What became of us

following, but when Penny said it, it was a statement of fact and there was not a dry eye in the marquee.
    How could you die at thirty-eight unneurotically?

Chapter 21

    ‘I think it’ll get dry if I wash it through by hand and hang it out straight away,’ Geraldine said, looking at Manon’s dress. ‘Come on, let’s have it off you.’
    ‘I’ll get you a T-shirt,’ Roy said, hastily leaving the kitchen as if Manon was about to strip there and then.
    ‘Run the girl a bath, Roy!’ Geraldine called up the stairs after him, then she pointed at a kitchen chair. ‘Now, let’s have a look at this foot.’
    Manon sat down. Geraldine inspected her foot seriously and silently, then took a clean plastic bowl from under the sink, filled it with hot water and decanted some salt into it.
    ‘Stick it in there!’
    Manon obeyed. The salt stung the cut.
    ‘It was brave of you to jump straight in,’ Geraldine said.
    ‘I didn’t think about it,’ Manon replied.
    She knew Geraldine had never liked her, and conversation had always been a strain.
    ‘Mummy is jealous of my friendship with you,’ Penny said once, ‘because she knows that I tell you things that I don’t tell anyone else.’
    ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Geraldine was asking.
    The good old English stand-by.
    ‘Yes, thank you, that would be very nice,’ Manon replied.
    Geraldine turned her back to her to fill the kettle and gazed out over the kitchen sink into the garden.
    ‘I don’t think we’ve seen you since the funeral,’ she said.
    ‘No.’
    ‘But I know that you see my granddaughters. They talk about you all the time.’
    She was trying hard to be friendly, Manon thought.
    ‘I come up for an afternoon every couple of weeks.’
    ‘Is it easy to get time off from your job?’
    ‘I work in the evenings. In the day I try to write.’
    ‘Yes, I bought your collection of stories.’
    The unexpectedness of the statement took Manon aback. The whole process of being published and letting other people read her work had been difficult, as well as strangely cathartic, but she had not for a moment considered that someone like Geraldine would get hold of a copy. She waited nervously as Geraldine weighed up what she was going to say.
    ‘Some of them were interesting. I found others a little...’ there was a long pause before she said, ‘adult.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Manon rarely blushed but she could feel her face burning.
    ‘Well written, though. In other circumstances I would recommend them to my book group.’
    Manon didn’t think she could ask what those other circumstances might be. If she had left out ‘The Leopardskin Bedspread’, the story about two Parisian prostitutes, or ‘Purple Sunset’, the woman studying the bruises from her first beating, would the volume then have been deemed acceptable?
    Or was the problem that the author was someone she knew, so that the work would somehow reflect on her? She hoped that Geraldine wasn’t going to ask whether the stories were autobiographical, as one member of the audience always did whenever she read her work in bookshops, as if it were the most original question in the world.
    ‘Are you going to write anything else?’ Geraldine wanted to know.
    ‘The publisher wants me to write a novel, but I’m not sure that I have anything to say.’
    Manon pictured the table in her anonymous Bloomsbury flat and the yellow notepad lying there with nothing written on it.
    ‘Writers’ block?’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    The conversation was weird. She had never mentioned her novel to anyone and it was most peculiar that the first person should be Geraldine.
    Cautiously, she smiled as Geraldine placed a cup and saucer in front of her, and Geraldine smiled back. Penny’s death had softened them both, Manon thought. The same sorrow occupied a huge space in both their lives, and beside it the differences in age, class, morality did not seem so huge.
    Roy came back into the kitchen carrying a pair of clean Levis and a handful of T-shirts. She selected a crumpled white one.
    ‘Let me iron it for you,’ Geraldine said.
    ‘But I’m only going to be wearing it for an hour or so,’ Manon protested.
    ‘Nevertheless...’
    She saw that it would please Geraldine to iron the T-shirt.
    ‘Well, thank you,’ she said.
    ‘Come on, then.’ Geraldine shooed her up to the bathroom and waited outside the door as Manon stripped and handed out her damp dress and knickers.
    ‘No bra?’ she said.
    ‘I don’t wear