The Last Letter From Your Lover (39 page)

He glances at her. “Hey,” he says neutrally. He’s headed for the Tube station and doesn’t slow his pace as he reaches the steps down into it.

“I wondered . . . do you fancy a quick drink?”

“I’m busy.”

“Where are you off to?” She has to lift her voice to be heard against the thunderous noise of feet, the Victorian acoustics of the underground system.

“The new building.”

They’re surrounded by commuters. Her feet are almost lifting off the ground as she’s borne down the stairs among the sea of people. “Wow. That must be some overtime.”

“No. Just helping the boss with a few final things so that he doesn’t wear himself out completely.”

“I saw him today.”

When Rory doesn’t reply, she adds, “He was nice to me.”

“Yeah. Well. He’s a nice man.”

She manages to walk alongside him until they reach the ticket barrier. He steps to one side to allow others to pass through.

“Silly, really,” she says. “You pass people every day without having a clue—”

“Look, Ellie, what do you want?”

She bites her lip. Around them the commuters separate like water, earphones on, some tutting audibly at the human obstacles in their path. She rubs at her hair, which is now damp. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. About the other morning.”

“It’s cool.”

“No, it’s not. But it’s . . . Look, what happened, it’s nothing to do with you, and I really like you. It’s just this is something that—”

“You know what? I’m not interested. It’s fine, Ellie. Let’s leave it at that.” He goes through the ticket barrier. She follows. She caught a glimpse of his expression before he turned, and it was horrible. She feels horrible.

She positions herself behind him on the escalator. Little pearls of water are dotted across his gray scarf, and she fights the urge to sweep them off. “Rory, I’m really sorry.”

He’s staring at his shoes. He glances at her, his eyes cold. “Married, huh?”

“What?”

“Your . . . friend. It was pretty obvious from what he said.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“I didn’t mean to fall in love.”

He lets out a short, unpleasant laugh. They have reached the bottom of the escalator. He picks up his pace, and she’s forced to run a little to keep up. The tunnel smells of stale air and burned rubber.

“I didn’t.”

“Rubbish—you make a choice. Everyone makes a choice.”

“So you’ve never been transported by something, never felt that pull?”

He faces her. “Of course I have. But if acting on it meant I was going to hurt someone else, I took a step back.”

Her face flames. “Well, aren’t
you
wonderful?”

“No. But you’re hardly a victim of circumstance. Presumably you knew he was married and chose to go along with it anyway. You had the choice to say no.”

“It didn’t feel like that.”

His voice lifts sarcastically. “ ‘It was bigger than both of us
.
’ I think you’ve been more affected by those love letters than you think.”

“Oh, well, good for you, Mr. Practical. Bully for you that you can turn your emotions on and off like taps. Yes, I let myself fall into it—okay? Immoral, yes. Ill-advised? Well, judging by your response, obviously. But I felt something magical for a bit and—and don’t worry, I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

“But you’re not the only one, are you? Every act has a consequence, Ellie. In my view the world divides into people who can see that, and make a decision accordingly, and those who just go for what feels good at the time.”

“Oh, Christ! Have you any idea how bloody pompous you sound?” She’s shouting now, barely conscious of the curious commuters who file past, fed into the tunnels of the District and Circle lines.

“Yes.”

“And no one in your world is allowed to make a mistake?”

“Once,” he says. “You can make a mistake once.”

He stares off into the distance, his jaw set, as if working out how much to say. Then he turns to face her. “I was on the other side, okay, Ellie? I loved someone who found someone else that she couldn’t resist. Something that was ‘bigger than both of them.’ Until, of course, he dumped her. And I let her back into my life, and she burned me a second time. So, yes, I do have an opinion on it.”

She’s rooted to the spot. There’s a rush of noise, a blast of hot, disturbed air as a train approaches.

Passengers surge forward.

“You know something?” he says, his voice lifting over the din. “I’m not judging you for falling in love with this man. Who knows? Perhaps he’s the love of your life. Perhaps his wife really would be better off without him. Perhaps the two of you really were
meant to be
. But you could have said no to me.” Suddenly she sees something unexpected, something raw and exposed, in his face. “That’s what I’m having trouble getting my head round. You could have said no to me. That would have been the right thing to do.”

