What became of us

he said at last, ‘I want to be back before the girls wake up.’
    He put his shirt on.
    Did Mrs Harris’s curtain twitch? He couldn’t be sure, but he felt suddenly ashamed of what had happened in Penny’s house.
    In the candid morning light, he noticed for the first time that Manon’s face had aged in the years that had passed since they first met. There were fine lines around her eyes. She was a woman, not a girl, not an evanescent wisp of fantasy that slipped away as soon as you tried to clutch it.
    ‘I’ll get the bus,’ she said, putting her clothes on and peering at the floor as if she might have left something behind.
    ‘No. The girls would love to see you.’ He looked at her.
    ‘I can see them some other time. I have to get back.’
    He knew he must be honest about his ambivalence otherwise she would be gone again, for ever this time.
    He grasped her forearms. She looked up at him. He thought of all the times he had imagined those pale green eyes and wondered what was going on in her mind and how it had never crossed his mind to think...
    ‘Look,’ he said, abruptly, ‘I feel as if we have thrown our lives up in the air and they’re still up there and we don’t know where they’re going to land. We have to wait for them to come down. Don’t go just yet.’
    Her instinct was to catch her falling life, bundle it up and run away with it, but she felt so tired.
    ‘Come on,’ he said again, sensing her giving in.
    Downstairs, in the middle of the living room, her red rose flowerbasket bag sat on the beige fitted carpet like a fresh bouquet on a grave. She went to pick it up. Then the room was empty again, and there was no evidence that anyone had been there.
    ‘Well, this really is goodbye,’ Roy said, as he opened the front door.
    She looked down the hall to the kitchen at the back, seeing them all for a ghost of a moment sitting at the table around the remnants of one of Penny’s pasta dishes, laughing, and Penny asking, in that slightly shocked way she had when things got a little raucous, ‘What will become of us?’

    The dampness of the dew chilled their flesh as they stepped into the street. He put his dinner jacket around her shoulders. They walked through the maze of little terraced streets that separated the flotsam and jetsam of bohemian Jericho from the respectable burghers of North Oxford. A shivering girl in an oversized dinner jacket, a man in formal dress and shirt sleeves. She imagined that they must look like exhausted revellers returning from a May Ball, not an unusual sight on a cloudless summer morning in Oxford.
    As they neared the junction with Woodstock Road, another couple, the man also dressed in evening wear, the woman in jeans, sailed past the end of the road on bikes, their laughter pealing through the still silence.
    ‘Was that Annie?’ Roy asked, pausing, interrupting the metronome tap of their footsteps on the pavement.
    ‘Can’t have been. She was with a man.’
    She realized the sentence was ridiculous when Roy raised his eyebrows comically.
    ‘She’s coming to lunch,’ he said, ‘with Ursula. Please come?’
    He was working hard at keeping it going so that they would not leave each other in confusion.
    ‘What will we tell Geraldine about where we spent the night?’ she asked as they crossed the road to where Roy’s car was parked outside St Gertrude’s. Next to it was a small sports car she had not noticed the day before. Its polished silver paint gleamed in the sunshine.
    ‘She won’t ask,’ Roy replied confidently, but she could tell that he was as uncertain as she was.

Chapter 37

    Ursula was sitting in the Examination Schools preparing to turn over her first finals exam when she became aware that the invigilator was walking up the aisle between the long rows of desks towards her.
    ‘Candidates for the University Examinations must wear full subfusc,’ he said, staring at her chest and she was suddenly aware that she was wearing no clothes at all...
    Ursula woke up.
    There was a loud thumping on the door.
    ‘Yes?’ she said cautiously, struggling to think who would have reason to knock so urgently at the door. The police? Why should the police be here? What was going on?
    ‘I’ve got your husband on the phone,’ said the voice.
    Why would Barry have called the police?
    She stood up uncertainly. The full rush of her hangover pulsated through her head, making her reel. She sat down again, looking forlornly round the room for the