The Last Letter From Your Lover (34 page)

Two days later the phone rings. It’s a quarter past nine, and she’s at her desk, standing up to answer it so that her boss can see she’s there and working. What time does Melissa come to work? She seems to be first in and last out in Features, yet her hair and makeup are always immaculate, her outfits carefully coordinated. Ellie suspects there’s probably a personal trainer at six a.m., a blow-dry at some exclusive salon an hour afterward. Does Melissa have a home life? Someone once mentioned a young daughter, but Ellie finds that hard to believe.

“Features,” she says, staring absently into the glass office. Melissa is on the phone, walking up and down, one hand stroking her hair.

“Do I have the right number for Ellie Haworth?” A cut-glass voice, a relic from a previous age.

“Yup. This is she.”

“Ah. I believe you sent me a letter. My name is Jennifer Stirling.”

Chapter 20

She walks briskly, head down against the driving rain, cursing herself for not thinking far enough ahead to bring an umbrella. Taxis follow in the slipstream of steamy-windowed buses, sending sprays of water in graceful arcs over the curb. She is in St. John’s Wood on a wet Saturday afternoon, trying not to think of white sands in Barbados, of a broad freckled hand rubbing sun cream into a woman’s back. It is an image that pops into her head with punishing frequency, and has done for the six days John has been gone. The foul weather feels like some cosmic joke at her expense.

The mansion block rises in a gray slab from a wide, tree-lined pavement. She trips up the stone steps, presses the buzzer for Number 8, and waits, hopping impatiently from one soaked foot to the other.

“Hello?” The voice is clear. She thanks God that Jennifer Stirling suggested today: the thought of negotiating a whole Saturday without work, without her friends, who all seem to be busy, was terrifying.

That freckled hand again.

“It’s Ellie Haworth. About your letters.”

“Ah. Come in. I’m on the fourth floor. You may have to wait a while for the lift. It’s terribly slow.”

It’s the kind of building she rarely goes into, in an area she hardly knows; her friends live in new-built flats with tiny rooms and underground parking, or maisonettes squashed like layer cakes into Victorian terraced houses. This block speaks of old money, imperviousness to fashion. It makes her think of the word
dowager
—John might use it—and smile.

The hallway is lined with dark turquoise carpet, a color from another age. The brass rail that leads up the four marble steps bears the deep patina of frequent polishing. She thinks, briefly, of the communal area in her own block, with its piles of neglected mail and carelessly left bicycles.

The lift makes its stately way up the four floors, creaking and trundling, and she steps out onto a tiled corridor.

“Hello?” Ellie sees the open door.

Afterward she’s not sure what she had pictured: some stooped old lady with twinkling eyes and perhaps a nice shawl amid a house full of small china animals. Jennifer Stirling is not that woman. In her late sixties she might be, but her figure is lean and still upright; only her silver hair, cut into a side-swept bob, hints at her true age. She’s wearing a dark blue cashmere sweater and a belted wool jacket over a pair of well-cut trousers that are more Dries van Noten than Marks & Spencer. An emerald green scarf is tied round her neck.

“Miss Haworth?”

She senses that the woman has watched her, perhaps assessing her, before using her name.

“Yes.” Ellie sticks out her hand. “Ellie, please.”

The woman’s face relaxes a little. Whatever test there was, she seems to have passed it—for now, at least. “Do come in. Have you come far?”

Ellie follows her into the apartment. Again, she finds her expectations defied. No animal knickknacks here. The room is huge, light, and sparsely furnished. The pale wood floors sport a couple of large Persian rugs, and two damask-clad chesterfields face each other across a glass coffee table. The only other pieces of furniture are eclectic and exquisite: a chair that she suspects is expensive, modern, and Danish, and a small antique table, inlaid with walnut. Photographs of family, small children.

“What a beautiful flat,” says Ellie, who has never particularly cared about interior decorating but suddenly knows how she wants to live.

“It is nice, isn’t it? I bought it in . . . ’sixty-eight, I think. It was rather a shabby old block then, but I thought it would be a nice place for my daughter to grow up, since she had to live in a city. You can see Regent’s Park from that window. Can I take your coat? Would you like some coffee? You look terribly wet.”

