The Men in her Life

the Friday afternoon and spent all weekend working on it, but, at the time, the thoughts he came up with looked utterly spontaneous.
    ‘I see an Alpine meadow, flowers, a couple of cows with bells and “Taste the cream”.’
    ‘Oh I say, that’s good. I think they’ll like that,’ the account director said, in a triumphant voice that had made Philippa regret all the times she had turned down his invitations to the opera.
    She had made a graceful enough exit. Philippa was good at dignity.
    ‘Class,’ Jack said to her as they lay in bed a couple of weeks later after the first time they’d made love, ‘I thought, she’s got class.’
    ‘And what would you know about class?’ she had asked him jokily, but trembling with the risk, knowing that she was already in love with this man with his accent like a steel cable, his one good suit and his hard blue eyes.
    The look he gave her was fearful in its intensity.
    ‘I know what you want,’ he told her, rolling on top of her again, effortlessly pinning her arms outstretched beneath his so that their bodies made a cross on the bed, ‘you want a bit of rough, don’t you? Shall I be your bit of rough and you be my bit of class, and together we’ll take over the world?’
    He had looked at her as she struggled not to show the electrifying desire his latent violence aroused, then suddenly he had lowered his mouth onto hers and kissed her with such profound tenderness that she felt for a delirious second that she owned him in all his complexity of strength and gentleness. Nothing she had ever experienced came close to the mind-blowing feeling of seeping into him and having him seep into her. It was as if there had been no other men. At that moment, she had known with certainty that all of him was hers and all of her was his.
    So when was it that she had become not enough?

Chapter 18

    ‘Going on holiday with Eamon? Why didn’t you tell me?’ Holly asked.
    ‘Well, I am telling you now,’ Mo replied.
    ‘Is that wise?’
    ‘I need a holiday, so does he...’ Mo defended herself.
    ‘Oh well...’ Holly said, resignedly. She had never been able to see what Mo saw in Eamon. He was a big, jolly man with a red nose, who said jolly, inconsequential things, the same jolly, inconsequential things, every time she saw him.
    ‘I wondered if you would have Frank Cooper...’
    Frank Cooper was the name of Mo’s cat. She had wanted to call him Marmalade, but Holly said that every ginger cat was called Marmalade and it was boring. She’d suggested Frank Cooper as a joke but it had stuck.
    ‘No, I can’t,’ Holly said.
    The last time she had taken the cat, when Mo went to the Canaries with the girls from work, he had howled all night pining for Mo and crapped in her best pair of loafers. Mo said it wouldn’t have happened if she had bothered to clear out his litter tray, but cleaning out a litter tray was almost as horrible a prospect for Holly as having to throw away a pair of navy blue suede shoes.
    ‘I’ll see if Sonya will have him,’ Mo said, ‘otherwise it will have to be a cattery...’
    ‘If that’s meant to make me feel guilty,’ Holly told her, ‘it doesn’t.’
    ‘You’re very selfish, sometimes,’ Mo said.
    ‘Still not feeling guilty,’ Holly told her breezily, ‘have a lovely time.’
    She put down the phone feeling a bit odd. Mo hadn’t even asked her this year whether she would like to go on holiday with her. Usually Holly said no, but this year she thought it would have been nice to have been asked. Everyone around her was in a couple, and now Mo too, and she couldn’t even go out for her usual drink with Robert to moan about the lack of men in their lives because she had agreed to go to dinner with Charlie Prince and his bloody wife. Holly scowled at herself in the Ladies mirror as she slicked on her most scarlet lipstick.

    Charlie Prince’s house was in a white crescent off Ladbroke Grove. The door was opened by a woman so elfin she made Holly instantly feel huge and ungainly.
    ‘Hello, I’m Pic,’ she said, with a broad, welcoming smile that put Holly slightly more at ease, ‘Ginger’s just feeding Rose.’
    Holly followed her along the high-ceilinged hall and downstairs to the basement kitchen. It was ground level at the back and had French doors onto a decked area, beyond which was a gate which led into a large communal garden canopied with tall trees. Sitting in a low chair on the decking was a woman so exactly like Pic