What became of us

it,’ she put a finger to his mouth as he opened his eyes and looked up at her face.
    ‘How did you know?’
    ‘It was the quality of the silence,’ she told him.
    ‘Don’t you think we have been silent for too long?’ he asked, suddenly impatient with her silences.
    ‘Yes. Probably.’
    ‘Why don’t you want me to say I love you?’ he asked, breaking the taboo she had silently imposed on the word.
    She yelped and waited, but strangely it was not so very painful to hear it.
    She remembered Penny saying to her once, ‘You’re afraid of someone loving you too much, so you push them away.’
    ‘Not in this place,’ Manon said to Roy, putting her hand over his mouth to quieten him.
    ‘This is our place.’ His hand shrugged hers off and gesticulated around the small room. The light seeping round the edge of his jacket was pale now. A new day was approaching. ‘This room has always been ours. I pretended it was my office, but it was never my office. It was always the place where I had lost my virginity.’
    ‘You were a virgin?’ she asked, rolling off him and lying next to him.
    ‘What did you think?’
    ‘Not that you were a virgin,’ she said, coyly.
    ‘We were so good together,’ he said, running a finger down her breastbone.
    ‘Why did you not move away from here?’ she asked, suddenly shy about talking about sex.
    He sat up, and sighed, as if he didn’t want to talk about his life since that day but knew that it was inevitable.
    ‘Why would we move? We couldn’t afford to. I stayed out of this room as much as I could.’
    She noticed how careful he was not to use Penny’s name.
    He slumped back down to the floor beside her. They both lay staring at the ceiling. She tried to cover herself with her dress. He put an arm behind her neck and drew her into the warmth of his chest. She felt so comfortable there that she allowed herself to ask the question she had always banned from her consciousness.
    ‘How would our lives have been, do you think?’
    ‘If you had let me love you?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s any point in talking about it.’
    ‘Of course not,’ she said, quickly.
    Could she have settled into Oxford life and become a don’s wife? Or a don herself? Would she have made him happy? Would he her? And the most unanswerable question of all. If all their lives had followed different paths, would Penny still have died?
    Nobody knew why Penny had cancer. It was not in her family. She had not smoked. People talked about chance X-rays in the atmosphere randomly hitting cells and making them cancerous. But if that was what had happened, then it was only logical to think that anything could have changed events. A phone call, a supermarket queue. Even if her life had been different by just a second, the lethal ray might not have found its target.
    But the unrelenting chain of guilt would never bring her back. It would not change anything except the future.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell Penny about us?’ Roy suddenly asked, as if he had been having similar thoughts.
    ‘Why didn’t you?’
    He thought for a moment.
    ‘At first I kept it secret because I somehow knew that Ursula wouldn’t like it, and, I suppose, because it kept it alive. If it was a secret then it was a possibility. If I had told anyone they would have said, don’t be so stupid, forget about it, and then it wouldn’t be there any more.’
    He paused, then went on:
    ‘I didn’t meet up with Penny until several years later, and we were just friends to begin with. It was irrelevant. I did consider telling her when we started sleeping together, but because I hadn’t told her all the time we were friends, I thought it would look as if I had been hiding it for a reason, or that it was significant to us. It would have made it more than it was...’
    He looked at Manon.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’ he asked.
    She had been frightened of her own feelings, and terrified because she knew that he had fallen in love with her. Keeping it secret was the nearest she could get to persuading herself that it had not happened, because if it had happened, then it would destroy him. Just as loving her had destroyed Carl.
    She thought for a long time before answering him, and when she spoke the words were only halftruthful.
    ‘I dared not admit that I could feel so much. I thought it would go away,’ she said. She looked at him, his cornflower blue eyes, his chopped corn hair.
    ‘But it