What became of us

wide-eyed as they sat at a pavement table eating brunch and watching the world go by, and Annie would see her life through a tourist’s eyes and feel rather pleased with it.
    As she stopped at the traffic lights just outside Headington, Annie tried to remember the names of Ursula’s boys, but could only get Luke, whose godmother she was supposed to be. With a panicky intake of breath she realized she had forgotten his birthday again this year and glanced at her giant plastic watch, deliberating whether it would be better to make herself later for the lunch date but arrive with a present, or whether she would be able to get away with nonchalantly handing Ursula a cheque at the end of the weekend, saying that she hadn’t wanted to put it in the post. Then she remembered that it wasn’t until September anyway.
    Then there was Roy. She didn’t know whether she was going to be able to look Roy in the face without blushing. On nights when she couldn’t fall straight to sleep, she had found herself deliberately thinking about Roy in the hope of getting a repeat of the dream. It hadn’t happened but the fantasy had escalated a bit, and it was starting to look blindingly obvious that there was a solution to all her problems and his. Annie and Roy. It even sounded right.
    Fresh-faced blonds had never been her type, but Roy was undeniably attractive if you liked that sort of thing. He was also intelligent and left wing (a bit unfashionably old Trot, but that was better than a Tory). Like her, he was working class made good. A Nottinghamshire miner’s son who had become a don at Oxford. He would understand how difficult it was to feel secure when you’d jumped out of your socio-economic band. And he needed her. She would be a friend to his girls, not a horrid stepmother, and they’d do fun things together like visit Disneyworld, which they would never be able to afford without her money.
    They’d have to move, of course. The little house in Joshua Street was too full of Penny, and Annie’s flat in London would hardly be suitable. She’d keep it for when she had meetings in London, and the rest of the time they’d live in a rambling manor house in one of the honey-coloured stone villages round Oxford, near enough for Roy to travel into college each day. Annie would have an office in one wing, as far away from the nursery as possible, and Roy was such a kind person he wouldn’t mind her converting one of the stables in the courtyard into a granny flat for her mother.
    Annie slammed on the brakes at red lights, so deep in her fantasy she had hardly noticed driving over Magdalen Bridge, and now she was in the wrong lane for cutting up by the University Parks. The traffic inched up the High and then forced her to loop right round the back of the town, to places she’d never ventured when she was a student. Had there been an ice rink then, she wondered. She only reorientated herself as she passed the back of the bus station and narrowly missed hitting a reed-thin stick of a woman crossing the road who looked a lot like Manon.
    Perhaps it was Manon, Annie thought, her heart pumping adrenalin. It would be typical of her to not notice she was about to be knocked over by a Ferrari, but she didn’t dare look round to confirm her hunch because the Randolph Hotel was coming up and she didn’t want to miss the sign for the car park and end up whirling round the other half of the Oxford one-way system.

Chapter 14

    Manon’s very first view of Oxford was the bus station. Even then she had been a misfit, leaving her boarding school in the morning wearing the navy and white uniform, but arriving at Oxford bus station in a black skirt and a black V-neck sweater. Her mother had sent her a genuine Hermes scarf which Manon tied round her neck at the last minute for luck. She assumed it was stolen. She did not like to think about what her mother might have done to earn it.
    In her memory, the other girls waiting in the common room to be interviewed had all been wearing the same Laura Ashley dress in sludge green with a pattern of tiny cream flowers. They had divided themselves into two groups. The talkers and the loners, Penny was later to call them. Penny and Ursula must have been among the big group of girls where the volume of chatter rose almost to screeching point when one of their names was called. They had made instant friends with each other and exchanged letters all the way through their gap year. Manon could remember