What became of us

again.
    She sat in the kitchen at the back, enjoying the stillness of the empty house and trying to think, at this significant watershed in her life, something profound about Oxford. She had little idea what lay ahead. She had not bothered to make the trip to the Careers Advisory Service in the large yellow brick house in North Oxford where they told you to sit the Civil Service exams and apply for advertising agencies. If she had learned only one thing, it was that she would not be shoe-horned again into some English institution. In Paris, she had always found ways of making enough money to support herself through the long vacations. She knew enough about the world to know that for a woman a word-processed CV was not as valuable a resource as a slim body and a pretty face.
    Then the doorbell rang and Roy was standing there, pink-faced from the exertion of carrying the heavy wicker hamper all the way back from the Parks.
    ‘Penny’s gone to see her boyfriend, Ursula and Annie got picked up by a party in a punt. There wasn’t enough room for me,’ he explained, in his soft Northern accent, lugging the basket over the threshold. ‘Something burning?’
    His hot presence intruding on her moment of contemplation, his casual reference to her friends’ names and their assumption that she would be in to open the door for him, all irritated her. Indicating the location of the kitchen with a contemptuous Gallic wave of her hand, she escaped upstairs to her room, closing the door with a bang behind her. She took off the white polo shirt and black skirt and gathered them with the rest of her possessions into a rucksack. Then she lay down on the bed in her knickers. The sun on the front of the building made the small space stiflingly hot, and as she lay there trying to regain the sense of peace she had attained in the kitchen, she couldn’t help picturing the boy sitting alone down there, wondering what he was going to do for the rest of the day. He had hitchhiked all the way down into unfamiliar territory and then been abandoned. She could quite imagine how it had happened. Penny looking at her watch and making excuses to go off to Keble in time for tea, a boatload of inebriated finalists splashing past on the river, waving at Annie to join them, and Ursula having to choose between looking after her kid brother and her last chance to score.
    In the hot stuffy room Manon fidgeted and frowned, pulled cutoff jeans and a black vest from the top of her rucksack, put them on and went downstairs again. The others would not return until much later and there was no particular point in she and Roy sitting in different parts of the house doing nothing. She knew that it was his first time in Oxford and that he was preparing to sit the entrance exams in the autumn. Perhaps a tour of the sights would be a good thing for both of them an introduction to the city of dreaming spires for him, for her a farewell. But as she stood in the doorframe to the kitchen, she found she was not altruistic enough to offer him a guided tour after all.
    ‘I’m going to go for a country walk,’ she told him, ‘do you want to come?’
    He looked up, his face such an innocent picture of gratitude that she had felt strangely moved. And it was only then that she had seen just how young he was. Eighteen, he told her later that evening as they sat drinking in the garden of the Trout, with exaggerated certainty and a look over his shoulder which made her suspect that he was younger.

    ‘When is your birthday, Roy?’ she asked suddenly. It seemed a very odd question to be asking him now, so many years later, without explaining why.
    ‘January,’ he replied.
    ‘I was trying to work out whether you were old enough to go into a pub that time we...’ she hesitated, realizing that she had just revealed where her thoughts were.
    ‘I was just thinking about that too,’ he said.
    ‘Whether you were old enough?’ she asked, prepared to be amazed at their empathy.
    ‘No!’ he laughed, ‘about our country walk. I always remember that you said that. A country walk. The words stuck out, you see.’
    ‘Why?’ she asked.
    ‘Because a truly English person would just have said, let’s go for a walk. It gave me a thrill,’ he admitted.
    ‘You were easily thrilled,’ she remarked tartly.
    ‘We ended up at the Trout,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ she spoke cautiously.
    ‘You drank bottles of Pils. I drank pints of ale. I couldn’t believe I was there with you,