What became of us

drinking pints in a perfect country pub, with you.’
    ‘We talked about D. H. Lawrence,’ she said.

    She had felt rather superior to him because she had passed the adolescent stage of thinking that Lawrence was the God of All Things Sensual, and begun to see him as a bit of a misogynist unjustly feted for his understanding of women’s sexuality. But Roy was very intelligent, and his sheer passion for literature was exhilarating to hear after three years of dry academic study. She remembered thinking that all his enthusiasm would be drained away just as hers had been, and she had fought back the urge to tell him not to come to this place. He quoted long passages that she had forgotten, until she was almost convinced that Lawrence was, after all, the greatest writer in the English language.
    At some point, as darkness began to fall, one or other of them had banged the wooden table to make a point with such force that pale brown liquid slopped over the top of Roy’s glass, spreading in an inexorable puddle and dripping between the wooden slats onto their legs. It was the surprise with which her knees registered the splatters of beer like unexpected rain that had first alerted her to the fact that she was drunk. But by then it had been too late to do anything about it.

    * * *

    ‘I was seventeen,’ Roy suddenly admitted.
    ‘I was twenty-two,’ she said.
    Curiously, five years seemed a significant difference now, with him in his early thirties, and her approaching forty, but then it had not seemed so great.
    ‘You don’t really look any different,’ he said.
    ‘That’s because it’s dark in here.’ She tried to deflect his compliment, but she could feel their bodies inching together, just as they had been drawn together that evening when they returned to Joshua Street and found everyone still out.

    She had been filling the kettle to make coffee when suddenly he was right behind her and she turned into his arms. Mid-kiss they heard the sound of a key in the door, and sprang apart as Annie marched into the house.
    ‘I can’t understand whether your objection is on grounds of morality or taste,’ she was saying loudly.
    ‘Both!’ Ursula said, letting herself into her room at the front downstairs, and closing the door with a loud bang.
    ‘I got laid, she didn’t,’ Annie said in explanation as she looked into the kitchen. ‘Is there any alcohol in the house?’
    ‘No,’ Manon replied.
    ‘Shit, I’m going to bed then,’ Annie said, turning round to reveal that her back was covered in bits of grass.
    It was easy to guess what had happened, and both girls were clearly too drunk to show any concern for Roy’s sleeping arrangements.
    Manon made strong black coffee. They sat at the kitchen table, awkward now in each other’s company but unwilling to be the first to say goodnight. She could remember staring at the brown foam that clung to the inside of the empty mugs as she asked him politely what college he was applying to. Balliol, he said, because of its left-wing tradition. She thought it would be too unkind to disillusion him about student politics.
    ‘What about you? What are you going to do now?’ he had asked her, equally blandly, and she had given him a meaningless answer, knowing that they weren’t really having a conversation, only marking time before one of them dared to move a fraction towards the other again.
    ‘Travel the world. Leave all this behind.’ She waved vaguely, so that she might have meant the kitchen, or the University, or life itself.
    He was young enough not to have learned that his face was a barometer of his emotions. She thought that when he came to understand it he would break many hearts. He was very attractive, poised at the perfect moment in his life where his beauty was exactly balanced by his naivety. It was a combination that had made her feel both vulnerable and powerful in his presence.
    Then they were kissing again. She did not want to want him, but she could not help herself. She unwound his hand from the back of her neck and pulled him to his feet, putting a finger to her lips to show that he must not make a sound. Then she led him upstairs to her tiny room.
    In the darkness they discovered each other’s bodies. The silence was a pact between them and their exploration of each other a ritual enacted with the utmost tenderness and reverence. He was on her, under her, beside her, beneath her, part of her pressing all of his skin against hers. And then