He hops lightly into the packed carriage just as the doors close. It pulls away, with a deafening whine.

She watches his departing back in the illuminated window until it disappears.
The right thing for who?

Hey, babe,

Thought of you all weekend. How is uni? Barry says all birds who go to uni eventually find someone else, but I told him he was talking out of his backside. He’s just jealous. He went out with that girl from the estate agent’s on Tuesday and she blew him out after the main course. Just said she was going to the ladies’ and went!!! He said he sat there twenty minutes before he realized. We were all killing ourselves down at the Feathers . . .

Wish you were here, babe. Nights seem long without you. Write to me soon.

Clive XX

Ellie sits in the middle of her bed, a dusty cardboard box on her lap, the correspondence of her teenage years spread out around her. She is in bed at nine thirty, trying desperately to think of some way of salvaging the love-letters feature for Melissa without exposing Jennifer to public view. She thinks of Clive, her first love, a tree surgeon’s son who had gone to the same secondary school. They had agonized over whether she should go to university, sworn that it wouldn’t affect their relationship. They lasted about three months after she went to Bristol. She remembers how the appearance of his battered Mini in the car park outside her halls of residence morphed frighteningly swiftly from being glorious, a signal for her to spray on perfume and belt down the corridor, to a sinking feeling of dismay when she knew she no longer felt anything for him, except a sensation of being pulled back into a life she no longer wanted.

Dear Clive,

I have spent much of the night trying to work out how to do this in a way that is going to cause each of us as little pain as possible. But there is no easy way to.

Dear Clive,

This is a really difficult letter to write. But I have to come out and say that I

Dear Clive,

I’m really sorry but I don’t want you to come down anymore. Thanks for the good times. I hope we can still be mates.

Ellie

She fingers her crossed-out versions, folded in a neat pile among other correspondence. After he had received the final letter, he had driven 212 miles just to call her a bitch in person. She remembers being curiously untouched by it, perhaps because she had already moved on. At university, she had scented a new life far from the small town of her youth, far from the Clives, the Barrys, the Saturday nights at the pub, and a life where everyone not only knew you but what you’d done at school, what your parents did, the time you sang in the choir concert and your skirt fell down. You could only truly reinvent yourself far from home. On trips to see her parents, she still feels a little stifled by all that communal history.

She finishes her tea and wonders what Clive is doing now. He’ll be married, she thinks, probably happily; he was an easygoing sort. He’ll have a couple of children, and the high point of his weekend will still be Saturday nights at the pub with the lads he has known since school.

Now, of course, the Clives of this world won’t be writing letters. They’d text her. All right babe? She wonders whether she would have ended the relationship by mobile phone.

She sits very still. Looks around her at the empty bed, the old letters strewn across the duvet. She hasn’t read any of Jennifer’s since her night with Rory; they are somehow uncomfortably linked to his voice. She thinks of his face as he stood in the Tube tunnel.
You could have said no to me.
She remembers Melissa’s face, and tries not to think about the possibility of having to return to her old life. She could fail. She really could. She feels as if she’s balanced on a precipice. Change is coming.

And then she hears her phone chime. Almost relieved, she stretches across the bed for it, her knee sinking into the pile of pastel paper.

No reply?

She reads it again and types:

Sorry. Thought you didn’t want me to text you.

Things have changed. Say whatever you want now.

She murmurs the words aloud into the silence of the little room, hardly able to believe what she’s seeing. Is this what actually happens outside romantic comedies? Can these situations, the ones everyone counsels against, really work out? She pictures herself in the café on some unspecified future date, telling Nicky and Corrine:
Yes, of course he’ll be moving in here. Just till we can find somewhere bigger. We’ll have the children on alternate weekends.
She pictures him returning in the evenings, dropping his bag, kissing her lengthily in the hallway. It’s such an unlikely scenario that her mind spins. Is this what she wants? She scolds herself for her moment of doubt. Of course it is. She couldn’t have felt like this for so long if it isn’t.

