The Men in her Life

watching Joss since his return from the poetry festival, wondering whether she had got it all wrong all these years.
    Could it be possible that she had long ago discovered what he was like but refused to believe it, because she so wanted him to be as he had first appeared to her, and not what he actually was? Could she have lived for so many years with an illusion? She stared at him as if he were a stranger as he recounted his story.
    ‘So the Italian woman says, “Rilly, ’ow do you know zis?” So Richard and I exchange glances, and she sees us, and she says, “No, rilly, I am very interested in spiritual zings...” She couldn’t understand why we roared. The poor signora thought that we really had met in another life...’
    Had Joss fucked the hapless Italian woman, Clare wondered. Did he have harems of women at the poetry festivals he enjoyed so much? She couldn’t imagine that he did not. He was always much nicer to her when he returned, which was probably as a result of guilt. She hoped he used condoms. Perhaps she should ask him. It would be perfectly reasonable, and yet she knew that his response would be a kind of wounded outrage that hurled the question back at her — don’t you trust me? — and, panicking, she would forget to ask the crucial question: trust you to be faithful, or to protect yourself and me?
    However calmly she prepared herself to challenge him, Joss always managed to get the better of her. It was as if their means of communication had stuck for ever at the point when she first met him, when she was a naive student and he was her tutor. She had been happy then to have all her thoughts about literature or politics, or any of the things that students took seriously, dismissed by him as middle-class daydreams. She had been totally in awe of him, unendingly grateful for his attention, especially since her thoughts were so utterly trivial in comparison to his.
    She stared at him now as he accepted the laughter of his fellow guests, basking in their admiration, and she suddenly saw that everything she had ever thought about him was wrong. She had mistaken his weakness for strength and his laziness for morality. In Penderric’s small pond he was a very big fish, but in the outside world he would flounder. That was why they were there and she was the last person to have realized it.
    In that lucid moment of truth she knew that she did not love him any more, or even like him very much, and it made her feel so guilty that she assumed everyone at the table must be reading her mind. Staring at the tablecloth she tried to occupy herself with the martini glass of prawn cocktail in front of her.
    ‘This is very good,’ she told Amelia, inadvertently interrupting Joss as he began to extemporize on the possible misinterpretation of figures of speech.
    ‘…chip on the shoulder, what does it mean — does it mean that you’re carrying a chip on your shoulder, or that you have a chip knocked out of your shoulder...?’
    ‘There’s a tremendous revival of Seventies food,’ Amelia said, just in case anyone had misunderstood the prawn cocktail as the old-fashioned variety instead of the contemporary one.
    ‘I always assumed that it meant chip as in fish and chips...’ said Olivia.
    ‘What! A greasy potato chip?’ Joss laughed dis-missively, ‘no, I’m certain it’s not that.’
    ‘What is chip on shoulder?’ Pepe, who had never really mastered English, asked.
    His wife, Vivienne, glanced at him contemptuously.
    ‘Are you old enough to remember Seventies food, Clare?’ she said.
    From anyone else it would have been a compliment, but Vivienne made it sound as if she were addressing a child, and Clare knew that the main purpose of the question was to make Joss feel his age. Vivienne was quite aware of the age difference between them and the fact that Joss would certainly remember prawn cocktail first time round. Vivienne had never got beyond the stage of cattiness after Joss had finished with her.
    ‘I’m thirty-six,’ Clare said neutrally.
    ‘Same age as Princess Diana,’ Amelia remarked as if that were a compliment.
    Pepe started singing Happy Birthday to You.
    ‘No,’ said Amelia, staying his arm, ‘no, you must wait for the pudding.’
    Oh for God’s sake let him sing, Clare wanted to say. It was kind of Amelia to host a dinner party for her birthday, but her insistence on having things just as they would be in a magazine was driving any fun out of the occasion. The food