What became of us

illogical. But it wasn’t about logic.

    ‘You’re very thoughtful this evening,’ he remarked.
    ‘Yes. I mean, thank you.’ She looked into his eyes, wanting to see something different there, some depth she had not understood, some vulnerability he had previously kept hidden, but he looked just the same. He was so confident in his good looks that his face was almost two-dimensional, like the square-jawed face of a cartoon hero.
    ‘See you later?’ He made the question sound like a command.
    ‘Sure.’
    She saw that he detected the waver in her voice. He stood there as if he would not move until she had given him a more acquiescent response.
    At the foot of the stairs, the street door opened with a welcome draught and a crowd of PR girls clattered up the stairs. They were dressed in corsets and bloomers like whores in a saloon and they were all laughing. The air around them was smoky and sharp with recently drunk champagne. One of them produced a glass flask.
    ‘Have you tried Rhett, for the man who gives a damn?’ she asked Frank, squirting the perfume in his direction.
    Frank sniffed.
    ‘What’s it supposed to smell of?’ he asked.
    ‘The indefinable appeal of the rogue,’ they all chanted together.
    ‘Well, fiddle-dee-dee!’ Frank said.
    The girls shrieked with laughter.
    Fie turned back to Manon, clearly pleased with his wit. She handed him one half of a pink cloakroom ticket. She was about to pin the other half to the paper around the bouquet when he leaned over the counter and took the pin from her hand and fastened the ticket onto the shoulder strap of her flimsy black dress. He stood back, as if admiring a brooch he had bought her.
    ‘I’ll pick you up later.’
    He glanced at the giggling saloon girls with a mischievous smile that drew them in and somehow made Manon’s shocked expression appear humourless. Carefully, she unpinned the ticket, but for several minutes after he had disappeared upstairs to the bar, the sensation of humiliation remained, and the place where the ticket had been burned like a brand on her shoulder.

Chapter 4

    Roy was standing in the empty living room. It had taken little time to clear the house. In just a few hours the removal men had filled the pantechnicon with possessions accumulated over years, and driven away. Only minutes later, he was finding it difficult to picture what had been there, which cushion on which sofa. The room seemed suddenly cool as he wondered whether he was capable of building a home again, and whether his children, who were waiting outside in the car, would find him lacking.
    He walked around the ground floor trying to judder himself out of the immobilizing panic that could descend so quickly. Then he ran upstairs, checking the bedrooms one by one and closing the doors behind him.
    Each room was a memory box of his adult life so far, each was filled with its own ghosts of laughter and searing pain. The house had been altered, decorated and changed in the seventeen years he had known it, but without furniture and fittings, with the curtains down and the colourful rugs rolled up and on their way to storage, it looked more like it had on the day he had first visited it, the day he had come up to meet his sister Ursula out of finals.

    Then, the fireplaces had been blocked and a typically Seventies gas fire, a narrow box of plastic wood with a fibreglass waffle, stood in each room with a meter beside it. Manon was the only one of them who’d worked out how to cheat the meter, he remembered with a slight guilty smile as he closed the door on the tiny room which had been hers.
    ‘Don’t tell the others,’ she’d whispered to him, and he never had.
    Not even Penny.
    He could not remember what the large room at the front had looked like then. Perhaps he had not seen it then, he thought, closing the door so quickly he almost smacked it into his nose, or perhaps what had happened there in recent times obliterated anything that had gone before.
    His daughters’ room had been Annie’s then. She had papered the walls with a collage of black-and-white photos of movie stars torn from a remaindered book. An Indian scarf shaded the lampshade on the central light-fitting. He remembered peering in, sniffing the combination of French cigarettes and strong, spicy perfume, thinking how sophisticated his sister’s friends were.
    Now it was decorated with a frieze of Flower Fairies the girls had been reluctant to leave. He had promised them another in