The Men in her Life

page was the result of many drafts. She sat down to read it, then realized that she could not with Tom dancing around her, knowing somehow that reading the letter was going to be a pivotal point in her life that demanded a certain concentration and quiet space. She remembered feeling exactly the same way on her wedding day, when she arrived at the register office alone, excited, but fighting the urge to run away, wanting somehow to duck the responsibility of changing her life irrevocably.
    There was pasta sauce in the freezer. The date label said 1st May 1997. The day she had made a wish for change. Clare stared at it with a sad, ironic smile. Her wish had been granted, a hundredfold, but if she had been able to see the future then, she did not know whether she would wish it again. Like all fairy stories, the moral was not to underestimate the power of magic. Unless you locked your wish in with conditions, as she could remember doing whenever she won the pull of a wishbone or caught a falling leaf when she was a child, then your gain might well be balanced by loss. She had lost her husband, which was what she supposed the original wish had been all about, but she had lost her father too and in doing so discovered a sister. And then she had lost her sister. And then she had found her mother. It was all very peculiar. She made Tom his supper then put him to bed, holding him very tight when he gave her his good-night hug.

    Clare,
    I see you in my class that first day of term. Your hair spotlit white-gold in the shaft of sun, and your face wistfully watching the sky through plate glass, paying no attention to the notice about canteen facilities I was obliged to read to the class. How other-worldly you were, a mermaid washed inland, floundering in the dust of the city and how I longed to take you back to the sea, to set you free again. You flourished here and bore my children and suckled them on the seashore, Madonna of the Rockpools, and every time I see you now, I think of your shining hair and its affinity with the sun. Clare running along the beach, Clare hiding among the raspberry nets, Clare on the clifftop path, thinking herself unobserved, betrayed by her phosphorescent tresses.
    My love,
    Joss

    The piece of paper in Clare’s hand shook as she began to weep. She stared helplessly as tears fell on the page and the letters blurred like chalk pavement pictures in the rain. She remembered that first encounter. How he had looked directly into her eyes and she had shivered with déjà vu, as if their souls had touched before and now recognized each other. The feeling was so powerful she had not been able to meet his eyes again, and so she had stared out of the window, hearing the lazy drawl of his voice, but not what he was saying. And she remembered, as if it were a photograph, the scene on the beach that he had written about so vividly before. The first time they went out after Ella was born, the three of them together. Clare had been dazed from lack of sleep but so proud. They had meant only to go for a short walk, but it was such a beautiful evening and they had found themselves far down the beach, just wandering, holding hands, with Ella strapped to her chest in a sling. Then Ella had yelled with hunger and Clare had sat down on a rock to feed her, bathed in the golden evening sunlight, while Joss skimmed stones out to sea.
    Is that it? she asked him silently, reading the prose poem again. Is that all you thought of me? A mermaid, a Madonna, a head of golden hair.
    But perhaps it was no different from what she had thought of him. A prince who rescued her, the black curls, the lulling enchantment of his voice. Perhaps that first impression was what remained, and if it lived for ever you called it love at first sight, and if it failed, you called it infatuation.
    She thought about the terrible weeks she had nursed him through pleurisy, and the moment she had confronted him with his affair with Joni, and the pain she had suffered with the first ectopic pregnancy, and the rush to hospital with her second. She thought about the moment earlier that year when the letter arrived from University College Hospital offering Ella a place, when both of them had been such embarrassingly triumphant parents they had made their daughter’s cheeks fire. And she thought about the constant gift that was Tom. She began to weep again as memories of their life together collided in a kaleidoscope of acute pleasure and pain. And she