The Men in her Life

and crockery and the arrangement of summer flowers in the centre of the table made it look as if Amelia was about to open the door to a camera crew, and the conversation was following the same route.
    ‘A spoonful of plain yoghurt just takes that slightly cloying sweetness out of the mayonnaise...’
    ‘Well, northerners always have chips on their shoulders, that’s why I thought...’
    ‘Olivia, you are the most terrible snob.’
    ‘I really like the way you’ve used string instead of napkin-rings...’
    ‘It was a bin end and I think I got a bargain...’ They had come to Cornwall to escape the inevitable slide into the middle-class rat race and nearly twenty years later they were sitting in the midst of Abigail’s Party, Clare thought.
    ‘I never would have thought of rosti with coq au vin. You are clever.’
    ‘They’re potato and salsify. I wasn’t sure about the salsify, but I think it works...’
    Nobody seemed to notice that Clare was not speaking.
    ‘ Black forest gateau,’ said Amelia, depositing the chocolate and cream confection on the table. It had a candle burning in the middle. ‘Now, you can sing!’

    Later, Clare watched Joss undress, staring at his body as if she had never seen it before. She realized that she had not really looked at him for a long time. When they first met she had thought his body like an Olympian athlete, not just the shape of the triangular torso, moulded muscles and long, strong legs, but the solidity. Next to him, she had felt like a slip of something flimsy, a cobweb clinging to a rock. Physically, as well as intellectually, he had overwhelmed her and she had found the sensation of drowning in his power unbelievably sexy.
    It was only when she became pregnant with Ella that she had experienced her body as something real and separate for the first time in her life. While other women hated the changes pregnancy brought to their bodies, Clare had enjoyed the sheer physicality of it. But even then she had been grateful to Joss for bestowing the gift of this condition upon her. In childbirth, the pain seemed to confirm her existence, but after Ella was born, things were never quite the same. Her body became something not just for his pleasure and hers, but for the sustenance of their child, and even though Joss claimed to approve of breastfeeding and wrote a long poem using the image of her as a madonna, she suspected that in reality he had felt diminished.
    It was during that time that he had begun his affair with Joni. Clare always thought of it as his first affair, although of course it was not as far as he was concerned. Their own relationship had started off as an affair. He had been living with a female tutor at the college when she met him. The woman had been older than him and eager to have children. It must have been a terrible blow for her when he left her for a pregnant teenager. Clare was so very different from the tutor, it had not even occurred to her that Joss might do the same to her. Why was it, she wondered now, that every woman who takes a man from another woman believes that it will be different for her? How arrogant passion makes people, and how undifferentiated in their stupidity.
    She watched Joss taking off an old checked shirt that she had ironed many times. When they were first married she had even loved ironing his shirts, enjoying the achievement of caring for him and the faint smell of his skin and washing-powder rising to her face in the steam. Now it irritated her hugely that he threw the shirt in the direction of the wicker washing-basket, neither seeing nor caring whether it went in.
    The hair on his chest had become as grey as wire wool. His hair was greying too. When she had met him the long black curls and the sparkle of his eyes had made him almost magical to look at. He was still handsome now, and sometimes, lifted by a couple of drinks and the telling of a good story, the magic returned, but his resting expression had fallen, and the skin on his cheeks was pitted by years of shaving his black facial hair, not smooth and fine as it had been.
    ‘Did you enjoy this evening?’ Joss asked, jolting her out of her silent assessment.
    ‘Yes,’ she lied, her heart beginning to beat quickly, wondering if, after all, he had been reading her thoughts.
    ‘You seemed rather quiet,’ he said, climbing into bed next to her, ‘there’s nothing wrong, is there?’
    His voice was filled with concern, and he put an arm around her,