Ellie sits while Jennifer Stirling disappears into the kitchen. On the walls, which are the palest shade of cream, there are several large pieces of modern art. Ellie eyes Jennifer Stirling as she reenters the room, and realizes that she’s not surprised that she could have inspired such passion in the unknown letter writer.

The photographs on the table include one of a ridiculously beautiful young woman, posed as if for a Cecil Beaton portrait; then, perhaps a few years later, she’s peering down at a newborn child, her expression wearing the exhaustion, awe, and elation seemingly common to all new mothers—her hair, even though she has just given birth, is perfectly set.

“It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble. I have to say, your letter was intriguing.” A cup of coffee is placed in front of her, and Jennifer Stirling sits opposite, stirring hers with a tiny silver spoon, a red-enamel coffee bean at the end. Jesus, thinks Ellie. Her waist is smaller than mine.

“I’m curious to know what this correspondence is. I don’t think I’ve thrown anything out accidentally for years. I tend to shred everything. And that PO box was . . . well, I thought it was private.”

“Well, it wasn’t actually me who found it. A friend of mine has been sorting out the archive at the
Nation
newspaper and came across a file.”

Jennifer Stirling’s demeanor changes.

“And in it were these.”

Ellie reaches into her bag and carefully pulls out the plastic folder with the three love letters. She watches Mrs. Stirling’s face as she takes them. “I would have sent them to you,” she continues, “but . . .”

Jennifer Stirling is holding the letters reverently in both hands.

“I wasn’t sure . . . what—well, whether you would even want to see them.”

Jennifer says nothing. Suddenly ill at ease, Ellie takes a sip from her cup. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, drinking her coffee, but she keeps her eyes averted, she isn’t sure why.

“Oh, I do want them.”

When she looks up, something has happened to Jennifer’s expression. She isn’t tearful, exactly, but her eyes have the pinched look of someone beset by intense emotion. “You’ve read them, I take it.”

Ellie finds she’s blushing. “Sorry. They were in a file of something completely unrelated. I didn’t know I’d end up finding their owner. I thought they were beautiful,” she adds awkwardly.

“Yes, they are, aren’t they? Well, Ellie Haworth, not many things surprise me at my age, but you have succeeded today.”

“Aren’t you going to read them?”

“I don’t have to. I know what they say.”

Ellie learned a long time ago that the most important skill in journalism is knowing when to say nothing. But now she’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable as she watches an old woman who has in some way disappeared from the room. “I’m sorry,” she says carefully, when the silence becomes oppressive, “if I’ve upset you. I wasn’t sure what to do, given that I didn’t know what your—”

“—situation was,” Jennifer says. She smiles, and Ellie thinks again what a lovely face she has. “That was very diplomatic of you. But these can cause no embarrassment. My husband died many years ago. It’s one of the things they never tell you about being old.” She gives a wry smile. “That the men die off so much sooner.”

For a while they listen to the rain, the hissing brakes of the buses outside.

“Well,” Mrs. Stirling says, “tell me something, Ellie. What made you go to such effort to return these letters to me?”

Ellie ponders whether or not to mention the feature. Her instincts tell her not to.

“Because I’ve never read anything like them?”

Jennifer Stirling is watching her closely.

“And . . . I also have a lover,” she says, not sure why she says this.

“A ‘lover’?”

“He’s . . . married.”

“Ah. So these letters spoke to you.”

“Yes. The whole story did. It’s the thing about wanting something you can’t have. And that thing of never being able to say what you really feel.” She’s looking down now, speaking to her lap. “The man I’m involved with, John . . . I don’t really know what he thinks. We don’t talk about what’s happening between us.”

“I don’t suppose he’s unusual in that,” Mrs. Stirling remarks.

“But your lover did. ‘B.’ did.”

“Yes.” Again, she’s lost in another time. “He told me everything. It’s an astonishing thing to receive a letter like that. To know you’re loved so completely. He was always terribly good with words.”

The rain becomes briefly torrential and thunders against the windows, people shouting below in the street.

“I’ve been mildly obsessed by your love affair, if that doesn’t sound too strange. I desperately wanted the two of you to reunite. I have to ask, did you . . . did you ever get back together?”

