The Men in her Life

street outside, dreaming that one day a prince would come to rescue her ...’
    Holly stopped reading and smiled broadly.
    ‘I love this beginning,’ she announced.
    Ginger looked relieved.
    ‘Any other weekend, I’d read it straight away, but I just don’t think I’ll be able...’ Holly began to apologize.
    ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Ginger said, standing up, ‘I don’t care when you read it. It’s enough for me to have handed it over... well, almost enough. I’m so pleased you were here. It had to be you, you see, because you gave me the idea... and Charlie says you’re the best agent of your generation... God, he’s so pompous sometimes... so I sort of can’t wait to know what you think, but now that I’ve handed it over, at least I feel it’s real... it’s been such a struggle...’ She paused for a moment. ‘Do you think I know you well enough for me to give you a piece of advice on the eve of your wedding?’ she asked, only semi-joking.
    ‘I need all the advice I can get...’ Holly told her.
    ‘Make sure that you’ve done everything you want to before you start having these...’
    Ginger pointed at her children’s heads.
    ‘They’re lovely, but they’re all-consuming and your brain turns to fluff, and you kind of lose confidence about doing anything else...’
    If this was Ginger with a fluffy brain and no confidence, what on earth had she been like before she had children, Holly wondered.
    ‘Charlie sends you his best,’ Ginger remembered at the door to Holly’s office, ‘and says he wants lunch. Oh, and have a lovely day tomorrow!’

    ‘So, how’s the man in your life?’ Danny asked.
    It was the moment she’d been waiting for.
    ‘I’m marrying him tomorrow...’ she said, smiling triumphantly at her hairdresser in the mirror.
    ‘Oh, that’s nice. So you eventually decided to tie the knot?’
    Eventually? We only started bonking a month ago, she wanted to say, realizing aghast that he asked the same question of every woman whose hair he styled and never even listened to their answers. She could have told him that she and Ralph Fiennes were getting spliced and he would have said oh, that’s nice, so you eventually decided to tie the knot, and the next time she got her hair cut he would ask, so, how’s the man in your life?
    Or was it possible that Danny was really psychic, as he always claimed, and he had known, just as many other people seemed to have known, that Simon was the perfect man for her?
    ‘Very nice,’ she said as he held up a hand mirror so that she could see the back of her head. She’d asked him to do a kind of Thirties bob because she was growing her hair and she thought it would look better with her dress than the untidy dreadlocks that seemed to be her hair’s natural state. He’d done an OK job, but she wondered why she always said very nice when the only time she had really liked her haircut was the day she’d had it all cut off. It was just what you said at the hairdresser. Somebody should record a loop of tape that you could slot in as soon as the hairdresser started cutting, which would blurt out meaningless dialogue while you relaxed:
    ‘How’s the man in your life? ... We’re getting married... Oh, that’s nice, so you eventually decided to tie the knot... Going anywhere nice on holiday this year? ... St Lucia , how about you? ... We thought we’d try Tunisia ... Is that OK? ... Very nice.’
    It would mean you could read in peace while he concentrated on snipping. Holly was dying to get back to Ginger’s script, but tradition demanded that she try to be as beautiful as possible by the next day and Colette’s wedding present to her was a Pampering Experience at the Sanctuary and she was already half an hour late.
    Holly couldn’t face an hour’s guilt-inducing talk about T bars and clogged pores so she cancelled the facial booked in her name and decided to spend the time reading the script, lying in a white towelling dressing-gown beside a pool filled with koi carp.
    It was the most wonderful feeling to discover a new writer. Holly could go for months reading scripts without finding anything that gave her that buzz, and she would begin to wonder whether she was being too critical, or whether her luck had failed her, then suddenly a script would simply jump off the page, and she would know with certainty that she was onto something. She often thought that the only skill required to be a good agent was patience. In quiet times you