Free The Men in her Life by Imogen Parker

Country and Western...’
    ‘Only ironically...’
    ‘I don’t see the difference. How can you like something ironically and not like it really?’ Mo wanted to know. ‘Seems silly to me.’
    ‘But you can go there any time,’ Holly said, trying another tactic.
    ‘You can go to the Ivy any time, but it doesn’t stop you going.’
    ‘True,’ Holly admitted. The logic was irrefutable if you left out the fact that the Ivy did great food and Jack Palmer was very good company, unlike the club and Eamon. But she knew Mo also knew these things.
    ‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ she said, resignedly.
    ‘Bloody hell!’ Mo teased her, ‘you must be getting old!’

    ‘Just a few crow’s-feet and we should be able to arrest the development of the wrinkles with this cream, Sonya said, smearing some onto Holly’s tilted face, ‘it’s got fruit AHAs...’
    Sonya was wearing a white coat. She looked like an over-made-up dental nurse and she spoke several decibels too loudly because she was used to doing demonstrations on willing victims with nothing better to do than kill half an hour on the ground floor of a department store.
    ‘If I just give you some of the night cream, a simple cleanser and moisturizer, and an exfoliating scrub to use once a week, you should be fine...’
    The trouble was, she wasn’t giving it. The subtotal was over eighty pounds, Holly calculated, and rising.
    ‘And just because it’s you,’ Sonya added with a bright coral smile, ‘I’ll give you the complimentary vanity bag, exclusive to this store, that really goes with two purchases from the make-up range. It includes a weekend-size eye-refreshing balm, two matt shadows and a mini-mascara.’
    ‘How generous,’ Holly said, wishing she had never sought advice.
    In her heart she knew that she would use the miraculously non-greasy contents of the frosted bottles once or twice before abandoning them on the top of the cupboard in her bathroom where they would gather dust until the contents began to separate and either Mo, or Colette on one of their exasperated unsolicited cleaning binges, would throw them away.
    ‘The trouble is they never do seem to make the visible difference they say they will,’ Holly whispered to her mother as they escaped from Sonya’s singsong mantra.
    ‘Perhaps you never use them long enough,’ Mo argued.
    ‘This morning I was absolutely determined to, you know, New Labour, New Skincare and all that...’
    Mo looked mystified.
    ‘…but Sonya’s made me a bit depressed. I mean crow’s-feet? I’ve gone straight from youthful complexion to crow’s-feet without passing laughter lines. I thought these were laughter lines,’ she wailed, pointing at the corners of her eyes.
    ‘As a matter of fact, I couldn’t see what she was talking about...’ Mo said, as they reached the escalator.
    ‘Even under that Nazi interrogation lamp?’
    ‘No.’
    Holly hugged her mother so tight, she almost picked her off the ground.
    ‘Every girl should have a mother like you,’ she said, ‘it’d put the cosmetics industry into recession.’
    ‘What are you going to do now?’ Mo asked, blushing pink, but clearly pleased to be so publicly loved.
    ‘I thought I might drop my bags back at the flat and go visit the new incumbents of Number Ten, cheer them in, I mean,’ Holly said, kissing her mother goodbye.

    When Holly had first moved into the flat, after answering an ad in the Evening Standard, two other people lived there too. She had been at the bottom of the hierarchy with the smallest room and bathroom-cleaning duties. The other tenants came and went, but Holly stayed, and after a couple of years she had the biggest room along with the responsibility for paying the bills and advertising for new flatmates. As her career progressed, she found she could afford not just the biggest room, but the little one at the back too, which became a kind of cupboard for all the stuff she didn’t want in the big room. And when