The Men in her Life

along to the song on the radio.
    ‘You look happy,’ Amelia told her when she arrived at the party.
    ‘I was miles away,’ Clare replied.

Chapter 4

    In the kitchen of a large house in Hampstead, Philippa Palmer poured herself a glass of Chablis from a bottle that was chilling in the fridge and picked up one of the little wooden bowls of Japanese rice crackers her housekeeper Lucinda had lined up on the breakfast bar in the kitchen.
    Apart from lighting a flame under the new potatoes, there was nothing left for her to do. She knew it was considered slightly de trop these days to serve poached salmon, but Lucinda had assured her that it was wild, not farmed, and Jack had always loved fresh salmon, rather sweetly believing it to be the ultimate upper-class food.
    It was warm enough to sit on the terrace. Philippa settled herself on a sun-lounger and began to leaf through the brochures her secretary had sent over by messenger. The previous evening, exhausted after his flight, Jack had agreed to her suggestion that they take a holiday, and she wanted to have something booked before he had a chance to change his mind. The nearest they had come to having a holiday for many years were the weekends they met up in New York, halfway between her work in London and his in Hollywood.
    She tried to remember the last time they had been on a Proper holiday together, or if they ever had. The very first summer they had intended to go backpacking round Europe , but when she became pregnant she had felt too sick to go. After that there had been family holidays but it wasn’t the same as being together, just the two of them, and by the time Clare had left home they were both too busy to take real time off. Jack always went skiing for two weeks in Whistler and she collapsed somewhere hot in the Caribbean, but for the rest of the year they were both travelling so much betweeen London, the States and the various locations of Jack’s movies, that evenings together just hanging out at home had become as rare and exotic as nights in the most luxurious hotels of the world.
    Now, for an unlimited stretch of time, neither of them was working. The coincidence of their individual decisions to take a breather was too glorious an opportunity to miss, but she knew that the liberating freedom they both felt now would never last unless they were challenged in some way. Jack especially had such a low boredom threshold he practically itched when unoccupied.
    Philippa was astonished by the variety of cultural holidays available. The Artistic Traditions of Japan, White Nights in St Petersburg with special access to the Hermitage, a tour of the archaeological sites in Libya, or Syria, the indigenous history and culture of Zimbabwe, for heaven’s sake. There was even a trip to Yemen which carried a health warning because of the high altitudes and off-road driving. Philippa tore that page out and threw it in the kitchen bin when she went to get herself another glass of wine. She wanted to be intellectually engaged, not utterly exhausted, and it was exactly the trip that Jack would get fixated on if he were allowed to see that it existed. There were gentler tours, and courses. They could learn to paint in the South of France, or to cook in Tuscany . There were opera festivals in Verona , Bregenz, Vienna and Prague .
    Philippa rather fancied the Italian cookery. She had never learned to cook. Her one act of rebellion in the Sixties had been to refuse to go to finishing school in Switzerland , as her older sister had done. In the Seventies she had refused to cook as a matter of political principle, in the Eighties she had simply been too busy. Now, suddenly, in the Nineties, cooking had become a revered skill that she did not possess. She liked the idea of learning how to make those deliciously crisp little pizzas that had become so popular recently, or to roast a pigeon. Her one attempt at roasting had been in the early days of marriage to Jack. Nobody had told her that you had to take the little plastic bag of giblets out of the chicken before putting it in the oven. At least it was the last time Jack had complained that they never ate a proper Sunday lunch.
    As she wandered back into the kitchen for a refill, she debated where she would install the wood-fired oven that seemed essential to modem Italian cuisine. She would ask Lucinda in the morning, she thought, when she came to clear up after the dinner party.
    Philippa had decided on a dinner party