After Twenty Years

Bridget had not planned to go. The invitation reached her in March, forwarded three times, with a photograph of the school gates and the words "Twenty Years On" set in a font that nobody had chosen with any care at all.

She replied yes at eleven at night, which is when most of her braver decisions are made, and regretted it before breakfast. Even so, she drove the ninety miles on the Saturday, telling herself the whole way that she could leave again after an hour.

The village hall smelled of floor polish and warm wine. A trestle table by the door held the name badges, arranged alphabetically by the surnames everyone had carried at seventeen: a small unkindness that nobody had intended and that three people mentioned before eight o'clock.

Ines was standing under the noticeboard with a paper cup, looking exactly like a woman who had also promised herself one hour and no more. They had shared a desk for two years and had not spoken since the summer the exams finished.

"You came," Ines said. It was not quite a question. "You told everyone you wouldn't."

"I said I probably wouldn't," said Bridget. "There's a difference, and I've spent twenty years defending it."

They fell back into it easily, which surprised neither of them and pleased both. Ines taught geography now, two counties away. Bridget worked for a company that measured things for other companies, a job she could describe in one sentence or in forty minutes, depending on the listener.

Somewhere near the second drink the conversation turned to the last week of school. Bridget mentioned the afternoon when the two of them had walked out to the reservoir instead of sitting the mock exam, and Ines looked back at her with a completely polite blankness.

"That wasn't me," she said. "That was Priya. I was at my grandmother's for the whole of that week. I remember, because I missed the leavers' photograph."

Bridget laughed and let it go, and then spent the rest of the evening quietly taking the memory apart: the gravel path, the flask of tea gone cold, the argument about whether they would be found out. Somebody had been beside her that afternoon. Twenty years had simply put the wrong face there.

Had she checked at the time, had anyone kept a diary, had a single photograph survived, the afternoon would have stayed exactly where she put it. Instead it had been allowed to drift, and she found, to her own surprise, that she did not entirely mind.

At half past ten Ines put her coat on and said that they really shouldn't leave it another twenty years, in the tone that people use when they mean it and know at the same time how unlikely it is.

Bridget drove home with the window open and the radio off. Near the turning for the reservoir she slowed down, looked at the flat dark line of the water, and then drove on. She still hasn't asked Priya.