What became of us

sensation of arousal that twitched between her legs. How could he do this just by talking on the phone.
    ‘I’m shopping for something to wear this weekend,’ she told him.
    ‘Can I come along and see you in your underwear?’

    He crept up on her as she flipped through a rack of own-brand dresses in House of Fraser and led her to the designer section. She had only dared to venture to this part of the store recently and had not yet been brave enough to try anything on. A quick glance at the price label was usually enough to make her walk briskly away. She had enough money now to buy whatever she wanted, but the grip of childhood poverty was hard to unclench. She could not bring herself to buy something whose price she would not dare tell her mother.
    Liam’s body was so close she could feel his breath on her neck. She turned round. He was holding a sleeveless black dress in front of his face. She stared at the large, powerful hand gripping the hook of the silky padded hanger.
    ‘I don’t want black,’ she said, affecting indifference, but she could feel her cheeks flaming to betray her.
    ‘I’ve never seen you wear anything but black,’ he said with a slightly disconcerted expression as he put the dress back on the rail.
    He had only ever seen her dressed for work. He did not know the person that slopped around at the weekends wearing big jumpers and walking boots for their hikes in the country. Would he like her looking like that, she wondered, looking like a mum?
    They wandered round the shop close together, brushing against each other. The outfits he suggested were not at all what she would have chosen, but it made her feel sexy trying them on, her newly slim figure alien to her as she came out of the changing room and twirled in front of him, trying to read his judgement in his eyes. She wavered for a long time about a suit in a shade of pink her mother would call shocking. She did not recognize herself in it. It made her look like a different person, like the sort of person who would wear shocking pink, she thought. But she was not quite ready to be that person yet.
    Instead she chose a linen dress in a kind of pale stone colour to wear under a navy jacket during the day and on its own for the evening. It was still a departure for her, very plain and elegantly understated, and nobody more than a size 12 would look nice in it.
    As she handed over her AmEx card, she wondered how she would explain her choice to Barry if he were to notice that her taste had suddenly changed. She would not let him pay as he had offered. Or perhaps she should, in case he suspected. There was nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing to suspect. She had done nothing, she told herself, except try on a few clothes with a friend.

    ‘So you’re going to Oxford all on your own?’ Liam said in the car park as she put the cardboard carrier bags into the boot of her car.
    ‘I won’t be on my own,’ she said, ‘I’ll be with old friends.’
    ‘Of course you will,’ he said, holding her eyes as he slipped a miniature carrier bag with the store’s logo on it into her shoulderbag. Her hand went automatically to retrieve it. He caught her wrist.
    ‘Uh-uh,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘not to be opened until tomorrow evening, when you’re wearing the dress.’
    Then he turned and walked away from her. She knew that she had approximately ten seconds before he reached his own car in which she could shout, or run after him and ask him to meet her in Oxford, and he would come. But she stood immobile, her hand clutching the small package in her bag. He got into his metallic grey sports car and roared out of the car park, leaving her standing beside her car gawping.
    She wondered if she had just missed her last chance. Liam was not an unreasonable man, but he would not let her dither much longer.
    Even thinking about an affair terrified her. It was just not like her. If one of her friends, even Barry, were asked to come up with three adjectives to describe her they would choose words like reliable, organized, she thought, and perhaps clever, or intelligent. The words adulterous, deceitful, dishonest would simply never occur.

Chapter 3

    The toilets at the Compton Club were not the most convenient place to perform a pregnancy test. From the slam of the doors and voices outside the cubicle, Manon could tell that there were at least three people waiting. The minute the test took to work felt like an hour, and when she saw the result