The Last Letter From Your Lover (33 page)

Rory looks at it. They’re sitting at the pub across from the
Nation
. It’s dark, even so early in the evening, and under the sodium lights green removal lorries are still visible outside the front gate, men in overalls traveling backward and forward up the wide steps to the
Nation
’s entrance. They have been an almost permanent fixture for weeks now.

“What? You think I’ve got the tone wrong?”

“No.” He’s sitting beside her on the banquette, one foot angled against the table leg in front of them.

“What, then? You’re doing that thing with your face.”

He grins. “I don’t know, don’t ask me. I’m not a journalist.”

“Come on. What does the face mean?”

“Well, doesn’t it make you feel a bit . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know . . . It’s so personal. And you’re going to be asking her to air her dirty linen in public.”

“She might be glad of the chance. She might find him again.” There’s a note of defiant optimism in her voice.

“Or she might be married, and they’ve spent forty years trying to get over her affair.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, how do you know it’s dirty linen? They might be together now. It might have had a happy ending.”

“And she kept the PO box open for forty years? It didn’t have a happy ending.” He hands back the letter. “She might even be mentally ill.”

“Oh, so holding a torch for someone means you’re mad. Obviously.”

“Keeping a PO box open for forty years, without getting a single letter in it, is on the far side of normal behavior.”

He has a point, she concedes. But the idea of Jenny and her empty PO box has taken hold of her imagination. More important, it’s the closest thing she has to a decent feature. “I’ll think about it,” she says. She doesn’t tell him she posted the good copy that afternoon.

“So,” he says, “did you have a good time last night? Not too sore today?”

“What?”

“The ice-skating.”

“Oh. A little.” She straightens her legs, feeling the tightness in her thighs, and reddens a little when she brushes his knee with her own. In-jokes have sprung up between them. She is Jayne Torvill; he is the humble librarian, there to do her bidding. He texts her with deliberate misspellings: Pls will the smart ladee com and hav a drink with the humble librarrian later?

“I heard you came down to find me.”

She glances at him, and he’s grinning again. She grimaces. “Your boss is so grumpy. Honestly. It was as if I’d asked him to sacrifice his firstborn when all I was doing was trying to get a message to you.”

“He’s all right,” Rory says, wrinkling his nose. “He’s just stressed. Really stressed. This is his last project before he retires, and he’s got forty thousand documents to move in the right order, plus the ones that are being scanned for digital storage.”

“We’re all busy, Rory.”

“He just wants to leave it shipshape. He’s old school—you know, everything’s for the good of the paper. I like him. He’s of a dying breed.”

She thinks of Melissa, she of the cold eyes and high heels, and cannot help but agree with him.

“He knows everything there is to know about this place. You should talk to him sometime.”

“Yes. Because he’s obviously taken such a shine to me.”

“I’m sure he would, if you asked him nicely.”

“Like I speak to you?”

“No. I said nicely.”

“Are you going to go for his job?”

“Me?” Rory lifts his glass to his lips. “Nah. I want to go traveling—South America. This was only meant to be a holiday job for me. Somehow I ended up staying eighteen months.”

“You’ve been here eighteen months?”

“You mean you hadn’t noticed me?” He makes a mock-hurt face, and she blushes again.

“I just . . . I thought I would have seen you before now.”

“Ah, you hacks only see what you want to see. We’re the invisible drones, there merely to fulfill your bidding.”

He’s smiling, and spoke without malice, but she knows there’s an unpleasant kernel of truth in what he said. “So I’m a selfish, uncaring hack, blind to the needs of the true workers and nasty to decent old men with a work ethic,” she muses.

“That’s about the size of it.” Then he looks at her properly, and his expression changes. “What are you going to do to redeem yourself?”

It’s astonishingly hard to meet his eye. She’s trying to work out how to answer when she hears her mobile phone. “Sorry,” she mutters, scrabbling in her bag. She clicks open the little envelope symbol.

Just wanted to say hi. Away hols tomorrow, will be in touch when I get back, take care Jx

She’s disappointed. “Say hi,” after the whispered intimacies of the previous evening? The uninhibited coming together? He wants to “say hi”?

