The Men in her Life

stepped out of the carriage.
    Undergound, London was more or less the same as it had been when she and Jack had arrived at the beginning of the Sixties. The escalators and ticket halls were all in the same places. The adverts were different now, of course. Bolder, funnier and that was partly down to Jack. He’d seen the potential of it like nobody else, probably because he and Mo had come down from Manchester , where there was no underground. It’s the ultimate captive audience, he’d explained one evening, rehearsing a campaign strategy for her as she ironed his shirt for the next day: you’ve got bored people, half-asleep, who want a bit of entertainment. If you can engage them, make them laugh, they’re going to like you.
    Jack was good at getting people to like him. Jack was the man who put a strawberry on the bowl of cereal in the picture on the packet. Nobody really eats their cornflakes with strawberries, he’d said, but then nobody has a sunny balcony where they have their breakfast either. The point is they like to think that one day they will attain that sort of life, and in the meantime, they can afford to have the cereal that goes with it.
    Above ground, London had changed. The depart ment store where Mo had first worked was now a mall with neon lights, artificial palms in pots and the same shops that appeared in every mall all over the country. Tie Rack, Next, Gap. You could buy the same here as you could in Manchester , which seemed a bit sad to Mo although she wasn’t sure why. She always felt nostalgic when she walked past the place that had been Bourne and Hollingsworth. It hadn’t been much of a job, demonstrating worksavers for the kitchen, but she had been so excited to get it, and there had been plum crumble and custard in the staff canteen.
    Now, what on earth had made her remember that? Mo shook her shoulders, trying to pull herself together. Jack was dead and all she seemed to be able to concentrate on were silly things. Plum crumble! Jack was dead. It couldn’t be true, could it? She wanted to stop someone and ask them, am I dreaming? There were crowds of young people and they all seemed to be talking into mobile phones. They wouldn’t know. They would think she had gone mad.
    Mo turned off Oxford Street and walked through Soho Square . The tall trees made it very dark. The square had always frightened her, she didn’t know why. She remembered running across it, hearing the clatter of her steps echoing round the deserted office buildings, reaching the top of Greek Street breathless and relieved, as if it were home in a game of dare she played with herself. Now she walked calmly, but she could still feel her heart racing at the slightest movement in the shadows.
    Soho had changed. Better really. It was full of cafes that smelled of freshly-ground coffee and sold cakes that made you fat just looking at them. No more porn shops and dodgy-looking derelicts in raincoats. Just beautiful young men these days and restaurants. Mo stopped at the end of the street where she and Jack had lived. It was a tiny street. Most people never noticed it even if they walked past every day. They had a room with bare boards, a bed and a Baby Belling, but you could squeeze out of the window into the gulleys between the pitched roofs and see all the tops of the theatres. It was a make-believe life. They had pretended to the landlady that they were married. They had pretended to be warm when they had no money for the meter. They had pretended not to hear the mice a1 night. But they had been happy. She had, anyway. She had never known when the exact moment was that Jack had decided to go nor how long he had lived with her, making love to her, knowing he was going to be leaving. It was something she always meant to ask him later, but never quite got up the courage. It would have been worse to hear that he didn’t remember, and she wasn’t sure whether she would have trusted his answer if he did. And now she would never know. Mo stared up through the orange vapour of neon into the darkness. The building was still there but you couldn’t see their window. It was at the back. Perhaps it wasn’t there at all, she thought. Perhaps she had made that up too.
    Mo crossed Shaftesbury Avenue and walked through Chinatown , breathing in the steam of broth and the wafts of hot air perfumed with five-spice. There were so many people milling around these days. At the beginning of the Sixties there had only been a couple