The Men in her Life

the barrel for new angles. There was an article entitled Luwies for Labour about famous people in the arts who were voting for Tony Blair. Mo sighed and was just about to turn over when her eyes fell on the photo at the bottom of the page. Under the headline ‘I’m all Left, Jack!’ was a picture of Jack arriving at Heathrow. Unusually, he was smiling. Mo couldn’t help smiling too. The California sun was doing him good. He looked relaxed and a bit weather-beaten, as if he’d been spending his days on a yacht. He had a pair of sunglasses in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and he had obviously just made a joke at the expense of the photographer because he had that look of his that was slightly shy and triumphant at the same time. Mo read the paragraph beneath.
    ‘Arriving at Heathrow yesterday evening, Jack Palmer joked, “When I heard that Andrew Lloyd Webber said he’d leave if Labour got in, I had to come home.” The director, whose new film Paying for It is set to open later this year, added, “On a more serious note, I’ve done what I want to do in Hollywood for the moment, and there are lots of exciting things going on here. It’s good to be back. Of course I’m voting Labour, as I’ve always done.” ’
    Mo doubted very much whether that was really what Jack had said. It didn’t sound much like him, but she supposed it was difficult to get his distinctive brand of dry sarcasm onto the page. It was a complete lie about voting Labour. She remembered being shocked when he told her he was going to vote for Thatcher in 1979. Or maybe he’d been lying then and the joke was on her. She’d known him nearly all her life, and she’d never been able to tell when he was teasing. Mo looked at the photo again, allowing herself to wonder just for a second whether she’d be seeing him this time he was home. He usually turned up just before he was about to leave again. She never knew whether the visits were supposed to be for her benefit, or for his, but she never told him to go away. She could tell herself a million times that he was a selfish, ruthless bastard, but she melted every time he stood in the door-frame with his sheepish half-grin — his sinner’s face, she called it — and she always forgave him.

Chapter 3

    As Clare dropped her vote into the black metal ballot-box, she closed her eyes and made a wish.
    ‘It’s no use praying,’ Joss told her, ‘you don’t believe in God.’
    ‘I was just wishing,’ she told him, ashamed that he had noticed her childish gesture. She could not tell whether his tone was hostile or indulgent. Even after eighteen years of marriage, she sometimes found it difficult to read her husband’s mood.
    ‘Do you still wish?’ he asked, very gently and incredulously. ‘Am I really married to the last dreamer in England ?’ Then he put his hand on her waist and drew her body to his, and for a moment she felt utterly cherished.
    To a casual onlooker they would appear a perfect family, Clare thought, as they walked back up the hill from the two-room school building that had become a polling-station for the day: a tall, handsome man, his wife, and between them, asleep in his buggy, a beautiful little boy with his father’s face and his mother’s golden hair. Even the teenager who walked a sulky couple of paces behind them was exactly as a teenager should be. Their daughter Ella wore black, and had a nose ring. Together they opened the gate and walked up the flagstone path to their Cornish stone cottage with its view of the sea and its garden crammed with orderly lines of vegetables and bean rows.
    They had always voted together. It was one of the first things they had done as a couple in 1979, the first time she had been old enough to vote. Clare recalled exactly the shiver of excitement as she dropped her ballot-paper into the box, and the sensation that she was now truly an adult, responsible for her own destiny. Later there had been the enormous weight of disappointment as they watched the results come in. It had felt like losing her innocence twice in one day.
    At every election since then her natural optimism had flared briefly in the run-up, then fizzled away on the day as the results confirmed inescapably that they were swimming against the tide. The rest of the population busied itself with the pursuit of wealth while she and Joss struggled to live on as little as they could. Without exception, her old schoolfriends in London had spent the Eighties