What became of us

friend...’
    ‘Is she your auntie or something?’
    ‘No,’ she could see Saskia struggling, then finding a resolution, ‘she’s like a godmother, but without the god bit,’ she said, which finally seemed to satisfy them.
    ‘See ya, then.’ The leader of the pack skulked off.
    Saskia stared at the still-rocking swing as if she was wondering whether it was permitted to get on now.
    ‘I want to go on the swing.’ Lily raced over, having failed to get the attention of the boy in the
    sandpit.
    Manon put her on. The thick heavy chains were too big for her fat little fingers.
    ‘Do you want me to put you in that other one?’ Manon asked, pointing.
    ‘No! That’s for babies!’ Lily declared, adding immediately, ‘I don’t like this park much.’
    ‘Well, why don’t we go and see where Mr Jeremy fisher lives?’ Manon improvised.
    ‘We’re going to see where Mr Jeremy Fisher lives,’ Lily called in a singsong voice.
    ‘He doesn’t live here,’ Saskia replied, authoritatively.
    ‘Perhaps he does, in the stream,’ Manon suggested, holding onto a straining Lily as they waited for Saskia to catch up.
    ‘He lives in a lily pond in the Lake District.’
    ‘That’s very clever of you, Sas, how do you know that?’
    ‘Daddy told me.’
    ‘Did he read you that story?’ Manon asked.
    The thought of Roy reading Beatrix Potter with a child on each knee momentarily made her forget how cross she was with him.
    ‘I can read on my own.’
    The encounter with the older girls seemed to have made Saskia grumpy.
    ‘Shall we pick some flowers for Mummy now?’ Manon asked, taking Saskia’s hand.
    ‘Yes please!’
    The child smiled with relief. She was such a good girl normally and such an obedient sensible personality that it was sometimes easy to forget how much she must miss Penny, whom she could remember more clearly than Lily could.
    Both girls had recently been on a day organized by a charity for bereaved children and returned with bottles of coloured sand that they had carefully filled. Each layer of colour was supposed to help them recall a happy time they had spent with their mother, and Saskia’s recollections were agonizingly specific, like the sugar pink of the icing Penny had used to decorate her fourth birthday cake, and the blue of the swimming pool where she used to take them swimming. Lily’s memories changed all the time, often echoing the things she had heard Saskia describe. Very quickly, her layers of sand had mixed together because she couldn’t resist shaking the bottle up to see what would happen. Saskia’s bottle was right beside her bed, in pristine condition, and nobody else was permitted to touch it.
    ‘Where’s the best place for picking flowers?’ Manon asked, ‘do you know?’
    ‘Grandma’s garden!’ Lily shrieked.
    ‘No, we’re not allowed to,’ Saskia said.
    ‘How about the meadow? There were some lovely flowers there...’ Manon thought quickly.
    ‘But they’re only weeds,’ Saskia said.
    ‘Another name for weeds is wild flowers,’ Manon said. ‘Mummy loved wild flowers, and when she was a little girl she used to pick flowers there herself.’
    She didn’t know that it was true but it was a harmless enough lie.
    ‘Did she?’ Saskia’s eyes lit up at the thought of doing something that Penny had done.
    ‘When I’m died and Mummy is a little girl she will pick flowers too!’ Lily added authoritatively.
    She had an endearing habit of reversing the roles of adults and children, so that whenever an adult said to her, ‘when you’re grown up...’ she would immediately reply, ‘yes, and when you are little...’ as if the cycle of life went round in a simple form of reincarnation.
    Saskia picked a bunch of buttercups, red campion and cow parsley and Manon found her a few purple aquilegia that had seeded themselves from one of the neighbouring gardens. They sat in the long grass while Manon showed her how to braid three blades together to make a garland to tie her posy. Meanwhile Lily dashed around pulling the heads off daisies and little purple rockery flowers that had woven themselves in the stone walls of the churchyard. Then they walked round the side of the church, to the new graveyard where their mother was buried.
    The grave had settled now and there was just a simple grey stone on a flat rectangle of lawn. Manon bent down and removed the bunch of pink roses that someone — Geraldine or Roy — must have placed there the day before, which had