What became of us

permission.
    Gillian stared at her.
    ‘Well, I’ll give you mine.’ She burrowed around in her capacious handbag and pulled out a reel of gold sticky labels on which her name, address and telephone numbers were printed.
    ‘Have you got anything to stick this to?’ she asked, looking at Manon’s tiny flowerbasket bag.
    ‘Not really,’ Manon said.
    Gillian delved again and came up with a till receipt from Asda to which she stuck the label and handed it over.
    ‘My business card,’ she said, which made them both laugh.

    Manon handed the waitress her empty plate and received her pink slab and yellow pool.
    ‘It looks like custard,’ she whispered to Ursula.
    ‘Tastes rather like it too,’ Ursula said, emptying the wine bottle in front of her in her glass, then holding it up in the air. Another waitress came and replaced it with a full one. A moment later there was a hand at every table holding an empty bottle in the air, and the noise level seemed to increase a decibel or two.
    Manon sat and listened to the conversations going on around the table. Gillian was explaining how her book group worked to a woman called Gemma who had some connection with publishing. Ursula, who was looking rather flushed, had aggressively taken on the woman opposite her who turned out to be a New Labour MP.
    ‘You weren’t in the Labour Party when you were here, were you?’ Ursula demanded.
    ‘Not really,’ said the MP. ‘Thatcherism seemed so insurmountable, then, didn’t it? There didn’t seem much point after the Falklands.’
    ‘There was for some of us,’ Ursula replied.
    ‘Are the women making a difference to Parliament?’ Manon asked, neutrally.
    ‘Oh yes,’ the MP said, ‘it’s a quiet revolution, but it is happening.’
    ‘Revolution? Really? That’s not a word you expect to hear from the mouth of a Blairite!’ Ursula said tartly.
    The woman smiled at her fixedly.
    ‘I always wanted to be in politics myself,’ Ursula went on, ‘but I don’t think I could have kept my mouth shut long enough for the Labour Party nowadays.’
    ‘Perhaps not,’ the woman said.
    Ursula downed another glass of wine and looked the other way. Manon noticed that the fingers of her left hand kept creeping to her throat and twiddling with the beads of a silver and turquoise necklace that she had not been wearing earlier.
    Raucous laughter pealed across the room from where Annie was sitting.

    ‘Are you married?’
    As the dinner plates were swept away from the table, Gillian leaned across the table and attempted to engage Manon in conversation again.
    ‘No,’ Manon said, then realized that it would sound rude not to elaborate further, ‘I was...’ fidanzata, she thought, unable to remember for a moment the English word: pledged? no ‘... engaged’, she said, finally, ‘I was engaged for a long time, but, in the end, I, I just left.’
    She didn’t often think about Rodolfo these days, which was odd considering the number of years they had been together, but she had never felt deeply about him, and she did not think that he was capable of feeling deeply about anyone. Some people were born so rich and privileged that they did not understand need. The capacity to feel someone else’s pain depended on having experienced pain yourself, and Rodolfo had not. That was one of his attractions.
    They had met in the casino in Estoril. He was there for the Grand Prix, following the Ferrari team. She was working as a croupier. One of the drivers had wanted to take her out, but she had chosen to accept Rodolfo’s invitation instead. They had dinner together. His eyes were like a bird’s. You could not see a soul in them.
    A few days later, when he asked her to go back to Italy with him, he described the garden of his palace in Rome, and she pictured herself sitting in the sun, breathing air scented with orange blossom, and the sound of fountains playing around her. She decided she had spent long enough listening to the clatter of the roulette ball, the plastic clack clack clack of stacking chips, long enough breathing refrigerated air in rooms with no windows or clocks while the rest of the world slept.

    ‘What about you? Are you married?’ Manon asked, suddenly remembering the rules of normal conversation.
    ‘I married Mark,’ Gillian responded. ‘He was at New College,’ she elaborated, as Manon’s face showed no sign of recognition, ‘he knew Carl. We all went to a garden production of Songs of Innocence and