The Men in her Life

got back yesterday,’ Philippa said apologetically.
    Her mother had called the night before, asking if Clare could come up to London straight away.
    ‘Why the rush?’ Clare asked.
    ‘I wanted to see you...’ her mother faltered.
    Clare wrestled with the adolescent rage rising in her body. It was so typical of her mother to think only of her own needs, and yet she appeared to have changed. The woman Clare had last spoken to on the day of the funeral would never have let her hair go grey.
    ‘Is there a supermarket?’ Clare tried to remember what was on Hampstead High Street. She could recall clothes shops, booksellers, coffee bars, but no food shops.
    ‘I thought we could go out...’ Philippa said.
    ‘But Tom’s too tired to go to a restaurant...’
    ‘Of course he is,’ Philippa said, defeatedly.
    ‘I’ll pop out,’ Clare said, finding herself unable to be cross with her.
    ‘Just a minute...’ Philippa said, walking through to the hall, ‘they’re always dropping stuff through the door about pizza delivery. Does he like pizza?’
    ‘Pizza, pizza, pizza,’ Tom jumped up and down.
    ‘There’s your answer,’ Clare said.
    When he heard that a man on a motor bike was going to bring the pizza round, Tom insisted on sitting on the doorstep to wait for him. Later, as they ate slices with their fingers, Tom declared it was the best food in the whole world, which Clare found slightly galling.
    ‘Which bit do you like best?’ Philippa asked, pointing at the pieces of olive and sausage and mushroom.
    Tom gave the question due consideration.
    ‘The big box,’ he said.
    Clare put Tom in the middle of the large double bed where she would be sleeping too, then made a moat of pillows all around the edge.
    ‘Why are we sleeping in Grandma’s house?’ he asked.
    ‘We’re having a holiday,’ Clare told him.
    ‘But why?’
    Before Clare could think up a suitable answer, he was asleep.
    She left the door open so that she could hear if he woke up, but blocked it with two chairs so that he could not go exploring the unfamiliar house in his sleep, then she went downstairs.
    In the huge back room with its wall of glass that overlooked the garden, Philippa was drinking a tall glass of something clear and fizzy.
    ‘Can I have one of those?’ Clare asked.
    ‘Of course. It’s just water... I gave up drinking alcohol in Seville .’
    Clare raised an eyebrow.
    ‘The quantities I needed to deaden the pain seemed to make the pain worse the morning after,’ Philippa laughed shortly.
    Clare poured herself gin from a bottle in a cupboard full of bottles in the kitchen, and plopped ice-cubes in from the dispenser in the fridge. There was no tonic water. She topped up the spirit with mineral water.
    ‘I’ve phoned Lucinda. She’s going to do a shop tomorrow and cook us something wonderful...’ Philippa called.
    ‘Oh, really, I can do that,’ Clare began to protest.
    ‘No, you are my guests...’
    ‘We’re your daughter and grandson...’ Clare walked back into the dining-room.
    The familiar pattern of argument was beginning to assert itself again.
    ‘Do you know how difficult it is to indulge you?’ Philippa asked her, half-exasperated, half-teasing.
    Curiously, Clare felt more comfortable now that they were back at the point of a row. The sad, repentant Philippa terrified her far more than the sharply aggressive one. She smiled at her and sat down on a large sofa opposite the one where her mother was sitting.
    ‘What did you do in Spain ?’ she asked her.
    ‘Nothing. I don’t really know. Just existed, I suppose... I did a lot of thinking. I learned quite a lot about Spanish history, as a matter of fact. Have you ever been?’
    ‘No. I’ve always wanted to.’
    ‘I never understood the pure pleasure of learning,’ Philippa turned and looked out into the garden. ‘I suppose when I was at university I saw it only as a means to an end. It can be very distracting...’
    ‘How do you feel now, I mean, about... about Jack?’ Clare asked.
    One of them had to mention his name sooner or later. She hadn’t thought it would be her.
    ‘Just as raw as I ever did... I wake up sometimes feeling fine and then suddenly I remember and I’m choked... what about you?’
    Clare was surprised by the question. She had never felt included in her parents’ life, nor in his death.
    ‘I cried a lot last week. I just couldn’t seem to stop myself,’ she admitted, ‘and I think maybe some of it was for him. I