What became of us

child. Her memory of those times seemed stronger and brighter than it had ever been, and Annie had driven back to Notting Hill telling herself that maybe there wasn’t anything wrong after all. Her mother was getting a bit forgetful, which was what happened when people had been forced into early retirement and hadn’t replaced work with anything to keep their mind busy. She would enrol her in U3A, she told herself, and pay for her to go on a Saga holiday.
    Her optimism evaporated when her mother rang her that very evening and asked, ‘When am I going to see you? You never seem to come here these days.’
    Recently, she had taken her mother to her GP and told him that she wanted a private referral to a consultant.
    ‘What do you want that for?’ her mother had asked.
    ‘Because you’re getting a bit forgetful,’ Annie had explained.
    ‘Rubbish,’ her mother said, but the next day, when they went to collect the typed-up letter from the surgery, she had asked, ‘What’s this about, then?’
    The neurologist had been pleasant enough, but confirmed Annie’s worst-case amateur diagnosis of the possible onset of Alzheimer’s.

    Annie put her foot down tentatively as she passed RAF Northolt. The street lamps in this particular section of road were truncated to half their normal size. She presumed it was because of low-flying aircraft coming in to land, but the idea of aeroplanes flying lower than the height of normal street lamps alarmed her. A couple of years before a plane had crashed on the motorway, narrowly avoiding fatalities. The passenger, a minor television personality, she seemed to remember, had been treated for shock. She slowed down again as the road widened out and the street lamps grew tall again.
    Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning when she was alone and suffering a bout of existential despair after an evening of fighting talk and alcohol with girlfriends, she would decide to buy the flat downstairs and move her mother in. Her mother had sacrificed everything to look after her when she was little, she would tell herself, weepily, and now she would do the same. It would be a different life, but a moral one.
    In fact she had become rather keen on the image of herself as a carer with a life of self-sacrifice instead of indulgence. She knew that some of her friends would think her mad, but anyone with any decency would admire her, seeing strengths they had not seen in her before and that they could not find in themselves. Marjorie might be going barmy, but at least she was pleasantly and politely barmy. long as she didn’t become incontinent...
    Doomed to be an old maid, Annie’s reasoning went, she might as well do it bravely, proudly giving herself up to duty as a daughter from a less selfish age might have done. It wasn’t as if any men were interested in marrying her anyway, so caring for her prematurely senile mother was hardly likely to put them off. In a funny kind of way, it might even make her more attractive. At least to the sort of kind and decent man that must exist out there somewhere.
    Sometimes, at two or three in the morning, the prospect of her meaningful and self-sacrificing future life with Marjorie was so attractive, she thought she might find the bones of a screenplay in it. Or at least a new angle for the sixth series of I Love Annie, which was becoming a little tired.
    But as yet the flat downstairs had not come on to the market.

    Once she had passed the M25 exit, the traffic thinned out and the road was empty enough for her to feel confident at seventy. Annie surprised herself by overtaking the Oxford Tube just past Thame, but then she had to slow down again in front of it as the turn-off to Oxford loomed much sooner than she had expected. The coach’s horn sounded angrily behind her.
    Oxford . The very sight of the word on the motorway signpost filled her with apprehension. She couldn’t work out whether she was looking forward to the reunion or not. Her hangover had caught up with her and was now making everything feel slightly hazy, as if she were out of sync with real time.
    It would be nice to see Ursula again. Even though she was a bit of a boring housewife these days, her transparent envy of Annie’s life always made Annie feel better about things. Every couple of years or so, Ursula escaped down to London for a weekend, and they spent Saturday trawling up and down the Portobello Road. Lucky you to have all this on your doorstep, Ursula would say,