What became of us

young communist, his bravery during the war, his disillusion with his colleagues during the miners’ strike, which seemed to have led directly to his decline. It was the first death of a close relative that Roy had experienced, and as he struggled to make sense of his loss, he found himself saying,
    ‘People live on, don’t they, in all the stories others tell about them. It’s a kind of existence, isn’t it?’
    And Penny had replied with glorious bluntness:
    ‘It is for the people left behind.’
    He had watched her scraping the last of the mango chutney from the little stainless steel dish between them and seen her suddenly as someone different from the pretty friend of his sister who was fun to go out with every so often. He realized that he had expected her simply to agree with him, not to point out the uncomfortable emptiness of his proposition. Her clarity that day had come as a delightful surprise to him and significantly altered the way he felt about her. It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic. Penny was the most sympathetic person in the world. But she was also the most rigorously honest.
    Penny had not even allowed herself many moments of sentimentality about her own death. The first punch of fear had sent her reeling, but she had steadied herself, and set about sorting out the practicalities. Penny was a great believer in practice over theory. She had made him repeat endlessly the different rituals that Saskia and Lily liked to observe, the names of their teddies and dolls, the books they most enjoyed at bedtime.
    ‘Just because they’re losing their mother doesn’t mean they have to lose the whole structure of their world. You must not go to pieces, Roy. That wouldn’t be fair.’

    He looked around the hall at the women exchanging stories about his wife. He knew that they were sharing memories of Penny’s kindness and goodness. He knew that was as it should be, but sometimes he yearned for someone to remember how sharp she was capable of being, or some distasteful habit she had. Even something as petty as the fact that on occasion she peed in the bath, because she couldn’t be bothered to get out.
    ‘Oh, I’ve weed in here,’ she had told him, laughing, the first time he had climbed in with her. ‘I’m afraid it’s the lazy habit of an only child.’
    Penny was a gorgeous human being, but she was no saint, and remembering her with no edges diminished her and seemed to make the loss of her even more intense than the plain, terrible fact that she was dead.
    He hadn’t dared to voice such thoughts to anyone else for fear of expressing himself badly, or them taking it the wrong way. But now, as he looked across the hall to where Manon was sitting, he thought that she would probably understand.
    Or perhaps he was just trying to find excuses for the inexorable disorientating sensation of being drawn towards her.

    ‘The girls seem very happy and confident.’ Leonora tried to engage him again.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, defensively.
    Confident was usually a euphemism for rude. He knew she was referring to Lily.
    ‘It’s quite a job doing it all on your own, isn’t it?’ Leonora persisted.
    ‘I have a lot of help. Especially now, my mother-in-law...’
    He didn’t want to be pitied, but he saw that his rejection of her sympathy wounded her. He remembered urging his daughters to be nice to Leonora earlier, and felt bad that he wasn’t capable of making the effort. She was irritating him more than usual tonight because his mind was already struggling to pay attention to what was going on around him, and every interruption made him lose his concentration.
    He smiled apologetically at her, but she turned towards Jennifer, the cellist, and began to discuss the moral outcry over a recent film about Jacqueline du Pre.
    Roy looked at Manon again. She was nodding at something the earnest woman opposite her was saying. He wanted to know what it was that she was agreeing with.
    It occurred to him that he would never have an answer to the question that was preoccupying him. He had no way of judging whether Penny would have approved or disapproved of the way he was feeling about Manon. He could sometimes almost hear what Penny would say about the children’s education, or moving house, but it was beyond the power of his imagination to summon up her opinion about whether this attraction to her best friend was shameful or perfectly natural.
    It was a question he would never have asked her, he suddenly