The Men in her Life

can’t pay. I used to think that doing something, anything, to do with films would be enough, but now I’d like to represent an Oscar-winning screenplay writer... d’you know what I mean?’
    Her accent sounded more East End the more impassioned she became, Clare noticed.
    ‘Come on,’ said Holly, aware that she was going on a bit, ‘CV time. You’ve got to do your CV.’
    Why? Clare asked herself. Why do I have to do it like a CV? I’m not sure I can. She was about to protest, but when she looked up Holly’s face was so eagerly awaiting her participation in this game she had devised, she felt she had to join in.
    ‘Clare Drummond,’ she began.
    Holly frowned, not understanding.
    ‘Born 1961, July. Star sign Cancer, and I don’t believe in it either,’ Clare looked up and saw that Holly’s face had softened. ‘Lonely childhood with Parents usually out and a series of depressed Scandinavian au pairs. Did everything wrong as a teenager, including conviction for possession of dope, expelled from nice girls’ direct-grant school and scraped into further education college, almost immediately got pregnant by English lecturer and poet Joss Drummond,’ she looked up. Holly clearly did not know the name. ‘Left home, married, moved to remote Cornish town, gave birth to Ella when I was nineteen, and then Tom two and a half years ago...’
    ‘What did you do in between?’ Holly interrupted, calculating a gap between children of almost fifteen years.
    ‘Gardened and cooked, mostly. We have a smallholding. We had this dream about living off the land...’
    ‘The Good Life?’
    ‘Sort of. Except it’s hard work.’
    ‘Bloody hell!’ said Holly, ‘and?’
    ‘That’s it,’ Clare said.
    So what became of the dream? Holly wanted to ask but sensed it was too soon.
    Now what, Holly wondered. They had both said their pieces and she was sure they had both been honest, but everyone knew that the truth lay in what you left out of a CV, not what you put in.
    ‘Perhaps we could do blurbs,’ she suggested, ‘you try to encapsulate the flavour of your life in less than a hundred words...’
    ‘How do you know all these games?’ Clare asked.
    ‘I go to a lot of dinner parties,’ Holly told her, ‘this is the sort of thing I mean: Holly is thirty-something,’ she interrupted herself, ‘I’m really sick of that thirty-something stuff, d’you know what I mean? Usually i* means getting pretty close to forty... so, Holly is thirty-quite-a-lot, with a bustling, busy life and a brilliant career. Parties, premieres and something else beginning with p — there are always three things on the list — may be fun, but sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, Holly lies awake wondering whether there’s more to life than champagne and hangovers
    Clare clapped her hands.
    ‘Now you,’ Holly encouraged her.
    ‘No, I couldn’t, you do one for me...’
    Holly thought for a moment.
    ‘It sounded like the perfect life: a cottage in Cornwall , a husband who wrote poetry and dug potatoes, two beautiful children... so why did Clare look so wistful when she spoke of it...?’
    ‘Hmm,’ Clare said, ‘as a matter of fact, I don’t think Joss would know a potato from a beetroot. I think I’d better have some more to drink...’
    Holly couldn’t work out whether Clare’s reticence was because she was shy or unwilling to trade in confidences so soon.
    ‘So, you left home when you were seventeen?’
    Clare nodded.
    ‘More precisely, I got thrown out...’
    ‘For the dope, or being pregnant?’
    Holly was so direct, it was proving difficult for Clare to sidestep her questions.
    ‘The dope was the main thing,’ she began, ‘the pregnancy just added insult to injury, although I didn’t really see why it was so significant before, but now I do…’ She looked at Holly. Because of you, she seemed to be saying, but without malice.
    ‘I suppose I can understand now that Jack was insecure and he couldn’t let anything go wrong in his house,’ Clare continued, looking at her hands that fidgeted and twisted as she spoke.
    ‘He was always going on about “my house” this and “my house” that and actually, it wasn’t his house, it was my mother’s, but that made him behave as if it was his even more. It made her behave like that too, because she was so determined that he must not feel inferior because of her class and her money and all that. I understand all that now, but I didn’t then, you see,’ Clare