The Men in her Life

seemed to be parties every night of the week, simple impromptu get-togethers fuelled by rough red wine and dancing. Sometimes Pepe had played flamenco guitar. Clare remembered making huge bowls of spaghetti aglio olio that people would fall upon at two in the morning, ravenous from enjoying themselves so much. It had been unlike anything she had known before.
    At home, in London , parties had been catered and waiters roamed around with trays of champagne flutes, but most of the time the large Hampstead house stood like a fortress, empty except for its three inhabitants, the windows and doors wired with devices to screech at uninvited intruders.
    Here nobody locked their front door. Tu casa es mi casa, Pepe had told them when they arrived. Clare had loved that closeness then, enveloping her like the family she had never had. She could not remember exactly when it was she had started to feel that the embrace of the community was stifling her.
    Clare walked slowly down the hill into town. It was a bit of a dead end, not really pretty enough to be a day-trip destination, and too far off the beaten track to become much of a resort. Nothing ever seemed to change. Recently there had been an influx of camper vans parked along the North Beach each weekend, but the surfers who owned them kept themselves to themselves. In the school holidays, families who had been coming to Cornwall all their lives filled the few empty cottages, spent their days pottering around the rock pools in rolled-up jeans and plastic macs and treated themselves to clotted cream teas at Amelia’s tea shop, but it was a long way to come down from London for the weekend, even a bank holiday.
    Clare knew every crack in every paving stone, every faded postcard advert on the post office notice-board, every tacky souvenir in every shop window. The day before, she had found herself telling Ella with some excitement that the jardinière in the shape of an elephant they had jointly voted most hideous artefact 1996 must have been sold since it was no longer in the window of The Kiln, and they had speculated for a good ten minutes about who could have been the purchaser before Ella had sighed and said, ‘Enough. We’re as sad as they are if this is all we can talk about!’ She had meant it as a joke, but like so much of what Ella said, it was almost chilling in its truth.
    Clare forced herself not to think about how she would cope without her beloved daughter. After her A levels, which were just starting, Ella was taking a gap year in the States, and then she was going to medical school in London . Despite looking the embodiment of disaffected youth, Ella was hard-working, clever and ambitious. Clare knew that there was no point in pretending that she would come back home in the holidays, because she would not. Ella despised all the things that constituted the town’s attractions — sailing, surfing and particularly the exclusive group of writers who had chosen to make Penderric their home in the Seventies and were known in the town as the Poets, but whom Ella usually referred to as the Wankers.
    ‘They’re nothing but a bunch of middle-aged Wankers living off their wives and fantasizing about bonking the girls on the beach. I don’t know why you Put up with it,’ she had told Clare, throwing down that spring’s edition of Penpoetry, the pamphlet the poets Published twice a year. And they had both burst into fits of conspiratorial laughter that stopped abruptly when Joss had walked in.
    When Ella left, she would be leaving home for good. America would change her. She would be able to be exactly who she wanted to be. When she came back she would be different, just a little, or maybe a lot, and it was odd to think about that. If you were a good mother, you had to trust your child to have the strength and resources to make herself happy. Letting go was going to be tough, but she was almost looking forward to it on Ella’s behalf. For a moment Clare visualized herself in America , on her own in a new land, creating a new identity for herself. She was driving a convertible across the States, losing herself in the vast landscape, and when she reached the other side running down the beach to leap into the salty spritz of the Pacific. With a stab of guilt she realized that she had not included Tom in her fantasy, so she immediately put a car seat in the back of the convertible and a baseball cap on his head and repeated the journey with him behind her, singing