What became of us

explained, ‘and she say, “a cup of coffee and the bill, please” and we bring it to her... and then she gives us some money, and we give her some change... in fact it’s only pretending...’
    So much for the expensive plastic kitchen that had been Lily’s Christmas present, Roy thought. Manon could create a whole restaurant just by sitting down at a table and asking them to use their imaginations.
    ‘What other games?’ he asked.
    ‘Hatchet girl, Hatchet girl, Hatchet girl!’ Lily screamed, getting slightly overexcited.
    ‘Hatchet girl?’ Geraldine repeated, making it sound like a violent computer game for adolescent boys.
    ‘Yes,’ Lily said, impatiently, ‘I have to sit behind the counter...’ '
    ‘... or I do,’ Saskia interrupted. ‘We take it in turns, don’t we Lily?’
    ‘... and then Manon and Sas give me coats and bags to look after, and you have to stick one ticket on the coat and give the other to the cuttomer,’ Lily said breathlessly.
    ‘Manon stole the tickets from her work,’ Saskia said, ‘but we’re not allowed to tell anyone.’ She put her finger against her lips and made an exaggerated shush noise.
    Roy chuckled and as he looked up he saw that even Geraldine was smiling. ‘That sounds a lovely game,’ she said.
    ‘May we be excused from the table?’ Saskia asked.
    Roy shot a glance at his mother-in-law. It was starting already. The formal manners, the strait-jacket of rural conservatism.
    ‘Of course you may,’ Geraldine replied, clearly pleased with her granddaughter’s polite request.
    The two girls slid off the ladderback chairs and ran into the garden.
    ‘It’s a wonderful garden for children,’ Geraldine remarked as she slid two fried eggs onto Roy’s plate, along with some triangles of fried bread, ‘because you can see them wherever they are.’
    She stood staring through the window above the sink, her eyes glazed with tears. He knew that she was remembering watching her own daughter turning cartwheels on the lawn, and he suddenly felt too sad to be irritated with her any more.
    ‘Well, it looks like a change of plan. I’ll take the girls in with me, then I’ll bring them back again and change for dinner. It’s probably more sensible. I didn’t want to wear a suit all day anyway.’
    ‘I thought that Leonora was going to take care of everything.’
    ‘She said she’d appreciate a hand with the placement,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what use I’ll be. I don’t even know half the people coming, but I thought I ought to show willing.’ He wiped the plate clean with a piece of toast from the rack in the middle of the table. ‘By the way, can I borrow your iron?’
    ‘Don’t be silly. I can iron a shirt for you.’
    ‘No, really...’
    ‘No, really,’ she repeated firmly, smiling at him. She was trying so hard, he thought. It was churlish of him to mind.
    ‘Cracking breakfast, Gromit,’ he said, putting down his knife and fork and smiling at her.

Chapter 13

    Annie was fond of saying,
    ‘I have no idea why I bought this Ferrari...’ because she thought it made her sound endearingly scatty as well as impressively rich, but in fact she knew exactly why she had bought it. On the evening she had signed her first syndication deal, she corralled all the people on the show that she liked for drinks at the Compton Club. Max, the cameraman who was also the current unattainable man she had a crush on, had been in a flirtatious mood and she had asked him, casually, what he would do if he suddenly found himself £100,000 richer than he had been when he got up in the morning.
    ‘Buy a Ferrari,’ he had immediately replied. ‘Funnily enough,’ Annie had heard herself saying, ‘that was my thought too, but I don’t really know how to go about it...’
    Two bottles of Rioja later, he had taken the bait and arranged to come round on Saturday morning with an armful of specialist magazines. You needed to know something about it if you were going to venture into the second-hand market, he had told her.
    The first time they’d gone Ferrari hunting, to an address in deepest Essex, they’d had a ball, and Annie had been delighted when the newly redundant foreign exchange dealer who was selling the ridiculous car was unable to produce the relevant documentation about its history, because that meant there was another date with Max on the cards. They’d had a test drive, just the two of them, with Max driving, and it had felt almost as exciting as