The Men in her Life

just had to trust that good things would come to you and that you would recognize them when you saw them. It was tempting to clutch at perfectly acceptable but ordinary scripts and try to build them into something special, but it never worked. The writer either had a voice, or they didn’t. Ginger did. A brilliantly funny and honest voice.
    There were moments when the story was uncannily like Holly’s own and she shifted around uncomfortably on her padded leather bench as it became increasingly clear that the working-class sister was going to sleep with the upper-class sister’s husband. But there were a series of deftly handled mishaps before the moment, a couple of which made Holly laugh out loud, which was something you didn’t do in the Sanctuary. She was three-quarters of the way through when she looked at her watch and realized that she was going to miss her massage if she didn’t stop reading immediately, and she knew that she couldn’t do that and look Colette in the face that evening. Holly locked the script in her locker and made her way to the treatment rooms. At least with massage you could pretend to fall asleep to stop the masseuse talking to you.

    What did you wear to your husband’s glittering premiere when your husband was dead and one of the major themes of the film was the gaping divide between rich and poor in today’s society? For the hundredth time, Philippa wondered whether she had been right to agree to the premiere. However hard she tried to work out what Jack would have made of it, she could not decide. Sometimes she visualized him thinking that the whole thing was a great kitsch joke. He’d always had a fascination with tacky glamour, and nothing delighted him more than rubbing shoulders with the stars of catwalk and soap opera at Hollywood fund-raisers. At other times, she could see him raging with indignity at the trivialization of his work. The worst thing was not knowing, not being able to tell what his reaction would have been. It was as if he were slipping away from her.
    She decided on black, then changed her mind to navy, not wanting the premiere to look like a memorial service, then she wondered about purple, but it was so unflattering, especially in colder weather. She decided to go to her favourite department store and have a mooch round Ladies’ Fashions. It was the first time for as long as she could remember that she did not know exactly the shapes and colours of the season.
    Wandering through the designer rooms, she recognized the assistant who’d been so kind to her the last time she had shopped there, and smiled at her. A flicker of alarm passed across the woman’s face. Philippa remembered how distraught she had been when she was last there. Then the woman smiled back cautiously.
    ‘Can I help you?’ Mo asked.
    ‘I wonder if you could?’ Philippa replied, ‘I’ve got an event. I need to be smart but not glamorous. I suppose a dress and jacket. I don’t really want black, not just black anyway... I don’t really know what I want...’ Mo realized immediately that her customer was buying something for Jack’s premiere. She struggled with the impulse to thank her for the invitation she had received via Holly. She had declined it formally, but she wanted Philippa to know how grateful she had been. But all that was in the past now. She had a new life.
    Eamon would not have objected if she had wanted to go, but she knew with absolute certainty that Jack would. It made Mo sad that the secret he had kept for so long from the woman in front of her had come out in the way that it had, sadder still that Philippa had turned out to be more forgiving than Jack had credited. To invite Holly to the film premiere was one thing, but to include Mo as well, that showed real class. All the times she had nagged him to be honest flooded through Mo’s mind, and his response:
    ‘She would never forgive me. No, I’m sorry, Mo, you don’t know Philippa. What’s the point? Everyone’s happy this way...’
    He was such a good persuader, it had taken her a long time to work out that no, everyone was not happy. He was happy. Everyone else in the equation was being deceived. But she had never been able to find a way of winning the argument. And if she was really honest with herself, half of her had wanted him to tell Philippa in the hope that she would kick him out, and Jack would finally come home to her.
    Now she looked at Philippa with her shock of white hair and had the