What became of us

seeing you so much,’ Roy remarked. ‘I mean, I didn’t mean...’
    ‘It’s OK,’ she said, more softly, ‘I know what you meant.’

    The rain stopped almost as suddenly as it started. When they emerged from the restaurant the air had cooled.
    ‘Are you still up for this?’ Roy asked her.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘You’re hardly dressed for it.’ His eyes ran up and down the black dress.
    ‘Well, now you’re here, you can punt and I can sit with the girls,’ she suggested.
    ‘I want a paddle,’ Lily interrupted.
    ‘You’ll still get wet. You always get wet on the river,’ Roy persisted.
    ‘I don’t care,’ Manon insisted.
    He shrugged his shoulders. Then he pushed the punt out from the bank and jumped in. ‘We’re off!’ he said, suddenly sounding excited, like a little boy. ‘I’m always in Swallows and Amazons when I’m in a boat,’ he explained.
    ‘What’s Swallows and Amazons?’ Saskia asked him.
    ‘It’s a book. I’ll read it to you.’
    ‘And me?’
    ‘And you, Lily.’

    Manon relaxed back against the plastic-covered cushion. She had not really seen Roy with his children since they were much smaller and she sensed that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with his role as father and didn’t know whether he ought to be strict or relaxed.
    He still looked not much older than a boy himself with his longish mop of straw-coloured hair, but he punted downriver with a confident firm technique that showed that he had lived in Oxford for some time. Manon was sitting at the front of the boat, facing him. The little girls were opposite her looking in the direction the punt was travelling. Punting was a wonderfully peaceful and gentle way to spend a summer’s afternoon when you were the one being punted. Otherwise, it was a lot of hard work. She looked at her flat black leather-soled ballet shoes and wondered how she had ever imagined that she would be able to punt and look after two small children dressed as she was.
    The sun was out again and the air was slightly steamy, as the heat boiled away the clouds. The sudden downpour had driven everyone else off the river. Apart from the sluice and plop of the punting pole, the only sound was of birdsong after rain. The tranquillity silenced even Lily.
    Under the deep shade of overhanging trees it was sometimes impossible to see the sky. The surface of the water changed from deep reddy-brown to evanescent turquoise, pale and shimmery as beaten silver, as the punt slid into the sunshine.
    ‘Did you see the Monet exhibition?’ Manon asked.
    ‘No, I meant to, and the next time I thought about it, it was over. Did you?’ Roy crouched down as he pushed the pole into the water, then stood up again.
    ‘He said that he wanted to paint the air around things and the beauty of the air, and just then, I suddenly knew what he meant...’ she said.
    Roy smiled, not at her particularly, but at the loveliness of the thought. She sighed and let herself relax to a deeper level of peace. Her body was wound up and each breath released another cog on the wheel of tension inside her. Here, now, she could not remember how it had felt to dread seeing Roy again. It was fine. They were grown-ups sharing an afternoon with children. The grass on the riverbanks was long and wavy, the sun-baked pavements of London were far away, and her anxiety too.
    ‘It’s heaven, isn’t it?’ she spoke upwards in Roy’s direction.
    The sun was shining directly into her eyes now. She shaded her face with her arm, but she couldn’t see his expression.
    ‘Mummy is in heaven,’ Lily announced.
    ‘Yes,’ Manon swallowed, regretting the use of the word.
    There was a long silence.
    Sluice, plop, sluice, plop. The punting pole marked out time passing like a very slow clock.
    ‘Why isn’t she here, then?’ Lily asked.
    ‘Come here, my darling...’
    Manon leaned forward and put her hands on Lily’s waist then jumped her into her lap. She kissed her on the nose, then turned her round so that she was facing Saskia and Roy.
    ‘Heaven is what people call somewhere really beautiful,’ she began to improvise, folding her arms over Lily’s chest, trying to press love and security into the tiny heart that beat so fast inside the little ribcage, ‘and sometimes we find a place in our world that we think is so lovely that we call it heaven, but sometimes we have to go to another world to find it.’
    ‘Do we go on British Airways?’ Lily asked.
    The sudden shade of a tree brought