The Men in her Life

shocked reflex reaction gave way to the knowledge that men did not seem to need good reasons to cheat on their wives.
    ‘That’s the part I don’t like about living here,’ Clare went on, ‘I don’t mind it being the back of beyond, but it’s so familiar. Everybody knows, you see, and they feel sorry for me. At least the ones who don’t still have the hots for him do. It’s humiliating. There you see, I am proud, and isn’t pride one of the seven deadly sins?’
    ‘If you believe that crap. But so are greed and sloth and I’ve never understood what’s deadly about pigging out and then having a bit of a lie-in. Why don’t you leave?’ Holly asked.
    ‘Because it’s not that easy when you have kids.’ Holly thought about it for approximately a second before saying, ‘You could stay with me... I really like Tom, and Ella’s going off anyway. I don’t mean I don’t like her, I just don’t know where I’d put my clothes...’ She was already envisaging the scenario. They could take it in turns to babysit and Clare could get a life. She felt easy with Clare. She knew they could work it out. In her mind she was already getting Simon to put up another towel rail in the bathroom, when Clare said, ‘Thank you. But that’s just not a solution. I mean, I’m really touched, really. It’s the nicest offer I’ve had in a long time, but it’s more complicated when you have kids. You haven’t seen Tom with Joss, but if you did, you’d know that you couldn’t just take him away. It wouldn’t be fair...’
    ‘But don’t you have to think of yourself too? You’re no good to your children if you’re miserable...’
    ‘I know that argument,’ Clare said, cautiously, ‘and I don’t buy it. I’ve brought the children into the world and I should do my best by them.’
    ‘But you can’t sacrifice yourself...’
    ‘That’s what Ella says. It’s what people who haven’t got children always say. And then I feel guilty for moaning in the first place because it’s not that bad. It’s not intolerable. I would leave if it were. That’s what I meant by how do you know you’re happy. Everyone makes choices. You’ve chosen not to have children. I chose to have them and I expect if I did one of your calculations I would probably come out at about seventy per cent too... and I suppose this is why I don’t talk about it.’
    ‘I haven’t chosen not to have children,’ Holly suddenly said, ‘it just hasn’t happened...’
    ‘Yet...’
    ‘No, no I don’t think so. I’ve never met anyone who wanted to... wanted to do anything serious with me. Jack said that he didn’t think there would be any men strong enough for me... At the time, I thought it was a compliment...’
    ‘I’m sure it was meant to be... you give a pretty good impression of not caring about men and babies and all that...’
    ‘I think I probably say I don’t because I can’t face the possibility of admitting that I might, and then not getting it...’ Holly stopped talking abruptly. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous to deny yourself the opportunity of something so big just because you might feel a bit of a failure if you didn’t get it.
    Upstairs, Tom woke up and Clare went to get him.
    ‘Let’s get our coats on and try to run off some of his energy while the weather holds,’ she said, when she came down. ‘It would be nice to talk some more later,’ she added, slightly alarmed by Holly’s thought-filled silence.
    ‘I sometimes think it’s a bit like having a dog,’ Clare went on, forcing Tom’s reluctant arms into his jacket, ‘you have to take them out for a good walk twice a day.’
    ‘I hate dogs. I was bitten by one when I was four.’ Holly stopped to turn her back to the wind and light a cigarette as they walked along the clifftop path. ‘Children kind of dictate the pace of your life, don’t they?’
    It wasn’t a criticism. It was just something she had never thought of before. On the rare occasions she had imagined herself having a baby, she’d thought about how she would look pregnant, and the scene in the hospital with baby all wrapped up in a cellular blanket in her arms, flowers all around them and a beatific smile on her face. She’d thought about how nice it would be to have someone that didn’t have a choice about loving you, and then, to stop herself getting soppy, she’d tried very hard to imagine the smell of a full nappy. She had never got to the stage of thinking that the baby