The Men in her Life

would grow up and become a child who asked you questions all the time, and determined whether you went out, or stayed in, or talked or listened. That was much more scary than any amount of baby poo.

    ‘Did you mean it when you said we could visit you in London ?’ Ella asked Holly in the pub that evening.
    ‘Of course,’ Holly replied, leaning back against the panel that divided the public and saloon bars. The place was growing on her. It reminded her of the pubs she and Colette had frequented in their teens. You couldn’t find a real pub in London any more. They were either pseudo-Irish bars or part of pub chains as homogeneous as McDonald’s but with sillier names.
    ‘It’s just that there’s a gig we both want to go to before I leave for the States...’
    ‘No, that’d be great,’ Holly said.
    ‘Can we stay?’ Ella asked, just to make sure.
    ‘Yes,’ Holly said.
    ‘Last time I slept with some dossers near Waterloo ,’ Matt told her.
    Holly didn’t know whether she was meant to be impressed or sympathetic.
    ‘I stayed with Philippa when I went up for my interview,’ Ella said, ‘but she was too busy to show me round. She took me for lunch at this health club she goes to and bought me some treatments for the afternoon, but it wasn’t really my scene...’
    ‘Have you only been to London once?’ Holly asked, astonished.
    ‘Yup,’ Ella said, ‘pathetic, isn’t it?’
    ‘Twice,’ announced Matt, proudly.
    Both women looked at him pityingly.
    ‘Oh well, that changes everything,’ Holly said, ‘I’ll show you round.’ She felt quite excited at the prospect. ‘If you want me to...’ she added quickly.
    When Matt went to the toilet, Holly found she couldn’t resist asking Ella, ‘What’s Philippa like?’
    ‘About as different from Mum as you could imagine. I mean Mum’s tough in her way, she’s the iron fist in the velvet glove, but Philippa’s iron through and through,’ said Ella.
    Holly remembered how smart and contained she had looked at the funeral, as if there were some magnetic field around her that would bounce away unwanted intruders.
    ‘What about you?’ Ella asked.
    ‘Me? I’m the velvet fist in the iron glove,’ Holly told her.
    Ella laughed. ‘Mum still doesn’t know whether Philippa knows about your mother. Isn’t that weird?’
    Then Matt returned to the table and Holly had to suppress the urge to tell him to piss off. She would have liked to have talked some more.

    Holly’s last day in Cornwall was her birthday. With a little help from his mother, Tom made her a card. They had a cake with three candles which he blew out at tea, and in the evening Holly bought three bottles of very expensive Barolo to drink with supper, thinking that Ella at least would join them, but she was babysitting for Amelia. Clare had baked a leg of spring lamb with rosemary and garlic from the garden. It was as good as anything Holly had ever tasted.
    ‘It almost makes me think I should get a garden and grow my own food,’ Holly said.
    Clare laughed. Holly frowned at her.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Clare, ‘it’s just that I can’t see you knee-deep in mud and mulch...’
    ‘I know,’ Holly said, dispiritedly, ‘Simon once bought me a window-box for my birthday. It was already planted with those pink things and that blue stuff, but I still couldn’t keep it going. It became a giant ashtray. When it rained, I almost expected to see tiny little tobacco plants germinating out of the dog ends, you know, like cress on a flannel. Did you grow cress on a flannel at school?’
    Clare nodded. She loved the way that after a few glasses of wine, Holly would veer off, Walter Mitty-like, from the most mundane conversation.
    ‘It stank, didn’t it? I mean the flannel? The only way I could have a garden would be if I was rich enough to have a gardener,’ Holly said, ‘or a husband, I suppose.’
    ‘Husbands aren’t necessarily much help,’ Clare said, sharply.
    ‘Tell me something,’ Holly said, emptying the remains of the first bottle into her glass, ‘what does Joss actually do? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but you work two days a week, you look after Tom, you cook, you clean, you do the garden, you make jam, for God’s sake. Is his sole contribution to the household a few lines of poetry?’
    Holly decided that she hated Joss, and whatever Clare said about the children, she was going to make it her mission in life to persuade her of the many good reasons to leave him.