The Men in her Life

were sticky leatherette. All the Spaniards were seated on one side of the aisle. Philippa happily chose a pair of seats on the empty side and it was only when the bus drew out of the station into the road that she realized why she had been left so much space. The sun was on her side of the bus and, even with the blinds down, it was impossibly hot. A sweat broke out instantly beneath the white T-shirt she had bought the previous day, and the baggy khaki chinos suddenly felt as tight as a newly-washed pair of jeans. Seeing her distress, an old lady shifted a pile of carrier bags from the seat next to her and beckoned Philippa over. The smell of garlic sausage that impregnated the old woman’s clothing was almost less bearable than the heat. Philippa picked the Sunday newspaper from the plastic carrier bag that contained her provisions for the journey — a large plastic bottle of mineral water that was already warm, a banana, a small tin of olives stuffed with almonds — and held it around herself like a makeshift cubicle, grateful that the English newspapers still came out in broadsheet form.
    It had been weeks since she had seen the news, but the world had gone on without her. Usually she was an avid reader of newspapers and now she wondered why she bothered. What was the point of cramming your head with facts and trivia and other people’s opinions? Because it was easy, she realized. It gave you the appearance of being a thinking person without the bother of thinking. Thinking was the hardest thing.
    A man the same age as her daughter had become Leader of the Conservative party. Philippa tried to examine why that news should make her feel peculiar. She was used to employing people half her age and respecting them. It was just that government was different. For a long time her own generation had held the reins of power, and now, all of a sudden, it was Clare’s. On page two there was a picture of Princess Diana in New York with Mother Teresa. Even living saints were handing over the baton of caring, Philippa thought grimly. Jack, she said silently, you got out just in the nick of time. You died before you ever became past it.
    She turned to the television listings for the week and noticed, with shocked synchronicity, that she had missed a screening the previous evening of his first film All Parties. A tribute to the late British film director, it said underneath, see Pick of the Day.
    Beneath the superficial glitter of Jack Palmer’s slick and sophisticated debut lurk dark questions about class and misogyny. A haunting examination of glamour and illusion with subtle performances from...
    Philippa read, proud and delighted as she always had been by his good reviews. She was about to tear it out to give to him when she next saw him when she remembered that she would not be seeing him again. It kept happening, this forgetting, and she wondered whether it was a sign of age, or grief, or both.
    Jack’s ambition had always been to direct a film of The Great Gatsby. She could remember the way he had told her, leaning forward over the coffee-bar table, as if honouring her with a great secret, after going to the pictures for the first time together. It had seemed an odd choice to her, until he had explained that cinema had been his only escape from the satanic mills of his dreary industrial home town and his local library happened to hold the complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had described the novel with such passion that she had gone straight to her bookshelf when she returned to her flat and reread the book that night.
    In the mid-Seventies, Jack had been furious when somebody beat him to making the film. He had always referred to the Robert Redford vehicle as the chocolate-box version, but it had not deterred him. It was almost impossible to divert Jack from something he wanted. Several years later, none of the reviewers had spotted the resemblance of Jack’s modem yuppie retelling of the story, All Parties, with its themes of glamour, rivalry and excess perfectly in tune with the mores of the early Eighties. Suddenly Jack was hailed as the man breathing life into British cinema. He had caught the Zeitgeist just as he had always done in his advertising campaigns — his films were always steamy enough to get the PR going, but not enough to present the censors with difficulty.
    Philippa put down her newspaper shield for a moment and stared blankly at the headrest on the seat in front of her. In all of