The Men in her Life

she was cross with him for not giving her time to get ready.
    ‘That would have spoilt the surprise. Anyway, you look beautiful.’
    ‘Ach you!’ she punched him playfully as she went to change. She looked in the bathroom mirror as she pulled the fastening from her long pony-tail, shaking her thick curly hair around her shoulders. Her face was pink from their walk, and her eyes were shining. The holiday had ironed the frown from her forehead. She thought she did look pretty for the first time in months.
    They had passed the restaurant on one of their walks in the rain and stood in the shelter of its porch reading the menu and wondering who could afford prices like that.
    ‘But...’ she said, when the cab drew up outside. ‘Now, Mo, I don’t want you spoiling your dinner by thinking of the price,’ Eamon had read her thoughts. ‘I won a few bob on the horses,’ he told her, ‘and you’re going to start with a glass of champagne...’
    For a moment Mo guessed that all the surprises and champagne were a prelude to a proposal, and she worried about what she would say to him, but after a couple of glasses she felt so relaxed she began not to care, and by the time she had finished her crème brulée she became anxious that the evening was going to end without him saying anything. Why should he propose, she asked herself, when he had everything he wanted without marrying her and his independence too? And why was she even thinking about it? They’d survived so far without being married. Why tie themselves down now?
    ‘Have you had a good time?’ Eamon asked.
    ‘I have,’ she found that they had both reverted to the Irish cadences of their childhood. An English person would have said yes in response to his question.
    ‘Would you really think about coming to live here,’ she asked him, ‘if you won the Lottery...’
    ‘I would.’
    ‘Maybe I’ll buy a ticket myself so we’d have a double chance,’ she was encouraging him to go further, she realized.
    ‘I don’t want to lead you into gambling,’ he teased.
    She blushed, and agreed to a brandy with her coffee.
    ‘Would you live here, then?’ he asked. Suddenly the conversation had become stilted and embarrassed as they simultaneously drew back from the brink of uncharted intimacy.
    ‘I don’t know. Oh, it’s a dream, isn’t it, Eamon?’ Mo thought of Sonya and Jose-something. Maria, that was it, Jose-Maria, at Tenerife airport.
    ‘Maybe we’ll come back next year for a holiday. I’d like that.’

Chapter 23

    Clare was sitting diagonally opposite Joss at Amelia’s oval dining-table, watching him tell an anecdote. She had heard the story several times since he returned from the literary festival, but he had a way of engaging his audience, as if inviting them to share a wicked secret, that never failed to please. When he performed, he turned himself inside out, she thought. The mist of suppressed rage that usually hung around him became a bright radiance of charm.
    ‘... so this Italian woman was talking to Richard and Richard said, “Do you know Joss Drummond? He was a neighbour of mine in another life...” ’
    Clare looked at the faces around the table, all smiling with the privilege of being in his company. She realized she had spent her life waiting for moments like this, when the sun broke through the clouds. Long, long ago, in the first few weeks of their relationship, it had been sunny all the time. She had been a tightly-furled bud opening and flowering under his warmth and light. And because she had seen the charm first, she had thought that the charmer was the man and the moods emanated from his acute awareness of the futility of life. As a poet, he felt these things more profoundly than she did, and she had thought her failure to feel equally deeply made her an inadequate person.
    What Holly had said about love kept coming back to Clare.
    ‘Everyone’s the One at first... you start off with someone and it’s gorgeous and you can’t eat because you’re so happy and then after a few weeks it splits up and you think what did I do? We were so perfect at the beginning. And then you work out that you only got along so well because you didn’t know each other ...’
    At the time, Clare had thought that Holly had no understanding of marriage, and she had been slightly miffed at the implication that her own situation with Joss could be so casually dismissed. But the words haunted her like a prophecy, and she had found herself