The Men in her Life

tell.
    ‘Don’t you mean sensual?’ Colette asked.
    ‘No, I don’t, although it is that too. It’s like really enjoying each other... and I mean really enjoying,’ she said, in case she hadn’t made it sound sexy enough.
    ‘Don’t you normally enjoy it then?’ Colette wondered.
    ‘Well, usually I’m trying so hard to be the best they’ve ever had... with Simon I can just relax...’ She saw that Colette had no idea what she had been talking about. However intimately you knew someone, Mo would say, you never knew what they did behind closed doors. For a moment Holly wondered whether Colette was a lie-back-and-think-of-England kind of girl, even though she spent half her life reading articles with titles like Ten Great Ways to Turn Him On.
    Colette lit up.
    ‘How’s Nigel in that department, then?’ Holly asked, staring at the cigarette.
    ‘Very nice, thank you,’ Colette said and blew out through her nostrils.

    ‘We’ve seen the virtues of purpose-built,’ Nigel was telling Simon, when the women returned to the table, ‘you get the garage and a downstairs loo thrown in if you’re prepared to forego a few period features...’
    ‘True enough,’ Simon said.
    Colette’s divorce was finally through and she was having to vacate the marital home she had occupied for so long. She and Nigel had decided to look for somewhere together, and Holly was glad that Simon had managed to introduce house-hunting into the conversation after the interminable talk over the first two courses about their professions. Movies, insurance, jockstraps and skin diseases. Skin diseases had won out for longer than the others because Nigel was troubled by psoriasis and Simon had recently been suffering from a very stubborn case of athlete’s foot. Apart from minor illnesses they seemed to have very little in common that you could talk about without the help of a few drinks, and they weren’t being allowed a few drinks because Colette had announced firmly as they sat down that it wasn’t fair for everyone else to get drunk because Nigel was driving.
    Holly and Simon were recent converts to househunting because that was how they now spent their weekends. They’d decided on Brighton because Simon’s boat was there and there were enough clothes shops and decent restaurants in the Lanes to keep Holly happy, as well as bowling, sleazy nightclubs and a permanent funfair. Simon talked about commuting, but Holly knew herself well enough to acknowledge that leaving a party she was enjoying in order to get herself to Victoria to catch the last train back was unrealistic, so they had decided to keep the lease on one of their flats. In the end they had tossed a fifty-pence piece and Simon’s flat had won, which was probably sensible because it was at the back of the courtyard, quieter, and had been kept in better decorative order over the years, but Holly had felt the wrench when the coin fell tails up, and she had struggled with the urge to say ‘best of three?’
    It was fun snooping round other people’s houses and laughing about their bathrooms afterwards, but they had not yet walked into one where they felt immediately at home. Mo said that you knew when you had found the place, you just knew. Even though they had seen several little terraced houses that Simon favoured, and one top-floor flat with sea view that Holly liked, neither of them had been convinced enough yet to take the next step of lobbying the other seriously.
    Mo was back from Ireland with a photograph of the pink cottage on a harbour wall that she and Eamon had bought. It seemed a miraculous trade for the two up two down in a grimy street near King’s Cross that was Eamon’s home in London .
    Everyone was moving on, Holly thought suddenly. Everyone was leaving the city and going into semi-retirement. She looked across the table at Simon, and his smile gave her strength.

    They lay in bed together chatting that night. Holly loved the chatting almost as much as the sex. It was nice just having somebody there.
    ‘Well, I can see why Colette’s always accusing me of being judgemental these days,’ Holly said.
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘Well, if you were her, you wouldn’t really want me to judge Nigel, now would you?’
    ‘He wasn’t that bad.’
    ‘Simon, he’s the sort of man who buys Lynx bodyspray...’
    ‘Do you think so?’
    One of the few minus points about Simon was that he just wouldn’t be drawn into unfair criticism.
    ‘Anyway, I think