What became of us

said that Penny is probably worse than she is letting on? I didn’t know what she was writing to you, did I?’
    The letters Penny had sent her had barely mentioned her illness. Perhaps he was right about her being unwilling to embrace the possibility of dying, Manon thought.
    ‘And you and I have never been good correspondents, have we?’ he continued.
    She looked at him, her eyes pleading with him to stop now.
    ‘Do you think you’re the only one who thinks they could have saved her?’ he pressed on with controlled fury. ‘Don’t you think I’ve spent every waking minute thinking that? That’s a stage of grief too, you know. It’s called guilt. It doesn’t help anyone, but it seems you have to go through it...’ His voice suddenly lost its volume. ‘Though that implies that you come out the other side. To me it just seems never-ending...’
    ‘Have you had bereavement counselling?’ she asked him.
    ‘I read a book,’ he said, more calmly.
    Then, for some reason they both laughed. He was a literature don. Books were where he sought comfort.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, embarrassed by the laughter and feeling claustrophobic in the empty room.
    ‘But it’s not just that, is it?’
    ‘No,’ she said, reluctantly, knowing that the inevitable was approaching, ‘it is not just that.’
    ‘Say it...’

    In the cool still darkness, her whole life pivoted.
    ‘You should never have married her when you loved me,’ Manon said.
    The words which she had held back for so long now, finally, when given their freedom, simply hung in the air.
    It seemed like an hour before Roy replied, an hour in which she felt that all the regrets and guilt in her life had been pushed into a syringe and injected into her bloodstream until the pain of the needle feeding the solution through her became almost unbearable.
    ‘I loved Penny,’ he said finally, ‘and I married her because I wanted to live with her for ever. But I can’t deny that once I loved you too. But my decision to marry Penny had nothing to do with you. That’s the truth... I think that’s the truth.’
    It was so very honest of him to qualify his statement, she thought she could not bear him to continue.
    ‘The love I felt for you tore me to pieces and when I was young, I thought that was how love was meant to be. “Nescio, sed id sentio, et excrucior”,’ he quoted Catullus. ‘I am, literally, crucified. That’s how I felt about you.’
    He let out a short ironic laugh.
    ‘Probably because I’d just done A level Latin, and there is a bit of a self-dramatizing streak in our family.’
    He took a deep breath.
    ‘The love I felt for Penny was a healing love. And the love I felt for you destroyed me. Penny made me feel whole again.’
    Tears began to run silently down Manon’s face, but she knew that he was not trying to be cruel. ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘please don’t...’
    He went to touch her arm, but she shrank away from him.
    ‘I wasn’t conscious of wanting to hurt you back,’ he said, ‘when I married Penny, but maybe...’ Manon suddenly found a voice.
    ‘But I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t have married her because of me ,’ she insisted. ‘I meant, you shouldn’t have because of her , because it wasn’t fair to her. She deserved better.’
    ‘But she wanted to marry me. And I loved her. She didn’t even know about us.’
    ‘She didn’t because I stayed away,’ Manon said, ‘and that’s what I hate you most for...’
    ‘Hate me?’ He sounded surprised and wounded.
    ‘I don’t hate you,’ Manon corrected herself. ‘What I’m most angry about is that you stopped Penny and me having a friendship. I couldn’t see her with you. And she was my only friend. You took away my only friend. It was too great a punishment for what I did to you.’
    ‘It wasn’t a punishment,’ he protested, then corrected himself, ‘I don’t think it was a punishment. I admit it took me a long time to get over you. But you were never part of my relationship with Penny. And you never saw each other anyway,’ he added.
    ‘Because I stayed away,’ she insisted.
    ‘Is that really true?’ he asked, ‘or is it a convenient excuse because now you wish you’d spent more time with her?’
    ‘God, you really hate me,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t.’
    Now that it was spoken, the complex structure of the relationship between the three of them that she had built in her mind didn’t seem as obvious as it had when stowed away,