The Men in her Life

hotel.’
    ‘I’d like to have met him,’ Holly said untruthfully. From what Clare had told her about Joss she had gained the impression of a lazy git who probably had a beard.
    ‘I’m sure there’ll be other times,’ Clare put an enamel jug of coffee on the table between them.
    Now that the pleasantries had been exhausted, they had come to a break in the conversation and Holly found the silence uncomfortable. Seeing Clare in her home made her realize just how little they had in common. This was the house of a poor family in a godforsaken outpost miles away from the things Holly thought of as civilization — cinemas, shops and Italian coffee-shops with steaming Gaggia machines and great discs of torta de noci on the counter. What on earth would they find to talk about? Suddenly the three days that stretched ahead of them seemed a very long time.
    ‘I hope the weather gets better,’ she said. The weather was what strangers talked about at bus stops.
    ‘The forecast is good,’ Clare replied, offering her a flapjack.
    ‘Forecast good,’ Tom confirmed from the back room.
    ‘How’s work?’ Clare asked.
    ‘Fine thanks. Well, the usual roller-coaster, but it’s fine. I’ve got a couple of really good scripts in at the moment and my prestige in the agency seems to have gone up now they’ve discovered who I am. Or at least, who my father was...’
    ‘You told them?’
    ‘It was that bloody clip of me and him going into the party. I kept noticing people giving me funny looks and then I was spotted at the funeral. Gossip’s like a virus at my place. One day someone sneezes, the next everyone’s got a streaming cold. So I explained, and then they were all so bloody impressed... Do you think about him?’ she asked Clare.
    In their phone conversations since the funeral, they had not discussed Jack. She imagined that they were going through a similar process, each trying to reassess her history in the light of the other’s existence.
    ‘Quite a lot,’ Clare replied, ‘I sometimes wonder why I didn’t make more of an effort to see him, for my children, if not for me. And I see him in Ella sometimes, and I’m sad that they did not meet... but my primary feeling is a kind of disbelief that he didn’t tell me about you.’
    ‘It’s weird, the genetic thing, isn’t it?’ Holly said, ‘I sometimes wonder whether there could be a gene for loving films that I inherited from him. No, seriously, I knew I wanted to work in movies long before I even met him, and then someone at work said something about having movies in my blood...’
    Holly stopped talking as the front door opened and a sulky-looking girl with long, almost black, curly hair walked in, closely followed by an extraordinarily beautiful young man with spiky hair which looked as if it had been dipped in gold. At first sight they looked not unalike the couple in the recent version of Romeo and Juliet, although she was more knowing than Juliet, and he a slightly stockier, more masculine version of Leonardo di Caprio.
    Clare stood up.
    ‘This is Ella,’ she announced.
    For an instant, Holly tussled with envy. In spite of all the things she had that Clare did not — money, career, clothes — she knew she had never looked as radiantly proud as Clare did, standing with her arm around her daughter.
    ‘Hello Ella.’ Holly got up and, not quite knowing whether to shake her hand or commit herself to a kiss, they ended up in a brief, embarrassed half-hug.
    ‘Matt,’ said the young man, holding out his hand. She shook it, wondering how he got his hair to go like that, and whether he looked at everyone with the same smouldering insolence. She felt herself blushing. ‘Tom, come and get your present,’ she said over-loudly.
    The little boy came pelting into the kitchen.
    ‘What it is?’ he asked, turning the parcel over in his hands.
    ‘Open it and see,’ Holly said.
    ‘He’s too young to open it himself,’ Ella told her, crouching down, ‘here, Tom, d’you want me to help
    you?’
    It was a pop-up book that had a 3D cardboard pirate ship inside.
    ‘It a boat?’ Tom asked uncertainly.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Take it in sea?’
    ‘Well...’ Holly looked to Clare for help.
    ‘Not really,’ Clare told him, ‘but we can sail it round the kitchen when it’s too rainy to go to the beach, can’t we?’
    ‘Ah, that OK then,’ Tom said.
    Holly smiled, relieved. ‘I bought something for you too,’ she told Ella, ‘Clare said you had a pierced