What became of us

sex.
    I’ve found the ultimate chat-up line, Annie thought, as she wrote up the day when she got back home, and saved it for a future episode.
    The second time, Max’s wife had come along too, and the two women had talked about girls’ things while the men walked slowly around the car. Then they had gone for a test drive together.
    ‘It’s a lot of money, but the poor guy’s got to educate his children,’ Max said loudly, then lowered his voice to urge her, ‘Snap it up. We’ve found you a bargain.’
    ‘Can’t he send them to state schools?’ Annie asked, grasping at the first excuse that came into her head to get out of it.
    ‘Don’t you like it?’
    ‘It seems a bit low.’
    ‘Low?’
    ‘Near the ground, I mean...’
    ‘That’s what they’re like.’
    ‘And I’m not sure about red.’
    But Ferraris should be red. Ferrari Red. It’s a colour in its own right.’
    Gloomily, Annie had handed over her banker’s draft for the best part of £30,000, terrified at the thought of having to drive the thing home. She’d only passed her test a couple of years and never felt completely comfortable behind a wheel.
    ‘You go on,’ she urged Max and Mrs Max, not wanting them to watch her try to reverse down the drive, then added brightly, ‘I think I’ll just go for a spin to the coast.’
    Max looked at her enviously at that point, which made her think she was still in with a chance. Since then she had offered several times to give him a lift home from the studios because she just happened to have the car with her, but on the last occasion he had shouted, ‘God, you really know how to rub it in, don’t you?’
    And they had never reached the kind of rapprochement which would allow her to ask his advice about selling it.

    Annie was the only person she knew who looked with envy at Nissan Micras as they drove past on the motorway. Generally, she liked to be in the slow lane behind a big lorry where she felt protected. She was nervous about overtaking because she always felt that the draught from the lorry might blow her into the path of another car speeding up the fast lane. The only trouble was that in the slow lane people would draw alongside to have a good look at the car and she would have to lift one hand from the steering wheel to point at a non-existent problem with a front tyre, pretending that it was responsible for her remarkably sedate progress.
    Annie felt a twinge of guilt as she passed the exit to Northolt, the undistinguished suburb where her mother lived in the little council house that she fused to move from, but had at least allowed Annie to buy after Annie had produced proof of her bank balance.
    What the hell was she going to do with her mum? The question had floated unanswered in her brain since Christmas when she had stayed there. It wasn’t until she had spent consecutive days with her mother that she had realized there was a problem. She knew that people got a bit repetitive as they got older, but Marjorie wasn’t even sixty and she repeated herself all the time.
    At first Annie had thought her mum might be going deaf when on Christmas morning she asked three times what Annie wanted for breakfast.
    ‘Cornflakes, please,’ Annie said, sitting down in her mother’s pink chenille dressing gown, staring at the service on the screen.
    ‘Rice Krispies or cornflakes?’
    ‘Cornflakes,’ Annie replied a little louder, over the strains of ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High.’
    ‘I was wondering what you fancy for breakfast.’
    ‘Have you got any cornflakes?’
    ‘Of course I have. Now what are you going to have for breakfast?’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum!’ Annie had shouted at her.
    The visit had been punctuated by similar exchanges, but she hadn’t been unduly worried, and when she had asked her mother, ‘Do you know you re repeating yourself a lot, Mum?’ her question had met with the defiant riposte:
    ‘You should hear yourself after a few Bristol Creams.’

    * * *

    At Easter, Annie had driven up to take Marjorie out for lunch and found her completely unprepared, even though they had rehearsed the arrangements many times on the phone. Marjorie had been delighted by the nice surprise and had dressed herself up in the pale blue suit from British Home Stores that she used to wear for work. Annie had taken her to a pub in Ruislip, and Marjorie had sat eating her roast dinner, recalling in vivid detail the few meals out they had been able to afford when Annie was a