The Last Letter From Your Lover, Page 35

  Cheryl was still sawing at him. "Why did you tell her he'd gone to Congo?"

  "You want me to tell her the truth? That he drank himself into a bloody coma?"

  Cheryl twisted the pen in her mouth, her eyes drifting across to the swinging office door. "But she looked so sad."

  "She should look bloody sad. She's the one who's caused him all the trouble."

  "But you can't--"

  Don's voice exploded into the newsroom. "The last thing that boy needs is her stirring things up again. Do you understand? I'm doing him a favor." He tore the note from the folder and hurled it into the bin.

  Cheryl stuck her pen behind her ear, gave her boss a hard look, and sashayed back to her desk.

  Don took a deep breath. "Right, can we get off O'Hare's bloody love life and on with this bloody dancing-priest story? Someone? Shove some copy over sharpish or we're going to be sending the paperboys out with a load of blank pages tomorrow."

  In the next bed a man was coughing. It went on and on, a polite, staccato tattoo, as if something was caught at the back of his throat. He did it even in his sleep. Anthony O'Hare let the sound recede to some distant recess of his consciousness, just like everything else. He knew the tricks now. How to make things disappear.

  "You have a visitor, Mr. O'Hare."

  The sound of curtains being pulled back, light flooding in. Pretty Scottish nurse. Cool hands. Every word she said to him was spoken in the tone of someone about to bestow a gift. I'm just going to give you a little injection, Mr. O'Hare. Shall I get someone to help you to the lavatory, Mr. O'Hare? You have a visitor, Mr. O'Hare.

  Visitor? For a moment hope floated, and then he heard Don's voice through the curtains and remembered where he was.

  "Don't mind me, sweetheart."

  "I certainly won't," she said primly.

  "Lie-in, is it?" A moon-sized ruddy face somewhere by his feet.

  "Funny." He spoke into his pillow, pushing himself upright. His whole body ached. He blinked. "I need to get out of here."

  His vision cleared. Don was standing at the end of his bed, arms folded, resting on his stomach. "You're not going anywhere, sonny Jim."

  "I can't stay here." His voice seemed to come straight from his chest. It croaked and squeaked like a wooden wheel in a rut.

  "You're not well. They want to check your liver function before you go anywhere. You gave us all a fright."

  "What happened?" He could remember nothing.

  Don hesitated, perhaps trying to judge how much to say. "You didn't turn up at Marjorie Spackman's office for the big meeting. When nobody had heard from you by six p.m. I got a bad feeling, left Michaels in charge, and shot over to your hotel. Found you on the floor, not too pretty. You looked worse than you do now, and that's saying something."

  Flashback. The bar at the Regent. The wary eyes of the barman. Pain. Raised voices. An endless careening journey back to his room, clutching at walls, swaying upstairs. The sound of things crashing. Then nothing.

  "I hurt all over."

  "So you should. God knows what they did to you. You looked like a pincushion when I saw you last night."

  Needles. Urgent voices. The pain. Oh, Jesus, the pain.

  "What the hell is going on, O'Hare?"

  In the next bed, the man had started coughing again.

  "Was it that woman? She turn you down?" Don was physically uncomfortable discussing feelings. This manifested itself in a jiggling leg, in the way his hand ran backward and forward over his balding head.

  Don't mention her. Don't make me think about her face. "Not as simple as that."

  "Then what the hell is all this about? No woman's worth . . . this." Don's hand waved distractedly above the bed.

  "I--I just wanted to forget."

  "So go and sling your leg over someone else. Someone you can have. You'll get over it." Perhaps saying it would make it true.

  Anthony's silence lasted just long enough to contradict him.

  "Some women are trouble," Don added.

  Forgive me. I just had to know.

  "Moths to a flame. We've all been there."

  Forgive me.

  Anthony shook his head. "No, Don. Not like this."

  "It's always 'not like this' when it's your own--"

  "She can't leave him because he won't let her take the child." Anthony's voice, suddenly clear, cut through the curtained area. Just briefly, the man in the next bed stopped coughing. Anthony watched his boss grasp the implication of the sentence, the creeping frown of sympathy.

