What became of us

it.’
    ‘When?’ he had interrupted, making it easy for her.
    She thought that brief concession of power was when she had fallen in love with him. That, and his voice, and the way he seemed to see depths to her, depths that she was never really sure existed.

    The train picked up speed as it charged through the Midlands on its way south. Ursula stared out of the window. Each time the door to the compartment opened with a whoosh and clunk, she half expected to see Liam approach and sit down opposite her, his face dangerous with possibility. And each time it was not him, she fought with disappointment, although realistically she knew that he was not on the train.
    Ursula’s coffee was cold. She glanced towards the man in the beige suit but his seat was empty. It slightly unnerved her that he had disappeared without her noticing him leave. Her thoughts of Liam had put her into a kind of trance. She did not know whether she had been asleep or simply staring into space, or even talking out loud.

Chapter 10

    If you woke up at the right moment, four hours’ sleep could be better than seven. Annie felt miraculously un-hungover. If the birds had started singing even five minutes later, then they might have interrupted a phase of rapid eye movement, or deep sleep or whatever it was, and she would have woken up with a brain feeling as if it had expanded in her head like a balloon that was just about to pop. She had once read about sleep cycles in a book called Successful on Six or something, and she had impressed people at dinner parties for weeks afterwards with the depth of her pseudo-scientific knowledge.
    Cautiously, she inclined her cheek one way, then the other, testing whether her early morning lucidity was just a momentary feeling that would disappear as soon as she made a sudden movement of her head. There was no rush of nausea. Still slightly drunk, but refreshed, she thought.
    Sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling window of the airy room she used as her office. She opened and closed her eyes a couple of times. The colour of the walls was the outcome of a conversation with the interior designer who bought his cigarettes in the same corner shop as she did. It surprised her every time she caught sight of it, jolting her with its unexpectedness, rather than creating the light carefree atmosphere he had promised. Try one room first, he had said, which had been his only piece of good advice. Her living room was still unfashionably white, but she thought that she would go mad in an environment entirely painted in lurid Miami pastels. Lilac was simply not restful, and the lime-green window frame, door and skirting boards did not make her feel as if she’d just taken an early morning dip in the Atlantic Ocean, as the designer had claimed.
    Annie frowned at the office chair that was standing on its own in the middle of the room. The memory of moving it back filtered to the front of her consciousness and provided an explanation as to why she appeared to be lying half inside a grubby, white, easy-assembly tent.
    The bones in the bodice of the dress left red marks on her ribcage, but the relief at stepping out of it and seeing it drop to the floor like a collapsing pavlova made the pain almost worthwhile. She’d once read a book about quitting smoking which said that the only reason people smoked was to relieve the craving for nicotine. Apparently, it was like taking off a shoe that pinched. Why put the shoe on in the first place when there wasn’t such a thing as an active desire to smoke, just a desire to end the pain, the book had asked. Why indeed? Annie had thought, turning the page, kicking off her Manolos and lighting up, but how does that help me?
    Annie stepped under a scorching shower and stood for several minutes letting the water stream over her head and flatten the pile of curls that had taken so long to construct the previous afternoon. Before the party, the hairstyle had looked rather magical; this morning Maurice’s dusting of silver powder simply made it look grey. Annie picked off her beauty spot. A fat lot of good that had done her. The only available men at the party had been wimps, embarrassed to speak to a woman in a bodice, let alone to rip it off her.
    If she thought about the men at the party (which she didn’t intend to, for long), they constituted a pretty comprehensive cross-section of London’s thirty-something intelligentsia. Why was it, she wondered, lining them up in her