Say whatever you want now.

Keep your cool, she tells herself. It may not be in the bag yet. And he’s disappointed you so many times.

Her hand drops to the little keys, hovers over them, undecided. She types,

Will do, but not like this. I’m happy that we will get to talk.

Then adds:

Finding this all a little hard to get my head round. But I missed

you too. Call me as soon as you get back. E xx

She’s about to put her phone on her bedside table when it chimes again.

Still love me?

Her breath stops briefly in her throat.

Yes.

She sends it almost before she’s thought about it. She waits a couple of minutes, but there’s no response. And, not sure whether she’s glad or sorry, Ellie lies back against her pillows and gazes, for a long time, out of her window into the empty black sky, watching the airplanes wink silently through the darkness toward unknown destinations.

Chapter 24

Rory feels a hand on his shoulder and pulls out one of his earphones.

“Tea.”

He nods, turns off the music, and shoves his MP3 player into his pocket. The lorries have finished now; only the newspaper’s own small delivery vans remain, scurrying backward and forward with forgotten boxes, small loads of things vital to the newspaper’s survival. It’s Thursday. On Sunday the last of the boxes will have been packed away, the last mugs and teacups transported. On Monday the
Nation
will start its new life in its new offices, and this building will be stripped for demolition. This time next year some shimmering glass and metal construction will be in its place.

Rory takes a seat at the back of the van beside his boss, who is contemplating the old black marble frontage of the building. The metal insignia of the newspaper, a carrier pigeon, is being dismantled from its plinth at the top of the steps.

“Strange sight, isn’t it?”

Rory blows on his tea. “Bit weird for you? After all this time?”

“Not really. Everything comes to an end eventually. There’s a bit of me that’s quite looking forward to doing something different.”

Rory takes a sip.

“It’s a strange thing, to spend your days among other people’s stories. I feel as if my own has been on hold.”

It’s like hearing a picture speak. So unlikely. So utterly compelling. Rory puts down his tea and listens. “Not tempted to write something yourself?”

“No.” His boss’s tone is dismissive. “I’m not a writer.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Travel, perhaps—maybe I’ll go backpacking like you.”

They both smile at the idea. They have worked together in near silence for months, rarely mentioning anything beyond the practical needs of the day. Now the fast-approaching end of their task has made them garrulous.

“My son thinks I should.”

He can’t hide the surprise in his voice. “I didn’t know you had a son.”

“And a daughter-in-law. And three very badly behaved grandchildren.”

Rory finds himself having to reassess his boss. He’s one of those people who gives off a solitary air, and it’s an effort to reposition him in his imagination as a family man.

“And your wife?”

“She died a long time ago.”

He says it without discomfort, but Rory still feels awkward, as if he has overstepped some mark. If Ellie was here, Rory thinks, she’d ask him straight out what happened to her.

If Ellie was here, Rory would have slunk off into a distant part of the library rather than talk to her. He dismisses her. He won’t think about her. He won’t think about her hair, her laughter, the way she frowns when she’s concentrating. The way she felt under his hands: uncharacteristically yielding. Uncharacteristically vulnerable.

“So, when are you going off on your travels?”

Rory hauls himself back from his thoughts and is handed a book, then another. This library’s like the Tardis: things keep turning up out of nowhere. “Gave notice yesterday. Just got to look up the flights.”

“Will you miss your girl?”

“She’s not my girl.”

“Just doing a good impression, eh? I thought you liked her.”

“I did.”

“I thought you two had a kind of shorthand.”

“Me too.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“She’s . . . more complicated than she looks.”

The older man smiles wryly. “I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t.”

“Yes . . . Well. I don’t like complications.”

“There’s no such thing as a life free of complications, Rory. We all end up making compromises in the end.”

“Not me.”

The librarian raises an eyebrow. There’s a small smile on his face.

“What?” Rory says. “
What?
You’re not going to give me some Waltons-family lecture about missed opportunities and how you wish you’d done things differently, are you?” His voice is louder, snappier, than he intended, but he can’t help himself. He starts to move boxes from one side of the van to the other. “It would have been pointless, anyway. I’m going away. I don’t need complications.”

