What became of us

children see her go mad. He wanted no part of the responsibility for choosing, but everyone seemed to expect it of him. Finally, he had taken the agonizing decision to move her to a hospice. Geraldine and Trevor had supported his decision, but he had never been able to see moving Penny as anything but a failure of care on his part.
    The silence in the car was full of unspoken thoughts and questions. He glanced again to his left. Manon’s eyes were on the road. Her arm was casually draped along the bottom of the open window, her hair blowing back from her face.
    He found himself thinking of a passage in one of her stories where she described the sound of a trickling fountain in the Tivoli gardens and then the sound of a bath running in a flat in the city. Both sounds were of running water, but the first image was filled with calmness and tranquillity and the second was alive with threat and fear. He understood suddenly why she had called the book The Quality of Silence. He was trying to think how to tell her that when she said, very quietly,
    ‘She loved you very much.’
    It was simple, and yet it meant so much because nobody else had bothered to say it to him, and even if they had, it would have meant nothing.
    He gulped back the swell of emotion beginning to engulf his throat and eyes and ears.
    ‘I know she did,’ he said, finally.
    He indicated and stopped the car outside the college.
    ‘And I loved her. Do you think she knew that?’
    Manon looked at him.
    ‘Yes, she did.’
    He pulled the handbrake up with a loud crack.
    It felt like the end of a long journey.
    Manon turned to him and smiled the same sweet smile he had seen this afternoon, and suddenly he found himself thinking that life could be liveable again.

Chapter 24

    The Gucci dress was almost dry, but it had shrivelled in the rain and Annie hadn’t the first idea of how to make it go back to its original shape. There wasn’t time to request an iron and she would be nervous about applying one to such delicate material. She glanced at the trouser press. Trouser presses had always held a certain fascination for her because every hotel room she had ever been into had one, but she had never met anyone who had used one.
    Have you ever used a trouser press? wasn’t the first question she asked men she didn’t know, but it was fairly high on the list. You could tell quite a lot about a man from the way he reacted.
    Trouser press? What do you mean? Wicked smile. Usually meant you were in with a chance.
    I’ve always wondered who does, myself! Inviting laugh. Meant that you were going to be friends.
    What’s a trouser press? Meant he wasn’t really in the right income bracket.
    She’d never met one who said: ‘Trouser press, yes, I find them very useful when I’m away on business.’
    Around the time of the last election a journalist had asked her for a soundbite for a piece he was doing about the sex appeal of the political leaders. John Major was a trouser press man, she had told him. Tony Blair was not. You had to point out these nuances because their political views were virtually indistinguishable.
    It was not going to be the Gucci dress, which was just as well, because it was a bit frivolous, she decided, relieved that she had packed an alternative.
    Annie pulled it over her head and smoothed it down her body. The trouble with little black dresses was that they were never as little as she would have liked. Also Manon, the thinnest person on earth, was wearing one, which would make her look bigger by comparison. On the other hand, everyone knew that black looked better on blondes. And it was Donna Karan. She looked at the label with satisfaction. The wonderful thing about Donna Karan was the American sizes, which meant she could wear a 10. She knew it was daft and irrational to feel better about wearing a dress with a smaller tiny number sewn into the label that nobody else was likely to see. So, she was daft and irrational.
    Annie brushed her hair, reapplied her lipstick, then remembered with dismay that even though she had brought a choice of handbags, she had only packed Nike trainers or ponyskin mules as alternatives to her red sandals. There was a whole cupboard full of black shoes back in her flat. The unfairness of it made her want to cry.
    She tottered to the taxi rank in the middle of St Giles and instructed the driver to take her to St Gertrude’s College. Grumbling, he started the engine, and Annie slumped back into her seat,