The Men in her Life

get his story straight, and as the silence continued she started to feel a little anxious. She called his name, the first time in anger, the second a question, the third a scream.
    He was lying on the polished wooden floor with ice-cubes all round his head, glittering in the kitchen spotlights like the Macarena’s tears. He looked so frightened, she found herself saying, ‘It’s all right,’ as she knelt beside him and felt for a pulse. The warmth of him steadied her, but there was no movement of blood in the veins, and no rise and fall of his chest. Suddenly she began thumping his ribcage, frantically pushing up and down, not knowing what she was doing, only copying what she had seen people do in ER. Then she grabbed the cordless phone from its hook by the cappuccino machine and stabbed out three nines, already knowing that it was too late.

    In the still heat of her room in the Barrio de Santa Cruz, Philippa knelt, howling her despair, doing penance for everything she could have done differently, and as she wept, her anger melted into grief for the man she missed so terribly.

    After shock came anger, then grief, and after that, curiosity. Shock, Anger, Grief, Curiosity. For some reason Philippa thought of the whiteboards they used in the first days of management consultancy, writing acronyms in coloured pens to make difficult processes sound simple, like POP which stood for People Off the Payroll. SAGC. If curiosity had begun with an E then the emotions would have spelled SAGE, but it didn’t, and she couldn’t think of a synonym which did. In any case, abbreviation didn’t seem to make the process of bereavement any more straightforward.
    She was sitting under the bright yellow Schweppes umbrella of one of the cafes near the cathedral in a daze of strange unconnected thoughts. Suddenly, she snapped back into consciousness, wondering whether she had been staring blankly, or twitching, or even sleeping, and for how long. A second, an hour? She had thought there would come a day when she would wake up feeling miraculously better, like the beginning of recovery after a long illness, but she was beginning to dread waking up at all.
    Her mind ran and reran over and over again the embrace she had witnessed on the television screen. She saw a cloud of red hair and a hug that was joyous in its fervour and then the memory collapsed into jealousy. She was his daughter. Slowly the image of the hug became almost tolerable. The woman was tall, but not a model, she had red hair. Given the location, she must be a Labour party supporter, Philippa realized, with a faint smile of self-congratulation for her powers of detection, but that was all she knew. How old was she? Philippa tried to date her, trying to think of bad patches in her relationship with Jack when he might have taken a lover. And gradually the man she thought she knew so well became more and more of a mystery.

    When they met, they were both junior copywriters at the advertising agency. He had been brought into an account that she was working on. Her first sight of him was his tall silhouette against the window of the sixth-floor conference room, looking out over the river Thames , his shoulders square, arms akimbo, the air charged with his determination. He turned, his eyes met hers, there was a split second of attraction like a glint of sun on the glass of a revolving door, and then the pale-blue eyes became opaque, unreadable. She had found herself twisted between resentment and longing.
    It was a campaign for a Swiss brand of butter. She had come up with the slogan ‘Better butter, bitte’ which she was rather pleased with, but Jack’s reaction was contemptuous.
    ‘That’s German, isn’t it? People don’t want Germany in their kitchen. The nearest Germany can come is the garage…’
    It was 1960, long before a German name became the acceptable byword of quality for freezers and washing-machines and practically all the white goods that aspirational families kept in their kitchen.
    ‘We’d love to hear your ideas,’ she told him, matching his rough northern bluntness with the pure, disdainful sweetness of breeding.
    I wanted to fuck you right there on the boardroom table, he had told her later, but his face had betrayed nothing.
    ‘It’s from Switzerland , right?’ He paused for a moment, letting her think that she had outmanoeuvred him with her challenge.
    He admitted afterwards, a long time afterwards, that he had been handed the account on