  "Ah. Tough."

  "Yes."

  Don's leg had begun to jiggle again. "Doesn't mean you had to try and kill yourself with drink. You know what they said? The yellow fever screwed your liver. Screwed it, O'Hare. One more drinking session like that, and you . . ."

  Anthony felt infinitely weary. He turned away on his pillow. "Don't worry. It won't happen again."

  For half an hour after he'd returned from the hospital, Don sat at his desk, thinking. Around him the newsroom was waking slowly, as it did every day, a sleeping giant spurred into reluctant life: journalists chatting on telephones, stories rising and falling on the newslists, pages formed and planned, the first being mocked up on the production desk.

  He rubbed his hand across his jaw, called over his shoulder toward the secretary's desk.

  "Blondie. Get me the number of thingy Stirling. The asbestos man."

  Cheryl listened in silence. Minutes later, she handed him the number she had scribbled down from the office Who's Who. "How is he?"

  "How'd you think?" He stubbed his pen on the desk a few times, still deep in thought. Then, as she walked back to her desk, he picked up the phone and asked the switchboard to put him through to Fitzroy 2286.

  He coughed a little before he spoke, like someone uncomfortable with using the telephone. "I'd like to speak to Jennifer Stirling, please."

  He could feel Cheryl watching him.

  "Can I leave a message? . . . What? She doesn't? Oh. I see." A pause. "No, it doesn't matter. I'm sorry to have troubled you." He put the phone down.

  "What happened?" Cheryl was standing over him. She was taller than him in her new heels. "Don?"

  "Nothing." He straightened up. "Forget I said anything. Go and get me a bacon sandwich, will you? And don't forget the ketchup. I can't eat it without."

  He screwed the scribbled number into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket at his feet.

  The grief was worse than if someone had died; at night it came in waves, relentless and astonishing in their power, hollowing him out. He saw her every time he closed his eyes, her sleepy-lidded pleasure, her expression of guilt and helplessness as she had caught sight of him in the hotel lobby. Her face told him they were lost, and that she already knew what she had done by telling him so.

  And she was right. He had felt anger, at first, that she should raise his hopes without telling him the truth of her situation. That she should force her way back into his heart so ruthlessly when there was no chance for them. What was the saying? It was the hope that would kill you.

  His feelings swung wildly. He forgave her. There was nothing to forgive. She'd done it because, like himself, she couldn't have not done it. And because it was the only bit of him she could reasonably hope to have. I hope the memory of it keeps you going, Jennifer, because it has destroyed me.

  He fought the knowledge that, this time, there really was nothing left for him. He felt physically weakened, left frail by his own disastrous behavior. His sharp mind had been hijacked, its lucid parts shredded, just the steady pulse of loss beating through it, the same relentless beat he had heard back in Leopoldville.

  She would never be his. They had come so close, and she would never be his. How was he supposed to live with that knowledge?

  In the small hours, he worked through a thousand solutions. He would demand that Jennifer get a divorce. He would do everything he could to make her happy without her child through the sheer strength of his wi
ll. He would hire the best lawyer. He would give her more children. He would confront Laurence--in his wilder dreams, he went for his throat.

  But Anthony had been for years a man's man, and even then some distant male part of him could not but feel what it must be like for Laurence: to know that his wife loved someone else. And then to have to hand over his child to the man who had stolen her. It had crippled Anthony, and he had never loved Clarissa like he loved Jennifer. He thought of his sad, silent son, his own constant ache of guilt, and knew that if he imposed that on another family, any happiness they gained would lie over a dark current of grief. He had destroyed one family; he could not be responsible for destroying another.

  He rang the girlfriend in New York and told her he wouldn't be returning. He listened to her astonishment and barely disguised tears with only a distant sense of guilt. He couldn't return there. He couldn't sink into the steady urban rhythms of life in New York, the days measured by journeys backward and forward to the UN building, because now they would be tainted by Jennifer. Everything would be tainted by Jennifer: her scent, her taste, that she would be out there, living, breathing, without him. It was worse, somehow, to know that she had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. He couldn't employ the necessary anger against her to propel himself away from thoughts of her.

