What became of us

it so obvious?’
    She explained again about the incident on the river.
    ‘... and you see, Geraldine wanted to lend me some jewellery...’
    ‘That I can understand,’ Annie interrupted, ‘but why didn’t you just take it off in the car?’
    ‘I don’t know!’ Manon laughed.
    ‘I’ll tell you why, because you’re the least vain person I have ever met, and it is so bloody unfair, because you’re beautiful too! You don’t worry about how you look, do you?’ Annie said, adding bitterly, ‘you don’t bloody need to.’
    ‘No, but,’ Manon searched for something to restore the equilibrium she had been enjoying between them, ‘no, but that part of your speech was just a metaphor, surely?’
    ‘It bloody wasn’t,’ Annie said petulantly.
    Manon laughed.
    ‘What’s so funny?’
    ‘Because you’re so honest. You’re so honest that you do yourself down all the time. It must be so hard to be that honest about yourself,’ Manon said.
    ‘Do you really think that?’ Annie asked.
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    She had an impatient French way of saying of course.
    ‘Don’t you think that I might be as dishonest as everyone else. Perhaps I just pretend to reveal my innermost failings, but there’s much worse underneath?’
    ‘I can’t know the answer to that, can I?’ Manon said. ‘But I suspect not.’
    Annie fell silent for a moment or two.
    ‘Why have you always snubbed me then?’ she asked.
    ‘I haven’t!’ Manon protested automatically.
    ‘You have.’
    Yes, it was true, thought Manon.
    ‘You’re right,’ she admitted finally. More lightness.
    Although she could not see her very well in the darkness, she knew that the frown on Annie’s face was smoothing itself out.
    ‘Why?’ Annie asked, more gently. Now that she had her on the hook, she was suddenly afraid of what Manon might have against her.
    ‘I suppose because you wrote that piece about me being Zuleika Dobson,’ Manon said.
    ‘I did not!’
    The denial was immediate.
    ‘But you were the one who coined the nickname that evening we were all talking in Joshua Street.’
    ‘I know I called you Zuleika once or twice, and it was tasteless, but I was only joking. I admit I’ve always been eaten up with jealousy of you, but I would never do you harm,’ Annie said, outraged.
    The axis of Manon’s world shifted again.
    ‘Well, who did?’ she asked. ‘It must have been one of us and it certainly wasn’t Penny.’
    Her eyes were getting used to the dark: she could see Ursula wandering back in their direction.
    ‘Leonora is holding Roy hostage in the JCR,’ she announced. ‘There are a few others still there, but I think we ought to go and get him.’
    ‘Oh fuck that,’ Annie said, ‘we’re having confession time. Manon wants to know who wrote that piece about Zuleika Dobson.’
    There was an awkward silence, then Ursula said, ‘I didn’t know that he was going to write it down. I was flirting. Showing off... oh Christ!’

    The student journalist responsible for the anonymous article had been called Oliver. Ursula had spent three years loving him from afar. One evening in the last term they were leaving Radcliffe Camera together at closing time when he asked her if she would like to go for a drink. The dream-come-true excitement she had experienced then was exactly the same shivery state that took her over now whenever she saw Liam. It made her unable to control the volume at which her voice left her mouth.
    Oliver had sauntered towards the Turf Tavern. She had picked her way along beside him, terrified of tripping on the cobblestones, wanting to stretch the moment for as long as possible, praying that somebody she knew would walk past and be able to confirm the next day that she had been with him.
    One glass of mulled wine had made her ridiculously garrulous. In ten minutes she had gone through every funny story about herself, and was struggling to come up with something interesting that would keep him sitting opposite her, his right knee brushing her left whenever he laughed. And so she had told him Manon’s story. She hadn’t known that he wrote most of the university paper. Later that week she had been aghast when he asked her to get him a photo of Manon, but it hadn’t stopped her doing it.
    It was only when she had seen the utterly defeated look on Manon’s face when Annie had waved the paper around the kitchen at Joshua Street, that she had known that she had done something terribly wrong. But she had never