The Men in her Life

enough when I was eighteen, but it is really silly now.’
    It was as if the intervening years had never happened. The only thing that had changed was the colour of the lining of the swimming-pool. Clare had stood in exactly the same spot vowing that she would never say ‘how dare you?’ to anyone.
    ‘I don’t know why you bothered coming back,’ Philippa said.
    ‘No,’ Clare replied, walking away, ‘nor do I.’
    She walked back into the house and up two flights of stairs to the guest-room. The room next to it had been her room. It had been quite a shock when she first arrived to find that the Mucha posters had been stripped down and her matching pine Habitat chest of drawers and bookcase removed. She had wondered briefly what had happened to the battered Penguin editions of D. H. Lawrence that had lined the shelves alongside the trendy Picador editions of Richard Brautigan. There had been no reason for her to imagine that her room was standing like a shrine to a lost child, untouched and undusted for all these years, but it had chilled her to see that her memory had been so comprehensively erased from the house. Even in the kitchen, the picture she had painted when she was about ten, that Jack had said was better than a Picasso, had been replaced by a genuine Picasso.
    The guest-room had Pompeian red walls, sanded boards and black and white curtains by Timney Fowler with a design of Roman emperors’ heads. Clare took the sheets off the bed. She collected her toothbrush from the en suite shower room, pausing before slipping two of the roughly chopped cubes of guest soap into her sponge bag. She had enjoyed the sheer expensiveness of the scent, and she knew that they would only be thrown away after she had gone. She took off her dress, rolled it and put it into the woven African shoulder-bag she had bought in Vivienne’s shop, then put on the vest, jeans and jeans jacket she had arrived in. She glanced around the room, checking to see that she had everything, then went over to the window. Philippa was still lying beside the bright blue rectangle of the pool) like an intruder on a David Hockney painting. It felt awful to be leaving again in just the same way as she had left before, and yet part of her was glad. It gave a weird kind of justification to the intervening years. Clare thought of the hugs she would give to Ella and Tom when she arrived back, and to Joss who had taken her away from all this. She swung her bag over one shoulder, smiling, then she stuffed the sheets under her other arm and walked downstairs to the laundry. She loaded the machine, tipped powder in and started it, then walked back out into the garden.
    ‘I’m going now,’ she told Philippa.
    Philippa was staring into the middle distance. She did not turn round to say goodbye.
    Clare shut the front door behind her and walked down the steps and through the front garden to the street. At the gate she turned back. The imposing white-fronted house was like a fortress and she had been its prisoner for too long. Now she was finally free.
    It was only when she was sitting on the tube that she looked at her timetable for trains back to Truro . The last one went at six thirty. She had twenty-five minutes to get it. She counted the stations left to Paddington and thought she would just make it in time. Belsize Park , Chalk Farm, Camden Town , Euston, Ring’s Cross then change. Clare looked at her watch again. Come on. At Camden Town , she allowed herself to think that she was going to make it with minutes to spare and immediately, as if in answer to her complacency, the doors opened a second time and clunked shut, the train started, moved an inch, but an automatic brake came on and stopped it. The doors opened again and shut. Minutes ticked away. Open, shut, brake. A waft of irritation blew through the carriage as other people checked their watches and shifted in their seats. Open, shut, brake. Open, shut, move. They were moving. Clare exchanged a smile with the man opposite. If her train was just a little late, she would still get it. Surely the last train was always a little late? At Paddington she ran up the flight of steps from the Circle Line and stood panting as her eyes scanned the departure board. Just as she spotted her train the numbers began to whirl. She dashed to the platform to see the last carriage a hundred metres away and moving at speed. Then, quite unexpectedly, she sank to her knees, her face in her hands, and