What became of us

voluptuous contemporary of theirs with a voracious sexual appetite who had worked her way through the entire intake of spotty youths who had littered the college corridors in their second year.
    Ian laughed raucously.
    ‘Whatever happened to her?’ Annie wondered out loud, thinking how strange it was not to think of someone for half a lifetime and then suddenly be able to remember everything about them right down to their perfume (Opium). Chloe Colefax.
    ‘I married her,’ Ian said.
    ‘Oh...’
    ‘I was a St Gert’s boy. You probably don’t remember...’
    ‘Sorry. I lived out after my first year.’
    ‘We once had a snog at a party in Exeter,’ he continued.
    ‘You and Chloe?’
    ‘You and me.’
    She thought it impertinent of him to remember that when she clearly hadn’t the slightest idea who he was. She glanced around the room hoping to catch someone’s eye, but everyone seemed to be deep in conversation. Nobody had overheard her companion’s remark. She looked back at his face, wondering what it was going to take to shrug him off. He smiled again. He was both over-familiar and discreet. It was a peculiar combination, a bit like being in a dirty joke, but not as funny.
    ‘Can’t have been very memorable,’ she said, sharply, and was delighted to see that she had wounded him.
    ‘The fuck afterwards wasn’t,’ he countered, ‘but the snog, well…’
    ‘We didn’t...’ suddenly coy, ‘…make love…, did we?’ Annie asked, horrified, although nothing much would have surprised her after one of those Exeter parties. She’d been able to match pints with almost any man in the University, but not joints.
    He held her eyes for a good ten seconds. Then his expression changed from teasing to regretful.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘sadly we didn’t.’
    Well that was quite charming anyway.
    ‘So you married Chloe?’ Annie said, warming to him a little more. ‘Well I never!’
    Then suddenly Leonora was tinkling a fork against a glass and everyone began to wander towards their places.
    ‘Have you looked at the table plan?’ Ian asked her.
    ‘No, I was late.’
    ‘Well, as chance would have it, you’re sitting opposite me,’ he said.
    ‘Really?’ said Annie. This piece of information came as a relief: she was generally more at home in the company of men. She didn’t know why it was exactly, but she often felt a bit of a fraud when she was surrounded by a lot of women and she wasn’t feeling very comfortable in this gathering. They were the sort of women who would all start menstruating together, given half a chance.
    When they lived in Joshua Street, Ursula and Penny had always had their periods at the same time of the month, she remembered. She didn’t know about Manon. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Manon would talk about. Annie had been proud that her own cycle resolutely refused to fall into line.
    They sat down. There was one empty space at the top table. She wondered whose it was, and then she remembered Roy.
    The crockery and cutlery were the same as she remembered. White plates whose glaze had detoriated to cracked and slightly brown; very large forks and knives. In the middle of each table for eight was one opened bottle of college white and one of college red.
    ‘Penny for them?’ Ian said across the table.
    ‘Penny?’ she repeated, not understanding, ‘Penny for what?’
    ‘Your thoughts.’ He looked a little ashamed at his inadvertent double entendre.
    She hated people who used that expression, especially now that a penny seemed such an insulting amount of money for somebody to offer to see inside your soul. Why had it not gone up with inflation? She looked at him, thinking how much she would charge him for one of her real thoughts and whether he would have the credit to pay it, then she replied.
    ‘I was thinking about menstruation, if you must know. I mean what is the evolutionary point of a group of women menstruating together? It means that they can all only get pregnant at the same time of the month, which is ridiculous if your concern is the perpetuation of the species, isn’t it?’
    He wasn’t as taken aback as she expected him to be.
    ‘That’s more Chloe’s field than mine,’ he said; ‘she’s a zoologist.’
    ‘Oh, yes, we always did say that she was interested in the lower forms of life,’ Annie remarked tartly.
    He laughed good-naturedly.
    ‘And where is Chloe today?’ she enquired.
    ‘The Galapagos Islands,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t