The Men in her Life

rails. She’d often seen clothes being delivered to the department stores on them when she walked up Regent Street early in the mornings, but she had never seen them for sale. One day she’d asked one of the guys trundling along a consignment of dresses where she could get hold of one, and after a short negotiation, he had turned up at her door that evening with two in exchange for five ten-pound notes. As it turned out, Simon had had to take the castors off in order to get them up the stairs, and somehow Holly had never got round to screwing them back on, so they didn’t trundle from room to room, in the way she had imagined, but stood in the spare room getting more and more weighed down with her purchases. Holly bought clothes like other people bought groceries, something almost every day and a big shop at the weekend.
    ‘What’s in there?’ Ella asked about the little room at the back that had been Holly’s first bedroom.
    ‘Skeletons... and a few shoes,’ Holly told her, ‘I’ve got big feet and it’s hard to get my size, so whenever I try some on that fit, I buy several pairs.’
    ‘Hard to get your size?’ Matt exclaimed, peering in. ‘Well, other people buy lampshades and vases and sets of kitchen knives in wooden blocks and chrome toasters. Cherie Blair buys all of those AND shoes,’ Holly defended herself, looking at the stacks of shoeboxes then closing the door, ‘as you can see, I don’t. It’s not exactly colour supplement, but it is home.’
    ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ Ella said, ‘it’s the kind of place I’ve always dreamed of living in.’
    ‘Me too,’ Holly smiled at her, ‘now it’s seven o’clock and it’s Friday and I want a drink. Shall we see if Simon’s around?’

    There was a floodlit statue on the top of the Palace Theatre that you couldn’t see from the street. Holly had never been able to work out whether it was a royal figure or a neo-classical god but she liked to think of it as an angel who stood up there in a golden halo of light, silently watching over the flashing lights and milling crowds of showbizland.
    ‘When my parents first lived in London , they had a room over there,’ Holly pointed, ‘in fact, that’s where I must have been conceived. No wonder I feel so at home up here,’ she said.
    ‘You are where my two worlds meet,’ she remembered Jack telling her.
    She had sat on this terrace drinking beer or wine or cocktails a hundred times with friends, or colleagues, or clients and yet never thought about her Soho origins. That was the difference with family, she realized. What she shared with Ella was more like history than anecdote. It meant that Ella understood things about Holly without even mentioning them which, with strangers, would have needed conversations to explain. It was what they meant by blood being thicker than water, Holly suddenly appreciated, liking the feeling it gave her.
    ‘How much older are you than Clare?’ Ella asked.
    ‘About a month. I’ve just been thirty-six. She’s about to be, isn’t she?’
    ‘Oh no, it’s tomorrow and I forgot,’ Ella said, ‘I can’t believe I forgot...’
    ‘You could send flowers.’
    ‘Yes, OK. I just can’t believe I forgot... Jack was a shit,’ Ella returned to the conversation.
    ‘No,’ Holly felt compelled to defend her father, ‘he didn’t know about me.’
    ‘He was still a shit to screw your mother and Philippa at the same time,’ Ella insisted.
    There was an uncomfortable silence in which Matt and Simon shifted around on their chairs and Holly stared at her niece.
    ‘You’re right,’ she said at last, ‘he was.’
    The men breathed almost audible sighs of relief.
    ‘Shall we eat Chinese?’ Holly changed the subject.
    ‘I don’t like Chinese food,’ Matt told her.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ Simon advised him, in a man-to-man kind of way, ‘that was a rhetorical question.’
    ‘You only think you don’t like it because all you’ve had is Mr Chan’s version,’ Holly told him.
    ‘There’s never any vegetables,’ Matt whined.
    In Chuen Cheng Ku, Holly ordered deep-fried bean-curd with pak choi and three kinds of mushroom for him, scallops, squid, Malaysian style Ho Fun and pork belly with yam for the rest of them. She closed the menu with a smack, feeling rather like a schoolmistress.
    ‘So what are we going to do tonight?’ she asked.
    ‘Is that a rhetorical question too?’ Matt asked.
    When was it that men developed that inwardly