The Men in her Life

would it last?
    Friends: 2. Colette was a bitch and Simon a traitor.
    Family: 8. She couldn’t in all honesty award herself 10 when she was cheating on her niece.
    Flat: 10. As usual.
    A total of 36 out of 50, which made 72%.
    Holly stared at the figure. The last time the circumstances had been completely different and yet still it came out the same. Whatever she did, she was stuck at seventy-two per cent.
    Perhaps she should go on holiday like everyone else. The papers were full of pictures of Princess Diana kissing Dodi Fayed on a boat in the Mediterranean . Holly imagined herself lying on the deck of a boat with Matt at the helm as they pottered from one Greek island to another, and then she remembered as the phone rang how sick she had been sailing.
    She picked up the receiver wearily.
    ‘Holly, it’s Mo...’
    ‘Hello, how are you, sorry I haven’t rung... I’ve been a bit busy...’ Holly sat up, slightly alarmed. Mo didn’t like disturbing her at work and very rarely rang her there.
    ‘I thought so,’ Mo said, ‘are you too busy to meet up...?’
    That was loading on the guilt a bit, Holly thought. It had only been a couple of weeks since they last spoke, hadn’t it? It probably seemed longer because Mo had been away on holiday but whose fault was that? Surely she wasn’t still annoyed about the cat?
    ‘When were you thinking?’ she asked, flipping through a virtually empty diary. At the beginning of each week that Matt was still miraculously there, she spent Monday morning clearing her evening engage-merits. Now that she had meetings with her clients in her office, not over a pavement table of a wine bar, she wondered why she had ever spent so much time working after work hours. As soon as you had a good excuse, work seemed a great deal less important.
    ‘Tonight?’ said Mo.
    ‘Bit busy tonight...’ Holly lied.
    ‘Tomorrow... I could pop in on my way home...’
    ‘Tomorrow’s looking a bit...’
    ‘Holly, there’s something I want to tell you, but I can’t tell you over the phone...’ Mo interrupted. She sounded a bit desperate.
    ‘You’re not ill...’ Holly was suddenly frightened.
    ‘No, not ill. It’s nothing to worry about...’ Mo conceded.
    ‘Well, what is it?’
    ‘I don’t want to tell you on the phone...’
    ‘All right, tonight then,’ Holly said, curiosity aroused, ‘after work at my place.’
    She could always give Matt a tenner to play video games at the Trocadero for an hour.
    Mo looked different. Her long and lustrous hair, normally pinned up in a severe bun for work, was pushed loosely back from her head with a couple of grips, the top two buttons of her blouse were open and the sleeves rolled up.
    ‘It’s hot out there,’ she said, sitting down on Holly’s collapsed chair in front of the pedestal fan and kicking off her court shoes.
    ‘Make yourself at home,’ Holly said sarcastically, ‘do you want a glass of wine?’
    ‘Oh, go on then,’ Mo said, ‘how are you?’ she called to the kitchen.
    Holly splashed the chilled liquid into two glasses. She had no idea of how she was.
    ‘All right,’ she called back.
    ‘Work?’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Simon?’
    ‘Haven’t seen him for a while...’ Holly walked back into her bedroom.
    ‘Boyfriends?’
    ‘Err. Not quite sure...’ She looked at Mo and saw that she wasn’t really paying attention, so it wasn’t worth beginning to explain, ‘so what’s so important I have to cancel everything to hear about it?’
    ‘I’m getting married,’ Mo said.
    ‘What? Oh, Mum, congratulations... who to?’ Holly asked.
    ‘Eamon, of course,’ her mother replied, slightly crossly, looking at Holly directly for the first time since arriving.
    ‘Eamon?’ Holly repeated astonished.
    ‘Well, who else?’
    ‘I don’t know. I thought you might have met someone... Eamon?’ Holly asked again.
    ‘Yes,’ said Mo with slight impatience. Holly really could be very spoilt and difficult, she thought.
    ‘You can’t,’ Holly said categorically.
    ‘I haven’t come to ask for your blessing...’
    ‘I wouldn’t bloody give it to you.’
    ‘Well, I don’t want it.’
    A charged silence invaded the room as disagreement pivoted on the edge of escalation. Mo pretended to be very interested in the rim of her glass. Holly began to tidy her dressing-table.
    ‘Mum, he’s not good enough for you,’ her back was to her mother, but she could see Mo’s face reflected in the mirror, ‘you never would have married him