What became of us

prosecution to prove that the damage had been caused by a shaking that no-one had witnessed. But Ursula knew that she would feel uneasy about an acquittal on those grounds. After all this time in the law, she had still never quite hardened herself not to care about the truth of the case.
    In her idealistic youth, she had thought guilt or innocence essentially a matter of politics. She and Roy had learned Marxism from the cradle. Their father was an old-fashioned left-winger who believed that theft was mostly a perfectly justifiable redistribution of wealth, and that the only real crime was capitalism. When she decided to become a lawyer, she had seen herself as someone who would fight from within for a finer justice system and a better society, and yet now most of her work seemed to consist of running defences that fitted the facts but might have nothing to do with the truth of what had happened. If the police weren’t so imperfect, she would have felt morally outraged by some of the acquittals she had engineered.
    The woman opposite put her magazine down on the table and picked up her coffee. Ursula’s eye was drawn to the headline on the letters page.
    Should I tell him about my affair?

    I’ve been happily married for seven years, but recently, at a business conference I made the mistake of sleeping with a colleague. It didn’t mean anything, but I cannot seem to stop feeling guilty. Should I tell my husband? I cannot bear to risk losing him, but...

    The bold type ran out at that point and, without her lenses in, Ursula could not read any further.
    Should she tell Barry what had happened?
    Her first instinct was a light-hearted confession. Pass it off as another foolish situation that she had got herself into through alcohol, like being drunk at the office party. She was 98 per cent sure that they would laugh together about it, and he would forgive her. Perhaps if she introduced the subject by telling him about Annie’s speech and the feeling that they all shared that they had to live a little, before reaching forty...
    Ursula imagined him listening to her excuses. The 2 per cent chance that he wouldn’t understand nagged at her.
    He would set about examining the evidence as he always did, and then he would begin his gentle, but ordered, cross-examination. Even if she lied to him about having invited Liam down to Oxford, claiming that she had just bumped into him there, it wouldn’t be possible to claim that he had been at the dinner because there were too many witnesses.
    So why had he been in Oxford, and what was it that had made her meet up with him later?
    All these questions would have to be answered, drawing her deeper and deeper into a web of lies.
    Perhaps she should tell him that Penny’s death had taken away her reason. It was true in a way because if Penny had been around then it certainly would not have happened. She could have talked in confidence to Penny about fancying Liam. Penny would not have goaded her on like Annie. Penny would have taken her through it all reasonably, and she would have ended up wondering how she could ever even have thought of doing something so stupid. Penny had been a real friend.
    She closed her eyes again and tried to imagine what advice Penny would give to her now. She tried to clear her brain for any message that Penny might want to pass on. Please, Penny! She imagined Penny’s face, but all she could hear her saying was ‘Don’t tell him’, which wasn’t at all what Penny would have said.
    Then suddenly Ursula remembered that she and Barry had talked about adultery only recently. She had mentioned that her secretary was in a state because she had just discovered that her husband was having an affair.
    ‘It’s not the sex, per se, that she minds,’ she had explained, ‘it’s the fact that she thought everything was one way, and then it turned out it wasn’t.’
    ‘Wasn’t she upset about the sex too?’ Barry enquired neutrally.
    ‘Well, I don’t think that she was exactly surprised. I don’t think she’s ever been that keen.’
    ‘But surely you can’t separate the two, can you?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Well, would she have been OK if he had said, look, I fancy some sex so would you mind if I did it with someone who enjoys it?’
    It was the sort of statement that would have sounded funny if anyone else had said it.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Ursula replied, wishing then that she had never brought the subject up. Had she been testing him