What became of us

meet up before the do, and Ursula had felt a slight thrill, replying without hesitation, ‘Good idea!’
    Twenty years before, neither of them would have been able to afford lunch at Brown’s, but now both of them could casually eat there every day if they wanted to without even considering the expense.
    The waitresses were still sexily sulky. When she was a student they had made her feel huge with their white tea-towels tucked over their miniskirted bottoms like upmarket bunny girls. Now that their skinniness could no longer mock her, they just made her feel old instead.
    The restaurant had expanded but it still had wall mirrors, brown wooden furniture and palms that made it feel like a colonial veranda. Thousands of cheap eateries had imitated the style, but she had never been in one that had quite succeeded. The hands on the old-fashioned station clock seemed to be moving incredibly slowly. For something to do, she looked in her handbag again. Liam’s little package was like a guilt grenade.
    ‘Not to be opened until tomorrow evening...’ His admonition had made her frightened of what might happen if she opened it.
    She took out her mobile phone and dialled home. Barry answered.
    ‘I’ve arrived. Is everything OK?’
    ‘It’s fine. Good journey?’
    ‘Fine. How’s George?’
    ‘He’s fine. A bit grizzly.’
    ‘I expect he’ll cheer up when you go off to football.’
    ‘We were just on our way out.’
    ‘Oh. Won’t keep you then. Bye.’
    ‘Bye.’
    ‘You will phone if you need me?’ she said as an afterthought, but the line had already gone dead.
    She pushed down the aerial and shut the phone, feeling slightly self-conscious. The waitress brought her coffee. Speaking to Barry had made her feel superfluous, his barely concealed impatience implying that she was being a bit of a nuisance delaying their departure to the training session.
    Shifting around on the unforgiving wooden seat she wished that Annie would just turn up. She read the menu several times even though she knew most of it by heart. Apart from the salmon fishcakes most of the dishes were the same things she remembered wanting to eat twenty years before.
    Finally she picked up the mobile again and dialled Liam’s number, picking out each digit tentatively and waiting several seconds before pressing the button that would make the connection. He answered immediately, as if he had been waiting for her to call.
    ‘Hello?’ the muzziness of his voice made him sound as if he were lying in bed with a duvet pulled right up to his chin.
    ‘Did I wake you?’
    ‘No, not really. I was just having one of those waking dreams.’
    ‘Ahh,’ she giggled, relaxing against the bentwood back of her seat.
    ‘Ahh, indeed,’ he replied.
    ‘I’ve arrived,’ she said, not really knowing why she had called him but feeling better just to hear his voice.
    ‘The dreaming spires,’ he said with a yawn. ‘Is it a fine day?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, giggling.
    They had discovered over their first drink that they had both been students at Oxford at the same time. She had found herself speculating even then what would have happened if their eyes had met across one of the T-shaped tables in the Radcliffe Camera. Except that he had read PPP so he wouldn’t have been using the Radcliffe Camera, and she had been so fat then that whenever a man she fancied looked up, he usually looked away.
    Not now, she thought, looking at herself in the huge mirror on the wall next to her table.
    ‘I’m in Brown’s,’ she told him.
    ‘Near Little Trendy Street,’ he said.
    ‘Yes!’ she giggled again.
    ‘You know, if I left now, I could be with you in time for tea.’
    It was the first time he had pinned down in words the floating possibility of meeting her there. She couldn’t help smiling ridiculously at herself in the wall mirror, flirting like a schoolgirl with the voice in her ear. Then suddenly Annie was standing right beside her in the reflection saying,
    ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, I am so sorry...’
    Beneath the spicy perfume, Ursula could smell the clinging sour odour of a recently extinguished cigarette. For a moment, she felt the pure white heat of anger that Annie could still be stupid enough to be smoking when they had a friend who had died of cancer.
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ Ursula said into the phone, ‘love,’ she added, trying to make the farewell sound more normal for Annie’s benefit. Then, flustered, she switched off the phone.
    ‘Don’t