What became of us

been ‘polite’. If he had been allowed a list, then the top five would have included middle-class, Christian, honest and kind, all of which would have sounded like put-downs when he was younger, but which were qualities he had come to value. He had never been one of them, and never would be, but they had welcomed him, and their sense of doing the right thing was practised as well as preached.
    Roy lay in bed, watching the colour of the plaster walls turn from grey to pale blue to bright white, as the rays of early morning sun seeping through the floral curtains intensified.
    The first time he had slept in the guest room the paint and matching soft furnishings had been new and he suspected that the refurbishment had been partly in his honour. Penny was their only daughter and it had been hard for them to give her away, but their genuine good manners made them want him to feel completely at home. Turning Penny’s old bedroom into a guest room where they could spend their first Christmas as husband and wife was the sort of project Geraldine took on with gusto. He could imagine her talking to Penny about it.
    ‘We do want Roy to feel comfortable. You’re not just our little girl any more darling. Anyway, if we’re buying a double bed for the room, we might as well do the whole thing...’
    And Penny protesting, knowing that he probably wouldn’t even notice, but secretly rather enjoying the idea of choosing new fabrics and colours, of having her new status given the full stamp of parental approval.
    He had been, and to some extent still was, an unknown quantity to them: left wing, an atheist, and not perhaps the husband they would have expected her to choose, even though he had agreed to a blessing of their marriage in Trevor’s church.
    The vicarage was less than an hour’s drive from Oxford, but it was the sort of home where you stayed over if you went for Christmas. You did not drive back across the deserted frosty landscape in the early hours of the morning laughing about all the inadvertent double entendres in the conversation. There were rituals that had to be observed, like the men chopping up vegetables for coleslaw on Boxing Day morning to go with the cold turkey, just as cream sherry had to be consumed after the morning service, with nibbles. One year, Penny had contributed a packet of Japanese rice crackers and their unusual flavour (‘seaweed, you say? well I never!’) had become an important theme of the conversation for that season and for several thereafter.
    He didn’t know why he was thinking about Christmas, since it was mid-July, and the quality of the sunny air streaming into the room filled him with optimism that it was going to be a beautiful day.
    Perhaps because he had only ever slept there at Christmas. Even the last two Christmases without Penny.
    If Penny could have lasted another couple of weeks she might even have slept her last sleep there at Christmas, but Death was not sentimental and did not wait around to give people picturesque endings. She had died in the third week of December just eighteen months before, and they had buried her in the churchyard on Christmas Eve. He didn’t know whether it seemed like a long time or a short time ago. He had no sense of her sleeping underground as the girls seemed to have, but there were reference points in the fabric of the house that sometimes made it seem as if she were startlingly still there. Even the most banal objects like the Staffordshire china dogs on the mantelpiece downstairs could evoke a remembered phrase.
    ‘Roy can’t stand them,’ she had announced one day quite early on, when her mother tried to interest him in her latest find from an antique shop in Woodstock, adding, daringly, ‘and I must say I agree with him!’

    It had not been appropriate to say goodbye to Penny’s sunny personality on one of the shortest days of the year. It had not even been a pretty Christmas. There had been no snow, not even the icing-sugar rime of frost. After the committal, it had begun to rain so heavily it seemed as though the very earth and sky, even God himself, were weeping at her passing.
    Few people had been able to come to the funeral because of the time of year. Ursula had urged him to postpone it, but Roy hadn’t wanted the girls to spend that Christmas, and every Christmas afterwards, waiting for a kind of closure, suspended in a state of unresolved grief. So it was just the two families who had stood at the graveside, and