What became of us

champagne!’
    She picked up the little drawstring evening bag that had come with the outfit, and flicked it over her shoulder, trying out a coquettish smile on the two men.
    They both smiled back indulgently.
    ‘You don’t think I’m overdressed?’ she asked, opening the front door of her flat.
    ‘Not with the watch,’ Denny offered.
    ‘I was joking,’ she scolded him.
    You hardly wanted to spend a couple of hundred hiring a dress, then whatever Maurice and Denny were going to charge for the hair, face and styling, and not look overdressed, did you?
    Five hundred pounds, Annie estimated. Minimum. Still, it was fun to go really over the top once in a while. She was sick of black, black, black and all the other dark colours that promised to be the new black but somehow always ended up in her wardrobes tried on, but swapped at the last minute for the real black. There weren’t many single items in her wardrobe that had cost five hundred pounds, but there were thousands of pounds’ worth of brown and grey items never worn, so in a way hiring a dress was a bargain, if you looked at it like that.
    Gathering up her skirts she picked her way down the two flights of stairs to her front door. Lucky that the party was in a boathouse on the Thames, and not at some grand ballroom where you had to make an entrance down a staircase. She loved the feeling of acres of rustling silk swishing round her legs, but she was slightly nervous about tripping herself up.
    She looked at the party invitation in her hand. It was engraved, on thick white card, and at the bottom the instruction urged in bold italics,
    ‘Wear something you’ve always dreamed of wearing!’

Chapter 2

    The mangetout came from Zimbabwe. Ursula rinsed them under the cold tap. She wondered whether they were trimmed in Zimbabwe too. She imagined an African woman with a basket on her lap topping and tailing the pea pods with a sharp knife. What would she think of a woman who was too busy to prepare her own vegetables? She tipped the flat green pods into the wok and watched them sizzle, seeing them now as a symbol of failure.
    Barry had just come in from work.
    ‘I’m doing a stir-fry,’ she told him, as he kissed the top of her shoulder in greeting.
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘Good day?’ she asked.
    ‘Not bad. He got off.’
    ‘The rapist?’
    ‘Yup.’
    Ursula sighed. It was good for Barry’s reputation to get an acquittal, but she wasn’t so sure that the verdict was good for the women who would come into contact with the defendant.
    They had a rule never to discuss their cases at home.
    She picked up the plastic tray and looked at the price per kilo on the label.
    ‘I was just thinking how decadent I’ve been, buying prepared vegetables. And they’re ludicrously expensive.’
    ‘Saves time though,’ Barry said, picking the Guardian up off the kitchen table. ‘And gives someone employment,’ he added.
    That made her feel a little better.
    ‘I’m just going to watch the news,’ he said.

    ‘Not vegetables again!’ her older sons Christopher and Luke chorused as she ferried bowls of stir-fry on trays into the living room.
    ‘There’s chicken in there too,’ she said.
    ‘I’m not hungry,’ George, her three-year-old stated categorically.
    Barry did not look out from behind the paper. She wondered why it was that George allowed his father to sit reading peacefully, but would charge the paper like a toreador’s cape if she so much as glanced at the television listings.
    ‘I’m going upstairs to sort out something to wear for tomorrow,’ she told the room.
    No-one replied.

    Her bed was covered in clothes like a stall at a church jumble sale. She couldn’t decide. All her smart clothes were black, but they were her work clothes. The only other garments she seemed to possess were track suits, leggings and jumpers, and a couple of huge over-bright dresses she had bought for weddings and .the christening of her goddaughter. Weddings and christenings were the limit of her social life these days. And funerals, she thought; increasingly funerals.
    She tried a couple of outfits on. They were gratifyingly big, but wouldn’t do.
    There was nothing that said what she wanted to say. Nothing that said: here I am, grown up. I know that I will never be beautiful, but I have discovered that you need not have the mousy hair you were born with, and I have learned the wonders of foundation, lipstick and contact lenses. I am slim.
    ‘I don’t know what on