What became of us

to be lusting after each other instead. Probably very sensible. She remembered all the angst she had been caused by those haughty rich boys who had been denied female company until they came to Oxford. Life would have been so much easier as a lesbian. Trouble was, she had never fancied women. If she was honest, she thought, she didn’t even like women very much, except for her mum, and Penny, and Ursula, although she had preferred her before she lost all that weight.
    How come Ursula had got so thin? She always had been a bit of a traitor. During the second year when everyone was competing to do the least work, Ursula had snuck off to the college library in the middle of the night. Annie had once caught her returning with a guilty look on her face pretending she’d just gone to the shop to get milk for breakfast. And now she’d gone on a secret diet, so that all the time they’d been sympathizing with each other on the phone about how many clothes seemed to be cut more skimpily these days, Ursula had been chewing on closet celery.
    Manon was just as bad. Sitting there laughing about all the women who were after Roy, and then going off with him as soon as he turned up.
    Roy had hardly even noticed that Annie was there. But she had to acknowledge that she had felt nothing whatsoever for him either. The moment she saw him coming round the corner of the quad, she had realized that she simply did not fancy him. Never had. Never would. Even making a huge effort to remember exactly how it had felt when he was licking her in the dream didn’t do it. So that was that.
    Oh well.
    In any case manor houses in the Cotswolds were full of mice and stank of manure. Roy was welcome to it, but she wouldn’t have been able to stand it for more than an afternoon.
    Nevertheless, it was a bit much to see Manon sauntering off with him and the children just like that.
    Every man at Oxford had fancied Manon.
    ‘Tell me the truth, is it just her looks? Is she so much more beautiful than everyone else?’ Annie had asked the Balliol boyfriend (what was his name?) one afternoon in bed after a marathon session.
    ‘It’s not just her looks,’ he had said, failing to understand that Annie did not require an honest reply, ‘it’s that she has mystique.’
    ‘And I don’t, I suppose?’ Annie had asked, hotly.
    ‘No, but you’ve got great tits,’ he had replied.
    The relationship had petered out soon after that.
    Annie never had a boyfriend who lasted more than a term. She was fine for a laugh and a fuck, but when reality loomed and the question of introducing her to Mummy and Daddy arose, she never made the grade. Not all the men there were public school boys, but the ones who weren’t generally didn’t have the confidence to go out with her in the first place. When she arrived she was loud and brash to overcome her nervousness, and the more insecure the experience of Oxford made her, the louder and brasher she became.
    She accepted the public school boys’ reluctance to take her home with a certain equanimity, because she would never have dreamed of taking one of them home to her own council house in Northolt. During term time, Marjorie kept in touch with her by writing letters on Basildon Bond lined paper that appeared in her pigeonhole once a week, sometimes more often, but Annie could never bring herself to invite her up even for a day.
    Annie looked at herself in the mirror above the sink in the King’s Arms’ ladies’ loos and she washed her hands, and felt a terrible sense of regret that there was nothing she could now do to make up for that.

    Slowly, she began to walk back along the Broad in the direction of the Randolph, stopping to buy what was left of the daily papers and a copy of OK! magazine. There was a copy reserved for her at her local newsagent’s in London, but she hadn’t had time that morning to pick it up and she was dying to see what Posh Spice’s wedding dress was like.
    It had clouded over, and rain looked imminent. She was passing the Martyrs’ Memorial when the skies opened and rain poured down in great arcs as if someone were emptying buckets from on high. It was not sensible to run across wet cobblestones in Jimmy Choo sandals. Annie chose to get drenched rather than to break an ankle.
    Under the canopy of the hotel entrance, a man still holding a newspaper over his head pushed open the door for her.
    ‘Thanks,’ she said, shivering.
    ‘You’d win any wet dress competition...’
    The