The Men in her Life

like pennies in a moneybox. They had both been swept off their feet — someday my prince will come — by the first man who had taken any notice of them.
    ‘Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down...’
    It didn’t seem to matter that the person in question was a public-school twit called James Hewitt. Clare began to cry again.
    Then the phone rang and Ella’s voice said, ‘Mum? Are you all right?’
    Clare couldn’t really speak, and then Ella was crying and Clare cradled the phone next to her ear, the hard plastic a poor substitute for her daughter’s shoulder.
    ‘I just feel so strange,’ Ella was saying, ‘I keep crying... I miss you so much...’

    * * *

    Clare went up to bed without saying anything to them when they returned. Holly sat down in the vacated sofa, and Joss slumped next to her. She tried to remember how much cider she had drunk. Was it three pints or four? It was much stronger than she had thought, anyway. Staring at the screen, she began to imagine all the news researchers in the country scrolling through their Psions desperate for another celebrity who had shaken Diana’s hand who might not have already been grabbed for a sound bite to camera, or, even better, a fawning debate about Diana’s qualities as a mother, ambassador and saint.
    ‘How do you think she’ll be remembered?’ the presenters asked, again and again, striving each time to make it sound like an original question that had just occurred to them.
    ‘Elton John’ll be singing “Candle in the Wind” at the funeral before we know it,’ Holly joked.
    Emerging from the blur of scrumpy, she was beginning to be slightly appalled at the blackness of her own humour. It was as if she and Joss had set up in competition to see who could make the wittiest remark about the day’s tragedy. Worse, she knew that she was only doing it to impress him. She felt Joss’s arm along the back of the sofa behind her. Was this the beginning of a pass and how was she going to respond, or was it just a tall man having to stretch his arms? Slowly she turned to look at his profile. He was staring at the screen. Then suddenly he got up and said, ‘I think I’ll go to bed now. Sleep well.’
    The television screen showed a montage of images of the Princess, ending with her coffin being taken off the Plane at Northolt. On the A40 into London people stopped their cars to watch the hearse go past. This was no ordinary tragedy, Holly realized, it was history. The country was in shock, and yet here in this house in Cornwall three people were acting out a Pinteresque play only connected to the rest of the world by the flicker of a television screen. One part of her desperately wanted to return to London , where she could feel the heartbeat of the nation. Here, in this remote corner of Britain , she had lost all sense of how to behave.

    As the strange, unreal week between death and funeral unfolded, the little house became claustrophobic with the palpable tension between Clare and Joss. He worked in his office most of the day, only venturing downstairs to glare silently at Clare and make himself a sandwich. Clare was untouchable in her mourning. There was a distractedness about the way she cooked and gardened, as if she was lost.
    Holly fell into the routine of taking Tom out each day. A little way along the beach, beneath the cliffs, there were rock pools which became sources of endless fascination for Tom and for her. She discovered how relaxing it was to pass time just looking at water — the vast and ever-changing sea, or the tiny world of a sea-water pond with its fronds of lime green seaweed waving and tiny crabs scuttling away from Tom’s curious fingers. For the first day or two she felt almost guilty to be so unoccupied, having no scripts to read, phone calls to make, nothing to do except amuse an easily pleased little boy. She stayed out of the house as long as she could, treating Tom to all the cheap plastic toys and ice-cream and chips he wanted.
    Clare and Joss were obviously on the brink of splitting up, the distance between them exposed by the freak death of a woman that neither of them had known. It was horrible being a bystander in the domestic drama, her only role to indulge the child. In the evenings she would sit in the kitchen pretending to read the newspaper as Joss and Clare sat in tense silence, or bickered with one another.
    The news was no longer the Princess’s death, but the depth of