The Last Letter From Your Lover (31 page)

She checks her face, applies some mascara, and paints out the bags under her eyes. She puts on lipstick, then rubs it off. She looks tired, and tells herself the lighting in there is harsh, that this is not an inevitable consequence of being a year older. Then she sits beside a washbasin, pulls her phone from her bag, and types a message.

Just checking—does “later” mean this evening? Am trying to work out my plans.

E

It doesn’t come across as clingy, possessive, or even desperate. It suggests that she’s a woman with many offers, things to do, but implies that she’ll put him first, if necessary. She fiddles with it for a further five minutes, making sure she has the tone completely right, then sends it.

The reply comes back almost immediately. Her heart jumps, as it always does when she knows it’s him.

Difficult to say at the moment. Will call later if I think I can make it. J

A sudden rage ignites within her. That’s it? she wants to yell at him. My birthday, and the best you can do is “Will call later if I think I can make it”?

Don’t bother, she types back, her fingers jabbing at the little keys. I’ll make my own plans.

And, for the first time in months, Ellie Haworth turns off her phone before she sticks it back into her bag.

She spends longer than she intended working on the problem-pages feature, writes up an interview with a woman whose child suffers from a form of juvenile arthritis, and when she arrives at the Black Horse Rory is there. She can see him across the room, his hair now free of dust. She makes her way through the crowd toward him, apologizing for the bumped elbows, the badly negotiated spaces, already preparing to say “Sorry I’m late” when she realizes he’s not alone. The group of people with him are not familiar; they’re not from the newspaper. He’s at their center, laughing. Seeing him like this, out of context, throws her. She turns away to gather her thoughts.

“Hey! Ellie!”

She paints on a smile and turns back.

He lifts a hand. “Thought you weren’t coming.”

“Got held up. Sorry.” She joins the group and says hello.

“Let me buy you a drink. It’s Ellie’s birthday. What would you like?” She accepts the flurry of greetings from the people she doesn’t know, letting them falter to a few embarrassed smiles and wishing she wasn’t there. Making small talk wasn’t part of the deal. She wonders, briefly, if she can leave, but Rory is already at the bar buying her a drink.

“White wine,” he says, turning to hand her a glass. “I would have got champagne, but—”

“I get my own way far too much already.”

He laughs. “Yeah. Touché.”

“Thanks anyway.”

He introduces her to his friends, reels off names she’s forgotten even before he’s finished.

“So . . .,” she says.

“Down to business. Excuse us, for a minute,” he says, and they make their way to a corner where it’s emptier and quieter. There is only one seat, and he motions her to it, squatting on his haunches beside her. He unzips his backpack, and pulls out a folder marked “Asbestos/ Case studies: symptoms.”

“And this is relevant because . . . ?”

“Patience,” he says, handing it over. “I was thinking about the letter we found last time. It was with a load of papers on asbestos, right? Well, there’s heaps of stuff on asbestos downstairs, from the group legal actions of the last few years mainly. But I decided to dig around a bit further back and found some much older stuff. It’s dated from much the same period as the bits I gave you last time. I think it must have become separated from that first file.” He flicks through the papers with expert fingers. “And,” he says, pulling at a clear plastic folder, “I found these.”

Her heart stills. Two envelopes. The same handwriting. The same address, a PO box at the Langley Street post office.

“Have you read them?”

He grins. “How much restraint do I look like I have? Of course I read them.”

“Can I?”

“Go ahead.”

The first is simply headed “Wednesday.”

I understand your fear that you will be misunderstood, but I tell you it is unfounded. Yes, I was a fool that night in Alberto’s, and I will never be able to think of my outburst without shame, but it was not your words that prompted it. It was the absence of them. Can’t you see, Jenny, that I am predisposed to see the best in what you say, what you do? But just as nature abhors a vacuum—so does the human heart. Foolish, insecure man that I am, as we both seem so unsure what this actually comprises, and we cannot talk about where it may go, all that is left to me is reassurance about what it may mean. I simply need to hear that this is for you what it is for me: in short, everything.

If those words still fill you with trepidation, I give you an easier option. Answer me simply, in one word: yes.

On the second there is a date, but again, no greeting. The handwriting, while recognizable, is scrawled, as if it has been dashed off before its author could give it careful thought.

I swore I wouldn’t contact you again. But six weeks on, and I feel no better. Being without you—thousands of miles from you—offers no relief at all. The fact that I am no longer tormented by your presence, or presented with daily evidence of my inability to have the one thing I truly desire, has not healed me. It has made things worse. My future feels like a bleak, empty road.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say, darling Jenny. Just that if you have any sense at all that you made the wrong decision, this door is still wide open.

And if you feel that your decision was the right one, know this at least: that somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Your

B.

“Jenny,” he says.

She doesn’t reply.

“She didn’t go,” he says.

“Yup. You were right.”

He opens his mouth as if to speak, but perhaps something in her expression changes his mind.

She lets out a breath. “I don’t know why,” she says, “but that’s made me feel a bit sad.”

“But you have your answer. And you have a clue to the name, if you really want to write this feature.”

