What became of us

had reassured her: ‘They were probably all as drunk as you.’ And even though she had known that was not true, it had eased the guilt enough to allow her to sleep, and by the next morning it didn’t seem to matter nearly so much.
    Now she needed him there to tell her that everything was going to be all right. She looked at her watch. Not yet two o’clock. Time seemed to have slowed down to prolong her agony, and sleep would not come to help her.

Chapter 33

    ‘The trouble with having dreams come true is that even when you get everything you thought you wanted, you’re still you, and you still have the same history and nothing really has changed,’ Annie observed.
    They had climbed over the railings and were sitting a yard or so apart on the curved steps of the Radcliffe Camera. The surfaces of the ancient stone buildings in the deserted square were ghostly white in the floodlights. The buildings looked flat, as if there were nothing behind the frontages. It was so much like a picture postcard of Oxford by Night that it felt like sitting in a film set replica of the square rather than the square itself.
    Halfway between them on the step was the halfdrunk bottle of champagne. She stretched out her hand and took a swig from it.
    ‘That sounds a bit profound,’ Ian said after a few moments.
    ‘Not really. What I’m saying is that fantasies are two-dimensional. You fit yourself into an image of what it would be like to do something and you forget that you would still be the same person doing it with all the baggage that you already have. You know when people say approvingly, “all that money hasn’t changed her...”?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, I would like to be the first person where they said “she’s a completely different person now that she’s rich!” ’
    A short loud burst of laughter emerged from his mouth and bounced around the square. She liked his laugh. One minute it was not there at all, and the next it was really loud and you never quite knew when it was going to surface. She thought she should get him to come along when they were shooting the next series. They recorded the programmes in front of a live audience, but they took a kind of average of the best laughs and added it on in the appropriate places afterwards. It was good to have someone with a really different laugh each week to make it sound more authentically live.
    ‘What were your dreams when you were here?’ she asked him.
    ‘I’m not sure I really had any. I just remember it being bloody hard work. You arty farty types could skip tutorials and miss lectures, but you couldn’t do that as a medic if you wanted to qualify. I was the first one in my family to come up and I felt enormous pressure to show that I deserved it. If I dreamed of anything I suppose it was having more sex,’ he added.
    He was a flirt, and she had to admit that she liked it. It was fun to flirt when you both knew it was going nowhere. It was the first time in ages she had talked to a man without reading something into everything he said.
    ‘Really? I was just the opposite,’ she responded, ‘I was the first one too, and my mum hadn’t the slightest idea what it involved, so there was no pressure whatsoever. I just wanted to have a good time. Loads of sex.’
    ‘So if you had such a good time why so wistful now?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t know. Missed opportunities, wrong directions. Now I feel I should have done something proper, you know, and, well...’
    ‘What’s proper?’
    ‘Something that I could rely on. Like, I have no qualifications at all apart from a poor degree. You have a profession. Ursula has a profession. Something you can take anywhere. Something that would make my mum less worried,’ she admitted.
    ‘I’m sure your mother isn’t worried about your career!’ he said.
    ‘Why are you so sure? You don’t know anything about it.’ She suddenly felt enormously protective of her background, which a minute before she had been wanting to dream out of existence.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ she said, feeling instantly more reasonable since he hadn’t taken the opportunity to argue with her, ‘I’m sorry. You were only trying to be nice.’
    ‘What do you mean, you don’t have a proper job?’ he asked, steering the conversation back.
    ‘What I do you could write on the back of a postage stamp.’
    ‘But making people laugh is a great gift.’
    ‘That’s my whole point,’ she interrupted: ‘if it’s a gift then