The Men in her Life

but I’m going to be sending it out to six other people this morning...’
    ‘Three thousand against ten thousand an hour full buy-out...’ he said.
    Holly thought for a second or two. He was obviously very keen indeed and she wondered if she could press him for more, but since she had had zero interest in the book from anyone else, she thought that might be greedy. The few occasions she had come unstuck in a negotiation had happened when she had started to believe her own sales pitch.
    ‘You just got yourself a deal,’ she told the producer and put down the phone with a satisfied smile.
    ‘Jemima!’ she called as she saw her secretary trying to sneak past her door unnoticed, ‘if I gave you a quid would you go round the corner for a cappuccino for me... tell you what, make it two quid and you get one for yourself...’ Holly knew that she was tough to work for, but she didn’t want to get a reputation as completely unreasonable.
    Jemima stepped forward and took the two pound coins. Then Holly changed her mind.
    ‘Take a fiver,’ she said, scrabbling around in her purse, ‘and get me two cappuccinos, one for yourself and a cinnamon Danish... oh to hell with it, I’ll go, I need a cigarette...’ she snatched back the money, ‘and while I’m out can you draw up the contract for this,’ she handed Jemima the notes of the telephone conversation she had just had, ‘I want to get it on his desk before he changes his mind...’
    Holly picked up her bag and walked towards reception.
    ‘I just made a deal for Deadly Serious ... ’ she told Robert as she sauntered past his office.
    ‘You’re joking?’
    ‘No, I’m... not... Three thou option...’
    ‘You’re a genius,’ Robert told her.
    ‘Fancy a coffee?’
    ‘It’s raining... oh, all right.’
    Sitting on high stools in the chrome-lined coffee bar, neither of them spoke for the first heady drags of the first cigarette of the morning, then Robert said, ‘You’re a sly minx...’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘First she’s escorting Jack Palmer on the telly, and then she’s spotted at his funeral... so what’s the story?’
    ‘You won’t believe me if I tell you,’ Holly replied, grumpily.
    ‘Try me...’
    ‘He was my father. You see, you didn’t...’
    She had never consciously hidden her parentage, but she had grown up without a father, he had never really been part of her vocabulary. Even when she had found out who he was, she had never called him Dad, and she saw him so sporadically, it had not really occurred to her to talk about him except to people who knew her really well. And though they had never exactly discussed it, she had somehow known that Jack would not have liked it if she had used his name at work. He had told her once that he was proud that she had come from nowhere, just as he had. It meant that no-one could take away the achievement, he said, and she had basked in the warmth of his praise.
    ‘Good God, you mean it!’ Robert said, delighted with an unexpected piece of gossip, then he remembered himself. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, formally.
    ‘That’s all right,’ Holly said automatically, and then realized that you weren’t supposed to say anything when somebody offered their condolences and anyway, it was a stupid thing to say because it sounded as if she didn’t mind that Jack was dead. It was an awkward moment.
    She sipped at the large paper cup, but the coffee beneath the froth was still too hot to drink.
    ‘I didn’t know him very well,’ Holly tried to explain, ‘I was illegitimate, and well, it’s a long story, but we had become quite close recently. I used to see him a bit when I went to LA.’
    ‘How extraordinary!’ Robert said.
    Her headache was too painful to get into a discussion about why he found it so odd.
    ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell everyone,’ Holly told him.
    ‘Of course not,’ he agreed, but she knew that by the end of the day the story would be all round the office.
    It didn’t matter, Holly told herself, because Jack was dead. A lot of things didn’t seem to matter nearly so much any more.

    The suburbs of London were endless: Acton, Southall, Uxbridge. Rows and rows of red-brick streets interspersed with increasing greenery as the train trundled further away from the centre of the city. Clare stared at the gardens which backed onto the railway and told a certain story about the occupants of each house. A well-manicured lawn bordered with standard rose trees indicated an