What became of us

Hardy novel.
    He was gripping the steering wheel so tight, his knuckles were white.

    ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked him quietly, as they turned off the main road down the winding country lane.
    ‘Nothing,’ he lied.
    ‘Oh, I can’t bear this,’ she said.
    ‘Have you ever told anyone what you told me except for Penny?’ he asked, feeling betrayed by Penny too for keeping this knowledge about Manon to herself.
    ‘Rodolfo. I should have learned from experience,’ Manon said, bitterly.
    ‘I am not like Rodolfo,’ he protested, glaring into her face.
    She raised her eyebrows just a fraction.
    ‘Why did you tell me?’ he asked, looking back at the road.
    ‘Would you rather not have known?’
    ‘Yes... no...’
    ‘Did you not suspect, when you read my stories?’
    ‘No!’
    He looked across again, and could almost hear her thinking that he spent his life studying the lives of writers. How could he not have known?
    ‘Perhaps I did not want to know,’ he admitted.
    ‘Oh Roy,’ she said, with a sad ironic smile, I think that really you are just like Rodolfo. You think that there is a type of woman who is a prostitute, but prostitutes are not born, they are made. I should have thought that you above all...’
    ‘Or they choose,’ he interrupted. ‘For a beautiful woman with a first from Oxford University there are other ways of making money. For heaven’s sake, Manon!’
    ‘Do smokers choose to smoke?’ she asked, ‘or do they try something and then find that they can’t stop?’
    ‘They still have a choice,’ he said.
    ‘All right, so I chose it. If I admit that, does it make it worse? Would it be better for me to be a passive victim? Would that be preferable?’ she enquired, sharply.
    ‘Of course not!’ he shouted, ‘but the risk of disease apart from anything else...’
    ‘I haven’t got AIDS, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
    ‘No! I don’t know!’ he shouted at her, ‘I just don’t know what to think.’
    ‘And I don’t care what you think!’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘You seem to think that I did what I did as a personal affront to you. It had nothing to do with you. Nothing.’
    ‘It does now though.’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    Had her telling him been a test for him, he wondered, a test that he had failed abysmally?
    ‘Oh, I don’t know why I allowed myself to come back here with you,’ she said, stamping a foot on the floor of the car. He noticed that her accent always became more French when she gave vent to her emotions. He found it very endearing.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    ‘Would you please take me back to Oxford now?’ she asked.
    ‘Not now, the girls will be waking up. I’ve got to be there. I’ll take you after lunch,’ he told her.
    She looked away, staring stiffly out of the window as she had when driving in the other direction the day before. In the furious air between them, he could almost taste her disappointment in him.
    During the night, when he had thought about bringing her back here in the morning, he had imagined them walking up the flagstone path towards the stone rectory like a couple of newlyweds, and the children running out to greet them. It was an image, he now realized with shame, that bore a striking resemblance to the scene in The Sound of Music when Maria and the Captain return from honeymoon. It was one of the few videos that Geraldine allowed the children to watch when they were staying with her, although he never could see why Austrian versus German nationalism was deemed more suitable than 101 Dalmatians.
    Their progress up the vicarage path now was as far from that celluloid fantasy as it could be. For a moment, it seemed as though Manon would stay in the car with her arms folded and leave him to explain away her presence, and then as he neared the front door, she jumped out and ran ahead of him, as if eager to put her version of events first.

    They found the girls eating cereal at the kitchen table. In the quotidian atmosphere of a family kitchen, he felt grounded again.
    ‘Where’s Grandma?’ he asked.
    ‘Having a bath,’ said Saskia.
    ‘In fact, Grandpa is in church,’ Lily announced, spooning most of a spoonful of Rice Krispies into her mouth. Milk dribbled down her chin and he snatched at a piece of kitchen paper to wipe it before it dropped onto her Sunday dress.
    Manon’s reappearance drew no comment. He was grateful for their innocence. And Geraldine who later emerged in a