What became of us

already browned in the heat. Then she stood back a little distance and watched the girls.
    Saskia stooped reverently to put her offering down on the exact spot where the roses had been. Then she stood back from the grave and mouthed each letter of the inscription silently, spelling out words she knew by heart. Lily, on her hands and knees, studded her flowers all round the edge of the plot, pressing the fragile little blooms hard into the mown grass with her thumbs, her tongue stuck out onto her chin in concentration.
    They were so different. Did it ever occur to Roy how different they were? Did he ever wonder where the brown eyes and the curls came from when his hair was thick and golden like straw, and Penny’s was fair and fine as a baby’s?

    Penny told Manon about her last encounter with Vin the day after her thirty-eighth birthday party and it was only then that Manon had understood why she was so keen for her to become a godmother.
    It was late afternoon. They were up in Penny’s bedroom. Roy was taking the girls for a walk. They both heard the front door bang behind him and the squeaking of the double buggy as he pushed it down Joshua Street. Then, almost immediately, the story began to spill from Penny’s lips. It was as if she had been waiting to tell her, anxious that her time was running out.
    ‘I saw Vin again...’ Penny began, her voice wavering slightly.
    Almost ten years after they had parted company in Africa, Vin had returned to Oxford for a conference about world debt. After a boozy lunch with some of the other speakers, he had found himself, so he said, in Jericho wondering what had become of Penny’s house in Joshua Street. Penny had been drawing the curtains in the upstairs front room for Saskia’s afternoon nap when she saw him standing on the pavement looking up. He waved. She let him in.
    They talked politely while she made him tea. He was divorced, no children. She told him proudly that she was married with a baby girl. On cue, Saskia cried. She brought her down and breastfed her.
    ‘Why did you do that?’ Manon had interrupted, anticipating what was going to come next. Vin had never looked at a woman’s face first.
    ‘I suppose because I’d known him all my life. It didn’t seem so odd,’ Penny had replied, then, as Manon stared at her, ‘oh hell, I never stopped loving him, you know, and I could see he fancied me with my big tits, and I just wanted to make him feel bad for leaving, for rejecting everything I could have given him.’
    Saskia had fallen asleep and when Penny had returned her to her cot and come back downstairs, Vin had knelt before her, throwing his arms around her waist with his head on her stomach.
    ‘He told me he had been a fool. I felt sorry for him. I kissed the top of his head...’
    ‘Penny!’
    ‘Not you, Manon. Everyone’s always thought I was perfect, but not you. You’re not allowed to be shocked.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘And then, well...’ Penny had actually smiled at the memory.
    ‘What?’ Manon had asked.
    ‘The sexual attraction had never gone away. It doesn’t, does it, not with your first love?’
    In the early evening shadows, Manon had felt herself reddening. Go on, tell her. It’s the right time. But she had not.
    ‘Anyway, I was randy as hell. Prolactin, you know, the hormone you get when you’re feeding, does that to me, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on Roy,’ Penny had added with a trace of naughtiness in her voice.
    ‘So?’
    ‘So nine months later...’
    ‘No!’ said Manon.
    For a moment she was too shocked to say anything.
    ‘I thought that stuff stopped you getting pregnant,’ she eventually said.
    ‘So did I. Wrong. Lily’s the proof.’
    ‘You don’t seem to regret it.’
    ‘I can’t because Lily is so wonderful. You will look after her, won’t you?’ Penny asked.
    ‘Of course I will. Does Vin know?’
    ‘No, I never saw him again, and I don’t expect I will now,’ she said with a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t want to. It was like a proper ending. I knew he just wanted a fuck, and that’s what I wanted too. There was something very honest and equal about it.’
    It wasn’t like Penny to use foul language. Her bluff nonchalance seemed false to Manon, as if it were masking something else.
    ‘Does Roy know?’ she asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Are you going to tell him?’
    ‘No. He loves Lily. He thinks that she’s like him, and Sas is like me. And it’s true. She is. He wouldn’t love her