What became of us

Africa. She was teaching and I suppose Roy must have been postgrad by then. She said on her Christmas card that they’d seen each other a few times. I thought nothing of it. She was still getting over Vin.’
    ‘Whatever happened to Vin?’ Annie asked.
    She tried to picture Penny’s former boyfriend but found she could not remember any details, just a general impression of a hulking great brute who occasionally stayed the night at Joshua Street and emptied all their packets of breakfast cereal into his bowl in the morning. Apart from vapid sporty kind of good looks, he had no discernible attractions and wasn’t at all good enough for Penny, so it had come as a shock to hear that he was the one to have left her. He had gone off with a woman who was working on the irrigation project he had set up in Africa, sending Penny back to England with a broken heart. Privately, Annie always had thought it a very lucky escape for Penny.
    Roy could not have been more different from Vin. Roy was blond, gentle and sensitive almost to a fault, and behind his even-toothed smile there was a brain that had achieved a double first and a PhD. Vin never seemed to possess much in the way of a brain.
    ‘I think somebody said that he had gone to Australia.’
    ‘Good riddance,’ said Annie. ‘With the female irrigator.’
    ‘No, she dumped him for an English teacher, I believe.’
    ‘Serves him right. Poor Penny. She loved Africa so much.’
    ‘She didn’t. She hated it,’ said Ursula. ‘She found it totally frustrating because it was just so desperate where they were.’
    ‘Really, I never knew that,’ Annie said.
    That’s because you never listen, Ursula wanted to say.
    ‘They’ve asked me to do something for Comic Relief next year. Do you think I should?’ Annie said vaguely.
    Ursula sighed. However far-ranging the conversation, Annie had the ability to make it return to her in one sentence. And just when you thought she was the most selfish person in the world she would start talking about what she was about to do for charity.
    ‘Of course you should.’
    ‘I don’t know. I was wondering whether I might do something for Penny’s charity. I mean I could really help them, whereas anything I do for Africa is a drop in the ocean, a grain of sand in the Sahara.’
    ‘Sounds a good idea.’
    Ursula looked at her watch. It was after midnight. She couldn’t concentrate any longer on what Annie was saying.
    ‘Could I have a bath here?’ she asked, ‘it’s so much more luxurious than trailing down the corridor at college and then finding out you’ve forgotten your towel.’
    ‘Be my guest,’ said Annie, lying down on the bed and listening as Ursula ran the taps, stepped in and let out a great wallowy sigh, like a satisfied hippo.
    Annie felt restless. The air outside was warm and the steam from Ursula’s bath was turning the room into a sauna. She flicked through the channels on the television. It was all tennis and films she had already seen.
    ‘You’re not going to put that old sack on again, are you?’ she said, wandering into the bathroom as Ursula stepped out and began to dry herself.
    A look of sheer mortification flew across Ursula’s pink face, as she tried to reapply lipstick in the misted-up mirror. She wished she had made the bath a little cooler. The night air would whiten her out, she thought, frowning at the pink blotches around her neck.
    ‘I mean it’s a lovely dress, but it’s got grass stains on it and, well...’
    ‘Well what?’ Ursula interrupted.
    ‘Well, sometimes people who have been fat still dress fat, you know what I mean? It’s the sort of dress you wear to hide that fleshy bit above your pelvic bones. But you don’t need to do that any more. You’ve got a great figure, really you have, I’m spitting with envy, but you have to learn to dress thin.’
    Ursula wasn’t sure what to make of this advice from someone who always seemed to be bursting out of her clothes.
    ‘But I don’t have anything else,’ she said.
    Unless he had been stopped for speeding, Liam would be waiting at the lodge by the time she walked back. His first sight of her would be a pink-faced, aggressive drunk staggering out of the shadows in a soiled sack.
    Annie held out the dress between her thumb and forefinger as if handling a piece of evidence. She hadn’t been exaggerating about the grass stains.
    ‘Didn’t you bring a change of clothes?’
    ‘Yes, but for tomorrow. Casual. Anyway I probably