The Men in her Life

public feeling. Queues of people waited for hours to sign books of condolence. All over the country in shopping malls that Diana had opened, hospitals that she had visited, leisure centres and department stores, little shrines were laid to her memory with candles and flowers wrapped in cellophane. The aerial photographs of Kensington Palace reminded Holly of the swathes of land in the Canaries where they grew tomatoes under plastic. She could not understand why anyone would want to sign a book of condolence. Or write a message on a card. Or pay over the odds for a mixed bunch of horrid spray carnations that would wither and die in a heap of rotting blossom and plastic. But she looked at her sister, her eyes emptied by genuine grief, and she realized with shock that it was she herself who was out of sync with everyone else. To Holly, Diana was the woman who had made it all right for tall girls to wear high heels. She thought she’d done a lot of good for AIDS and land-mine awareness, and she was grateful to her for that, but that was about as far as her emotions went.

    On the Thursday afternoon, Clare went into the garden and saw that the sweet peas were at their best. She cut a small bunch and was about to put them in a vase on the kitchen table, then changed her mind. Stealthily, she left the house and walked up the hill towards the cliff path. Checking that nobody could see her, she put down the flowers on the grassy hillock where she and Ella sometimes used to sit, chatting and looking out to sea. Then she closed her eyes and said out loud, but softly, ‘Dear Diana, I wish you had known how much people loved you and how much all the good things you did meant to them. I wish you had had a happier life.’
    As she opened her eyes, a wind picked up the frail blooms and carried them bowling over the turf to the cliff’s edge where they remained for seconds caught in a tuft of longer grass, as if saying goodbye, and then a gust of wind carried them out over the sea.

    On Friday evening, Joss announced that he had written a poem called ‘ Sea of Cellophane ’.
    ‘That’s so typical of you,’ Clare snapped at him, ‘you write, you don’t feel. You’ve always done that...’
    ‘What?’ he asked.
    Sometimes his voice was like a knife, and he used it to terrorize, Holly thought. He liked people to adore him or fear him. He lived on extremes.
    ‘You write because you have no compassion. You’re a voyeur. Actually you’re no better than the bloody paparazzi...’ Clare said to him, shaking with her bravery which seemed to render Joss incapable of speech.
    ‘It’s the messages I think are so funny,’ Holly said, trying to defuse another argument. ‘I mean who on earth do they think is going to read them? “Dear Diana, you will stay for ever in our hearts.” Do they really think she’s looking down from heaven?’
    ‘It’s just a simple human need to do something,’ Clare spat at her, ‘why do you have to be so dismissive about it?’
    ‘ “Diana and Dodi, now you can be at peace together”... probably from the same people who last week were saying, “Surely she could do better than that Arab playboy...” ’
    ‘Honestly,’ Clare said, getting up to leave the room.
    ‘I wish I had a flower shop right now, that’s all I can say,’ Holly said.
    ‘I wish it was all you would say,’ Clare suddenly shouted.
    If Colette had said such a thing, or even Mo, Holly wouldn’t have been in the least bit shocked, but Clare didn’t say things like that. Holly stared as her sister marched upstairs, her face quivering with unrepentant determination. The phone rang. Joss picked it up and handed it to her.
    ‘There is a smell!’ Simon’s familiar, unneurotic voice brought homesick tears to Holly’s eyes.
    ‘Hooray.’
    ‘No, not hooray, it is the worst smell I have ever smelled. Colin says it will dissipate in ten days, but I wouldn’t advise you coming back before then...’
    ‘Colin?’
    ‘Our friend in pest control.’
    ‘But I want to come back,’ Holly said. ‘It can’t be that bad...’
    ‘No, Holly, I’m telling you, it is really bad...’
    ‘The rat is dead,’ Holly told Joss solemnly as she put down the phone.
    ‘Are you going to open a condolence book?’ Joss asked.
    She looked at him as sternly as she could, and then she felt the effort of being cross and the tension of the whole week welling up behind her face and she couldn’t seem to stop it bursting through in