The Men in her Life

insisted on going in. I didn’t know he was my dad then. I wondered how come Mo had such a rich friend.’
    ‘But why did he take you in?’ Clare asked.
    ‘Maybe he wanted to show me the life I should aspire to,’ Holly said.
    ‘Who did your mother tell you he was?’ Clare wanted to know.
    Holly was surprised by the question. Most people would not have thought to ask that.
    ‘She said he was a friend from back home, old schoolmates, you know... which was true. She never lied, you see, but she didn’t tell me all the truth, and I was too thick... I even remember asking her when we were really poor one Christmas why we didn’t touch Jack for a loan and she was furious with me...’
    ‘I don’t think you were ever thick,’ Clare said, smiling.
    They had both been to Epping Forest in his E-type Jag, but neither could remember which year. Had he taken them one weekend after another, or had there been longer in between? It was a little spooky if you started to think about it like that, and Clare remembered the silence and the coldness under the canopy of trees. Why Epping Forest anyway, Holly wanted to know. They both pondered that for a while until Clare suggested that he might have filmed a shampoo advert there.
    ‘You know, one of those “natural” products,’ she said, ‘before Body Shop and all that, with essence of silver birch or something... they all smelled like pine toilet-cleaner...’
    ‘Perhaps it was a commercial for toilet-cleaner,’ Holly said. ‘He was one of the first people to think about the image of the product as opposed to the germs under the rim Holly talked about Jack with pride, Clare noticed. She had bought the fresh-scented image he had created of himself, whereas Clare had only seen the nasty bits lurking beneath.
    When they emerged from the wine bar, Holly expected it to be dark. She had the same kick of exhilaration that she always felt after seeing a matinee, that made her feel as if it were wrong to be caught enjoying yourself in daylight. She was in the happy, floaty stage of drunkenness where she wanted to go on drinking, chatting, anything to delay returning to reality for a few hours longer, but she was still sober enough to understand that Clare was beginning to suffer from sensory overload. They began to wander in the direction of Philippa’s house. Holly knew that she wasn’t going to go in, even though Clare had issued an invitation for tea. At the junction with Haverstock Hill, seeing the orange light of a free cab, Holly’s arm suddenly shot in the air.
    ‘You will call me before you go back?’ she insisted, grabbing Clare and kissing her on both cheeks.
    ‘Yes. Yes. Of course...’ Clare looked confused and lost now that Holly was leaving her so abruptly.
    As the cab lurched away, Holly instinctively turned round to see Clare waving, her thin bare arms looking like a child’s as the distance between them grew longer.

    ‘I didn’t want you coming back to an empty home.’ Mo was sitting in the kitchen when Holly arrived back at the flat. Why did everyone sit in the kitchen when they came round, Holly wondered. It was the least comfortable room in the flat, the chairs were hard and it stank of Ajax liquid because Mo hadn’t been able to resist giving the floor a once-over.
    ‘Did you take the afternoon off?’ she asked Mo.
    ‘Took the day off. I wanted to pay my respects, in my own way...’
    For people like Mo who were not confident in their use of words at the best of times, death turned love into deepest sympathy, flowers into floral tributes, and tears into paying respects.
    ‘What did you do?’ Holly asked.
    ‘I wandered round a bit. Sat in the park. That didn’t feel right. Then I thought of the river boat. I haven’t done that since we first came down...’
    It made Holly sad to think of her mother dressed in her smart black suit sitting on the deck of a river boat, surrounded by Americans in Burberry raincoats, the incessant crackle of the captain’s commentary filling her ears as she tried to mourn the man she had loved.
    ‘ Greenwich or Richmond ?’
    It was the only thing she could think of asking that wouldn’t make her cry.
    ‘ Hampton Court . It’s quite pretty down that way,’ Mo replied, thinking how strange it was that you could live in a city for nearly forty years and still not know bits of it. ‘How was the funeral?’
    ‘Funeral itself was all wrong. You would have hated it. But I had an interesting meeting