When the coffee arrived, she realized she hadn’t put pen to notepad for almost forty minutes.
“Don’t you love the sound of them, though?” she’d said, as they left the restaurant and headed back toward the literary festival. It was late in the year and the winter sun had dipped below the low buildings of the quieting high street. She had drunk too much, had reached the point at which her mouth would race off defiantly before she had worked out what she should say. She hadn’t wanted to leave the restaurant.
“Which ones?”
“Spanish. Mostly Italian. I’m sure it’s why I love Italian opera, and I can’t stand the German ones. All those hard, guttural noises.” He had considered this, and his silence unnerved her. She began to stutter: “I know it’s terribly unfashionable, but I love Puccini. I love that high emotion. I love the curling r, the staccato of the words . . .” She tailed away as she heard how ridiculously pretentious she sounded.
He paused in a doorway, gazed briefly up the road behind them, then turned back to her. “I don’t like opera.” He had stared at her directly as he said it. As if it was a challenge. She felt something give, deep in the pit of her stomach. Oh, God, she thought.
“Ellie,” he said, after they had stood there for almost a minute. It was the first time he had called her by name. “Ellie, I have to pick up something from my hotel before I go back to the festival. Would you like to come with me?”
Even before he shut the bedroom door behind them, they were on each other, bodies pressed together, mouths devouring, locked together as their hands performed the urgent, frantic choreography of undressing.
Afterward she would look back on her behavior and marvel as if at some kind of aberration seen from afar. In the hundreds of times she had replayed it, she had rubbed away the significance, the overwhelming emotion, and was left only with details. Her underwear, everyday, inappropriate, flung across a trouser press; the way they had giggled insanely on the floor afterward underneath the multipatterned synthetic hotel quilt; how he had cheerfully, and with inappropriate charm, handed back his key to the receptionist later that afternoon.
He had called two days later, as the euphoric shock of that day was segueing into something more disappointing.
“You know I’m married,” he said. “You read my cuttings.”
I’ve Googled every last reference to you, she told him silently.
“I’ve never been . . . unfaithful before. I still can’t quite articulate what happened.”
“I blame the quiche,” she quipped, wincing.
“You do something to me, Ellie Haworth. I haven’t written a word in forty-eight hours.” He paused. “You make me forget what I want to say.”
Then I’m doomed, she thought, because as soon as she had felt his weight against her, his mouth on hers, she had known—despite everything she had ever said to her friends about married men, everything she had ever believed—that she required only the faintest acknowledgment from him of what had happened for her to be lost.
A year on, she still hadn’t begun to look for a way out.
He comes back online almost forty-five minutes later. In this time she has left her computer, fixed herself another drink, wandered the flat aimlessly, peering at her skin in a bathroom mirror, then gathering up stray socks and hurling them into the laundry basket. She hears the ping of a message and hurls herself into her chair.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so long. Hope to speak tomorrow.
No mobile-phone calls, he had said. Mobile bills were itemized.
Are you in hotel now? she types rapidly. I could call you in your room. The spoken word was a luxury, a rare opportunity. God, but she just needed to hear his voice.
Got to go to a dinner, gorgeous. Sorry—behind already. Later x.
And he is gone.
She stares at the empty screen. He will be striding off through the hotel foyer now, charming the reception staff, climbing into whatever car the festival has organized for him. Tonight he will give a clever off-the-cuff speech over dinner and then be his usual bemused, slightly wistful self to those lucky enough to sit at his table. He will be out there, living his life to the full, when she seems to have put hers perennially on hold.
What the hell is she doing?
“What the hell am I doing?” she says aloud, hitting the off button. She shouts her frustration at the bedroom ceiling, flops down on her vast, empty bed. She can’t call her friends: they’ve endured these conversations too many times, and she can guess what their response will be—what it can only be. The irony is, if it had been any of them, she would have said exactly the same thing.
She sits on the sofa, flicks on the television. Finally, glancing at the pile of papers at her side, she hauls them on to her lap, cursing Melissa. A miscellaneous pile, the librarian had said, cuttings that bore no date and had no obvious category—“I haven’t got time to go through them all. We’re turning up so many piles like this.” He was the only librarian under fifty down there. She wondered, fleetingly, why she’d never noticed him before.
“See if there’s anything that’s of use to you.” He had leaned forward conspiratorially. “Throw away whatever you don’t want, but don’t say anything to the boss. We’re at the stage now when we can’t afford to go through every last bit of paper.”
It soon becomes apparent why: a few theater reviews, a passenger list for a cruise ship, some menus from celebratory newspaper dinners. She flicks through them, glancing up occasionally at the television. There’s not much here that’ll excite Melissa.
Now she’s leafing through a battered file of what looks like medical records. All lung disease, she notes absently. Something to do with mining. She’s about to tip the whole lot into the bin when a pale blue corner catches her eye. She tugs at it with her index finger and thumb and pulls out a hand-addressed envelope. It’s been opened, and the letter inside is dated October 4, 1960.
