What became of us

asked.
    ‘My leg has cramped,’ she said, bending over to rub her calf. ‘Jesus, it feels as if it’s seized up.’
    Ian helped her sit down on the pavement. He slipped off her shoe and bent her foot towards him from the ankle.
    ‘Ow!’ Annie cried.
    ‘Better?’
    ‘Worse,’ she said.
    ‘Wait here,’ Ian instructed.
    He disappeared up the road. Sitting on the cold pavement, she fought tears of pain and exhaustion. The chilly air was suddenly full of the incessant chirping of the dawn chorus.
    ‘Oh shut up!’ she shouted.
    Where was Ian? What was he doing leaving her crippled like this? Had he gone to get his doctor’s bag? How serious could cramp in your leg be? she asked herself, feeling her muscles tearing as she tried to stand up again. She hit the pavement hard with the palm of her hand in frustration, swore out loud, then stopped to listen. Amid the mocking twittering of birds there was a metallic clinking and trundling noise drawing closer which she could not place but which sounded strangely familiar. Then, from the cobbled side street that led down the back of the Oxford Union, Ian reappeared pushing an empty Marks and Spencer shopping trolley.
    ‘Madame, your carriage awaits,’ he announced with a bow.
    He let go of the trolley to help her up. It rolled away to one side.
    ‘Hmm, not exactly the Rolls-Royce of shopping trolleys, but it was the only one I could find.’
    He hoisted her up and lifted her into the trolley as if she were weightless, then stood back to look at her.
    ‘All you need now is a ballgown.’
    She began to giggle, then to laugh, as he pushed her all the way back to the Randolph Hotel.

Chapter 36

    The light round the edges of the impromptu curtain was bright and golden. Roy sat up quickly. Alone. Manon had left him again.
    He lay down, feeling guilty because it was the first time since Penny became too ill to share a bed with him that he had woken up without a moment of surprise that she was not there beside him. There was always a split second when he was tempted by the thought that nothing had happened, that his wife was simply sleeping in the children’s room as she did when they were ill or frightened, that he was not alone.
    He gazed at the corona of light around the window until his focus was lost in tears that rolled down the sides of his cheeks and dripped silently into the carpet. He wondered whether there would ever come a time when he would greet the new day free from dread.
    Manon had gone. He was more resigned than disappointed. The intensity of sex the night before had made him as certain of his love for her as the first time, but it was an illusion, a spell that she cast.
    Perhaps Ursula had been right to say, as she had one weekend when she was visiting with George just a baby, that Manon was a siren, calling men to their doom. He tried to think why Manon would have been the subject under discussion, since they rarely mentioned her. On the odd occasions when one of her letters dropped through the door, Penny would smile and put it in a pocket to read it later when she was alone.
    It must have been just after Lily was born, he thought, and Penny was telling Ursula of her choice of godmother. It was an awkward conversation in which he had realized that even though Ursula was already godmother to their first child, she was still envious of the honour to Manon. She had always wanted Penny to be her best friend. Women could be very possessive about such things. He remembered his sister’s increasingly hurt face as Penny had defended Manon.
    It was then that he had found out about the boy who had killed himself. It had finally given him a reason why Manon had behaved as she did. As the women chattered on, he remembered the pale, fearful face staring back at him the last time he had seen her in the Piazza Navona, and began to understand.

    Manon was sitting on the edge of the bath wearing Roy’s shirt as a dressing gown. The first rays of sunshine had already taken the chill out of the air, but she was shivering, from sex and love and loss of sleep, and the giddy mix of elation and fear that follow. In this pleasant white room with the door locked behind her, she could believe she was in a transitional capsule between the grey continuum of the past, and whatever would become her future. She wanted her life to be as simple and light as the sky outside the curtainless bathroom window which was the palest duck-egg blue. But she feared that when she opened the