What became of us

said, ‘thanks for your support.’
    ‘Yeah, all right,’ Annie said, seeing Ian nearing in her rearview mirror. ‘Call me anyway. Let’s have a drink?’
    ‘OK, I will,’ Manon said.
    She opened the door and sinuously wound herself out of the low-slung seat up onto the raised pavement. Annie ducked down so that her head was practically resting on the passenger’s seat to be able to see the exchange between her and Ian, but they were both too tall.
    ‘Hello,’ she heard him say.
    ‘Hello and goodbye,’ Manon replied in her sexy French accent, with a little laugh.
    Annie was furious. How dare she flirt with him. How dare she? Then suddenly Ian’s face was right in front of hers as he bent down to look inside the car.
    ‘Hello there!’
    ‘Hi! Er, I was just moving over to let you get in,’ she explained, wriggling her body with difficulty over the gearstick.
    ‘Shall I get in the driver’s side?’
    ‘Well, I don’t want you on my lap.’
    She watched his quite substantial legs walking round the front of the car.
    ‘I’ve booked us tea somewhere nice,’ he said, lowering his bum in. The suspension seemed to sag under his weight.
    ‘Oh good!’ she said, ‘I’ve had nothing to eat today except a charred chicken drumstick.’
    ‘And a bacon sarnie,’ he said, starting the ignition and looking as if he were about to have an orgasm.
    ‘I’d forgotten the sarnie,’ she said. ‘Oh well, never mind. Diet tomorrow.’
    He indicated and pulled the car smoothly out into the road.
    ‘Who was that?’ he asked.
    Jealous acid streamed through her veins.
    ‘Manon.’
    ‘Oh that was Manon, was it?’ he said, smiling. ‘The one who always looked as if she was in mourning. I thought you said she was so beautiful?’
    ‘Isn’t she?’
    ‘A bit scrawny and tragic for me, I’m afraid,’ he said.
    ‘She’s got mystique,’ Annie said, trying to catch him out.
    ‘Life’s a bit short for too much of that, don’t you think?’ he asked, winking at her.
    ‘I suppose so,’ Annie admitted, settling back into her seat and thinking what an amazingly alkaline effect Ian had on the bloodstream.

    Manon boarded the coach and chose a window seat near the back. She closed her eyes so that she could think better, and when she opened them again, the coach was pulling up Headington Hill, leaving Oxford behind. She turned round, wanting to see the dreaming spires as she said goodbye to them finally but forgetting that there was no rear window on this type of coach, only a toilet and the place where the hostess left the drinks trolley.
    She turned frontwards again. A middle-aged man with a mobile phone who was occupying the two seats on the other side of the aisle smiled at her. She closed her eyes again, blocking him out.
    There was one obvious way of getting some money. At least until the pregnancy started to show. How long did it take for that to happen? Two months, three months? She calculated she could probably earn at least ten, maybe twenty thousand pounds before that, if she wanted to.
    Then she forced herself to imagine a client’s penis thumping against the neck of her womb and it made her feel sick and frightened. You could not afford to be frightened alone with a man you did not know. Fear had a scent, an invisible vapour that mixed with arousal and turned it into violence. She was not going to do that. She put her hands on her tummy and rested them there and was suffused with a feeling of well-being.
    She opened her eyes and suddenly knew that she had just quit prostitution. Even though she had not done it for many years, it had always been there in the very back of her consciousness, like an exsmoker’s craving for nicotine. Just one trick won’t matter, if I’m desperate. Addicts never quite lost the desire to abuse themselves and so they trained themselves never to accept a taste of their addiction. But she knew now she was no longer an addict. And now she understood why people spoke of relief as a liquid that flooded or seeped, because she began to be aware of each part of her body again slowly filling with the fluid of sensation after the catatonia of long paralysis.

Chapter 44

    The familiarity of their street calmed Ursula’s racing heartbeat. Each house was set back from the road, each had its own plot of land. Theirs had four bedrooms, two reception rooms and a conservatory. They had been poor students when they met at the Royal College of Law. They had come a long way together.