What became of us

Barry’s so boring.
    I was the one most likely to be Prime Minister, Ursula thought, turning onto her side and staring out of the window as the sudden rainstorm spattered against the glass. When Annie said that, she had felt a frisson of pride that people had once thought of her as a person who was going to be someone.
    Ursula followed the rivers of rain sliding down the glass. What had she done? Nothing. She wasn’t Prime Minister, she wasn’t even an MP. It was easier now than it had ever been to be a female MP and yet she wasn’t one. If she had been, she would be a bit less docile than the rest of them, but it was too late for hypotheticals. At forty, you either had or hadn’t, time had run out for should’ves and could’ves. She had done what she had done, and that was that. Life did not begin at forty any more. She doubted that it ever had.
    She was a successful lawyer, she told herself, trying to stave off the sudden gloom that had descended in the room. But not as successful as she would have liked. She had not brought about the release of the Guildford Four or uncovered any major miscarriages of justice. She was married to a barrister who would never take silk, and she was not even a good wife to him.
    She was the mother of three healthy, intelligent boys. But she was not a very good mother. She had handed them over to au pairs at quite an early age, and although her children respected her, feared her even, they were not affectionate as some sons were to their mothers. She had never felt comfortable doing the things that mothers were supposed to do with their boys, like taking them to theme parks or buying them baseball hats and hamburgers in loud American restaurants.
    She could not call herself a good aunt to her nieces, nor sister to her brother. She was not even sure that she had been a good daughter to her mother since the death of her father. Her insistence that she move to a bungalow near to where they lived meant that her mother was spending her last few years friendless and lonely in a city she did not know and was too old to find out about.
    Suddenly, Ursula found herself weeping for the mess she had made of her life.
    If Penny were here, she thought, sniffing, trying to conjure up her friend’s good sense, she would find a success to balance every failure. But Penny was not there. Her death, which should have made everyone who knew her value their lives more, seemed to have had the opposite effect on Ursula, making her more dissatisfied.
    She was painfully aware that she had not even been a good friend to Penny. She had failed to get to grips with Penny’s illness because she had been so sure that Penny’s strength of character would conquer it. Now she realized that she had only made it more difficult for Penny.
    ‘You have to keep fighting,’ she had urged her on the last occasion she had seen her conscious, and Penny had looked cross for the first time in their friendship, and spoken sharply to her.
    ‘The cancer is killing me, Ursy. Don’t make it my fault.’
    Even right at the end, when Penny sank into madness as the cancer spread to her brain, even in those last days, Ursula had still kept on insisting that there was hope. She had simply refused to believe that Penny could die.
    And that had not helped anyone.
    Her entire life had been a failure, Ursula thought, staring across the room at the two blobs of Blu-Tack on the wall which were the only sign that this room had ever been occupied, and tears flooded down her cheeks.

    Just before the rain stopped, the sun began to shine making the room seem light and dark at the same time.
    Somewhere there would be a rainbow, Ursula thought, wanting to run downstairs and out into the quad to catch it, but almost immediately the room was filled with a bright, almost magical, silvery light, and she knew that the rainbow would be gone.
    She and Liam had seen a rainbow once, a clear arc of pure colour over the muted grey, yellow and purple of the hills. They sat in the car staring at it through the windscreen, and then it faded so quickly that she wasn’t sure that it had ever existed. Neither of them had mentioned it, as if the magic would be broken in the telling.
    Liam. Twenty years ago, they had walked the cobbled streets of Oxford unaware of each other’s presence. It seemed almost inevitable that they had been unwittingly together in this beautiful city whose every stone seemed to confirm her failure.
    Were you talking to a secret