What became of us

come to lunch.’
    ‘They probably didn’t do it just to spite you,’ he reasoned.
    She smiled at him.
    ‘It’s just I hate driving,’ she explained.
    ‘What car have you got?’ he asked.
    ‘A Ferrari,’ she told him.
    A loud blast of laughter.
    ‘Right,’ he said, disbelievingly.
    ‘No, really. I have got a Ferrari. What’s so funny about that?’
    ‘Well, one, I’ve seen you on a bike, and two, you’ve just told me you hate driving. How could anyone with a Ferrari hate driving?’
    ‘It’s a long story.’
    What had been so comical about her performance on the bike?
    ‘What car do you drive?’ she asked with barely feigned interest.
    ‘Pretty boring doctor’s family car,’ he admitted. ‘A Volvo.’
    She looked suitably bored, then suddenly sat up straight.
    ‘What sort of man drives one of those funny little cars that had all those adverts on television a while back?’ she suddenly demanded, remembering the metallic grey sports car below her hotel window earlier.
    ‘Fiat Cinquecento?’
    ‘No, that was the yellow one, wasn’t it? No, I mean that silly, sporty one that looks a bit like a toy, you know,’ she urged impatiently.
    Men could always remember the names manufacturers gave to cars even the ones which were so ridiculous she would be embarrassed to say them out loud in a showroom.
    ‘A Tigra?’
    ‘That’s it!’
    ‘What kind of man drives a Tigra?’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘A wanker!’
    She laughed.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s just the way you said it. Made it sound like the name of a car too. I think I’ll be able to use that somewhere.’ She took her notebook out of her red handbag, wrote down the date then CAR NAME — WANKER, WANKA?
    ‘Is everything research for you?’ he asked.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she said, snapping the notebook shut, ‘no secret’s safe with me, I’m afraid. Sometimes I don’t even know I’m using things that have happened. I wake up with this great idea, I think, wow, what a fantastic imagination I’ve got, I write it into an episode, and then Ursula points out that it happened five years ago, and actually, she’d have preferred me not to tell the whole world.’
    He laughed.
    ‘So, this lunch today...’ he said.
    He was clearly fishing for an invitation. What was to stop her taking him along? It might be quite fun. She was about to ask when she had a fleeting memory of Penny’s mother’s disapproving face. She always seemed to time her ‘poppings in’ to Joshua Street to coincide with the moment Annie emerged from her bedroom at noon with a new man in tow.
    So what? She was nearly forty now, for heaven’s sake, Annie thought, and she hadn’t bonked Ian anyway. Of course the irony was that because she was forty, Penny’s mother would think there was something wrong with her if she hadn’t bonked him, but at twenty there was a lot wrong if she had. Sex wasn’t approved of in Joshua Street. Even Penny, who had been sleeping with Vin since she was sixteen, very rarely dared to do it in the comfort of her own home. Ursula never did (how times changed), and nobody really knew about Manon or dared to ask. And that was a point. Manon. Had she really gone home the night before as she had pretended? It was awfully late for a goodnight snog outside the Ashmolean. Had she stayed the night?
    It was mainly the possibility of Ian meeting Manon that made her decide not to invite him along. She was bored with introducing Manon to her male friends and then having them drool on about how bloody marvellous she was. She’d had enough of that when Manon stayed on her return from Italy. It was two years ago now, but still there were men who asked whether her French friend was still staying with her, and declined an invitation to come back for coffee when they discovered that she was not.
    ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Ian.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it seems a pity to waste the best part of the day on a train. I’ll probably have a walk, a leisurely lunch by the river.’
    ‘I thought you had a Volvo,’ she said.
    ‘Not with me. It’s being serviced. Anyway it’s a long drive up from Broadstairs.’
    ‘Broadstairs?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You live in Broadstairs?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh.’
    The only time she’d been to Broadstairs was on a school trip. She had seen the Dickens House and been sick in the coach on the way back to London after smoking her first cigarette in the shelter of the harbour wall. She couldn’t think