The Men in her Life

guy…’
    ‘Can you do that on the Internet?’ Holly interrupted, ‘I mean personal ads...’
    ‘Yeah...’ Jeff looked rather uncomfortable.
    ‘Sorry. Go on.’
    Holly wondered whether Colette knew about Internet dating.
    ‘... so her ad says she wants someone with a poetic nature, and there’s this computer nerd who falls in love with her. So they strike up an E-mail correspondence, and he knows that he’s going to have to do the poetry thing before he gets to meet her, so he gets in his friend...’
    Jeff looked up for her approval.
    ‘It is a good idea,’ Holly said. ‘Why don’t you work up an outline and I’ll have a look...’ She was sure he could do the nerd bit convincingly, but she wasn’t at all sure about the poetry or the romance.
    ‘There’s another one I’d like to...’
    Holly’s phone rang, on cue. She’d told the receptionist to interrupt if he wasn’t gone after half an hour.
    ‘Right,’ Holly spoke to the dialling tone, ‘I’m just finishing here...’
    Taking his cue, Jeff said goodbye and left, and as soon as he’d gone Holly wished she’d let him stay. He had body odour and a dead father and he wasn’t much of a writer, but there was a bulge near his groin that shouted almost full pack of Marlboro, and now she was going to have to last the next half an hour without one. Holly’s phone rang.
    ‘I’ve got Charlie Prince for you,’ Jemima announced. Charlie Prince said that he didn’t think he was the one for The One. He liked the script, but thought it needed work. At the moment the central character was too much like a dominatrix and the men looked too silly. It was only one man’s view, he told Holly, adding, ‘I’m sure you’ll prove me wrong.’
    ‘Yes, I’m sure I will,’ she said, laughing, ‘I already have a six-figure offer on the table.’
    ‘I thought you said you were giving me first look,’ Charlie objected.
    ‘In the circumstances it’s a good thing I didn’t,’ Holly retaliated, ‘anyway, you said you’d come back to me on Monday morning. It’s now Friday afternoon, three weeks later.’
    ‘God, you’re tough... you’re my kind of woman,’ he joked.
    If only, Holly thought, without rancour.
    ‘But you’re right,’ he conceded, ‘I don’t think I’m a romantic comedy person...’
    ‘You ought to be. It’s the only thing Hollywood thinks we do well here...’
    ‘Yeah, I know. I need to team up with someone who is... do you know anyone who’d be interested? Who you rate, I mean?’
    ‘I’ll think about it,’ Holly told him, putting her feet up on the desk.
    ‘You wouldn’t be interested, I suppose?’
    ‘Me?’ She wasn’t sure whether he was joking.
    ‘Think about it,’ Charlie said, banging down the phone.
    She didn’t have time to think about anything, Holly realized, looking at her watch, because Ella and Matt would be arriving at her flat any minute, and even though she lived just a short walk from the office, she had never made it in less than five minutes.

    They were standing by the wrought-iron entrance gates when she arrived, looking like a couple of young backpackers.
    ‘You’re not planning on moving in,’ Holly exclaimed, kissing each of them on the cheek, and looking sceptically at the size of the rucksack on Matt’s back.
    ‘It’s Ella’s...’ he said, ‘she is going away for a year...’
    ‘God, what a gentleman you are!’ Holly said, putting her key in the lock.
    They all tramped up the stairs.
    ‘What a fantastic place,’ Ella said, putting her head round Holly’s bedroom door on their way to the kitchen.
    ‘Could do with a bit of a clean-up,’ Holly said. The sun was at the perfect angle to show up all the smudges on the kitchen window. She had never really noticed before how shabby the kitchen was.
    ‘I would offer you coffee,’ she said, ‘except that I don’t have any milk, or any coffee for that matter. We could go into Soho and have one or a drink...’
    ‘Be great.’
    ‘I’ll just show you your room...’
    Nobody ever stayed in the guest-room except Colette when she couldn’t be bothered to go back to her mansion in the burbs. Holly didn’t have friends who lived outside London , except the people she’d met in New York and Los Angeles through work, and she couldn’t imagine any American wanting to stay in a dusty room on an old double divan wedged between two clothes manufacturer’s rails of her garments and surrounded by piles of books. She was proud of the