What became of us

composure as she could manage.
    ‘Are you free for dinner?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, but I want to know what it was first,’ she said.
    ‘That was it.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I wanted to know whether you were free for dinner,’ he smiled a little more confidently. ‘I wondered whether you would like to have dinner with me?’
    ‘That’s it?’
    What she had envisaged, she realized, when he had looked up at her from the steps, was something more along the lines of I’m just a provincial doctor standing here asking a famous television personality to love him.
    But dinner was a start.
    ‘And there’s another thing,’ he said.
    ‘Yes?’ she smiled sweetly.
    ‘Can I use your loo? I’m dying for a wee.’
    She could feel the smile settling on her face becoming more of a rictus as she tried to cover her disappointment.
    ‘In there.’
    She pointed at the bathroom door.
    She slumped down on the sofa, half tempted to put on Meat Loaf’s Greatest Hits. It was beginning to get dark outside. Where would she take him? she wondered. 192, or the tapas bar on the Portobello Road? No doubt he would suggest a curry at the Indian she’d pointed out. They would have nothing to talk about and then she’d have to put him up in her spare room and in the morning they would have an embarrassed breakfast and that would be that. She drained her glass of champagne.
    ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ he asked, coming back into the living room.
    ‘Ask away,’ she said.
    ‘Why have you got a wedding dress on your bathroom floor?’
    It took her a couple of seconds to understand what he was referring to.
    ‘It’s not a wedding dress,’ she told him, laughing weakly, ‘it’s a dress with a hooped petticoat. They only had ivory left because of the launch of Scarlett... oh doesn’t matter...’
    The great mass of ivory silk on the floor of he her bathroom was a fitting metaphor for her life, she thought. Grubby, torn, nothing whatsoever to do with weddings, and soaked with champagne.
    ‘There was this party,’ she tried to explain, ‘and I’d always wanted to wear a dress with one of those huge skirts that sort of bobs along on its own, and, well, anyway,’ she wiped a tear away from her eye. Why on earth did she keep crying in front of him? ‘Well, anyway, it was a bit of a disaster, really...’
    He knelt down in front of her.
    She thought he was about to say ‘there, there’, and if he had, she knew she would have hit him.
    ‘Put it on,’ he said, quietly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Put it on,’ he insisted, ‘I want to see you in it.’
    ‘Oh, you’re just saying that.’
    ‘Put it on.’
    ‘All right, I bloody will,’ she said defiantly.
    She got up and went into the bathroom and stepped into the dress. ‘I need some help with the hooks,’ she called, walking back into the living room.
    In the huge mantel mirror above the fireplace she caught sight of herself. Her hair was all over the place and her lipstick was slightly smudged. Her cheeks had bright spots of pinkness from the first glass of champagne. She was holding up the stiff corset of the dress by pressing her elbows into her sides. She looked, she thought, like a courtesan at the end of a hard night.
    She turned and offered her back to him.
    His fingers fiddled with the hooks and then stopped. She waited silently, holding her breath, feeling his hand hovering an inch away from her spine.
    ‘Your skin is like a peach,’ he said.
    ‘What orange and pink with a sort of dust on it?’ she asked.
    ‘No, it’s smooth and creamy and... yes...’ he put both his hands on her shoulders and sighed, ‘very soft.’
    ‘So more like a Mr Whippy ice cream then,’ she said, nervously. He had large hands, they felt heavy resting there.
    ‘Except warmer,’ he said, and then he laughed his bark of a laugh, which cut through the incredible sexual tension that had descended on them and made her turn to face him.
    ‘The trouble is,’ he said, running a finger from the bottom of her earlobe down her neck and along the top of her bare shoulder, ‘there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of point doing up all these hooks just to undo them again...’
    ‘You could rip them apart, rather than going to all the trouble of actually undoing them,’ she reasoned.
    ‘True,’ he said, leaning forward and kissing her very, very lightly on her mouth.
    If she had been a soft ice cream, Annie thought, she would just have melted.
    ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘I have to