The Last Letter From Your Lover (45 page)

Jennifer Stirling is standing in the middle of the room, wearing a dressing gown, her hair standing up on one side. “Look at me,” she says despairingly. “What a fright. What an absolute fright. I couldn’t sleep last night, and then I finally dropped off some time after five and I slept right through my alarm and missed my hair appointment.”

Ellie is staring at her. She has never seen her look like this. Anxiety radiates from her. Without makeup her skin looks childlike, her face vulnerable. “You—you look fine.”

“I rang my daughter last night, you know, and I told her a little of it. Not all. I told her I was due to meet a man I had once loved and hadn’t seen since I was a girl. Was that a terrible lie?”

“No,” says Ellie.

“You know what she e-mailed me this morning? This.” She thrusts a printed sheet, a facsimile from an American newspaper, about a couple from New Jersey who married after a fifty-year gap in their relationship. “What am I supposed to do with that? Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?” Her voice crackles with nerves.

“What time are you meeting him?”

“Midday. I’ll never be ready. I should cancel.”

Ellie gets up and puts the kettle on. “Go and get dressed. You’ve got forty minutes. I’ll drive you,” she says.

“You think I’m ridiculous, don’t you?” It’s the first time she has seen Jennifer Stirling look anything other than the most composed woman in the entire universe. “A ridiculous old woman. Like a teenager on her first date.”

“No,” says Ellie.

“It was fine when it was just letters,” Jennifer says, barely hearing her. “I could be myself. I could be this person he remembered. I was so calm and reassuring. And now . . . The one consolation I have had in all of this was knowing there was this man out there who loved me, who saw the best in me. Even through the awfulness of our last meeting I’ve known that in me he saw something he wanted more than anything else in the world. What if he looks at me and is disappointed? It’ll be worse than if we’d never met again.
Worse
.”

“Show me the letter,” Ellie says.

“I can’t do this. Don’t you think that sometimes it’s better not to do something?”

“The letter, Jennifer.”

Jennifer picks it up from the sideboard, holds it for a moment, then offers it to her.

Dearest Jennifer,

Are old men supposed to cry? I sit here reading and rereading the letter you sent, and I struggle to believe that my life has taken such an unexpected, joyous turn. Things like this are not meant to happen to us. I had learned to feel gratitude for the most mundane gifts: my son, his children, a good life, if quietly lived. Survival. Oh, yes, always survival.

And now you. Your words, your emotions, have induced a greed in me. Can we ask for so much? Do I dare see you again? The Fates have been so unforgiving, some part of me believes that we cannot meet. I’ll be felled by illness, hit by a bus, swallowed whole by the Thames’s first sea monster. (Yes, I still see life in headlines.)

The last two nights I have heard your words in my sleep. I hear your voice, and it makes me want to sing. I remember things I’d thought I’d forgotten. I smile at inopportune moments, frightening my family and sending them running for the dementia diagnosis.

The girl I saw last was so broken; to know that you made such a life for yourself has challenged my own view of the world. It must be a benevolent place. It has taken care of you and your daughter. You cannot imagine the joy that has given me. Vicariously. I cannot write more. So I venture, with trepidation: Postman’s Park. Thursday. Midday?

Your Boot X

Ellie’s eyes have filled with tears. “You know what?” she says. “I really don’t think you need to worry.”

Anthony O’Hare sits on a bench in a park he hasn’t visited for almost forty-four years with a newspaper he won’t read and realizes, with surprise, that he can recall the details of every commemorative tile.

Mary Rogers, stewardess of the
Stella,
self-sacrificed by
giving up her life-belt and voluntarily going down in
the sinking ship.

William Drake lost his life in averting a serious accident
to a lady in Hyde Park whose horses were unmanageable
through the breaking of the carriage pole.

Joseph Andrew Ford, saved six persons from a fire in
Grays Inn Road but in his last heroic act he was
scorched to death.

He has been sitting here since eleven forty. It is now seven minutes past twelve.

He lifts his watch to his ear and shakes it. Deep in his heart he didn’t believe this could happen. How could it? If you spend long enough in a newspaper archive, you see that the same stories repeated themselves over and over again: wars, famines, financial crises, loves lost, families divided. Death. Heartbreak. There are few happy endings. Everything I have had has been a bonus, he tells himself firmly, as the minutes creep past. It is a phrase that, over the years, has become achingly familiar to him.

The rain is heavier and the little park has emptied. Only he is sitting in the shelter. In the distance he sees the main road, the cars sluicing their way along, sending sprays of water across the unwary.

It is a quarter past twelve.

Anthony O’Hare reminds himself of all the reasons he should feel grateful. His doctor is amazed he is alive at all. Anthony suspects he has long sought to use him as a cautionary tale to other patients with liver damage. His rude health is a rebuke to the doctor’s authority, to medical science. He wonders, briefly, whether he might indeed travel. He doesn’t want to revisit Congo, but South Africa would be interesting. Maybe Kenya. He will go home and make plans. He will give himself something to think about.

