The Men in her Life

just give her time to collect her thoughts, she might be able to make some kind of sense. She wanted to say that she tried not to think about where she would be in ten years in case that meant facing the prospect of still being in Penderric, still serving in his former mistress’s shop two afternoons a week, still making jam. But she knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t really interested in hearing what she wanted to say. The silence that had fallen between them was charged with his impatience. Tom started to grizzle. Clare shot Joss a glance that said, don’t go on.
    He turned back to the sink and the task of scrubbing paint from his nails and then asked with studied indifference, ‘I don’t suppose he left you any money?’
    ‘There was no will.’
    ‘Which means that Philippa gets the lot.’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Surely you’re entitled to some of it?’
    Suddenly the direction of the conversation became clear. Joss was so bloody clever. He had dangled the carrot of talking about their future so that she would ask him what it meant and he could ask about Jack’s money without appearing grasping. How was it that he always managed to sneak up on her tangentially? In a curious kind of way, she admired his ingenuity, wondering, as she had wondered on many occasions before, whether he had planned their conversation in advance, or whether he was just effortlessly manipulative.

    Mo had seen her before, many times. Even if there hadn’t been the name on the credit card, she would have recognized her. Philippa had not changed much since the day that she married Jack Palmer and was pictured in the Tatler standing outside the registry office in King’s Road wearing a short white couture dress. She came into the store once or twice a year, at the beginning of the season, and spent several thousand pounds on what she called her basics. Sometimes Mo had tried to imagine how many yards of cupboard space Philippa’s basics must occupy: an aircraft hangar always came to mind. It was a bit of a shock to see her so soon after the funeral.
    Philippa was wearing a black trouser suit, but the summer clothes she had picked out and hung over her arm were mostly orange and lime green, the year’s bright citrus shades, which only someone with the right colouring could get away with. Philippa had had the right colouring, Mo thought, bitchily, once upon a time. Usually, Mo let someone else attend to her, but she was standing in the middle of the section clearly expecting service and there were no other assistants around.
    ‘Can I help you with those?’ Mo approached, taking the hangers from her one by one and showing her to the changing-rooms. ‘Lovely bright colours,’ she hung the clothes on a hook, unable to resist the urge to say something.
    ‘I’m going on holiday,’ Philippa replied, with a faint patronizing smile.
    ‘If there’s anything you need...’ Mo said, tightly, swishing the curtain across the cubicle.
    Philippa began to strip. She had often meant to find out where department stores bought mirrors with subtly distorting glass that made you look far better than you ever looked at home. She stepped into a loose dress made of orange linen, turned round and smiled at her reflection but the dress hung unflatteringly from her shoulders and threw a horrible yellow light onto her neck and face. Quickly, she took it off and put on a trouser suit of white linen which made her look like an inmate at a psychiatric hospital. She inspected the labels. Everything was her size but it was all too big. She had always lived by the adage that you could never be too rich or too thin, and now she had more money than she could ever spend, and she was so thin that clothes looked like sacks. With rising panic, she tried a belted sleeveless Versace dress the colour of a geranium, but neither the stylish simplicity of the garment nor the outrageous charm of the mirror could flatter her neck and arms. There was too much skin and too little flesh. Recent rapid weight loss had made her look suddenly old. She had come to the store to cheer herself up, but had looked in the mirror and seen her own mortality. Trembling, Philippa drew back the curtain.
    ‘Can you get me these in a size 8?’
    ‘Everything?’ the assistant asked.
    ‘Not the orange. Nothing orange. Or white...’ her voice was rising.
    Mo looked at the hangers she was being handed, and then at Philippa’s face poking through the curtain, the selvage