The Men in her Life

Friday?’
    ‘I’ll call you. My wife and I are trying to arrange some dinner parties. You’d really get on with her, I think...’
    What are you doing married, she wanted to ask him. You’re years younger than me and miles trendier.
    ‘She’s writing a script herself. Needs a good agent,’ Charlie winked at her as he signed the bill with a flourish. ‘Maybe you could bring The One with you.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Holly, feeling as if she had just been run over.

    Eamon was the only teetotal Irishman Mo knew and he was all the more unusual because he was a barman. It wasn’t that he didn’t like drink, he told anyone who asked, it was that he liked it too much. If only someone would perfect a way of taking the alcohol out of Guinness and making it taste the same, like they did with decaffeinated coffee, he’d be a happy man. But he was a happy man, Mo thought. He was the happiest man she had ever met. And as a matter of fact, decaffeinated coffee was never as nice as the real thing.
    ‘There were a lot of them tonight,’ he said, pouring some lime cordial into the pint glass of mineral water she was drinking.
    ‘It’s Riverdance ,’ Mo said, ‘every little girl wants to be in Riverdance now. If the class gets much bigger I’m going to have to split it and do two a week.’
    She had been running an Irish dancing class for years. It was the only part of her heritage that she had brought down south with her. Her mother had taught her when she was a girl, and she had won prizes. When Holly was little, she had started to teach her on Saturday mornings, when nobody could object to the tapping on the floor. Then some of Holly’s friends wanted to learn after they’d seen her showing off in the playground, and that was how the class had started. Holly had dropped out at eleven when she grew. In just over a year she shot up a foot, and suddenly her long legs seemed to get tangled up in the steps, but the class continued. Recently it had become so popular Mo had had to hire the whole hall at the Irish Club rather than one of the rooms, which was better really, because the hall had bare wooden boards and the girls could really hear the thud of their shoes. She enjoyed the class. It meant there was more to life than work, tube and home every day. It brought in quite a tidy sum of money these days too. Enough so she didn’t have to save for a holiday.
    Eamon wanted her to go to Ireland with him for two weeks in July. He said she looked as if she needed a holiday, and he was right. The past few weeks had been draining.
    Mo hadn’t been to Ireland since she was a little girl. She remembered soda bread, donkeys and the Connemara landscape which couldn’t make up its mind whether to be land or sea. Eamon came from County Mayo .
    ‘There is a little golf course just across from Achill Island ,’ he was telling her, a faraway look in his grey eyes, ‘and sometimes the wind is so strong it blows the best-hit ball right back at you.’
    Mo couldn’t see the attraction of that, but then she’d never understood golf.
    ‘You wouldn’t be playing golf all day, though, would you, Eamon?’ she asked him.
    ‘Of course I would not,’ he protested with a wink, ‘I’d have a break for my dinner and my tea...’ He leaned forward over the bar, sensing a weakening of her resistance.
    She couldn’t make up her mind. She and Eamon had been together years, but they had never been on holiday together. It would put the relationship onto a different plane. They had always been equally reluctant to get serious, Eamon because he had married too young and been through an acrimonious divorce which had brought shame on his family back home, Mo because of Holly, or so she told herself. Even though they got along famously and they slept together once or twice a week, Mo had never wanted to live with him. She’d become used to having her own key to her own front door. But it was stupid to waste the opportunity of having a good time for a couple of weeks, just because she was afraid of getting in too deep. They were both in their fifties, not teenagers. There was no-one she was more comfortable with than Eamon, except Holly, and Holly was too busy to have holidays with her nowadays. Mo had been on enough bargain breaks to Tenerife with the girls at work to last her a lifetime.
    ‘All right, then,’ she heard herself saying, ‘I’ll go up to the travel agency tomorrow and see about some brochures.’
    ‘But Charlie Prince is