He hears the screeching brakes of a bus, the shout of an angry bicycle courier. It’s enough to know that she had loved him. That she was happy. That had to be enough, didn’t it? Surely one of the gifts of old age was meant to be the ability to put things in perspective. He had once loved a woman who turned out to have loved him more than he’d known. There. That should be enough for him.

It is twenty-one minutes past twelve.

And then, as he is about to stand up, fold his newspaper under his arm, and head for home, he sees that a small car has stopped near the gates of the park. He waits, shielded from view by the gloom of the little shelter.

There is a slight delay. Then the door opens and an umbrella shoots open with an audible whoosh. It is up, and he can see a pair of legs beneath it, a dark mackintosh. As he watches, the figure ducks to say something to the driver, and the legs walk into the park and along the narrow pathway, making straight for the shelter.

Anthony O’Hare finds he’s standing up, straightening his jacket and smoothing his hair. He can’t take his eyes off those shoes, the distinctive upright walk, visible despite the umbrella. He takes a step forward, not sure what he’ll say, what he’ll do. His heart has lodged somewhere near his mouth. There is singing in his ears. The feet, clad in dark tights, stop in front of him. The umbrella lifts slowly. And there she is, still the same, startlingly, ridiculously the same, a smile playing at the corners of her lips as her eyes meet his. He cannot speak. He can only stare, as her name rings in his ears.

Jennifer
.

“Hello, Boot,” she says.

Ellie sits in the car and wipes the steam from the passenger window with her sleeve. She’s parked on a red route, no doubt drawing down the wrath of the parking gods, but she doesn’t care. She can’t move.

She watches Jennifer’s steady progress down the path, sees the slight hesitation in her step that tells of her fears. Twice the older woman had insisted they return home, that they were too late, that all was lost, useless. Ellie had pretended to be deaf. Sang
lalalalalalala
until Jennifer Stirling told her, with uncharacteristic crossness, that she was an “interminable, ridiculous” girl.

She watches Jennifer moving forward under her umbrella and is afraid that she’ll turn and run away. This thing has shown her that age is no protection against the hazards of love. She has listened to Jennifer’s words, spinning wildly between triumph and disaster, and heard her own endless analyses of John’s words, her own desperate need for something that was so transparently wrong to be right. Her own conjuring of outcomes, emotions, from words whose meanings she could only guess at.

But Anthony O’Hare is a different creature.

She wipes the window again and sees Jennifer slow, then stop. And he is stepping out of the shadows, taller somehow than he had appeared before, stooping slightly at the shelter’s entrance before he stands squarely before her. They face each other, the slim woman in the mackintosh and the librarian. Even from this distance Ellie can see they are now oblivious to the rain, to the neat little park, to the curious eyes of observers. Their eyes have locked, and they stand as if they could stand there for a thousand years. Jennifer lets her umbrella fall, dips her head to one side, such a small movement, and lifts her hand tenderly to his face. As Ellie watches, Anthony’s own hand lifts and presses her palm against his skin.

Ellie Haworth watches a moment longer, then moves away from the window, lets the steam obscure the view. She shuffles over to the driving seat, blows her nose, and starts the engine. The best journalists know when to bow out of a story.

The house is in a Victorian terraced street, its windows and doorways iced in white masonry, the mismatched selection of blinds and curtains telling of the varied ownership within. She turns off the ignition, climbs out of the car, and walks up to the front door, gazing at the names on the two bells. It is only his name on the ground floor. She’s a little surprised; she had assumed he wouldn’t own a flat outright. But then, what does she know of his life before the newspaper? Nothing at all.

The article is in a large brown envelope, with his name on the front. She pushes it through the door, letting the letterbox clap loudly. She walks back to the front gate, climbs up, and sits on the brick pillar that supports it, her scarf pulled up around her face. She has become very good at sitting. She has discovered there is joy in letting the world move around her. It does so in the most unexpected ways.

“You spelled my name wrong. It’s R-u-a-r-i-d-h.”

She glances behind her, and he’s propped against the door frame, the newspaper in his hand. “I got a lot of things wrong.”

He is wearing the same long-sleeved T-shirt he had on the first time they spoke, soft from years of use. She remembers she liked the way he wasn’t fussy about his clothes. She knows how that T-shirt feels under her fingers.

“Nice piece,” he says, holding the newspaper up. “ ‘Dear John: Fifty Years of Love’s Last Letters.’ I see you’re the golden girl of Features again.”

“For now. Actually,” she says, “there’s one in there that I wrote myself. It’s something I would have said. Had I had the chance.”

It’s as if he hasn’t heard her. “And Jennifer let you use that Paddington letter.”

“Anonymously. Yes. She was great. I told her the whole thing, and she was great.” His face is even, untroubled.