It lasted a long time really, those years of contentment. Three, almost four years. Until slowly, gradually, the old sense of absence crept in again, and George felt it too, and they realised that what they lacked now, was a baby.

The only other occasion in which Veronica could remember feeling this way was the summer before Oman, before Kent, when she spent three weeks living in Sarah’s house, enjoying Sarah’s family, and forgetting that she wasn’t, in fact, Sarah.

“Lovely,” she smiled again to David.

Sarah

The text from David arrived just as Sarah reached her parents’ house: Dinner with Veronica next Thu. 8pm. See you after your session x

And just like that, all the calmness and clarity that she had spent the last hour assembling with her counsellor, dissolved into a dry mouth, shortness of breath, and heaving nausea. Telling her mother that she needed some air, Sarah threw open the back door, and without intention, found herself here, at the bottom of the garden.

The pool house that had existed twenty-two years earlier was now a dilapidated shed, but in truth, ‘pool house’ had always been a flattering fancy. Even back then, ‘in its heyday’, as her mother would say, the wooden slats of roof were regularly commandeered by nesting birds, the banister that enclosed a token deck dripped some kind of sticky substance which nobody could identify, and the three tiny rooms inside were never decorated with anything beyond a fridge. There were a few summers when Sarah’s mother ‘rolled up her sleeves’ and ‘got in gear’ and spent a day cleaning and clearing and fighting with cobwebs. Then she would bang the lounger cushions until most of the gunk from the previous summer had landed in the bushes, and fill the fridge with Cherry Coke and white chocolate Magnums, and stock the changing room with spare towels, declaring the pool house open. But then inevitably, being England and being June, it would rain for three weeks solid, and by the time they actually spent an afternoon swimming, the cushions would be sodden, and persistent spiders would have re-spun their webs, and the towels would somehow have developed a stale, slightly rotten odour. In the end, they dashed with dripping costumes inside the main area to grab ice creams from the fridge, and sometimes remembered to put their wet goggles and floats into the changing room, and didn’t even enter the third space at the back. None of them could quite say what that room was for anyway. It had the idea of bunk beds, except that the ‘beds’ were hard slats of painted wood, and there was no ladder to the top one, and there was only one miniscule window, not even big enough to climb through, and an inadequate single light bulb, and the door that led from the changing room sometimes got stuck.

It was Veronica who decided that this would be their chatting place. The Chatting Room. TCR, she called it. Whispered to Sarah, depending on her mood, either as a question or a command.