What became of us

forty take?’ Annie whispered, as they watched Leonora marching purposefully towards the dining hall with her clipboard and mobile phone.
    ‘She keeps checking her watch. It’s as if she’s masterminding a military campaign,’ Ursula giggled.
    ‘I mean, what can possibly go wrong?’ Annie asked.
    She and Ursula exchanged looks.
    ‘You’re right, I’d better have a think about what I’m going to say,’ she admitted. ‘You don’t fancy having a wander round, to give me inspiration?’
    ‘I need to sober up,’ Ursula said, yawning.

    * * *

    Ursula watched Annie walking towards the back gate slightly unsteadily in her red strappy sandals, then she made her way up to her room.
    It was far better equipped than the one she had been allocated in college in her first year, but the bed was just as narrow and hard. Sex had been discouraged then, and obviously still was. She prodded the bed, sat down, bounced, then lay down on her back, looking at the ceiling.
    During their first year at Oxford, the college had still been all female. After midnight, men had only been able to enter or leave the college by climbing over the back fence. She had always envied those women who emerged from their rooms with dark shadows under their eyes and the blotchiness of sex around their mouths.
    Along with many of the other colleges, St Gertrude’s had changed from all-female to mixed in their second year. She supposed that meant the rules had been relaxed on the subject of ‘overnight guests’, as the college authorities had quaintly called them. By then she had been living out in Joshua Street with Penny and the others. It wouldn’t have made any difference to her, anyway, because she had come up to Oxford a virgin, and gone down in the same intact state.
    Like everyone else, she had fallen in love, but the man she had chosen was so far out of her league she had been doomed to worship from afar, apart from the one time he had taken her for a drink.
    In those days, the number of male students had far exceeded the number of women, but it had never felt to her as if there was a surplus around.
    ‘There are meant to be five of them for each one of us . .
    She remembered Annie sounding off about it at the kitchen table in Joshua Street.
    ‘...the trouble is, one has a girlfriend at home, one plays rugby with the boys, at least two are poofs, and the other one wears an anorak and a college scarf.’
    Ursula had never understood how someone’s choice of clothing could affect their suitability as a boyfriend, but these things had always mattered to Annie.
    Annie had been quick to fall in and out of love and bed with men, which must be why she had never married, Ursula thought. In recent years, the more desperate her search for a man, the more picky she seemed to have become. The last time Ursula had visited her in London, there were endless nice men popping round to her flat, or bumping into her in the street, but Annie dismissed all of them in the same peremptory way that she had dismissed the men at Oxford.
    ‘Yes, he’s very nice, but you couldn’t marry a man who wore a brown leather jacket,’ or, ‘Yeah, he’s OK, apart from his shoes.’
    The only men she ever went for seemed to be impossible, or married, or both.
    Ursula wondered what they would have predicted then if they had tried to foresee their love lives in twenty years’ time.
    Penny was always going to get married, but they would all have assumed that she would marry Vin, who had been her boyfriend since before Oxford. He had been the head boy of the boys’ school when Penny was the head girl of the neighbouring girls’ school. They had spent their sixth form together and come up to Oxford together. He rowed for Keble. Penny was a tennis blue. After Oxford they were going to do teaching diplomas, then VSO, then, everyone assumed, return to England to marry, teach and raise a family.
    Manon was the most beautiful of them, but eschewed the company of men, or women. Manon was a loner. Men adored her. She could have slept with any man in Oxford, but she was so private a person that Ursula had no idea whether she had been with anyone apart from the boy who had killed himself.
    As for herself, well, everyone would have expected her to become a spinster don. She wondered if that expectation had been the reason she had fallen for the first man who ever really paid any attention to her.
    Barry’s so nice, Annie had said, but Ursula knew that what she meant was