The Men in her Life

Colette’s madly jealous of me,’ Holly said with great satisfaction as Simon switched off the light next to the bed later that night.
    ‘You say that as if you’re pleased.’
    "Course I’m pleased. There’s almost nothing nicer than the jealousy of your best friend.’
    ‘How can you say you’re best friends, when you’re so nasty about her behind her back?’ Simon said.
    ‘You can do that with best friends. In fact it’s a measure of your friendship how horrible you can be, and still be best friends...’
    In the darkness, she heard Simon sigh. She thought she might have heard him mutter ‘Women!’ under his breath, but she told herself she hadn’t. ‘Have you ever muttered “Women!” under your breath?’ would be one of her make-or-break questions.
    There had been a time when Holly could drink coffee before bedtime and still fall fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, but recently she had noticed that if she forgot to say ‘decaffeinated’ before ‘double espresso’ she was awake half the night. It was another thing she probably ought to give up. Her list of sins was becoming so short she could hardly dignify it with the term list any more. Smoking, no. Well, not really. You couldn’t count a puff on Colette’s Silk Cut just before re-entering the restaurant. ‘Exhale,’ Colette had reminded her, before pushing open the door. That was the sort of thing that made someone your best friend, Holly thought, although she couldn’t see how to explain that to Simon. Excessive alcohol consumption, no. Even though there had been occasions that evening when Holly would have welcomed the freedom of speech that several very dry Martinis would have given her, she was glad that she had stuck to a couple of glasses of wine. Sleeping around, of course not. Not that she had exactly slept around before, Holly reminded herself, but that was more through lack of opportunity than restraint. It was amazing how easily you could give up all these things when you were happy, she thought, unable to resist doing a quick happiness calculation.
    Work: 8. So it wasn’t everything she wanted, so what?
    Family: 8. She was friends with Mo again which felt much better, but Mo was going to live a long way away, and there was still the residual guilt about Clare.
    Flat: 9. It had never been 10 since the rat, but now that she was leaving it she had become prematurely nostalgic.
    Men: 8, almost 9. She loved Simon dearly and he was great in bed and she thought that one day she might feel passionate, but in the meantime, it was lovely.
    Friends: 10. Technically she didn’t know whether she could still count Simon as a friend, but she decided to anyway, because he was.
    Holly did the mental arithmetic. Eighty-six per cent. Higher than it had ever been. And that was if she counted Simon as 8 not 9 in the men stakes. By settling for second best she hadn’t just levelled out, but had actually given herself a ten per cent rise in happiness. Amazing, she thought, smiling to herself. Perhaps she should write an article for Cosmopolitan, with pseudoscientific graphs and bullet points, call it something like ‘Why Settling Down is Really Settling Up’. She turned over and drifted pleasantly into sleep.

Chapter 36

    The weeds had already begun to take over the garden and some of the vegetables had gone to seed. How quickly nature reclaimed what was hers, Clare thought, absently deadheading the last of the yellow roses as she fumbled in her bag for the key.
    ‘Are we going to see Daddy?’ Tom asked.
    ‘No. Not today. Daddy’s gone on his holidays,’ she hated herself for lying to him, ‘and we’re going too. We’re going to America to see Ella...’
    ‘Oh.’
    She waited for him to say ‘That OK, then,’ but this time he did not. Children had favourite little not-quite-correct sayings that they repeated for days, or weeks. Then one day for no apparent reason they just stopped and moved onto something else and it was the adults who missed the phrases that had become part of the family’s vocabulary, and who wished that they had recorded that little bit of development before it vanished without warning.
    Clare stroked her son’s dark gold curls, wondering what went on inside his angelic head. Did he have any sense of time? Did he know that Daddy had been away longer now than he ever had before? Would the conscious part of his mind forget one day that he had once had a daddy who chased him along the beach and