The Men in her Life

equivalent of the teenage diary she herself had kept, except that Ella’s thoughts were more secure because no-one else in the household had the first idea of how to use the machine.
    ‘Why do you ask?’ she asked, suddenly defensive on Ella’s behalf, wanting to protect her daughter from having Joss surfing around her secrets, as Jack had done in hers, mocking her adolescent confessions, using her own words as ammunition to humiliate her with in their final battle.
    ‘If I could just use the word-processor part, I feel I would be more productive...’
    ‘Why don’t you ask her, then?’ Clare suggested.
    ‘It would be better coming from you...’
    Clare was torn. She wished that either Ella or Joss would grow up enough to speak to each other properly without her having to be the go-between, and yet she wanted to encourage him. She had always thought that their fortunes might change if he would just set his mind to working rather than using his intellectual abilities to create more and more elaborate reasons why life as a writer was impossible. Since he had returned from the poetry festival, he seemed more at ease with the world. She was always looking for a turning-point and she must not let the possibility of one slip away just because she felt uncomfortable about using her influence with Ella on his behalf.
    ‘All right, I’ll ask her,’ she said.
    ‘You’re a good woman,’ he said, putting down his mug and looking at her.
    It was a long time since she had seen his face when they were making love. At night, she sometimes suspected that he did not want to see her as he pushed himself into her in the dark, whispering into her ear and yet never speaking her name. My love, my beauty. They were transferable blandishments acceptable to any woman, whatever her name.
    ‘Clare,’ he smiled at her now, pulling back the duvet, looking at her as her white flesh turned goosebumpy as it met the colder air of the room.
    ‘Still beautiful,’ he said, running his large hands over her body.
    She smiled nervously, feeling strangely as if she were being rewarded for falling in with his plans, like a dog being stroked on the head after retrieving a stick. As Joss climbed on top of her, she was almost grateful to hear Tom’s voice yelling out his morning call.
    ‘MAR ME!!’

    ‘I’d like to take some photographs of you before you leave,’ Clare said to Ella later that day.
    ‘I’m not leaving yet,’ Ella said grumpily.
    ‘But it’s a nice day. It’s a pity to waste it.’
    ‘Mum!’
    ‘Oh, just indulge me, just this once,’ Clare said.
    They walked up along the top of the cliff together arm in arm. Ella would be leaving in just a few weeks and however much she told herself that she must get on with her life, find new interests, work harder, Clare couldn’t persuade herself that she wasn’t going to be desperately lonely.
    Ella stood at the edge of the cliff surrounded by sky, posing awkwardly, then hamming it up, blowing Clare exaggerated kisses, pretending she had lost her balance over the edge. Clare dropped the camera and was halfway across the distance that separated them before she realized it was a joke.
    ‘Oh you...’ Clare lunged, and Ella squealed and then Clare chased her all over the top field just as she used to when Ella was a little girl and eventually they fell down in the grass together giggling.
    ‘Are you taking your computer with you to the States?’ Clare asked, when their laughter had subsided.
    ‘No,’ Ella said, clearly mystified by the question, ‘why?’
    ‘I don’t suppose you’d let Dad use it, would you?’
    ‘I don’t see why not...’ Ella said.
    Relief flooded through Clare as the confrontation she had been anticipating suddenly evaporated.
    ‘You’re marvellous, did you know?’ she said to her.
    They lay on their backs looking at the sky for a few minutes.
    ‘We thought we’d stay a couple of days with Holly before my flight...’ Ella said a little warily, and Clare was suddenly conscious that her daughter too had been waiting for a good moment to ask something tricky.
    ‘Oh...’ Despite her best efforts to pretend otherwise, it hurt. She had assumed that she would go to the airport to see Ella off.
    ‘Good idea,’ she added quickly, trying to adjust the picture she had imagined of herself crying at the airport after Ella disappeared through the departure gate, to a picture of herself crying at the station as her train pulled away.
    ‘There’s a