“Jenny,” she muses. “It’s not a lot to go on.”

“But it’s the second letter that was found in files about asbestos, so perhaps she had some link to it. It might be worth going through the two files. Just to see if there’s anything else.”

“You’re right.” She takes the file from him, carefully replaces the letter in the plastic folder, and puts it all in her bag. “Thanks,” she says. “Really. I know you’re busy at the moment, and I appreciate it.”

He studies her in the way someone might scan a file, searching for information. When John looks at her, she thinks, it’s always with a kind of tender apology, for who they are, for what they have become. “You really do look sad.”

“Aw . . . just a sucker for a happy ending.” She forces a smile. “I guess I just thought when you said you’d found something that it might show it all ended well.”

“Don’t take it personally,” he says, touching her arm.

“Oh, I couldn’t care less, really,” she says brusquely, “but it’d fit the feature much better if we could end on a high note. Melissa might not even want me to write the thing if it doesn’t end well.” She brushes a lock of hair from her face. “You know what she’s like—‘Let’s keep it upbeat . . . readers get enough misery from the news pages.’ ”

“I feel like I rained on your birthday,” he says, as they make their way back across the pub. He has to stoop and shout it into her ear.

“Don’t worry about it,” she shouts back. “It’s a pretty apt finish to the day I’ve had.”

“Come out with us,” Rory says, stopping her with a hand on her elbow. “We’re going ice-skating. Someone’s pulled out, so we have a spare ticket.”

“Ice-skating?”

“It’s a laugh.”

“I’m thirty-two years old! I can’t go ice-skating!”

It’s his turn to look incredulous. “Oh . . . Well, then.” He nods understandingly. “We can’t have you toppling off your walker.”

“I thought ice-skating was for children. Teenagers.”

“Then you’re a very unimaginative person, Miss Haworth. Finish your drink and come with us. Have a bit of fun. Unless you really can’t get out of what you’d planned.”

She feels for her phone, tucked into her bag, tempted to turn it on again. But she doesn’t want to read John’s inevitable apology. Doesn’t want the rest of this evening colored by his absence, his words, the ache for him.

“If I break my leg,” she says, “you’re contractually obliged to drive me in and out of work for six weeks.”

“Might be interesting, as I don’t own a car. Will you settle for a piggyback?”

He’s not her type. He’s sarcastic, a bit chippy, probably several years younger than she is. She suspects he earns significantly less than she does, and probably still shares a flat. It’s possible he doesn’t even drive. But he’s the best offer she’s likely to get at a quarter to seven on her thirty-second birthday, and Ellie has decided that pragmatism is an underrated virtue. “And if my fingers get sliced off by someone’s random skate, you have to sit at my desk and type for me.”

“You only need one finger for that. Or a nose. God, you hacks are a bunch of prima donnas,” he says. “Right, everyone. Drink up. The tickets say we’ve got to be there for half past.”

As Ellie walks back from the Tube some time later, she realizes the pain in her sides is not from the skating—although she hasn’t fallen over so often since she was learning to walk—but because she has laughed pretty solidly for almost two hours. Skating was comic, and exhilarating, and she realized as she took her first successful baby steps onto the ice that she rarely experienced the pleasure of losing herself in simple physical activity.

Rory had been good at it; most of his friends were. “We come here every winter,” he said, gesturing at the temporary rink, floodlit and surrounded by office buildings. “They put it up in November, and we probably come every fortnight. It’s easier if you’ve had a few drinks first. You relax more. C’mon . . . let your limbs go. Just lean forward a bit.” He had skated backward in front of her, his arms outstretched so that she clutched them. When she fell over, he laughed mercilessly. It was liberating to do this with someone whose opinion she cared so little for: if it had been John, she would have fretted that the chill of the ice was making her nose redden.

She would have been thinking the whole time about when he would have to leave.

They have arrived at her door. “Thanks,” she says to Rory. “Tonight was going pretty badly, and I ended up having a great time.”

“Least I could do, after raining all over your birthday with that letter.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“Who’d have thought? Ellie Haworth has a heart.”

“It’s just an ugly rumor.”

“You’re not bad, you know,” he says, a smile playing around his eyes. “For an old bird.”

She wants to ask him if he’s talking about the skating, but she’s suddenly unnerved by what he might say. “And you’re all charm.”

“You’re . . .” He blinks, glances back down the road toward the Tube station.

She wonders, briefly, if she should invite him in. But even as she considers it, she knows it won’t work. Her head, her flat, her life, are full of John. There’s no room for this man. Perhaps what she actually feels for him is sisterly, and only mildly confused by the fact that he is not exactly ugly.

He’s studying her face again, and she has the unnerving suspicion that her deliberation was written on her face.

“I’d better go,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “Thanks again, though.”

“No problem. I’ll see you at work.” He kisses her cheek, then turns and half jogs toward the station. She watches him go, feeling oddly bereft.

Ellie makes her way up the stone steps and reaches for her key. She will reread the new letter and go through the papers, checking for clues. She’ll be productive. She’ll channel her energies. She feels a hand on her shoulder and jumps, stifling a scream.