The Men in her Life

though completely different from Philippa’s, also frowned on displays of emotion, especially from men. Perhaps that explained his great attraction to Philippa and their hunger for each other’s bodies, which had been so obvious and so excluding. And maybe the reason Clare had dreamed of being swept off her feet by a handsome prince long after she had grown too old for fairy stories was because that was what she had witnessed all through her childhood, Jack scooping Philippa up and their bedroom door closing behind them, and that other sound, which the house had lost, the sound of her parents making love.
    In the morning Clare felt as if sleep had unravelled the tight coils of anxiety in her brain and made it calm and smooth again. She had a moment of panic when she found Tom no longer beside her, but then she heard his chattering voice coming from downstairs. Philippa was already sitting at the breakfast table trying to feed him his cereal. She had a large box of tissues beside her, and one in her hand to dab immediately at the splashes of milk caused by the entry of Tom’s spoon into the bowl at high velocity. Tom was still in his pyjamas and his face and chest was covered in softened Weetabix.
    ‘You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ Clare asked him, planting a kiss on top of his head.
    ‘This is how you make a sandcastle,’ Tom demonstrated.
    ‘We thought we’d let you sleep,’ Philippa said.
    ‘What’s the time?’
    ‘Nearly ten o’clock.’
    ‘That’s the longest lie-in I’ve had for two and a half years!’
    Philippa looked pleased. White hair suited her, Clare decided. It made her face softer. She hoped that she would not dye it again, but she did not think that they were yet friends enough to tell her that. There would always be some boundaries best left uncrossed.
    ‘About the money,’ Philippa said with a kind of determination Clare knew it was going to be impossible to deflect, even if she wanted to.
    ‘Yes?’ She felt light today, refreshed by her sleep.
    ‘Why don’t we go to the bank today and sort something out for the interim...’
    ‘For the interim?’ Clare repeated suspiciously.
    Surely her mother was not now going to impose conditions, not after all that had passed between them the day before?
    ‘Well, I don’t want to load you up with the lot before you’re divorced... you are going to get divorced?’
    Clare looked significantly at Tom, but then saw that Philippa had chosen her words well. Tom did not know what divorce was yet. She had not mentioned his father’s name.
    ‘Yes I am,’ she said.
    Curiously, her mother’s determination filled her with courage. She had been dreading facing Joss.
    ‘I don’t want him having a claim on it,’ Philippa said, ‘and Jack would be appalled...’
    ‘He hated him, didn’t he?’ Clare asked, sitting down beside her son, idly spooning some of the contents of his bowl into her mouth out of habit.
    ‘He did. He didn’t think he was good enough for you... but of course, no man ever thinks that anyone is good enough for their daughter. My father was the same, although he did acknowledge that Jack was very clever...’
    Philippa’s father had died when Clare was a baby. She had never known him. The wedding picture had him looking very straight and stem, but Clare had always assumed that that was his formal pose for photographs. He had been an ambassador. There was a portrait of him looking just the same in Philippa’s office. There were so many things she did not know about her mother that she now wanted to learn about. She was intrigued by the knowledge that Philippa’s father had disapproved of her shotgun wedding, and by the realization that she herself had slipped into another family pattern without even knowing it. How strange it was that families seemed not to learn from past mistakes but to repeat them endlessly.
    ‘I think Jack always believed that you would come home and throw yourself on his mercy, you know... sounds so Victorian, doesn’t it? If you had, he would have been kindness itself, you know... but of course you were just as proud as he was...’
    ‘Yes, I know that now,’ Clare said, ‘and I regret it,’ she added.
    Philippa looked up at her with great gratitude in her
    eyes.
    ‘You will take some money?’ she asked.
    The money had become hugely symbolic to both of them, Clare realized. To refuse it now would give it far too much significance.
    ‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, trying