“No.”

Rory shoots him a sideways look, registers the creeping smile. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me now. I need to remember you as a miserable old bugger.”

The miserable old bugger chuckles. “I wouldn’t dare. Come on. Let’s go and do a last check of the microfiche area and load up the tea stuff. Then I’ll buy you lunch. And then you can not tell me all about what happened between you and this girl you patently couldn’t care less about.”

The pavement outside Jennifer Stirling’s block is bleached a barnacle gray under the winter sun. A street sweeper is working his way along the curb, deftly picking up pieces of rubbish with a pair of pincers. Ellie wonders when she last saw a street sweeper in her part of London. Perhaps it’s considered too Sisyphean a task: her high street is a riot of takeaways and cheap bakeries, their red-and-white-striped paper bags floating merrily around the neighborhood, telling of yet another lunchtime orgy of saturated fat and sugar.

“It’s Ellie. Ellie Haworth,” she shouts into the entry phone, when Jennifer answers. “I left you a message. I hope it’s okay if I—”

“Ellie.” Her voice is welcoming. “I was just coming down.”

As the lift makes its unhurried way down the stories, she thinks about Melissa. Unable to sleep, Ellie had arrived at the
Nation
’s offices shortly after seven thirty. She needed to work out how to salvage the love-letters feature; rereading Clive’s communications to her has made her realize there’s no way she can return to her old life. She’ll make this feature work. She’ll get the rest of the information from Jennifer Stirling and somehow turn it around. She’s her old self; focused, determined. It helps her not think about how utterly confusing her personal life has become.

She had been shocked to discover Melissa already in the office. Features was otherwise empty, but for a silent cleaner, listlessly pushing a vacuum cleaner between the remaining desks, and Melissa’s door was propped open.

“I know, poppet, but Nina’s going to take you.” She had lifted a hand to her hair and was twisting a shining strand restlessly. The hair wove through her slim fingers, illuminated by the low winter sun, pulled, twisted, released.

“No, I told you on Sunday night. Do you remember? Nina’s going to take you there and pick you up afterward.... I know.... I know . . . but Mummy has to go to work. You know I have to work, sweetie—” She sat down, briefly rested her head in her hand so that Ellie struggled to hear.

“I know, I know. And I will come to the next one. But do you remember I told you we were moving our offices? And it’s very important? And Mummy can’t—”

There was a long silence.

“Daisy, darling, can you put Nina on? . . . I know. Just put Nina on for a minute.... Yes, I’ll speak to you afterward. Just put—” She glanced up, saw Ellie outside the office. Ellie turned away quickly, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping, and picked up her own phone, as if involved in some equally important call. When she looked up again, Melissa’s office door was closed. It was hard to tell, from that distance, but she might have been crying.

“Well, this is a nice surprise.” Jennifer Stirling is wearing a crisp linen shirt and a pair of indigo jeans.

I want to wear jeans when I’m sixty-something, Ellie thinks. “You said I could come back.”

“You certainly can. I must admit, it was a guilty pleasure unburdening myself last week. You remind me a little of my daughter, too, which is rather a treat for me. I do miss having her around.”

Ellie feels a ridiculous thrill of pleasure at being compared with the Calvin Klein woman in the photograph. She tries not to think about why she’s there. “As long as I’m not bothering you . . .”

“Not at all. As long as you’re not horribly bored by the ramblings of an old woman. I was going for a walk on Primrose Hill. Care to join me?” They walk, talk a little about the area, the places each has lived, Ellie’s shoes, which Mrs. Stirling professes to admire. “My feet are awful,” she says. “When I was your age we used to cram them into high heels every day. Your generation must be so much more comfortable.”

“Yes, but my generation never looked like you did.” She’s thinking of the picture of Jennifer as a new mother, the makeup and perfect hair.

