Free What became of us by Imogen Parker Page A

let me know?’
    ‘I know where to find you,’ he told her with a friendly wink.
    Manon took a bite of the apple and walked up the street towards the main road. She liked living in this place. She liked the fact that the shopkeepers recognized her but were too busy, too urban, to pry further into her life. It was not a residential neighbourhood and most of the buildings nearby were offices or hospitals. She liked the blend of anonymity and acceptance you found in the heart of a city.
    You couldn’t bring a baby up in a city, she told herself, as she waited at the bus stop, watching a young mother on the other side of the road who was bent with the effort of pushing a toddler and a baby along in a double buggy.
    Stop it. Stop thinking about it.
    When the bus came, Manon went upstairs. There was no-one else on the top deck. She allowed her vision to become blurred with welling tears, then she wiped her eyes with her forearm, wishing she had thought to put some tissues in the flowerbasket bag that sat on the seat next to her like a toy.

    * * *

    It was the kind of glorious summer day that makes people walk along the street with their faces tilted upwards to the sun. Even the ugly grey buildings along the Euston Road exuded a kind of grandeur in the sunshine. She got off at Baker Street. The forecourt of Pizza Express was busy with people eating lunch al fresco. As she walked past, the yeast and oregano wafts from the pizza oven brought back the balminess of summer evenings in the Piazza Navona.
    She waited for the Citylink coach at the stop in Gloucester Place. A dad with two boys, all of them in orange baseball caps, jogged past her bound for Regent’s Park. When the coach came, she sat halfway down. The airbrakes sighed with relief as the traffic began to move and they soared up onto the Westway, over the tops of the buildings, away from the city streets that today seemed to be taunting her with happy family life.
    The tinted windows made the clear blue sky outside almost violet. Manon wondered if people on buses looked at her when she was with Saskia and Lily and smiled. Did they watch the little girls in their Laura Ashley pinafores bouncing down the street beside her and assume she was their mother? Did they think that the three of them were as happy as they looked?
    How easy it was to imagine uncomplicated lives tor strangers.
    The coach charged along the outside lane of the flyover. Manon closed her eyes. She was quite used to the road from London to Oxford now, because she went up most Wednesday afternoons to see Penny’s daughters, but as she passed the familiar landmarks of the journey, Trellick Tower, the traffic lights near Acton, the huge advert for a car dealer at Park Royal, she was reminded of the day almost two years before, when she had gone back to Oxford for the first time since leaving college, for Penny’s thirty-eighth birthday party.

    That day had been almost mockingly sunny too.
    Penny’s letter, which had been tucked inside the party invitation, had explained that she was ill again, and Manon had been alarmed by the PS at the bottom.
    ‘I must see you!’
    Penny had the neatest handwriting in the world, but this was a giant scrawl.
    Nothing had prepared her for what she was to see, and the shock made the very air that she breathed taste different. There was an unmistakable gauntness about the dying. Penny had always been slim, but now she was almost ethereal. Her hair was cut short as a precaution against the chemotherapy. She looked very young and very old at the same time. She was too frail to stand for very long, but when Manon embraced her, her clutch was desperately strong, as if to graft herself onto something living.
    Manon’s first reaction had been pure white anger.
    ‘It’s all happened a bit quickly,’ Penny said understanding, as Manon held her, unable to stop herself shaking with fury. ‘They said I was free of it, but I wasn’t.’
    They had looked at each other for a long