She has specifically asked not to write for Books just now.
Dear Anthony,
Yes, it is me. Whatever me is, compared to the girl you knew. I’m guessing you know our journalist friend has spoken to me by now. I’m still struggling to comprehend what she has told me.
But in the Post Office box this morning, there was your letter. With the sight of your handwriting, forty years fell away. Does that make sense? The time that has passed shrank to nothing. I can barely believe I’m holding what you wrote two days ago, can hardly believe what it means.
She has told me a little about you. I sat and wondered, and hardly dared think that I may get the chance to sit and talk to you.
I pray that you are happy.
Jennifer
It’s the upside of newspapers: your writing stock can rise stratospherically, twice as quickly as it fell. Two good stories and you can be the talk of the newsroom, the center of chatter and admiration. Your story will be reproduced on the Internet, syndicated to other publications in New York, Australia, South Africa. They liked the letters piece, Syndication told her. Exactly the kind of thing they can find a market for. Within forty-eight hours she has had e-mails and a few handwritten letters from readers, confiding their own stories. Within a week, a literary agent has rung, wondering if she has enough of the letters to turn into a book. They have penciled in a date for lunch.
Melissa wants a follow-up feature, using the new material. It is, she says, the perfect example of connecting with your readers. She uses the words “interactivity” and “added value.” As far as Melissa’s concerned, Ellie is back in the game. She suggests Ellie’s name in conference when someone mentions an idea that needs a good thousand words. Twice, this week, her short features have crossed to the front page. It’s the newspaper staffer’s equivalent of winning the lottery. Her increased visibility means she’s more in demand. She sees stories everywhere. She’s magnetic: contacts, features, fly to her. She’s at her desk by nine, works till late in the evening. This time, she knows not to waste it.
Her space on the great oval desk is gleaming and white, and on it sits a seventeen-inch nongloss high-resolution screen, and a telephone with her name, clearly marked, on the extension number.
Rupert no longer offers to make her tea.
Dear Jennifer,
I apologize for this tardy reply. Please excuse what may seem to you like reticence. I have not put pen to paper for many years, except to pay bills or record some complaint. I don’t think I know what to say. For decades now I have lived only through other people’s words; I reorder them, archive them, duplicate and rank them. I keep them safe. I suspect I have long forgotten my own. The author of those letters seems like a stranger to me.
You sound so different from the girl I saw at the Regent Hotel. And yet, in all the best ways, you are so evidently the same. I am glad you are well. I am glad I have had the chance to tell you this. I would ask to meet you, but I am afraid you would find me much removed from the man you remember. I don’t know.
Forgive me.
Anthony
Several days previously Ellie had heard her name shouted a little breathlessly as she made her way down the stairs of the old building for the last time. She had turned to find Anthony O’Hare at the top. He was holding out a piece of paper bearing a scribbled address.
She had skipped up again, to save him further effort.
“I was thinking, Ellie Haworth,” he said, and his voice was full of joy, trepidation, and regret, “don’t send a letter. It’s probably better if you just, you know, go and see him. In person.”
Dearest, dearest Boot,
My voice has exploded in me! I feel I have lived half a century not being able to speak. All has been damage limitation, an attempt to carve out what was good from what felt destroyed, ruined. My own silent penitence for what I had done. And now . . . now? I have talked poor Ellie Haworth’s ear off until she stares at me in stunned silence and I can see her thinking: Where is the dignity in this old woman? How can she sound so like a fourteen-year-old? I want to talk to you, Anthony. I want to talk to you until our voices croak and we can barely speak. I have forty years of talking to do.
How can you say you don’t know? It cannot be fear. How could I be disappointed in you? After all that has happened, how could I feel anything other than acute joy at simply being able to see you again? My hair is silver, not blond. The lines on my face are emphatic, determined things. I ache, I rattle with supplements, and my grandchildren cannot believe I have ever been anything but prehistoric.
We are old, Anthony. Yes. And we do not have another forty years. If you are still in there, if you are prepared to allow me to paint over the vision you might hold of the girl you once knew, I will happily do the same for you.
Jennifer X
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.