Vee says, ‘You just seemed so – OK with it all. It was like being with you in the old days, at the beginning, when you knew everything and I knew nothing.’ She says it as though life is the opposite now, Vee the authority and Leonie the learner. Leonie would challenge her, but her mouth has, without her noticing, become dry with tears that would fall if she let them. So she waits for Vee to continue. ‘I thought about what you said, afterwards. I thought about it a lot. And about how if I got pregnant I would want to be as—’ Leonie sees Vee’s mouth hesitate, start to form one sound, then make another, ‘detached.’

‘Right,’ is all Leonie can get out. Wow, she must be tired, if she’s as emotional as this. She needs to get a grip. She clears her throat, hoping it sounds more like a cough than a cry, raises an eyebrow. She didn’t know how deeply she felt Vee’s abandonment, until now.

Vee is still looking straight ahead. ‘What I’m saying is, what you thought – felt – about the baby, that was something I needed to think about. But I did, and I understood it, and I – I admired you for it. So that phone call – I didn’t think it was as serious as it obviously was. I didn’t know that I was letting you down so badly.’ Vee looks as though she might cry. Well, good.

‘And what would you have done? If you had realised how serious it was? Would you have given up your precious prizegiving night?’

Vee turns to Leonie so she can look her in the eye, sighs, and asks, ‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

‘I’ve thought about it, a lot, and I still don’t know,’ she sighs. ‘I keep thinking – would we ask a man not to go to something like that? And would we be surprised, would we mind, if he refused?’

And Leonie, caught in her own trap, feels the tears she’s holding in vanish, and finds that she can only laugh. Vee is right. It was only one night, unimportant then and unimportant now.

‘What happened? With the baby?’

‘Fuck off, Veronica. You’re too late.’

‘Please, Leonie.’

Oh, life’s too short. ‘My sister helped me out,’ she says, and then, because she really doesn’t need to talk about this anymore, ‘Come on. Let’s go and see what’s happening out there. Let’s work.’

10 April 2018

10 April 2018

Vee