My dearest and only love. I meant what I said. I have come to the conclusion that the only way forward is for one of us to make a bold decision.
I am not as strong as you. When I first met you, I thought you were a fragile little thing. Someone I had to protect. Now I realize I had us all wrong. You are the strong one, the one who can endure living with the possibility of a love like this, and the fact that we will never be allowed it.
I ask you not to judge me for my weakness. The only way I can endure is to be in a place where I will never see you, never be haunted by the possibility of seeing you with him. I need to be somewhere where sheer necessity forces you from my thoughts minute by minute, hour by hour. I cannot do that here.
I am going to take the job. I’ll be at Platform 4 Paddington at 7:15 on Monday evening, and there is nothing in the world that would make me happier than if you found the courage to come with me.
If you don’t come, I’ll know that whatever we might feel for each other, it isn’t quite enough. I won’t blame you, my darling. I know the past weeks have put an intolerable strain on you, and I feel the weight of that keenly. I hate the thought that I could cause you any unhappiness.
I’ll be waiting on the platform from a quarter to seven. Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.
Your
B.
Ellie reads it a second time, and finds her eyes welling inexplicably with tears. She can’t take her eyes off the large, looped handwriting; the immediacy of the words springs out to her more than forty years after they were written. She turns it over, checks the envelope for clues. It’s addressed to PO Box 13, London. It could be a man or a woman. What did you do, PO Box 13? she asks silently.
Then she gets up, replaces the letter carefully in the envelope, and walks over to her computer. She opens the mail file and presses refresh. Nothing since the message she had received at seven forty-five.
Got to go to a dinner, gorgeous. Sorry—behind already. Later x
Chapter 17
Tuesday lunch. Red Lion? Any good? John x
She waits for twenty minutes before he arrives, all cold air and apologies. A radio interview had gone on longer than he’d expected. He’d bumped into a sound engineer he’d known at university who wanted to catch up. It would have been rude to rush away.
But not rude to leave me sitting in a pub, she replies silently, but she doesn’t want to upset the mood, so she smiles.
“You look lovely,” he says, touching the side of her face. “Had your hair done?”
“No.”
“Ah. Just habitually lovely, then.” And, with one sentence, his lateness is forgotten.
He’s wearing a dark blue shirt and a khaki jacket; she had once teased him that it was a writer’s uniform. Understated, muted, expensive. It’s the outfit she imagines him in when she’s not with him. “How was Dublin?”
“Hurried. Harried.” He unwinds his scarf from his neck. “I have this new publicist, Ros, and she seems to think it her duty to pack something into every last fifteen-minute slot. She’d actually allocated me loo breaks.”
She laughs.
“Are you drinking?” He motions to a waiter, having spotted her empty glass.
“White wine.” She hadn’t been planning to have more: she’s trying to cut down, but now he’s here and her stomach has those knots that only alcohol can loosen.
He chats on about his trip, the books sold, the changes in the Dublin waterfront. She watches him as he talks. She’d read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, colored by what you thought of them. It gave her comfort on the mornings when she woke up puffy-faced after drinking too much, or with eyes pixellated from lack of sleep.
“Not working today, then?”
She hauls herself back into the conversation. “It’s my day off. I worked last Sunday, remember? But I’m going to pop into the office anyway.”
“What are you working on?”
“Oh, nothing very exciting. I found an interesting letter and wanted to have a root around in the archive in case there were more like it.”
“A letter?”
“Yes.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Nothing to tell, really.” She shrugs. “It’s old. From 1960.” She doesn’t know why she’s being reticent, but she would feel strange showing him the raw emotion on the page. She’s afraid he might think she had some hidden reason for showing it to him.
“Ah. Strictures were so much firmer then. I love writing about that period. It’s so much more effective for creating tension.”
“Tension?”
“Between what we want and what we’re allowed.”
She looks at her hands. “Yup. I know all about that.”
“The pushing against boundaries . . . all those rigid codes of conduct.”
“Say that again.” Her eyes meet his.
“Don’t,” he murmurs, grinning. “Not in a restaurant. Bad girl.”
The power of words. She gets him every time.
She feels the pressure of his leg against hers. After this they will return to her flat, and she will have him to herself for at least an hour. It isn’t enough, it never is, but the thought of it, his body against hers, is already making her giddy.
“Do you . . . still want to eat?” she asks slowly.
“That depends . . .”
Their eyes linger on each other. For her there is nothing in the bar but him.
He shifts in his chair. “Oh, before I forget, I’m going to be away from the seventeenth.”
“Another tour?” His legs are enclosing hers under the table. She struggles to focus on what she’s saying. “Those publishers are keeping you busy.”
“No,” he says, his voice neutral. “Holiday.”