  Forgive me. I just had to know.

  He needed to be in a place where he couldn't think. To survive, he had to be somewhere where survival was the only thing he could think about.

  Don picked him up two days later, on the afternoon that the hospital had agreed to discharge him, with appropriate liver-function results and dire threats of what would happen to him if he dared to drink again.

  "Where are we headed?" He watched Don load his small suitcase into the boot of his car and felt like a refugee.

  "You're coming to mine."

  "What?"

  "Viv says so." He didn't meet Anthony's eye. "She thinks you need some home comforts."

  You think I can't be left alone. "I don't think I--"

  "It's not up for discussion," Don said, and climbed into the driver's seat. "But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting."

  It was always disconcerting to see one's workmates in a domestic setting. Over the years, although he had met Viv--red-haired and as vivacious as Don was dour--at various work functions, Anthony had somehow seen Don, more than anyone, as someone who physically inhabited the Nation. He was always there. That office, with its towering piles of paper, its scribbled notes and maps pinned haphazardly to walls, was his natural habitat. Don in his house with velvet slippers, his feet up on an overstuffed sofa, Don straightening ornaments or fetching pints of milk, went against the rules of nature.

  That said, there was something restful about being in his house. A mock-Tudor semi in the commuter belt, it was large enough that he didn't feel under anybody's feet. The children were grown and gone, and aside from framed photographs, there were no constant reminders of his own failure as a parent.

  Viv greeted him with kisses on both cheeks, and made no reference to where he had been. "I thought you boys might like to play golf this afternoon," she said.

  They did. Don was so hopeless at it that Anthony realized afterward it must have been the only thing his hosts could think of that the two men might do together that didn't involve drinking. Don didn't mention Jennifer. He was worried still, Anthony could tell. He made frequent references to Anthony being all right, to the resumption of normality, whatever that was supposed to be. There was no wine at lunch or supper.

  "So, what's the plan?" He was sitting on one of the sofas. In the distance they could hear Viv washing up, singing along to the wireless in the kitchen.

  "Back to work tomorrow," Don said. He was rubbing his stomach.

  Work. Part of him wanted to ask what that might be. But he didn't dare. He had failed the Nation once, was afraid to have it confirmed that this time he had done so conclusively.

  I've been talking to Spackman."

  Oh, Christ. Here it comes.

  "Tony, she doesn't know. Nobody upstairs knows."

  Anthony blinked.

  "It's just us on the desk. Me, Blondie, a couple of the subs. I had to ring them to tell them I wasn't coming back to work when we got you to hospital. They'll keep their mouths shut."

  "I don't know what to say."

  "That's a bloody change. Anyway." Don lit a cigarette, and blew a long plume of smoke. His eyes met Anthony's almost guiltily. "She agrees with me that we should send you back out."

  It took Anthony a beat to register what he was saying.

  "To Congo?"

  "You're the best man for the job."

  Congo.

  "But I need to know . . ." Don tapped his cigarette on an ashtray.

  "It's fine."

  "Let me finish. I need to know you're going to look after yourself. I can't be worrying."

  "No drinking. Nothing reckless. I just . . . I need to do the job."

  "That's what I thought." But Don didn't believe him--Anthony could see it in the sideways look. A short pause. "I would feel responsible."

  "I know."

  Clever man, Don. But Anthony couldn't reassure him. How could he? He wasn't sure how he was going to get through the next half an hour, let alone how he'd feel in the heart of Africa.

  Don's voice broke in again before the answer became overwhelming. He stubbed out his cigarette. "Football's on in a minute. Chelsea versus Arsenal. Fancy it?" He climbed heavily out of his chair and flicked on the mahogany-clad box in the corner. "I'll tell you one bit of good news. You can't get that bastard yellow fever again. When you've been as sick as you were, apparently you're immune."

