The Men in her Life

of Chinese restaurants. Nowadays, people casually dropped fifty pounds for a meal for two. Then it had been an event. She remembered precisely the moment she had savoured her first morsel of sweet and sour pork, her surprised remark that it tasted like jam and vinegar. Then the look of dismay on Jack’s face as his colleagues from the agency sniggered into their chop suey. It was one of those moments of acute embarrassment when she had wondered how it was that Jack just knew what to say and she hadn’t a clue. Years later, she had felt a tiny jolt of triumph when she discovered from a recipe in Woman magazine that her guess about the ingredients had been almost exactly right.
    Mo stopped walking, shaking with shame and anger as she stared at the bundles of pak choi outside a Chinese grocer’s shop. Why couldn’t he have stuck by her about the sweet and sour pork? He was always Pulling rank with his bloody working-class background, but truth be told he hadn’t been able to leave it behind fast enough.
    He had said sorry, she reminded herself, breathing deeply, trying to calm herself as she continued on down Wardour Street . Sorry for the way he had behaved, but not until years later. And she had replied that it was all right, she understood. But now she regretted giving him a blanket of absolution to cover all the little wounds he had inflicted so casually, which had taken so long to heal. And she was angry with herself for being so weak, even though it didn’t matter any more.
    ‘I wish I’d shouted at him. I wish I’d given him bloody hell,’ Mo said as Holly let her into the flat. She sat down on a hard kitchen chair, her handbag on her lap.
    Holly was taken aback. It wasn’t like Mo to swear.
    ‘I wish you’d told me he died,’ Holly said quietly, sitting down opposite her.
    Both held their backs stiffly upright, as if trying to make their bodies impenetrable against pain.
    ‘I didn’t know until the ten o’clock news...’
    ‘Not now, I don’t mean today,’ Holly said impatiently. ‘Then. When I was little. I wish you’d told me he was dead...’
    ‘I thought about it,’ Mo admitted, ‘it just didn’t seem right.’
    Holly shot an infuriated glance at her mother, but seeing how pale she was, how debilitated, she felt the tension of anger subside. It was Mo’s loss too, she reminded herself. She got up to put on a kettle. She wasn’t sure she had a tea bag in the house, but she needed something to do, some ritual to perform. They couldn’t just sit there.
    ‘I used to make up the dad I wanted,’ Holly said, turning on the tap, ‘he was always changing when I discovered something more exciting for him to do… one week he would be an astronaut, the next a film director. And then I met him. And then he became a bloody film director. I could never get over that. Sometimes it was like I had really made him up... and now it doesn’t seem like he ever existed really. I hear about his death along with millions of other people and I’m there on television like bloody Forrest Gump appearing in a bit of newsreel as a bystander to a historical event...’ Her voice, which had been calm and controlled, began to wobble. She stretched her hand behind her and Mo took it.
    ‘I didn’t want to lie to you,’ Mo told her, ‘and there was always that chance that I’d run into him or you would...’
    Jack had left Mo just before Christmas 1960, the Christmas she had spent crying and wandering by the river trying to decide whether to jump in. He had appeared in her life again at Christmas eleven years later.
    She was working in Children’s Clothes. They’d moved her up from Haberdashery because they were short-staffed. She had often wondered whether she would have set eyes on him again if she had stayed at her usual counter. She couldn’t imagine Jack ever buying a card of hooks and eyes, or a reel of cotton.
    It was so busy in the department, she hadn’t noticed him until he came to pay. She was on the till and there was a queue. There was no way of avoiding him.
    ‘Mo?’ he’d said, unbelieving.
    ‘Hello Jack.’
    ‘I thought... I assumed... you’d gone back home...’
    ‘Well you were wrong.’ Mo placed a piece of tissue paper on the dress, and began to fold it. It was an expensive rustly dress of ice-blue satin with a net crinoline and a sash.
    ‘Well, what do you think?’ Jack asked her, trying to appear unruffled.
    ‘About what?’ Empowered by his obvious discomfort, she