She rereads the message. He never says much via the mobile phone, she knows that. He told her at the start it was too risky, in case his wife happened to pick it up before he could delete some incriminating message. And there’s something sweet in “take care,” isn’t there? He’s telling her he wants her to be okay. She wonders, even as she calms herself, at how far she stretches these messages, finding a whole hinterland in the sparse words he sends to her. She believes they’re so connected to each other that it’s fine, she understands what he really wants to say. But occasionally, like today, she doubts that there really is anything beyond the shorthand.

How to reply? She can hardly say “Have a good holiday” when she wants him to have a terrible time, his wife to get food poisoning, his children to whine incessantly, and the weather to fail spectacularly, confining them all to a grumpy indoors. She wants him to sit there missing her, missing her, missing her . . .

Take care yourself x

When she looks up, Rory’s eyes are fixed on the removals lorry outside, as if he’s pretending not to be interested in what’s going on beside him.

“Sorry,” she says, tucking her phone back into her bag. “Work thing.” Aware, even as she says it, why she’s not telling him the truth. He could be a friend, is already a friend: why would she not tell him about John?

“Why do you think nobody writes love letters like these anymore?” she says instead, pulling one from her bag. “I mean, yes, there are texts and e-mails and things, but nobody sends them in language like this, do they? Nobody spells it out anymore like our unknown lover did.”

The removal lorry has pulled away. The front of the newspaper building is blank and empty, its entrance a dark maw under the sodium lights, its remaining staff deep inside, making last-minute changes to the front page.

“Perhaps they do,” he says, and his face has lost that brief softness. “Or perhaps, if you’re a man, it’s impossible to know what you’re meant to say.”

The gym at Swiss Cottage is no longer near either of their homes, has equipment that is regularly out of order and a receptionist so bolshy that they wonder whether she’s been planted there by some opposition, but neither she nor Nicky can be bothered to go through the interminable process of ending their membership and finding somewhere new. It has become their weekly meeting place. 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 afterward, 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 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 mind-set.
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 anymore,” Nicky says. “My sister did, when her fiancé moved to Hong Kong back in the nineties, at least two a week.” 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.

Ellie smooths her hair off her face. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. On my birthday.” She lowers her voice. “About John’s wife.”

“Ah.”

“I know you’re 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?”

“Interesting logic.”

“Okay. 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.

“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 happy.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow.

“Okay. I’m happier and unhappier than I’ve ever been with anyone else, if that makes sense.”

Unlike her two best friends, Ellie has never lived with a man. Until she was thirty she had assigned marriageandchildren—it was always one word—to the folder of things she would do later in life, long after she had established her career, along with drinking sensibly and taking out a pension. She didn’t want to end up like some girls from her school, exhausted and pushing prams in their mid-twenties, financially dependent on husbands they seemed to despise.

Her last boyfriend had complained that he had spent most of their relationship following her while she ran from place to place “barking into a mobile phone.” He had been even more pissed off that she’d found this funny. But since she’d turned thirty, it had become a little less amusing. When she visited her parents in Derbyshire, they made conspicuous efforts not to mention boyfriends, so much so that it had become just another form of pressure. She’s good at being on her own, she tells them and other people. And it was the truth, until she met John.

“Is he married, love?” the woman asks, through the steam.

Ellie and Nicky exchange a subtle glance.

“Yes,” Ellie says.

“If it makes you feel any better, I fell in love with a married man, and we’ve been married four years next Tuesday.”

“Congratulations,” they say in tandem, Ellie conscious that it seems an odd word to use in the circumstances.

“Happy as anything, we are. Of course his daughter won’t talk to him anymore, but it’s fine. We’re happy.”

“How long did it take him to leave his wife?” Ellie asks, sitting up.

The woman is pushing her hair into a ponytail. She has no boobs, Ellie thinks, and he still left his wife for her.

“Twelve years,” she says. “It meant we couldn’t have children, but like I said, it was worth it. We’re very happy.”

“I’m glad for you,” says Ellie, as the woman climbs down. The glass door opens, letting in a burp of cold air as she leaves, and then it’s the two of them, sitting in the hot, darkened cabin.

There’s a short silence.

“Twelve years,” says Nicky, rubbing her face with her towel. “Twelve years, an alienated daughter, and no kids. Well, I bet that makes you feel loads better.”