The Men in her Life

attraction.
    ‘Maybe I just don’t find him attractive,’ Clare suggested, skirting the question.
    ‘Impossible!’ Holly replied, then suddenly yawned. ‘It’s only half past ten and I feel shattered. Must be the sea air. Now that really does sound middle-aged. Doesn’t it make you feel old being the mother of someone who’s old enough to bonk?’
    ‘Not as old as it does looking after a two-year-old,’ Clare replied, ‘why don’t we turn in. We’re bound to be woken up at six in the morning...’
    ‘Jesus,’ said Holly, ‘who’d have kids?’

    Was Holly really so concerned about sex and men and growing old, Clare wondered as she washed her face. Was she really so very unkeen to have children? She never quite knew when Holly was being serious and when she was being ironic, and the line between the two appeared to be fairly fine. Sometimes it looked as if Holly were tossing thoughts into the air like cards, watching how they fell, bringing out the joker if she found she had dealt herself a duff hand. Was it true that there were no men around that an attractive single woman in her thirties could fall in love with?
    She squeezed toothpaste onto her toothbrush, and stood holding it in front of her mouth as if it were impossible to brush and think at the same time. Why was it that she had never thought about Matt in a sexual way, she wondered. Was it because he was Ella’s boyfriend, as she had told herself when Holly asked, or was it because she didn’t seem to think about men like that any more. Did that mean she was frigid, or just unbelievably naive? You couldn’t exactly be naive after eighteen years of marriage to an extremely sexual man, and yet she was inexperienced compared to Holly, who had probably had at least a different man for each of those years. Sex was simply not something she thought about as a separate element of her life in the way that Holly seemed to, it was just there as part of the continuum. Holly could talk about wanting some sex, or having great sex without a relationship, and Clare could not imagine what that would be like. Perhaps she should try, she thought as she began to brush her teeth. Perhaps if she had separated the act of sex from the loving of Joss, she would not have felt so wounded when he slept with other women. Perhaps that was what he meant when he said it didn’t mean anything.
    Clare crept in beside Tom’s cot as she did every night to watch him sleeping. Sometimes he was so peaceful she had to stop breathing herself in order to hear the whisper of his lungs. He was beautiful, lying on his back, both arms stretched up behind his head, dreaming the innocent dreams which made him smile and which he sometimes described the next day to her as if they were just part of his waking life. She was filled with an anguished love for him that she could not remember feeling for Ella when she was a baby. She had loved Ella differently. She had known how Ella’s life would be and she had done everything she could to try to make it easy for her, but she did not know in the same way how Tom’s life would be. It was impossible to imagine the soft skin on his face growing stubble one day, or the beam of his guileless smile becoming an expression that he would manufacture to manipulate and charm. And sometimes she feared the day when he would stop prattling on about Fireman Sam and Tinky Winky and Ella and Daddy and Mary Poppins as if they all existed on the same plane of reality, and the day his feet would begin to smell, as he began to turn into a man.

    ‘Are you awake?’
    The voice was exactly the same height as her ear.
    Holly put her hand up to the side of her face as if she’d been smitten.
    ‘I am now,’ she said.
    ‘Holly AWAKE!’ Tom shouted up the stairs.
    ‘Is that right?’ Clare answered with weary patience as she was woken for the second time.
    ‘I want to wee on the toilet,’ Tom informed Holly, clambering onto the bed.
    ‘Be my guest.’ Holly turned over and pulled the sheet and blanket over her head. Suddenly realizing that if she didn’t want a bed that smelled like a nappy, she had better do something about the small person who seemed so eager to become intimate with her, ‘Let’s go up and see Mummy,’ she added hastily, jumping up and taking him by the hand.
    ‘I’m sorry.’ Clare was at the top of the stairs wearing a long nightie. She led him into the bathroom but he refused to go unless Holly watched, so Holly ran a bath while