  Anthony stared unseeing at the black-and-white screen. How do I make the rest of me immune?

  They were in the foreign editor's office. Paul de Saint, a tall, patrician man with swept-back hair and the air of a Romantic poet, was studying a map on the desk. "The big story's in Stanleyville. There are at least eight hundred non-Congolese being held hostage there, many in the Victoria Hotel, and perhaps a thousand more in the surrounding area. Diplomatic efforts to save them have so far failed. There's so much infighting between the rebels that the situation is changing by the hour, so it's near impossible to get an accurate picture. It's pretty woolly out there, O'Hare. Until maybe six months ago, I would have said the safety of any white man was guaranteed, whatever was going on with the natives. Now, I'm afraid, they seem to be targeting les colons . There are some fairly horrific stories coming out. Nothing we can put in the paper." He paused. "Rape is only the half of it."

  "How do I get in?"

  "There's our starting problem. I've been talking to Nicholls, and the best way is going to be via Rhodesia--or Zambia, as they're now calling the northern half. Our man there is trying to work out a land route for you, but many of the roads have been destroyed, and it'll take days."

  As he talked travel logistics with Don, Anthony let the conversation drift away from him and saw, with some gratitude, that not only had a whole half hour gone by in which he hadn't thought of her but that the story was pulling him in. He could feel nervous anticipation germinating in his belly, and was drawn to the challenge of getting across the hostile terrain. He felt no fear. How could he? What worse things could happen?

  He leafed through the files that de Saint's deputy handed him. The political background; the Communist aid to the rebels that had so enraged the Americans; the execution of the American missionary, Paul Carlson. He read the ground-level reports of what the rebels had done, and his jaw tightened. They took him back to 1960 and the turmoil of Lumumba's brief rule. He read them as if at a distance. He felt as if the man who had been out there before--the man so shattered by what he had seen--was someone he no longer recognized.

  "So, we'll book flights to Kenya tomorrow, yes? We've got a man on the inside at Sabena who'll let us know if there ar
e any internal flights to Congo. Otherwise it's drop at Salisbury airport and make your way across the Rhodesian border. Yes?"

  "Do we know which correspondents have made it there?"

  "There's not an awful lot coming out. I suspect communications are difficult. But Oliver has a piece in the Mail today, and I've heard the Telegraph is running big tomorrow."

  The door opened. Cheryl's face was anxious.

  "We're in the middle of something, Cheryl." Don sounded irritated.

  "Sorry," she said, "but your boy is here."

  It took Anthony several seconds to grasp that she was looking at him. "My boy?"

  "I've put him in Don's office."

  Anthony stood up, barely able to digest what he had heard. "Excuse me a moment," he said, and followed Cheryl out across the newsroom.

  There it was: the jolt he experienced on the few occasions he got to see Phillip, a kind of visceral shock at how much he had changed since the last visit, his growth a constant rebuke to his father's absence.

  In six months his son's frame had elongated by inches, tipped its way into adolescence, but not yet filled out. Hunched over himself, he resembled a question mark. He looked up as Anthony entered the room, and his face was blanched, his eyes red-rimmed.

  Anthony stood there, trying to work out the cause of the grief etched across his son's pale face, and some distant part of him wondered, Is it me again? Did he find out what I did to myself? Am I such a failure in his eyes?

  "It's Mother," Phillip said. He blinked furiously and wiped his nose with his hand.

  Anthony took a step closer. The boy unfurled and threw himself with unexpected force into his father's arms. Anthony felt himself gripped, Phillip's hands clutching at his shirt as if he would never let him go, and he allowed his own hand to fall gently onto his boy's head as sobs racked the thin body.

  The rain was so loud on the roof of Don's car that it almost drowned thought. Almost, but not quite. In the twenty minutes it had taken them to edge through the traffic on Kensington High Street, the two men had sat in silence, the only other sound Don's fervent drags on his cigarette.

  "Accident," Don said, staring at the snaking red taillights in front of him. "Must have been a big one. We should ring the newsroom." He made no effort to pull over by the telephone boxes.