What became of us

feeling rather proud of the fact that she was the sort of person who could afford to take a taxi a distance of half a mile if it suited her, as well as having a car that most men would kill for standing idly by in the Randolph garage. Then she wondered whether it wouldn’t have been a better idea to drive up to the college gates in her Ferrari so that the others would see her arriving. It would make the red shoes and handbag look more like a stylistic decision than a packing oversight. She would casually drop the keys to her red sports car into her colour-coordinated handbag... but knowing that lot, she thought, remembering a mass of pasty-faced girls troughing at plates of uniformly brown, fried food, they would all be sitting down to dinner unfashionably early, and wouldn’t even notice her accessories.
    In the end, it was a good thing that no-one was looking because she always found it impossible to extract herself from a taxi with any dignity, especially in a short dress.
    She psyched herself up for an entrance, then took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the hall. There was a split-second drop in the volume of chatter, and then the noise resumed. Annie strode past the easel with the table plan on it, feeling both relieved and slightly irked. Nearly everyone was wearing black. The New Black, she thought, the only colour to wear at the memorial of your first friend to die.
    For a second she could not see anyone she recognized, then she spotted Ursula and walked over to the group of people she was talking to. They were looking at the official photograph of the year’s intake at matriculation the week after they came up. They were all wearing subfusc: black skirt, white shirt, black tie, four-cornered hat and gown.
    ‘Now, where are you?’ Ursula said, looking up and smiling at Annie.
    Annie had been one of the few who refused to buy a copy of the photo at the time. She had been appalled by the degree to which this great University she had dreamed about resembled the school she had hated. But she knew exactly where she was on the photo. Right in the middle wearing an expression she had intended to be ironic, but came out looking fat and smirky.
    ‘Oh, there you are!’ said one of the other women, picking her out: ‘just the same!’
    ‘Annie, do you remember Gillian?’
    ‘Of course I bloody do,’ Annie said, unable to stop herself swearing, as she always had in Gillian’s very Christian presence. She did not know whether to shake the woman’s hand or kiss her, and ended up doing both.
    ‘You had a never-ending supply of Hob-nobs,’ she said.
    ‘You were one of the only people who ever replaced the packets they ate,’ Gillian replied.
    ‘Was I?’ Annie asked, peculiarly pleased with this recollection of decent behaviour.
    ‘You said that you ate fewer if you kept them in someone else’s room.’
    Everyone laughed.
    ‘So what are you doing now?’ Annie asked her.
    ‘Still doling out biscuits. I’ve got three kids and I teach. And you’re still eating them,’ she added.
    ‘How do you know that?’ Surely the black dress wasn’t that tight?
    ‘Because I always watch I Love Annie.’
    Annie found herself blushing.
    ‘So you didn’t have kids?’ Gillian went on.
    Didn’t made it sound so final.
    If Annie was grateful for one thing in her life it was that she had never heard the ticking of her biological clock, but she thought that might be because she had never met the right man. She didn’t want to think that doors were closing around her.
    ‘Not yet,’ Annie said, and was grateful to feel a tap on her shoulder.
    ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Gillian, then turned round.
    The man looked slightly familiar though she could not think where from.
    ‘Hello, Annie,’ he said.
    The bloke from the Randolph. What on earth was he doing here?
    ‘Ian, Ian Brown,’ he said, as if that would jog her memory. ‘Do you know, the weirdest coincidence is that there’s someone staying in my hotel who looks exactly like you.’
    ‘What are you doing here?’ Annie asked him abruptly as if he were at best a nuisance, at worst a stalker.
    ‘I’m a guest.’ His eager smile faded slightly.
    ‘But...’ she looked around. Everyone else was female. Roy wasn’t even there.
    ‘Do you remember Chloe Colefax?’ he asked.
    Annie searched her memory. What a peculiar question.
    ‘Oh, yes, wait a minute, the one who turned St Gert’s boys into St Gert’s men,’ she said, remembering a rather