What became of us

wouldn’t.’
    ‘...although, of course, there might be quite a good series in that. You know, famous metropolitan television personality decides to downshift and become a provincial doctor’s wife, giving up the bitchy media world she has come to despise, only to find that she’s met her match with her new stepdaughter
    ‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? I mean, how about suggesting you have dinner together for a start?’
    ‘Or lunch? Isn’t the Whitstable Oysterage somewhere round there?’
    ‘Trust you to think of oysters,’ said Ursula.
    ‘Oh, there’s no point,’ Annie sighed. ‘We’d bore each other to tears before they brought the main course.’
    ‘But you got on so well.’
    ‘But that was Oxford. Oxford’s like that, isn’t it? It gives you a false idea of what you are.’
    ‘It does,’ Ursula sighed heavily.
    ‘Didn’t you have a good time?’ Annie couldn’t resist asking.
    ‘Not really,’ Ursula said.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I’m not. It’s made me see how happy I really am.’
    ‘Oh God, not you too! Manon’s been banging on all afternoon about changing her life. Everyone in the world had a life-enhancing bloody watershed of a weekend and all I learned about myself was that my body is not up to cycling back from the Woodstock roundabout... and there’s the doorbell. All I need now is some bloody Jehovah’s witness telling me that the world is about to end after all...’
    She got up from the sofa and went to the window. Whoever it was had either gone, or was standing underneath the porch. Usually friends of hers stood on the steps looking up at the window, because they knew that the intercom was broken. The doorbell rang again. She waited. It rang again. Very persistent Jehovah’s witnesses, she thought.
    ‘Listen Ursy, I’ll just deal with this and call you back,’ she said, and pressed the disconnect button.
    Her left leg hurt too much to contemplate the idea of running downstairs to open the door, but she was paranoid enough about stalkers not to simply buzz the visitor in. She heaved up the heavy sash window and leaned out.
    ‘Hello?’
    Her visitor took a step back. It wasn’t a head she recognized, but it had a good covering of greying hair, then he tipped his head back to look up at her.
    ‘Hello!’ Ian called.
    ‘Oh!’
    ‘I got as far as Faversham,’ he shouted up.
    ‘Havisham?’
    ‘Faversham!’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    ‘It’s a town in Kent.’
    ‘Oh!’ she said, as if that made everything clear. ‘Hang on, I’ll buzz you in.’
    She went to the entryphone, buzzed, then turned and looked at herself in the huge mantel mirror. Hair everywhere, a white T-shirt with a grubby wet patch on it. Too late to do anything about it because she could hear him taking the steps two by two.
    ‘Come in!’ she said, opening the door, ‘I was just about to change.’
    She pointed at the sofa, then ran into her bedroom, grabbed a clean T-shirt from her separates beach hut cupboard and pulled it on.
    He was standing looking out of the window.
    ‘I got as far as Faversham,’ he began again.
    ‘So you keep saying, but it means nothing to me,’ she interrupted.
    ‘It’s where the fast trains stop. You have to change there sometimes.’
    Was he a closet trainspotter or something?
    ‘So?’ she asked.
    ‘What I’m saying is that I didn’t get all the way home. If I had got all the way home then I wouldn’t have come back. You know how it is, back to reality and all that. I was almost there, but at Faversham I decided that it might be crazy, but it might be crazier not to...’
    ‘You’re making no sense at all. How about some champagne?’
    ‘Oh, yes. That would be nice.’
    She suddenly realized that he was tremendously nervous. It was rather sweet, she thought, taking the champagne from the fridge, then breaking a fingernail trying to get the wire off.
    ‘Damn!’
    She banged the bottle down on the counter then picked it up and angrily twisted the cork out without getting glasses ready. The champagne foamed down the front of her T-shirt.
    There weren’t any more clean white T-shirts. She pulled on a black one and when she came back into the living room he looked at her oddly as if he thought something had changed, but couldn’t make out what it was.
    ‘Cheers!’ she said, holding out a glass.
    ‘Cheers!’ he replied, smiling.
    ‘So what was it that you wanted to say?’ she asked, with as much