What became of us

him,’ she blurted in a rush of wretched self-incrimination. ‘He knew someone who had known me years ago in Cannes, and he knew that’s what I did then...’
    Now she looked at Roy, wanting him to see that she was telling him the truth.
    ‘When I left Oxford, I fucked strangers for money.’
    The words were brutally honest and cold. She saw his face turn white, and wanted to take them back, but they were said now. It was too late.
    ‘Not on the street,’ she said, trying to soften the information, ‘not in some terrible cramped room with a leopardskin bedspread and pink net curtains or anything. I worked the good hotels.’
    ‘Why?’ he asked, stunned.
    ‘Because we needed the money. Because it was easier for me to get it than for my mother.’
    He had imagined many lives for Manon, but never this one, and yet there was something specific and familiar about the description of the tawdry tart’s apartment. Then he remembered a story in Manon’s collection which was set in that very room. She had been describing her mother’s flat.
    ‘My mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and by the time I understood that, her body was so fucked up it was too late to do anything about it except keep her supplied. I did modelling, which is only really the sanitized end of the whole business, and, God, if you’re being ordered to pose this way and that all day by egotistical men, 5,000 francs for a fuck seems like such a breeze.’
    She looked at the side of his face to see his reaction. He was punch drunk.
    ‘Far easier than taking the Civil Service exams anyway!’ she said, with a short ironic laugh.
    ‘And when your mother died?’ he asked, as if he hoped that would be an end to it.
    ‘When she died, I left Paris. I went south and worked the resorts. I was never a full-time hooker. I always wanted to believe that it wasn’t my real job. I became a croupier. I was very good at it. That’s how I met Rodolfo.’
    ‘Did he know?’
    ‘I made the mistake of telling him before he found out for himself. At first, when he loved me, he saw me as a victim, and in his big-hearted Italian way he wanted to take me away from all that. I think he thought I would be his Sophia Loren, plucked from the streets and turned into a star, or something like that. Then, when he didn’t love me so much, he said I was born a whore. Neither version had much to do with the truth.’
    She saw the alarm on Roy’s face. It was strangely reassuring to know that he now despised her.
    ‘He began to give me wildly lavish presents when he wanted sex, and I know it sounds silly, but I found that more cheapening than anything I had done before. But perhaps I was just kidding myself. Perhaps I was prostituting myself all along. He had almost limitless wealth, you see, and when I decided to go with him I thought his money would make me free.’
    ‘You did not ever love him?’ Roy asked, shocked.
    ‘You’re such a romantic, Roy.’
    She allowed herself a smile which faded as he did not return it. She picked at the carpet as if searching for a lost speck of dust.
    ‘I don’t know if it was love,’ she said. ‘He was offering me a home. A lovely home. I had never really had a home before. I went willingly and happily.’
    ‘You ended up a prisoner in a palazzo.’
    ‘Almost. I escaped.’ Again she tried to smile at him but he would not look at her.
    ‘Did Penny know all this?’ he asked.
    ‘Some.’
    ‘What did she think?’
    ‘She worried about my safety. She thought I should value myself more.’
    ‘You should.’
    The advice sounded final, as if she was nothing to do with him any more.’
    ‘She made me promise that I would not do it again, but she didn’t need to because I don’t hate myself now quite as much as I did,’ she offered.
    There was a long pause. Several times Roy looked as if he was about to say something but stopped.
    ‘And Frank?’ he eventually asked.
    ‘Frank didn’t know that I had changed,’ she protested, resenting him for remembering Frank’s name and picking her logic apart. How could she explain to this innocent man about £1,000 hidden in a Lulu Guinness bag?
    ‘I see,’ Roy said again.
    ‘Now you hate me,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t hate you,’ he said, too quickly.
    His grip had relaxed on her arm and it did not tighten for a moment to show that he meant it. She lay perfectly still, craving that absent squeeze, feeling exposed without it.
    The silence felt unending.

    ‘Come on,’