What became of us

she realized, shocked, and grudgingly admiring.
    There was no coughing now. Annie glanced around. Everyone was staring at the stage. Some had tears in their eyes. The music had taken over the room, joining every one of them there together. In twenty years’ time, if they were all to meet again, she thought, they would look back and remember not Penny, but the way Jennifer had played that time. The music was moving them on. Not towards forgetting grief, because grief was in the music too, but towards celebrating grief as part of their humanity.
    Annie found herself looking at Roy’s distant gaze as he stared out from the platform. His hair was still thick and fair and he still had the sort of fresh, classically handsome face that was every mother’s dream date for her daughter. Over the last few years his features had changed somehow from a boy to a man. From Brad Pitt to Robert Redford, she thought. Robert Redford as he was in All the President’s Men , not ancient and lined like he was in The Horse Whisperer. But she had never fancied him even when he was the Sundance Kid.
    Roy ’s gaze travelled past Jennifer’s bow, through the huge darkened glass windows of the hall, and beyond, to some faraway time when he had heard this music with Penny, or perhaps to some even more distant place, some point in his life where he had found his identity.
    Everyone had a point in their life like that, where great music, or art, took them, or where they imagined themselves for a split second when they were called upon to say who they were, Annie thought.
    For her, it was standing in the empty front room of the little house in Northolt with its gas fire and onyx-coloured carpet, just before they moved in, long before they had any furniture, and her mother saying,
    ‘Well, Annie, I think we’ve arrived!’
    She had experienced a similar moment when she had looked out of the tall front windows of the flat in Notting Hill for the first time. There was a huge pink cherry tree in full blossom just below the window and expensive cars parked in the street. The airy room had thirteen-foot ceilings, cornicing and stripped floorboards.
    ‘What do you think?’ the estate agent had said behind her.
    I think I’m the type of person who could buy a place like this, she had told herself excitedly.

    Then the music stopped.
    There was a hush, and then Ian started clapping and everyone else followed him, and all the faces in the room changed from serious contemplation to laughter and congratulation. Jennifer took a modest bow and looked towards Leonora, not sure what to do next. Leonora stood up and the clapping gradually died down. Annie felt a peculiar combination of elation and sadness that the moment was over. Reality filtered once more into the room and there was a chorus of coughing. Jennifer had upped the ante. Annie reached for her handbag to extract a packet of cigarettes. There were no ashtrays, but surely no-one was going to object when she had a speech to deliver?
    ‘Give us one of those,’ Ian said, as she lit up a Marlboro.
    ‘But you’re a doctor!’ she whispered, shocked.
    ‘Oh, we’re the worst. But I don’t often.’
    ‘I’m going to take it up again at sixty,’ she told him, taking her first drag.
    ‘But you haven’t given up.’
    ‘No, but I’m going to when I’m forty.’
    ‘It’s very bad for you,’ he said, inhaling.
    ‘Don’t start. I know all the health risks and they make me feel so terrible I need to smoke even more.’

    The woman from Penny’s charity was talking about the support group she and Penny had set up in Oxford for young women with breast cancer. Annie noticed Ursula glaring up at her from the other side of the hall. Guiltily she extinguished the cigarette in her untouched meringue nest.
    Then Leonora stood up and handed the woman an envelope which she said contained a cheque for £4,823, the money raised from tickets to the dinner and donations. Annie wondered who could possibly have given three pounds, until she remembered that Leonora had had to fund the food and wine from the contributions too and that was bound to make it an uneven number. She kicked herself for not asking Leonora how much had been raised, because she would happily have made it up to £5,000. It seemed so cheap of Leonora to have been so precise about it. Even £4,800 would have sounded better than £4,823.
    Then suddenly, Leonora was singing, and Annie noticed a couple of women turning over their menus to