What became of us

you pick some mint for me?’
    Annie scuttled back into the garden. Scanning the herbaceous borders with increasing desperation she hissed at Roy.
    ‘How would I recognize mint?’

Chapter 40

    On the see-saw, Lily and Saskia balanced almost perfectly.
    ‘Hold on tight, Lily,’ Manon said, as Saskia bounced her up and down increasingly forcefully. ‘Slow down, Sas, she’s much littler than you, remember?’
    Saskia gave her kid sister a sceptical glance. Lily was a little shorter, but what she lacked in height, she made up in weight.
    ‘Younger, I mean,’ Manon corrected herself.
    Lily wasn’t fat, but she was solid, just like her father, Manon couldn’t help herself thinking.
    Since Geraldine had been in charge of buying the girls clothes, Manon had noticed that they were usually dressed in identical outfits. She wondered if their grandmother simply couldn’t be bothered to choose different outfits for each child, or whether it was a subconscious effort to make them look more alike. Oddly, it had the reverse effect of emphasizing their differences. Saskia was willowy with flyaway blond hair; her sister was sturdy with short dark curls and a determined expression.
    Perhaps Lily asked to be dressed like her big sister. When Manon was little, her mother had sewn dresses and skirts for her from the pieces of material she had left over from making her own clothes, and she had loved the feeling of stepping out of the door into the world dressed the same as her beautiful mother. When they returned to Paris and her mother was working for the couturier, she had sometimes sneaked out tiny scraps of fabric for Manon to make into clothes for her dolls. But at boarding school, Manon’s idiosyncratic home-made clothes had drawn ridicule. She remembered her mother’s horror when she returned in the holidays, inspecting the machined hems of the cheap little garments she had purchased with her pocket money in Chelsea Girl.
    ‘Doesn’t anyone at this expensive English school teach you about style?’ she had asked, genuinely bewildered.

    Some older children wanted to go on the see-saw.
    ‘Come on!’ Manon said, ‘let’s give them a turn.’
    ‘No,’ said Lily, ‘it’s my see-saw.’
    ‘No, it’s everyone’s see-saw,’ Saskia said with the sanctimoniousness of a five-year-old. She slipped off and Lily banged down to the ground.
    Lily began to cry.
    ‘Come on, Lily,’ Manon said, lifting her off and giving her a cuddle.
    Lily held tightly on to her.
    ‘You won’t leave again, will you, Manon?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ll be leaving later this afternoon, but I’ll be back soon. I promise.’
    ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
    The phrase was too old for her, Manon thought. It must have been something Saskia picked up in nursery school.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘You have to say it,’ Lily insisted.
    ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ Manon replied reluctantly.
    ‘Mummy died,’ Lily said.
    ‘Yes.’
    She could see the child trying to work out why the promise was a good thing to say then, but she resisted the temptation to elaborate. She had learned to answer only what was asked and not to try too hard to explain, because it only became more confusing.
    Saskia had gone to talk to some bigger girls who were sitting in a line on the swings. She was beginning to be able to meet people through conversation. Lily was still at the stage where, if she liked the look of someone, usually a boy, she would mimic everything he did in parallel, which sometimes led to some very silly behaviour, but usually achieved the end that she desired. She was pretending to dig sand next to the sandpit where there was a small boy with a shovel.
    Manon left her to her flirtation and wandered to a bench within earshot of the swings, interested to hear the first overtures of friendship developing.
    ‘We’ve just moved to this village,’ Saskia was explaining.
    ‘Is that your mummy?’ the older girl asked, giving Manon a cool look.
    Manon pretended not to hear. The girl was wearing a cropped top and cargo pants and her ears were pierced with two holes each. In a couple of years, Manon thought, she would be the one who offered them all cigarettes.
    ‘No. My mummy is dead,’ Saskia replied, with perfect equanimity.
    ‘Is that your dad’s new girlfriend, then?’
    For all their sophistication, they couldn’t be more than eight or nine. How did they know about things like that?
    ‘No. She’s my mummy’s