitting in the window of one of the little cafes that spewed out a vapour of deep-fat frying. The smell reminded Holly of her office.
    ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer,’ Holly said, joining them at a formica table and picking one of Tom’s chips off his plate.
    ‘Put that back,’ Tom ordered. He had a fat plastic tomato of vinegar-diluted ketchup in both hands and was endeavouring with huge concentration to swamp his chips in it.
    Holly popped it into her mouth defiantly.
    ‘Where’s it gone?’ Tom asked.
    ‘Where d’you think? I’m eating it. What do you do with chips?’
    ‘I seeing if they swim,’ Tom announced, ‘Daddy say that fish do swim.’
    His eyes went from hers to the remains of a piece of battered cod on his father’s plate as if to say, and you think I’m the one who’s being silly?
    ‘Do you think the Royal Family did it?’ Joss asked as she sat down.
    Holly found it easier to watch Tom’s antics than to meet his eyes.
    ‘Organized a car accident? Nah. They’re too incompetent. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested...’
    ‘I’m interested in news, not in sentimentality,’ Joss retaliated, but it sounded a bit lame.
    Holly laughed.
    ‘Of course you are,’ she said, congratulating herself on a hit. You see, she thought confidently, I do know how to deal with bastards.
    It began to rain.
    Joss went up to the counter and ordered an ice-cream for Tom. He came back with coffee for Holly and the Cornish pasty she had selected from the heavy leatherette-bound menu.
    ‘Tom likes anything with red sauce on it,’ Joss said, looking at the cascade of raspberry-flavour topping on the sundae.
    Holly took a bite of her pasty, made a face, then washed it down with a mouthful of bitter coffee.
    ‘Well, that’s nice,’ she said, ‘to know that there are still things you can rely on, like soggy Cornish pasties that taste of flour and pepper and cubes of not-quite cooked potato. You couldn’t get this in London , you know,’ she pointed with her fork at her plate, ‘first of all it would be called a filo pastry parcel and it would be full of char-grilled vegetables. I’m so tired of the renaissance of British cooking, aren’t you?’
    ‘It doesn’t interest me,’ Joss said, coldly.
    OK, round two to you, Holly thought.
    It was still drizzling as they wandered across the beach. The tide was out and the sand undulated with even ripples.
    ‘How does it go like that?’ Holly wanted to know, ‘so uniform...?’
    ‘Sometimes nature is very ordered,’ Joss replied.
    Tom ran on ahead, shouting. One minute he was a plane, the next a train.
    ‘What are those little squiggles?’ Holly asked, bending over to point at the sand.
    ‘They’re lugworm holes,’ Joss crouched down in front of her, ‘if you dug down a bit you’d find one.’
    His face was very close to hers and, in the cold damp air, she felt the warm puff of his breath in her eyes.
    ‘Do you want to?’ he asked.
    She met his eyes and was unable to remember what the question referred to. Then she stood up quickly and walked on.
    ‘Brrmmm,’ Tom came racing back to her and fell in the wet sand at her feet.
    ‘What are you now?’ she asked him.
    ‘I’m a car crash,’ he said.

    Joss and Holly went to the pub for the evening. Clare stayed at home, glued to the documentary tribute to Diana. There were clips from the famous confessional Panorama interview. She remembered the first time round when Joss had mocked Diana’s wide-open panda eyes and muted voice. She had sat watching the screen, wishing he would stop, but not daring to say anything, because of the diatribe that was bound to follow. Like thousands of other women who had been humiliated by their husbands when they were at their weakest, she knew what Diana had suffered, and, just fleetingly, far too embarrassed ever to admit it, she had wanted to be her friend.
    In some ways their lives had been similar, Clare thought now. They had both lived unhappy childhoods in large houses where they rattled around