The Men in her Life

off. Mo couldn’t understand why Holly was so vehement about that, but that was just how Holly was. She had very strong opinions.
    ‘It is beautiful,’ Mo agreed, slipping her hand through his arm. Eamon squeezed affectionately with his elbow.
    It had been the best holiday Mo could remember. They had rented a cottage just along the coast from Galway City . They’d had to take a place that slept six but it was nice to have a bit of room. Normally holidays meant living out of a suitcase with nowhere in the bathroom to put your toothbrush. Here they had three cupboards and three double beds with stiff white sheets and blankets that smelt of childhood holidays. In the mornings, Mo lay in bed enjoying the luxury of dozing warmly while Eamon cooked her breakfast, and the taste of buttered soda bread dipped in egg was as good as anything she’d ever eaten.
    ‘It tastes better when someone makes it for you,’ she told Eamon.
    ‘I’ll make it for you every day, if you’d like,’ he replied.
    She didn’t know if he meant every day on the holiday, or every day of her life. Then she wondered why she was even thinking about it.
    They’d had a few fine days and on one of them they had taken a flight to the Aran Islands in a little propeller plane that chugged along like a minibus in the sky and landed in a field. She thought it was the most wonderful place she had ever been. They hired bikes and cycled to the end of the island, past donkeys in tiny walled fields the size of rugs. Out here on the edge of the Atlantic with nothing but sea for thousands of miles until America, it was difficult to believe that London was going on just the same, that the tube was still filling and emptying its hordes of disconsolate commuters, and that shoppers were wandering through her department with its distinctive city smell of perfume and carpet.
    Every night they went into Galway and listened to Irish music in a pub, and as the evening wore on people began to sing in turn, and, finally, Eamon persuaded her to dance, and even though she tried to make herself shy, she could not be. She stood and danced, her long hair loose around her shoulders, as happy as she had ever been in her life.
    ‘You look like a native,’ Eamon told her proudly as people applauded.
    She looked at the other faces in the pub, listening, smiling at the fiddler, and she recognized herself in them — the blue eyes, the tawny, freckled colouring — and she felt as if she had come home. In London , everything was difficult, and people spent their lives hardening themselves to the stress, but it was different here.
    Then she thought of the time she had been to Tenerife with the girls and Sonya, who had got off with a bartender, Jose-something, whining on the last day that she never wanted to leave and draping herself ridiculously over him at the airport. Mo had thought it a silly display. She was sure that Jose-something would be with another impressionable tourist by the end of the evening, or even sooner by the way he was looking at the Arrivals gate over Sonya’s shoulder. Holidays were holidays and that was why everything felt so much better. There was no point in thinking it could go on like that for ever.

    Arm in arm they watched the molten red wafer of sun stick on the horizon for just a second before disappearing. Gulls swooped around the harbour as the sky faded from pink and gold to grey. Two lovers on a beach at dusk, a sunset, the damp breeze just slightly tainted with seaweed, and the poignant cry of a seagull. It was so perfect it had made her feel powerful, as if anything could happen.
    ‘Well, that’s it for another day,’ Eamon sighed.
    Mo’s spirits sank. Eamon was a good man, a kind man, but he was no poet, and poetry was what the moment had demanded. He stooped to tie his shoelaces and she put a hand on his back to steady herself as she slipped her feet back into her sandals.
    ‘Lean on me, Mo,’ he joked, and she was filled with such fondness for his cheerful good humour, it made her want to cry.
    She had bought steak for the evening, his favourite meal, and a bag of oven chips, but as she was lighting the grill he came up behind her and put his hands around her waist.
    ‘You’re not cooking on our last night,’ he told her. ‘But the steak...’
    ‘I’ll have it for breakfast...’
    ‘But where will we go? By the time we walk into...’ He pointed through the window. To her surprise, there was a mini-cab waiting outside. Then