The Men in her Life

elderly couple of diligent gardeners, the shed and heap of rusting doors a car-repair enthusiast, a climbing frame and several faded plastic pushalong toys spoke of toddlers who were growing up. Each rectangle of land encapsulated its own small world. All those lives going on every day. All those breakfasts and school runs and arguments. Outside, lives collided, and serpentine trails of kinship and friendship threaded through society, but inside, in each little home, family dramas unfolded like plays without an audience, and nobody really knew what went on in another person’s life.
    Clare was hungover. Her pummelled brain did not feel capable of focusing on anything for very long, but from time to time a thought would shoot painfully to the front of her forehead and seem almost terrifyingly profound. But as soon as she tried to retain it for the future it eluded her, and she found herself holding onto the sensation of revelation without a clue as to what the thought had been.
    When she was little she had fantasized about having a sister. Lone heroines like Susannah of the Mounties and Anne of Green Gables interested her for a while, but it was only when she discovered Little Women that she really understood the escapist pleasure of reading. Friends were OK, and she had as many as anyone else, but there had never been a special best friend in whom she could confide that her life, even with all its privilege that her father reminded her of daily, was desperately lonely. It would have seemed too ungrateful.
    The sister she imagined was someone like her, but naughtier. They would have adventures together. She was the sort of person who would suggest and build a tree house on the Heath. The sort of person with whom she could run away to the seaside and survive in an upturned boat on the beach.
    Perhaps that was why she had been so insistent, the Previous afternoon when they were sitting in the wine bar, that she and Holly were similar. Now that she thought about it, it seemed a pretty hollow claim. It Was strange to think that all those times she had wished for an urchin to materialize with scuffed knees and a cheeky look on her grubby face, Holly had been only five or so miles away.
    Outside the train window there was a cemetery that seemed to go on for miles. Clare closed her eyes and let herself drift, but when she opened them again, it was still there. When she was a little girl she had wished for parents who would do normal things like go to the park at the weekend, or teach her to swim. But she could not even imagine her mother in the public pool, her thick shining hair flattened and dripping with chlorine water. The week before Clare’s birthdays, Philippa would ask Clare to make a list of four or five friends and invitations would be sent out for tea at Harrods. The girls would all arrive in party dresses and white ankle socks and dutifully eat their ice-cream with long-handled spoons. Philippa and Jack would sit a little distance away, drinking coffee, smoking, and occasionally glancing at their wrist-watches, waiting for the first moment when the interminable boredom of the occasion could be politely brought to a conclusion. Clare had once overheard Jack joking about it afterwards at one of the cheese and wine parties her parents used to throw on Saturday nights during the early Seventies.
    ‘I’ve spent most of my life trying to find adults I could have intelligent conversation with. I find it almost impossible to revert to talking to children…’
    And his companion had roared with sycophantic laughter as people always did when Jack made one of his pronouncements, half-shocked, half-admiring the iconoclastic sentiments he dared to express.
    Jack had the great gift of making everything he said sound spontaneous. It was why his most famous commercials ran and ran, for there was a fresh simplicity about the words that people could not tire of. His best lines became part of the language. ‘Taste the dream,’ people said to one another with a knowing smile, when they tried a new food they liked. ‘We’re on the road,’ they said when they switched on the engine and released the handbrake at the beginning of a car journey. It was all the more remarkable that Jack could claim no interest in children when everyone knew that he had come up with the immortal line, ‘Here’s Farmer Fred who makes your bread.’ Farmer Fred was so successful that the spin-off merchandise and books about Farmer Fred and his