The Men in her Life

Anyone could see that he was doing her in. It was mad for someone of Clare’s looks, brains and charm to be mouldering away in a hole like this. The view was great, but man could not live on view alone, and even if he could, woman couldn’t. Clare had to leave him. He was a puffed-up, arrogant womanizer who’d been allowed to have his own way far too long.
    ‘Sometimes he does a bit of carpentry...’ Clare offered.
    ‘Jesus Christ!’
    ‘No, even he doesn’t have that big an idea of himself...’ Clare joked.
    ‘Are you sure about that?’ Holly asked, ‘what with the beard and everything...’
    ‘He doesn’t have a beard,’ Clare said, mystified. ‘Doesn’t have a beard?’ Holly repeated surprised. ‘Well, I don’t notice his looks like I used to,’ Clare said, ‘but I think I would have noticed that...’
    ‘He sounds as if he has a beard to me, which is just as bad. He’s a closet beard and they’re the worst sort,’ Holly pronounced.
    ‘He sometimes does some decorating...’ Clare suddenly felt the need to defend Joss against Holly’s increasingly irrational criticism, ‘and he is quite good at making things. He made Ella a dolls’ house...’As soon as she said it she realized how long ago that had been. Ella had not played with dolls since she was about seven.
    It wasn’t that he couldn’t do things, because he could. He had converted the house from a ramshackle cottage to a home. In the beginning, his ability to do real work, like constructing a staircase was one of the things she had so admired in him. It was a terrible cliche, but masculinity was attractive. She had come from a house where everything was done by paid help. The garden had a gardener, the redesign of the ground floor was done by an architect, a decorator painted the stucco front with white matt and the front door with black gloss once every three years. She had found sensuality in Joss’s dirty hands and the smell of turps and wood shavings.
    Holly did not trust herself to speak.
    ‘Another bottle?’ she asked, her lips black with wine.
    ‘I don’t think...’ Clare began.
    ‘It’s my birthday,’ Holly said, ‘my bloody thirty-sixth birthday. I’m nearer forty than thirty...’
    ‘All right, all right...’ Clare gave in.

    Finding a sister at the age of thirty-six was a bit like falling in love, without the sex bit, which always fucked it up anyway, Holly thought as she tried to brush the taste of red wine from her tongue the next morning. You meet someone, you like the look of them, you test them out with a few targeted probes to see how they react, you find you like them more, you laugh, you reveal a little of yourself, you sense they like you, and suddenly you’re telling them everything you’ve ever thought and dreamed, and they still like you and you can’t believe your luck. You talk till dawn, fall asleep and the next morning they’re still there.
    They had finished two bottles of wine and talked long into the night, so long that both of them had been too tired and drunk to make up Holly’s bed, so Holly had slept next to Clare in her bed, and they had chatted in the dark until at some point Holly had realized that the only sound in response to the last two questions she had asked was Clare’s even breathing.
    ‘Taxi’s here,’ Clare shouted up the stairs.
    Holly spat the third squeeze of toothpaste out of her mouth. It still tasted like the inside of a wine keg. She grabbed her bag and clattered down the wooden steps. Clare was at the bottom with a mug of coffee in her hand.
    ‘I put some cold water in so you wouldn’t bum your mouth,’ she said, as Holly gulped hastily, and handed her a family-sized tetrapack of orange juice and a brown paper bag. ‘Sandwiches,’ Clare smiled.
    Holly was about to protest when she thought of the alternatives. Anything that Clare had made was bound to be better than what she could get on the train.
    ‘Tom, come and give Holly a kiss.’
    The little boy charged Holly’s legs and clung on for dear life. She bent down and kissed the top of his head. Everything about him was soft, his skin, his glorious curls, but his grip was like iron.
    ‘You look after your mummy,’ she told him. ‘It’s been lovely,’ she said, enfolding Clare in a hug.
    ‘It has, hasn’t it?’ Clare said, her eyes filling with tears.
    ‘Tell Ella to call about her weekend.’
    ‘I will.’
    ‘And you take care...’
    ‘You take care...’
    They exchanged significant