The Last Letter from Your Lover

pitying twenty-year-old personal trainers. Now, after a few desultory laps up and down the small pool, they sit in the hot tub or the sauna for forty minutes to talk, having convinced themselves that these things are ‘good for the skin’.
    Nicky arrives late: she’s preparing for a conference in South Africa and has been held up. Neither friend will pass comment on the other’s lateness: it’s accepted that this happens, that any inconvenience caused by one’s career is beyond reproach. Besides, Ellie has never quite understood what Nicky does.
    ‘Will it be hot out there?’ She adjusts her towel on the hot bench of the sauna as Nicky wipes her eyes.
    ‘I think so. Not sure how much time I’ll get to enjoy it, though. New boss is a workaholic. I was hoping to take a week’s holiday afterwards, but she says she can’t spare me.’
    ‘What’s she like?’
    ‘Oh, she’s all right, not knitting herself a pair of testicles or anything. But she really does put in the hours, and can’t see why the rest of us shouldn’t do the same. I wish we had old Richard back. I used to love our long-lunch Fridays.’
    ‘I don’t know anyone who gets a proper lunch break now.’
    ‘Apart from you hacks. I thought it was all boozy lunches with contacts.’
    ‘Hah. Not with my boss on my tail.’ She tells the story of her morning meeting, and Nicky’s eyes screw up in sympathy.
    ‘You want to be careful,’ she says. ‘She sounds like she’s got you in her sights. Is this feature coming okay? Will that get her off your back?’
    ‘I don’t know if it’ll come to anything. And I feel weird about using some of this stuff.’ She rubs her foot. ‘The letters are lovely. And really intense. If someone had written me a letter like that I wouldn’t want it put into the public domain.’
    She hears Rory’s voice as she says this, and discovers she’s no longer sure what she thinks. She’d been unprepared for how much he disliked the idea of the letters being published. She’s used to the idea that everyone on the Nation shares a mindset. The paper first. Old school .
    ‘I’d want to blow it up and put it on a billboard. I don’t know anyone who gets love letters any more,’ Nicky says. ‘My sister did, when her fiancé moved to Hong Kong back in the nineties, at least two a week. She showed me once.’ She snorts. ‘Mind you, most of them were about how much he missed her bum.’
    They break off from laughing as another woman enters the sauna. They exchange polite smiles, and the woman takes a place on the highest shelf, carefully spreading her towel beneath her.
    ‘Oh, I saw Doug last weekend.’
    ‘How is he? Got Lena up the duff yet?’
    ‘He asked about you, actually. He’s worried he upset you. Said you and he had words.’
    Sweat has crept into Ellie’s eyes, making the remnants of her mascara sting. ‘Oh, it’s fine. He just . . .’ She peers at the woman on the upper shelf. ‘He lives in another world.’
    ‘One in which nobody ever has an affair.’
    ‘He came over a bit . . . judgy. We had a disagreement about John’s wife.’
    ‘What about her?’
    Ellie shifts awkwardly on her towel.
    ‘Don’t worry about me,’ the woman’s voice filters down. ‘Everything overheard in this place is off-limits.’ She laughs, and they smile obligingly back at her.
    Ellie lowers her voice. ‘About how far I should be taking her feelings into account.’
    ‘I should think that’s John’s job.’
    ‘Yes. But you know Doug. The Nicest Man in the World.’ Ellie smooths her hair off her face. ‘He’s right, Nicky, but it’s not like I know her. She’s not like a real person. So why should I care what happens to her? She has the one thing I really, really want, the one thing that would make me happy. And she can’t be that much in love with him, can she, and pay so little attention to what he needs and wants? I mean, if they were that happy, he wouldn’t be with me, would he?’
    Nicky shakes her head. ‘Dunno. When my sister had her kid she couldn’t see straight for six months.’
    ‘His youngest is almost two.’ She feels, rather than hears, Nicky’s shrug of derision. It was the perennial downside of good friends. They never let you get away with anything.
    ‘You know, Ellie,’ Nicky says, lying back on the bench and putting her hands behind her head. ‘Morally, I wouldn’t care either way, but you don’t seem happy.’
    That defensive clench. ‘I am