The Men in her Life

the back and a bulldozer at the front. Tom’s face lit up with pleasure at finding the revered object in unfamiliar surroundings. He began to scoop up sand, frowning with concentration.
    A voice behind Clare said, ‘Shall we build a dam?’
    ‘Daddy!’
    Neither of them had been aware of Joss approaching.
    ‘Got a new guwermen, Daddy,’ Tom told him solemnly.
    ‘That’s right,’ Joss smiled and took his son’s hand and walked closer to the water’s edge looking for a suitable rivulet to block.
    ‘Here, Daddy.’
    ‘There’s no water there,’ Joss said, ‘I’m sure we can find a better place.’
    ‘No, here a very good place...’
    Men never understood that small children weren’t amenable to reason. Joss seemed to think that if he argued coherently enough, Tom would suddenly see sense and agree with his choice of location. Clare lay back in the sand, pretending not to listen.
    ‘Oh, all right then,’ Joss finally capitulated, ‘we’ll build the damn thing here...’
    ‘Tom and Daddy building dam thing,’ Tom informed his mother, which made her sit up and exchange a complicit parental smile with Joss over their child’s head. She found herself blushing, as if he had tricked her into inadvertent intimacy. She looked away quickly.
    ‘I went for a long walk,’ Joss said to her.
    ‘It’s a lovely morning.’
    He sounded on the verge of confession and she didn’t want to hear it. Especially not in front of Tom.
    ‘I was drunk last night, I was stupid...’he went on.
    Olivia couldn’t have been what he wanted in bed, then. Clare had heard so many apologies over the years, she was weary with cynicism. Silently, she frowned at Joss, nodding significantly at Tom.
    ‘I wanted to say I’m sorry,’ he continued, oblivious to her attempts at discretion.
    It made her furious that he had engineered a situation where she couldn’t be angry with him because he knew she wouldn’t want to upset Tom.
    ‘I think I’ll go for a walk myself,’ she said, jumping up, ‘will you look after him for the morning?’
    ‘Of course.’
    She walked away before either of them could see she was crying. She didn’t know whether she was crying because he still had the power to hurt her, or whether they were just tears of frustration with herself. Ella was right. It would be simple enough to leave him, so why, whenever she started to think about it, did she seem to find it so frightening? There was no need to be the humiliated wife when she could be a free and independent woman.
    From the railings that edged the sea front, she watched Tom pick a stone out of the wet sand and show it to his father. Joss knelt down to inspect it and then he stood up and skimmed it out to sea. Tom needed a father. It would not be fair on him to move away, and anyway she had no money. What she managed to earn from seasonal jam-making, odd bits of cleaning and decorating other people’s houses and two afternoons a week in Vivienne’s shop just about kept them all. She had worked so hard on the house and the garden, it would not be easy to give it up. Alone, she could not be lonelier than she already was, but there was always the nagging doubt that she would be happier. ' j
    She had always been lonely. Her favourite fairy story when she was little had been Rapunzel. The house in Hampstead had the unusual feature of battlements at the top of the stucco front, and in her room on the top floor she had often imagined that she was in a castle. Her hair was very long, and sometimes she would try hanging her plaits out of the window to see how much longer it needed to be before a prince could use it as a golden rope to scale the building and claim her. An only child of parents who loved each other so passionately there seemed to be no love left over for her, she had dreamed of being rescued by someone who would be just hers. Years later, the moment she saw Joss with his dark curls and his sparkling eyes, her first thought had been that he looked like a prince in a book, and her fingers had automatically started twirling the long golden hair that fell around her shoulders, wondering if fairy stories really did come true.
    There were still moments with Joss that glittered, then disappeared like shooting stars, tantalizing her with the thought that things might be as they were again, and making her believe that it was only her lack of understanding, or generosity, that had failed them.
    In the distance Tom picked up another stone and threw it