What became of us

somehow betrayed. Ursula had always been larger than her. Ursula being fatter than you was something you could rely on. How dare she lose weight without even telling her?
    She let Ursula order first. A salad, as she suspected.
    ‘So have you been eating nothing but salad?’ she asked, trying to think of all the wonderful meals she had eaten recently, but unable to convince herself that they had been worth the fact that the dress she was wearing was actually the largest size and still creased up across her thighs. Gucci was generally quite skimpy and the Italian sizes didn’t translate exactly, she told herself. What anyone else would call a 12 they called a 14.
    ‘Not really,’ Ursula replied.
    There was one thing that Annie hated more than an effortlessly slim person, and that was an obsessive salad eater who pretended that she ate a wide and varied diet.
    ‘Fettucine carbonara and a bottle of the house champagne,’ she told the waitress, and was pleased to see Ursula’s frown. On Monday she would start a diet in earnest, she promised herself. At the moment she needed a carbohydrate fix.
    ‘Champagne?’ Ursula repeated.
    ‘It’s all I seem to drink these days,’ Annie said, airily. ‘Oh come on, Ursy, you look like one of those awful people who thinks that champagne is only for weddings and christenings.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Ursula replied sharply.
    ‘So how is Barry?’ Annie asked, feeling slightly more in control.
    Their relationship had always been a bit of a power struggle. It was very childish because underneath it all they both knew they liked each other a lot although they would have been reluctant to admit that to one another.
    The waitress brought an ice bucket and twisted the cork out of the bottle with a satisfying pop. Annie tasted the champagne.
    ‘Cheap and cheerful,’ she told the waitress; ‘a bit like me, really.’
    The waitress laughed, hesitated, looked for a moment as if she were about to ask for an autograph, then poured.
    They both watched the pale gold liquid foam up to the top of the narrow flutes and settle, then Annie clunked her glass against Ursula’s, took a mouthful and said ‘Cheers!’ all in one go.
    ‘What are we drinking to?’ Ursula asked.
    ‘Oh hell, I don’t know. To us.’ Then, noticing the crestfallen look on Ursula’s face, she added, ‘well, to Penny if you like.’ Annie emptied the rest of the glass into her mouth and poured another.
    ‘Barry’s fine,’ Ursula said, which reminded Annie that she had just enquired, although she couldn’t have been less interested in the answer. She thought it incredibly boring of Ursula to have married a barrister, especially one called Barry. Barry the barrister. It sounded like one of the characters in a game of Happy Families.
    ‘And the boys?’
    ‘They’re fine. George is not too pleased with me leaving him for a whole weekend...’
    Drone, drone, drone. Annie pretended to listen, but the champagne had bypassed her stomach and gone straight to her ears. It sounded as if Ursula was talking under water. She could see her lips moving and hear a sort of murmur, but she just couldn’t seem to take in any of the words. Ursula was smiling, with that God-they’re-hard-work-but-they’re-so-fucking-interesting look that mothers always adopted when they were relating their child’s latest naively profound utterance.
    Did having babies remove certain layers of sensibility from your brain? Annie wondered. Was it actually a chemical reaction born of the massive hormonal change that made mothers fail to notice non-mothers’ eyes glazing over as they described the cute phrases their offspring had just coined?
    ‘…and then he said, if Jesus has got the whole world in his hands, what’s he standing on?’ Ursula finished her anecdote triumphantly.
    ‘Oh, how sweet!’ Annie tried to smile sincerely.
    ‘Anyway, how’s Max?’ Ursula suddenly asked.
    ‘Max? Oh, him. How is he? I don’t know, really. Married...’
    Annie wished that she had never mentioned her pursuit of Max to Ursula. She tended to divulge confidences to Ursula, partly to shock her and partly because Ursula lived so far away and didn’t know anyone, so couldn’t possibly tell. She always forgot that Ursula not only remembered everything, but had the annoying habit of correcting Annie on the details of a story she told months before but amended with the passage of time. Ursula’s enquiries were sometimes as agonizingly