“Oh, we didn’t really have a choice. It was a terrible tyranny. My husband wouldn’t have let me have my picture taken unless I was shipshape.” She seems lighter today, less bowed by the dredging of memories. She walks briskly, like someone much younger, and occasionally Ellie has to jog a little to keep up. “I’ll tell you something. A few weeks ago I went to the station to get a newspaper, and a girl was standing there in what were plainly her pajama bottoms and those enormous sheepskin boots. What do you call them?”

“Uggs.”

Jennifer’s voice is merry. “That’s it. Atrocious-looking things. And I watched her buy a pint of milk, her hair standing up at the back, and I was so horribly envious of her freedom. I stood there staring at her like an absolute madwoman.” She laughs at the memory. “Danushka, who runs the kiosk, asked me what on earth the poor girl had done to me. . . . I suppose, looking back, it was a terribly hemmed-in existence.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Jennifer’s mouth lifts slightly at the corners. “I suspect you’re going to.”

“Do you ever feel bad about what happened? Having an affair, I mean.”

“Are you asking if I regret hurting my husband?”

“I suppose so.”

“And is this . . . curiosity? Or absolution?”

“I don’t know. Probably both.” Ellie chews a fingernail. “I think my . . . John . . . may be about to leave his wife.”

There is a short silence. They are at the gates of Primrose Hill and Jennifer stops there. “Children?”

Ellie does not look up. “Yes.”

“That’s a great responsibility.”

“I know.”

“And you’re a little frightened.”

Ellie finds the words she hasn’t been able to say to anyone else. “I’d like to be sure I’m doing the right thing. That it’s going to be worth all the pain I’m about to cause.”

What is it about this woman that makes it impossible to keep back any truth? She feels Jennifer’s eyes on her, and wants, indeed, to be absolved. She remembers Boot’s words:
You make me want to be a better man.
She wants to be a better person. She doesn’t want to be walking here with half her mind wondering which bits of this conversation she’s likely to plunder and publish in a newspaper.

Years of listening to other people’s problems seem to have given Jennifer an air of wise neutrality. When she speaks, finally, Ellie senses she has chosen her words carefully. “I’m sure you’ll work it out between you. You just need to talk honestly. Painfully honestly. And you may not always get the answers you want. That was the thing I was reminded of when I reread Anthony’s letters after you left last week. There were no games. I never met anyone—before or afterward—that I could be quite so honest with.”

She sighs, beckons Ellie through the gates. They begin to walk up the path that will lead them to the top of the hill. “But there is no absolution for people like us, Ellie. You may well find that guilt plays a much larger part in your future life than you would like. They say passion burns for a reason, and when it comes to affairs, it’s not only the protagonists who are hurt. For my part, I do still feel guilty for the pain I caused Laurence. . . . I justified it to myself at the time, but I can see that what happened . . . hurt all of us. But . . . the person I have always felt most bad about is Anthony.”

“You were going to tell me the rest of the story.”

Jennifer’s smile is fading. “Well, Ellie, it’s not a happy ending.” She tells of an abortive trip to Africa, a lengthy search, conspicuous silence from the man who had previously never stopped telling her how he felt, and the eventual forging of a new life in London, alone.

“And that’s it?”

“In a nutshell.”

“And in all that time you never . . . there was never anyone else?”

Jennifer Stirling smiles again. “Not quite. I am human. But I will say that I never became emotionally involved with anyone. After Boot, I—I didn’t really want to be close to anyone else. There had been only him, for me. I could see that very clearly. And, besides, I had Esmé.” Her smile broadens. “A child really is a wonderful consolation.”

They have reached the top. The whole of north London stretches beneath them. They breathe deeply, scanning the distant skyline, hearing the traffic; the cries of dog walkers and errant children recede beneath them.

“Can I ask why you kept the PO box open for so long?”

Jennifer leans against the cast-iron bench, thinks before replying. “I suppose it must seem rather silly to you, but we had missed each other twice, you see, both times by a matter of hours. I felt it was my obligation to give it every chance. I suppose shutting down that box would have been admitting it was finally over.”

She shrugs ruefully. “Every year I’ve told myself it’s time to stop. The years crept by without my noticing how long it had been. But somehow I never have. I suppose I told myself it was a rather harmless indulgence.”