The Last Letter From Your Lover, Page 27

  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.

  John is on the step behind her, a bottle of champagne and a ridiculously large bunch of flowers under one arm. "I'm not here," he says. "I'm in Somerset, giving a lecture to a writers' group, who are talentless and include at least one interminable bore." He stands there as she catches her breath. "You can say something--as long as it's not 'Go away.' "

  She's mute.

  He puts the flowers and champagne on the step and pulls her into his arms. His kiss has the warmth of his car. "I've been sitting over there for almost half an hour. I started to panic that you weren't coming home at all."

  Everything inside her melts. She drops her bag, feels his skin, his weight, his size, and allows herself to fall against him. He takes her cold face in his warm hands. "Happy birthday," he says, when they finally pull apart.

  "Somerset?" she says, a little giddy. "Does that mean . . . ?"

  "All night."

  It's her thirty-second birthday, and the man she loves is there with champagne and flowers and is going to spend all night in her bed.

  "So, can I come in?" he says.

  She frowns at him in a way that says, Do you really need to ask? Then she picks up the flowers, the champagne, and heads upstairs.

  Chapter 19

  "Ellie? May I have a word?"

  She's sliding her bag under her desk, her skin still moist from the shower she had not half an hour previously, her thoughts still elsewhere. Melissa's voice, from the glass office, is hard, a brutal reentry into real life.

  "Of course." She nods and smiles obligingly. Someone has left a coffee for her; it's lukewarm, has obviously been there some time. There is a note underneath it, addressed to "Jayne Torvill," that reads: "Lunch?"

  She has no time to digest this. She has whipped off her coat, is walking into Melissa's office, noting with dismay that the features editor is still standing. She perches on a chair and waits as Melissa walks slowly round her desk and sits down. She's wearing a pair of velvety black jeans and a black polo-neck, and has the toned arms and stomach of someone who does several hours of Pilates every day. She sports what the fashion pages would call "statement jewelry," which Ellie assumes is just a trendy way of saying "big."

  Melissa lets out a little sigh and stares at her. Her eyes are a startling violet, and Ellie wonders briefly whether she's wearing colored contact lenses. They're the exact shade of her necklace. "This isn't a conversation I'm entirely comfortable having, Ellie, but it's become unavoidable."

  "Oh?"

  "It's nearly a quarter to eleven."

  "Ah. Yes, I--"

  "I appreciate that Features is considered the more relaxed end of the Nation, but I think we're generally agreed that a quarter to ten is pretty much the absolute latest I want my staff at their desks."

  "Yes, I--"

  "I like to give my writers a chance to prepare themselves for conference. That gives them time to read the day's newspapers, check the Web sites, talk, inspire, and be inspired." She swivels a little in her seat, checks an e-mail. "It's a privilege to be in conference, Ellie. A chance a lot of other writers would be very glad to have. I'm finding it hard to see how you can possibly be prepared to a professional degree if you're skidding in here minutes beforehand."

  Ellie's skin prickles.

  "With wet hair."

  "I'm very sorry, Melissa. I had to wait in for a plumber, and--"

  "Let's not, Ellie," she says quietly. "I'd rather you didn't insult my intelligence. And unless you're going to be able to convince me that you have a plumber in attendance almost every other day of the week, I'm afraid I have to conclude that you're not taking this job very seriously."

  Ellie swallows.

  "Our Web presence means there's no place to hide on this newspaper anymore. Every writer's performance can be judged not just by the quality of their work on our print pages, but by the number of hits their stories get online. Your performance, Ellie," she consults a piece of paper in front of her, "has dropped by almost forty percent in a year."

  Ellie can say nothing. Her throat dries. The other editors and writers are congregating outside Melissa's office, clutching oversize notepads and polystyrene cups. She watches them glance through the glass at her, some curious, some vaguely embarrassed, as if they know what is happening to her. She wonders, briefly, if her work has been a wider topic of conversation and feels humiliated.

  Melissa is leaning across her desk. "When I took you on, you were hungry. You were ahead of the game. It was why I picked you above any number of other regional reporters who, frankly, would have sold their grandmothers to be in your position."

  "Melissa, I've--"

  "I don't want to know what's going on in your life, Ellie. I don't want to know if you have personal problems, if someone close to you has died, if you're in mountains of debt. I don't even particularly want to know if you're seriously ill. I just want you to do the job you're paid to do. You must know by now that newspapers are unforgiving. If you don't pull in the stories, we don't get the advertising or, indeed, the circulation figures. If we don't get those things, we're all out of a job, some of us sooner than others. Am I making myself clear?"

  "Very clear, Melissa."

  "Good. I don't think there's any point in you coming to conference today. Get yourself sorted out, and I'll see you in the meeting tomorrow. How's that love-letters feature coming along?"

  "Good. Yes." She's standing, trying to look as if she knows what she's doing.

  "Right. You can show me tomorrow. Please tell the others to come in on your way out."

  At a little after twelve thirty she runs the four flights of stairs down to the library, her mood still dark, the joys of the previous evening forgotten. The library is like an empty warehouse. The shelves are now bare around the counter, the misspelled paper notice ripped off, only two sides of Scotch tape remaining. Behind the second set of swing doors she can hear furniture being dragged. The chief librarian is running a finger down a list of figures, his glasses tilted at the end of his nose.