The modern parlance seems wrong, inappropriate, and Ellie feels suddenly self-conscious. There’s something graceless in what she was asking, she thinks. She has pushed it too far.

Just as Ellie is about to apologize, and make to leave, Jennifer speaks: “Would you like another cup of coffee, Ellie?” she says. “I don’t suppose there’s much point in your leaving while the rain is like this.”

Jennifer Stirling sits on the silk-covered sofa, her coffee cooling on her lap, and tells the story of a young wife in the south of France, of a husband who, in her words, was probably no worse than any others of the age. A man very much of his time, in whom expressiveness had become a sign of weakness, unbecoming. And she tells a story of his opposite, an opinionated, passionate, damaged man, who unsettled her from the first night she met him at a moonlit dinner party.

Ellie sits, rapt, pictures building in her head, trying not to think about the tape recorder she has surreptitiously turned on in her handbag. But she no longer feels graceless. Mrs. Stirling talks animatedly, as if this is a story she has wanted to tell for decades. She says it’s a story she has pieced together over the years, and Ellie, although she doesn’t completely understand what is being said, doesn’t want to interrupt and ask her to clarify.

Jennifer Stirling tells of the sudden palling of her gilded life, the sleepless nights, her guilt, the terrifying, irrevocable pull of someone forbidden, the awful realization that the life you’re leading might be the wrong one. As she speaks, Ellie bites her nails, wondering if this is what John is thinking, right now, on some distant sun-drenched beach. How can he love his wife and do what he does with her? How can he not feel that pull?

The story becomes darker, the voice quieter. She tells of a car crash on a wet road, a blameless man dead, and the four years she sleepwalked through her marriage, held in place only by pills and the birth of her daughter.

She breaks off, reaches behind her, and hands Ellie a photo frame. A tall blond woman stands in a pair of shorts, a man with his arm around her. Two children and a dog are at her bare feet. She looks like a Calvin Klein advertisement. “Esmé’s probably not that much older than you,” she says. “She lives in San Francisco with her husband, a doctor. They’re very happy.” She adds, with a wry smile, “To my knowledge.”

“Does she know about the letters?” Ellie places the frame carefully on the coffee table, trying not to begrudge the unknown Esmé her spectacular genetics, her apparently enviable life.

This time Mrs. Stirling hesitates before speaking. “I’ve never told this story to a living soul. What daughter would want to hear that her mother was in love with somebody other than her father?”

And then she tells of a chance meeting, years later, the glorious shock of discovering she was where she was meant to be. “Can you understand that? I had felt out of place for so long . . . and then Anthony was there. And I had this feeling.” She taps her breastbone. “That I was home. That it was him.”

“Yes,” says Ellie. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa. Jennifer Stirling’s face is illuminated. Suddenly Ellie can see the young girl she had been. “I know that feeling.”

“The awful thing was, of course, that having found him again, I wasn’t free to go with him. Divorce was a very different matter in those days, Ellie. Awful. One’s name was dragged through the mud. I knew my husband would destroy me if I tried to go. And I couldn’t leave Esmé. He—Anthony—had left his own child behind, and I don’t think he ever really recovered from it.”

“So you never actually left your husband?” Ellie feels a sinking disappointment.

“I did, thanks to that file you found. He had this funny old secretary, Miss Thing.” She grimaces. “I never could remember her name. I suspect she was in love with him. And then, for some reason, she handed me the means to destroy him. He knew he couldn’t touch me once I had those files.”

She describes the meeting with the unnamed secretary, her husband’s shock when she revealed what she knew at his office.

“The asbestos files.” They had seemed so innocuous in Ellie’s flat, their power dimmed by age and hindsight.

“Of course nobody knew about asbestos then. We thought it was wonderful stuff. It was a terrible shock to discover that Laurence’s company had destroyed so many lives. That was why I set up the foundation when he died. To help the victims. Here.” She reaches into a bureau and pulls out a pamphlet. It details a legal-help scheme for those suffering work-related mesothelioma. “There’s not much money left in the fund now, but we do still offer legal help. I have friends in the profession who provide their services for free, here and abroad.”