What became of us

admitted it. Not, if she were honest, because of any lasting feeling for Manon, but because Penny would have stopped being her friend. Even this evening, when she had overheard Manon talking to Gillian, Ursula had not thought about what she had done to Manon, but about how Penny was no longer there to find out. It had been a peculiar mingling of shame and relief.

    ‘I was an ugly duckling and he was the first good-looking man who had ever shown any interest in me.’ Ursula tried to excuse herself.
    ‘You see,’ Annie said, triumphantly to Manon.
    Manon said nothing.
    Say something horrible to me, Ursula thought. Anything would be better than silence.
    ‘Say you’re sorry,’ Annie demanded of Ursula.
    ‘I am, very sorry.’
    ‘No, it’s OK, actually,’ Manon said at last. ‘It was only what people would call a youthful indiscretion, after all. I think it is one of the things that I have given far too much space in my life.’
    ‘She thought it was me, so she’s been horrible to me ever since,’ Annie told Ursula.
    ‘I haven’t,’ Manon said.
    ‘Why didn’t you suspect me?’ Ursula asked, suddenly feeling desperately wretched. ‘But of course, I know the answer to that one. I wasn’t the sort of girl who knew the journalist set, was I? I was the boring, bossy old bluestocking.’
    ‘No!’ Manon and Annie said together.
    ‘It’s true,’ Ursula said.
    ‘Labels,’ Manon said suddenly, ‘don’t you think we’ve all spent our lives just confirming the labels that we got here?’
    ‘I was the tasteless tart, you mean,’ Annie said, ‘and you were the femme fatale , Ursula was the sexless swot, and Penny was perfect.’
    ‘Well...’ It was what Manon had meant but she wasn’t willing to be so blunt about it.
    Ursula fiddled with her necklace. Her face and body were no longer sexless, she knew that, but inside she felt just the same, and Annie’s way of putting it was like a knife in her gut.
    ‘I’m not going to have that label any more,’ she blurted out.
    ‘Really?’ Annie asked, always attuned to the slightest nuance. ‘OK. So tell me, on the eve of the millennium, how are you going to change your life?’
    ‘None of your business. If you must know, I’m going to have an affair,’ Ursula said.
    There was a short silence as the tumble of words arranged themselves in the warm night air, and then both Annie and Manon screamed together:
    ‘What?’
    In the darkness, Ursula felt herself glowing with ridiculous pride.
    ‘Tell us,’ ordered Annie.
    ‘My lover is a psychologist,’ Ursula said, as nonchalantly as she could, ‘he looks like Frank Furillo and I have just decided to have sex with him.’
    ‘Who is Frank Furillo?’ Manon asked, but Annie drowned her out.
    ‘Hold on a minute, how can he be a lover if you haven’t had sex, or are we talking the Clintonian definition here?’
    Ursula blushed. Annie had an uncanny knack of catching her out.
    They had kissed, and they had touched each other down to the waist. And once, up in the hills, the day of the rainbow, he had unzipped the straight black skirt of her best work suit and pulled it down to her knees, then buried his face in her lap while she sat perfectly still stranded halfway between total abandon and the horror of him seeing her stretch marks. When everyone else had held Clinton’s legalistic definition of sexual relations up to ridicule, she had been the only person in the world who could see the distinction between what Monica had done and proper sex. She had found herself sympathizing with the President as he wriggled and squirmed his way out of a perjury charge. Yes, she had had sexual relations with Liam, but she did not yet feel she had betrayed her husband.
    ‘Well?’ Annie asked.
    ‘Some people spend time getting to know someone before they jump into bed with them,’ Ursula snapped.
    ‘Ow, that really hurt,’ Annie said with deep sarcasm.
    ‘And I’m married,’ Ursula added, as an afterthought.
    ‘So when are you going to?’ Annie demanded.
    ‘Soon.’
    ‘You wouldn’t dare!’
    ‘I would too! He wanted to come with me this weekend,’ Ursula said, pulling a blade of grass out of the lawn and twirling it between her forefinger and thumb.
    ‘Where does he live?’ Annie demanded.
    ‘In Nottingham.’
    ‘Oh, that’s too far to get him to come over right now.’ Annie sounded disappointed.
    ‘Not really. He said he could be here in less than three hours,’ Ursula argued, then