  "Is Rory around?"

  "He's busy."

  "Can you tell him I can't meet him for lunch?"

  "I'm not sure where he is."

  She feels anxious about Melissa noticing she's not at her desk.

  "Well, are you likely to see him? I need to tell him that I've got to go out on this feature. Can you tell him I'll p
op down at the end of the day?"

  "Perhaps you should leave him a note."

  "But you said you didn't know where he was."

  He looks up, his brow lowered. "Sorry, but we're in the final stages of our move. I don't have time to be passing on messages." He sounds impatient.

  "Fine. I'll just head up to Personnel and waste their time asking for his mobile number, shall I? Just so I can make sure I don't stand him up and waste his time."

  He holds up a hand. "I'll tell him if I see him."

  "Oh, don't trouble yourself. So sorry to have bothered you."

  He turns slowly toward her and fixes her with what her mother might have termed an old-fashioned look. "We in the library may be considered something not far short of an irrelevance by you and your ilk, Miss Haworth, but at my age I stop a little short of office dogsbody. Forgive me if that inconveniences your social life."

  She remembers, with a start, Rory's claim that the librarians can all put a face to a byline. She doesn't know this man's name.

  She blushes as he disappears through the swing doors. She's cross with herself for behaving like a stroppy teenager, cross with the old man for being so uncooperative. Cross that Melissa's icy assessment means she can't have a cheerful lunch outside on a day that had started so well. John had stayed till almost nine o'clock. The train from Somerset didn't get in until a quarter to eleven, he said, so there was no point in racing off. She had cooked him scrambled eggs on toast--almost the only thing she can cook well--and sat there in bed blissfully stealing bits from his plate as he ate it.

  They had spent a whole night together only once before, back in the early days of their relationship when he had claimed to be obsessed with her. Last night, it had been like those early days: he had been tender, affectionate, as if his impending holiday had made him extra sensitive to her feelings.

  She didn't talk about it: if this past year has taught her one thing, it is to live in the present. She immersed herself in every moment, refusing to cloud it by considering the cost. The fall would come--it always did--but she usually collected enough memories to cushion it a little.

  She stands on the stairs, thinking of his bare, freckled arms wrapped around her, his sleeping face on her pillow. It had been perfect. Perfect. A small voice wonders whether one day, if only he'd think about it hard enough, he'll realize that their whole life could be like that.

  It's a short taxi ride to the post office in Langley Street. Before she leaves the office, she takes care to tell Melissa's secretary. "Here is my mobile number, if she wants me," she says, her voice dripping with professional courtesy. "I'll be about an hour."

  Although it's lunchtime, the post office isn't busy. She walks to the front of the nonexistent queue and waits obediently for the electronic voice to call, "Till number four, please."

  "Can I talk to someone about PO boxes, please?"

  "Hang on." The woman disappears, then reemerges, pointing for her to move to the end, where there is a door. "Margie will meet you down there."

  A young woman sticks her head around the door. She's wearing a name tag, a large gold chain with a crucifix, and a pair of heels so high that Ellie wonders how she can bear to stand in them, let alone spend a whole day working in them. She smiles, and Ellie thinks briefly how rare it is that anyone smiles at you in the city anymore.

  "This is going to sound a little strange," Ellie begins, "but is there a way of finding out who rented a PO box years ago?"

  "They can change pretty frequently. When are you talking about?" Ellie wonders how much to tell her, but Margie has a nice face, so she adopts her confidential tone. She reaches into her bag and pulls out the letters, carefully enclosed in a clear plastic folder. "It's a bit of a strange one. It's some love letters I found. They're addressed to a PO box here, and I want to return them."

  She has Margie's interest. It's probably a nice change from benefit payments and catalog returns.

  "PO box thirteen." Ellie points at the envelope.

  Margie's face reveals recognition. "Thirteen?"

  "You know the one?"

  "Oh, yes." Margie's lips are compressed, as if she's considering how much she's allowed to say. "Apart from a short break, that PO box has been held by the same person for, ooh, almost forty years. Not that that's particularly unusual in itself."

  "So what is?"

  "The fact that it's never had a letter. Not one. We've contacted the holder lots of times to give her the chance to shut it down. She says she wants to keep it open. We say it's up to her if she wants to waste her money." She peers at the letter. "Love letter, is it? Oh, how sad."

  "Can you give me her name?" Ellie's stomach tenses. This could be a better story even than she'd envisaged.

  The woman shakes her head. "Sorry, I can't. Data protection and all that."

  "Oh, please!" She thinks of Melissa's face if she can come back with a Forbidden Love That Lasted Forty Years. "Please. You have no idea how important this is to me."

  "Sorry, I really am, but it could cost me more than my job."

  Ellie swears under her breath and glances behind her at the queue that has suddenly appeared. Margie is turning back to her door.

  "Thank you anyway," Ellie says, remembering her manners.

  "No problem." Behind them a small child is crying, trying to escape from the restraints of its pram.

  "Hang on." Ellie's rustling in her bag.

  "Yes?"

  She grins. "Could I--you know--leave a letter in it?"

  Dear Jennifer,

  Please excuse the intrusion, but I have come across some personal correspondence that I believe may be yours, and I'd welcome the opportunity to return it to you.

  I can be contacted on the numbers below.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ellie Haworth

  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.