The Men in her Life

simple question filled her with optimism. Children adapted quickly and survived. They were going to be OK.
    ‘Can I have an ice-cream?’
    He had heard the tinkle of the van in the distance seconds before she did.
    ‘OK, then,’ she smiled at him and took him by the hand.
    The ice-cream van climbed up the hill towards them on its way to the factory to fill up with its frozen cargo. Clare recognized Matt at the controls and waved him down.
    ‘One last cornet for Tom?’ she asked through the driver’s window.
    He smiled at her, switched off the engine and climbed into the back.
    ‘Where’s your white coat?’ Tom asked suspiciously.
    ‘I’m not on duty right now,’ Matt told him, ‘so this is a really special ice-cream for you.’
    He squirted a trickle of red sauce all over the white pyramid and Clare instantly regretted not having packed a spare T-shirt for Tom in their bag for the journey.
    Tom took the comet and looked at it in wonder.
    ‘I heard you were moving out,’ Matt said to Clare.
    ‘Yes. We’re going to see Ella.’
    ‘We going to MERIC A in a BIG CAR!’ Tom confirmed.
    She saw from the envy in Matt’s eyes that despite what he had written to Ella, he had not entirely got her daughter out of his system.
    ‘I’m surprised you’re still here,’ Clare said, suddenly feeling awkward.
    ‘I’m auditioning for a new band in a couple of weeks. I decided to put college off again. Don’t know whether I’ll bother...’
    ‘Oh, you should...’ Clare said immediately, feeling very middle-aged as she heard herself, ‘you’ll regret it if you don’t...’
    He gave her the arrogant, insolent look she had always found so irritating.
    ‘How’s Holly?’ he asked.
    ‘Fine, I think,’ Clare said, ‘getting married...’
    ‘Married?’
    The surprise in his voice made her look at him again.
    ‘Oh well, I’d better be on my way,’ Matt said, closing the window in front of his face, so that she was left staring for a moment at peeling transfers of lollies in all shapes and lurid colours.
    She looked down. Tom was holding his cornet solemnly in both hands as if it were a posy and he were a very conscientious page-boy.
    ‘See you around.’ Matt started the engine then pressed the button which blasted a speeded-up snatch of ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. They watched as the van chugged up the road and disappeared over the brow of the hill. And then their cab arrived.

Chapter 37

    It was Holly’s last day in the office before the wedding. They’d decided to take a week off straight after to give them time to sort their living arrangements out. Weekends were not long enough to make real progress finding a house to buy, partly because Holly refused to spend Saturday nights on Simon’s boat, and so they seemed to spend half their time on the train. Simon had suggested that they check into a hotel in Brighton for a week for what he called a working honeymoon and she had agreed on condition that a) they would have a real honeymoon in the Caribbean at Christmas and b) when he said hotel he meant the Grand.
    Holly stared out of her window, then back at her desk. Even though she would only be away for five working days, she found herself looking at everything as if for the last time, wondering whether she would see things differently when she was married. On her screen, she scrolled through a list of the ongoing projects she represented and their status. The One was now in production, Never Enough was under option to a British independent, Soul Mates was out on multiple submission... All of them were about single people in their thirties. It had never before occurred to her that agents represented their peers. She thought of her colleagues in the offices down the corridor. Serena Bean, a mother of two in her mid-forties, handled all the cooks and gardeners; Robert’s novelists were nearly all youngish gay men; Louis Gold’s screenwriters had been angry young men when he founded the agency in the Sixties, and now they were mainly self-satisfied older men who only got angry when they couldn’t find a parking space; the ancient agents’ clients were mostly literary estates.
    Holly began to wonder whether she would now find herself representing situation comedies about newlyweds. Would she, in a few years’ time, discover the next Teletubbies, or, God help her, Barney ? Would the feature films she would then be touting be aw^r-ridden dramas about middle-aged adultery starring the leading