The Men in her Life

we could persuade Vivienne to have some in her shop? Primitive art. I’m sure she’d love it if you told her it was done by Andean Indian children...’ Joss said.
    ‘...with paint made from ground-up beetle and the sap of an endangered tree...’ Clare added.
    They smiled at one another, enjoying the easy digs at their friend’s obsession with alternative products.
    ‘Couldn’t you get Amelia to put them up in her tea room? Thirty quid each framed, two for fifty?’ Joss asked.
    ‘Trouble is, I want them all myself,’ Clare laughed, ‘you are a clever boy.’ She bent down and scooped Tom up from the floor.
    ‘I’ve been working on something, while you were away...’ Joss said suddenly.
    ‘Oh, that’s marvellous,’ she began to enthuse, then stopped herself, knowing that the slightest mistake in tone could send him into a mood. If she was too encouraging he would almost immediately stop what he was doing, if she pretended not to be very interested, he would rage about nobody understanding how hard it was for him. He always made her feel that she was somehow to blame for his writer’s block.
    When she first met him, his future had looked as bright as any poet’s ever did. His poems were published in magazines. One had even made the pages of the Observer. Then a small, but highly-regarded, publishing house had published his volume Women. In retrospect, the title had been a mistake because although the review coverage had been wide, much wider than for most first collections, most of it had been very negative. Literary editors had not been able to resist giving such a title to leading feminists to review, and, to a woman, they had hated it. Since most of the poems were obliquely about her, Clare had felt responsible for that too. Joss had sunk into a kind of beleaguered gloom and had not written any poetry for several years.
    They had been busy then, doing up the house and garden, with Ella a little girl. Clare remembered it as a happy time. Then he had written a novel, which had been rejected by his publisher, and a couple of others. And after that he had retreated into poetry again, but in the interim he seemed to have lost touch with the Zeitgeist. Now, when poetry was enjoying a popularity it had never before achieved, Joss’s work was not read. In the Seventies he had been a young lion and his voice had spoken to a generation, but now his roar seemed anachronistic among the knowing, quirky voices of the young post-modernists.
    ‘What’s it about?’ she asked, trying to sound neutral, but engaged.
    ‘All this newness that’s around,’ Joss replied.
    He never let her read his work until it was finished. Sometimes not even then.
    ‘You seem new too,’ he told her, ‘you’ve changed.’
    ‘Have I?’
    ‘ “All these years I thought I knew you, but I did not know this new you...” ’ Joss quoted a line.
    Clare still experienced a girlish thrill when he wrote about her.
    ‘So, what do you think? Can we renew? A modern relationship for the Millennium? What is Clare’s vision of the future?’
    She laughed at the pun. All the Sunday newspapers seemed to carry supplements entitled ‘Blair’s Vision of the Future’. She wasn’t sure whether he was reciting, or asking her a question.
    ‘What do you mean?’ she finally asked, realizing that she was supposed to say something.
    Joss sighed heavily and impatiently.
    ‘I suppose I realized when you were not here how much I take you for granted,’ he said almost sheepishly, adding, with sudden anger, ‘you shouldn’t let yourself be taken for granted...’
    Like most of what he said, there was a germ of truth that made him impossible to dismiss as merely selfish. She had never been very good at asking for what she wanted, and that was not something she could blame on him.
    ‘OK then,’ she said to him, making a feeble joke, ‘you can do the washing-up for a week...’
    ‘I’m not talking about the bloody washing-up,’ Joss said, suddenly angry, ‘for God’s sake, you shouldn’t think of yourself as a washing-up machine. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about you recognizing your needs as a woman... you constantly undervalue yourself... I’m talking about what you want from life, where you see yourself in ten years...’
    She wanted to say that if she undervalued herself it was because her confidence had been eroded not just by his fucking other women, but the way he jumped on everything she said. If he would