What became of us

dresses,’ she said.
    ‘Well, I’ve got some jeans and a shirt.’
    He was as boyishly callow and sweet as he ever had been. She imagined Ursula’s expression if she turned up wearing baggy Levis and a shirt.
    ‘Are you coming?’ he asked again, sensing her resistance ebbing away.
    ‘OK, why not?’ she said, smiling at him.

Chapter 20

    The dress was more elegant than she had expected, but didn’t look like the £60,000 Posh had allegedly paid for it. Annie flipped through OK! again. The bridesmaids were sweet. She threw the magazine down and looked at her watch. Only three hours to go before the dinner. She had to find something to say. She picked up a newspaper, trying to find a human interest story that might give her a starting point for her speech, but there was nothing appropriate. There was an article which said that most families would soon include a step-parent, another about Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall haggling over the division of their property. If it wasn’t marriage, it was divorce. Apparently they had sacrificed a chicken at their Balinese wedding ceremony, but it still wasn’t deemed legal.
    ‘The bird died for nothing,’ Annie wrote. Then balled up the piece of paper and threw it in the direction of the bin.
    It was a matter of finding the voice, but every Word on every sheet of Randolph Hotel paper Annie had started had so far failed to achieve the right tone. Why had she ever agreed to say anything? The only reason she had been asked was that she was famous, but she was famous for being the flawed scatty protagonist of a sitcom and she didn’t think that was the right voice for when you were talking about the death of a dear friend.
    On the other hand, there was no point in her standing there like an unlikely vicar reading something dignified and uplifting about death. The charity woman would do that and anyway there had been nothing particularly dignified or uplifting about Penny’s death. According to Ursula, in the last few weeks she had gone horribly mad, refusing to see Roy or the girls.
    ‘There’s nothing particularly dignified or uplifting about death, but...’
    Annie crumpled up another piece of paper.
    Why could Leonora not just have asked someone to read out the Auden poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral, and be done with it?
    How about a shared cultural reference point? Shakespeare? A Motown song? The Who? Of course, that was it.
    ‘We all hope that we’ll die before we get old…’ Annie wrote at the top of a new page. Then under it she scribbled in capital letters:
    NO WE DON’T.
    What was it that had made Penny mad? she wondered. The physical cause of it was the secondary tumour on her brain, but all that anger that Ursula talked about, had it always been there, hidden beneath layer upon layer of good breeding and good manners? Had the tumour merely eaten away inhibition, or had it actually changed the make-up of the brain? Had there always been a dark side to Penny? Was there a dark side to every human being, that only revealed itself when defences were stripped away by cancer, or age, or Alzheimer’s? Was that what people meant by original sin?
    If it was, she herself was going to be a vile old woman, because her dark side was so very near to the surface it would only take the most minor illness to strip away the semblance of decent human behaviour. She suddenly realized that she was actually feeling jealous of Penny for her death. Not the madness, of course, but to die so young that everyone remembered you as a saint, and you never had to worry about broken veins on your thighs (or, horror, the side of your nose), or what to do about a pension, or what you were going to wear when black became impossible.
    Annie threw down her pen again. The fact was that she was not worthy to make this speech. She had not even been a good friend to Penny when she most needed friends, because selfishly, she could not bear to see Penny deteriorating.
    Had she ever been a good friend to her? She was the only one Penny had not made a godmother to her children. Ursula was Saskia’s godmother, which was understandable, since she was Roy’s sister, but Man on? Who could have chosen Manon over Annie? Penny could. And actually she had been right, because Manon really did take the time to see the little girls every week or so. It was easy to tell herself that Manon had the time. But that was rubbish because if Annie had spent half the time seeing the girls that she spent making up