What became of us

Roy said as if he had only just registered her absence. ‘I thought you were giving her a lift.’
    ‘No, she popped in on her way to the station to get... to tell me to tell you that she wouldn’t be coming because Georgie got ill in the night. Only chickenpox, apparently, but she wanted to be with him. And her mobile’s run out of juice.’
    As she said it, Annie thought it sounded a really pathetic excuse. Had Ursula deliberately invented a minor illness to stop Roy running to the phone to find out what his nephew’s condition was? Had she lied about her mobile so that no-one would try to ring?
    ‘Oh well.’ Roy didn’t appear very bothered.
    ‘So it’s just me,’ Annie said brightly.
    ‘And Manon,’ he said, casting his eyes down. A distinct blush rose from his neck to his hairline.
    ‘Manon,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I thought she said she was going back to London. Oh well, my mistake!’
    The knowingness in her tone made him look up, but she was walking purposefully onto the lawn.
    ‘Anything I can do?’ Annie asked rhetorically, lying down across the full length of the yellow-and-white swing seat.
    One of the reasons her relationship with Roy would never have worked was that she could never think of a thing to say to him, she remembered. Roy was the sort of person who liked to do a proper critical test of any theory you happened to make up on the spur of the moment to fill the silence. His seriousness made her gabble. In fact she had never been able to see what Penny had seen in him, except that he was probably a good gene mix for the father of her children. Penny was so organized she thought about things like that, and she had always been unfashionably keen to have children. Actually, after Vin, anyone would have been a refreshing change, Annie thought. Vin took up so much space in a room. He was a lad before lad behaviour became acceptable in a post-modern sort of way.
    She tried to imagine Roy and Manon on their own. Did they talk or did they just stare meaningfully at each other exchanging silent intellectual thoughts?
    Annie reached into her bag and lit up a cigarette, her first of the day. Roy looked over at her when he smelt the smoke, frowned, but did not say anything. She looked at her watch. Less than twenty-four hours ago she had considered him the perfect partner for the rest of her life, and now she was wondering how she would tolerate getting through the next couple of hours in his company.

    ‘Good morning Annie, Pm afraid we don’t allow smoking in the house or the garden.’ Geraldine’s voice was commanding the moment she emerged found the side of the house.
    Startled, Annie squashed the cigarette out on the lawn, put the butt back into the packet and scuffed the grass with her foot to disperse the ashes. She caught Roy’s eye. His look said, I have to put up with this all the time. It annoyed her. Why had he not told her she mustn’t smoke? He was a coward. There was only one sort of man worse than a domineering man and that was a weak man, she thought. She had definitely had a lucky escape with Roy.
    ‘The girls have gone to put flowers on Penny’s grave,’ Geraldine announced.
    ‘I thought I might go later.’ Annie said the first thing that came into her mind. She tried to remember the name of Penny’s father. Trevor. That was it. She was about to ask where Trevor was when the thought occurred to her that he might be dead. People’s parents were always dying these days.
    ‘Hello, by the way!’ she said, trying to make a joke out of the not-very-good start they had got off to.
    ‘Come along and help me scrub some potatoes,’ Geraldine ordered. ‘I thought we’d have new potatoes with fresh mint, Roy,’ she added. ‘They eat so many chips.’
    ‘Fine,’ he agreed.
    Annie walked desultorily inside. She had only attended Brownies once in her childhood, and that was because the Brown Owl had been a woman very much like Geraldine.
    ‘Just a minute!’
    As Annie was about to plunge her hands into the bowlful of cold, earthy water and recently dug potatoes, Geraldine grabbed her wrists and inspected the long red nails. For a moment Annie thought she was going to be told to get the polish off immediately, just as she had been by Miss Greer during the Oxbridge entrance examination at school.
    ‘We don’t want to spoil that, do we?’ Geraldine said kindly, reminding Annie that she had been Penny’s mother, after all. ‘Why don’t I do the scrubbing and