The Last Letter from Your Lover

Jennifer, meanwhile, would bathe and dress. She might pop next door for coffee with Yvonne, take her mother for a light lunch, or hail a taxi and go into the center of town to do a little Christmas shopping. She made sure she had always returned by early afternoon. It was at that point that she usually found some other task for Mrs. Cordoza: a bus trip to buy curtain material; a search for a particular type of fish that Laurence had said he might like. Once, she gave the housekeeper an afternoon off—anything to grant herself an hour or two alone in the house, buy time to search for more letters.

In the two weeks that had passed since she’d discovered the first, she had found two more. They, too, were addressed to a post-office box, but were clearly for her. The same handwriting, the same passionate, direct way of speaking. The words seemed to echo some sound deep within. They described events that, while she couldn’t remember them, held a deep resonance, like the vibrations of a huge bell long after it had stopped ringing.

None was signed other than with “B.” She had read them, and read them again until the words were imprinted on her soul.

Dearest girl,

It’s 4 a.m. I can’t sleep, knowing he is returning to you tonight. It is the road to madness, but I lie here imagining him lying next to you, his license to touch you, to hold you, and I would do anything to make that freedom mine.

You were so angry with me when you found me drinking at Alberto’s. You called it an indulgence, and I’m afraid my response was unforgivable. Men hurt themselves when they lash out, and as cruel and stupid as my words may have been, I think you know your words hurt me more. Felipe told me I was a fool when you left, and he was right.

I am telling you this because I need you to know that I’m going to be a better man. Hah! I can barely believe I’m writing such a cliché. But it’s true. You make me want to be a better version of myself. I have sat here for hours, staring at the whiskey bottle, and then, not five minutes ago, I finally got up and poured the whole darned lot into the sink. I will be a better person for you, darling. I want to live well, wish for you to be proud of me. If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them onto my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

Take him to you, if you must, my love, but don’t love him. Please don’t love him.

Yours selfishly,

B.

Her eyes had welled with tears at these last lines. Don’t love him. Please don’t love him. Everything had become a little clearer to her now: she had not imagined the distance she felt between herself and Laurence. It was the result of her having fallen in love with someone else. These were passionate letters: this man had opened himself to her in a way that Laurence never could. When she read his notes, her skin prickled, her heart raced. She recognized these words. But for all that she knew them, there was still a great hole at their heart.

Her mind buzzed with questions. Had the affair been going on for long? Was it recent? Had she slept with this man? Is that why things felt so physically stilted with her husband?

And, most incomprehensible of all: Who was this lover?

She had gone over the three letters forensically, searching for clues. She could think of no one she knew whose name began with B, save Bill, or her husband’s accountant, whose name was Bernard. She knew without a shadow of doubt that she had never been in love with him. Had B seen her at the hospital, in the days when her mind had not been her own, when everyone had been indistinct around her? Was he watching at a distance now? Waiting for her to get in touch? He existed somewhere. He held the key to everything.

Day after day, she tried to imagine her way back into her former self: this woman of secrets. Where would the Jennifer of old have hidden letters? Where were the clues to her other, secret existence? Two of the letters she had uncovered in books, another folded neatly in a balled-up stocking. All were in places her husband would never have thought of looking. I was clever, she thought. And then, a little more uncomfortably: I was duplicitous.

“Mother,” she said, one lunchtime, over a sandwich on the top floor of John Lewis, “who was driving when I had my accident?”

Her mother had glanced up sharply. The restaurant around them was packed with customers, laden with shopping bags and heavy coats, the dining room thick with chatter and the clatter of crockery.

She glanced around before she turned back to Jennifer, as if the question was almost subversive. “Darling, do we really need to revisit that?”

Jennifer sipped her tea. “I know so little about what happened. It might help if I could put the pieces together.”

“You nearly died. I really don’t want to think about it.”

“But what happened? Was I driving?”

Her mother inspected her plate. “I don’t recall.”

“And if it wasn’t me, what happened to the driver? If I was hurt, he must have been, too.”

“I don’t know. How would I? Laurence always looks after his staff, doesn’t he? I assume he wasn’t badly hurt. If he needed treatment, I dare say Laurence would have paid for it.”

Jennifer thought of the driver who had picked them up when she left the hospital: a tired-looking man in his sixties with a neat mustache and a balding head. He had not looked as if he had suffered any great trauma—or as if he might have been her lover.

Her mother pushed away the remains of her sandwich. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will.” But she knew she wouldn’t. “He doesn’t want me to dwell on things.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s quite right, darling. Perhaps you should heed his advice.”

“Do you know where I was going?”

The older woman was flustered now, a little exasperated by this line of questioning. “I’ve no idea. Shopping, probably. Look, it happened somewhere near Marylebone Road. I believe you hit a bus. Or a bus hit you. It was all so awful, Jenny darling, we could only think about you getting better.” Her mouth closed in a thin line, which told Jennifer that the conversation was at an end.

In a corner of the canteen, a woman wrapped in a dark green coat was gazing into the eyes of a man who traced her profile with a finger. As Jennifer watched, she took his fingertip between her teeth. The casual intimacy of the gesture sent a little electric shock through her. No one else seemed to have noticed the pair.

Mrs. Verrinder wiped her mouth with her napkin. “What does it really matter, dear? Car accidents happen. The more cars there are, the more dangerous it seems to be. I don’t think half of the people on the roads can drive. Not like your father could. Now, he was a careful driver.”

Jennifer wasn’t listening.

“Anyway, you’re all fixed up now, aren’t you? All better?”

“I’m fine.” Jennifer turned a bright smile on her mother. “Just fine.”

When she and Laurence went out in the evenings now, to dinner or for drinks, she found herself looking at their wider circle of friends and acquaintances with new eyes. When a man’s focus lingered on her a little longer than it should have, she found herself unable to tear her gaze away. Was it him? Was there some meaning behind his pleasant greeting? Was that a knowing smile?

There were three possible men, if B was in fact a nickname. There was Jack Amory, the head of a motor-spares company, who was unmarried and kissed her hand ostentatiously whenever they met. But he did it almost with a wink to Laurence, and she couldn’t work out if this was a double bluff.

There was Reggie Carpenter, Yvonne’s cousin, who sometimes made up the numbers at dinner. Dark-haired, with tired, humorous eyes, he was younger than she imagined her letter-writer to be, but he was charming, and funny, and seemed always to ensure that he was sitting at her side when Laurence wasn’t there.

And then there was Bill, of course. Bill, who told jokes as if they were only for her approval, who laughingly declared he adored her, even in front of Violet. He definitely had feelings for her. But could she have had feelings for him?

She began to pay more attention to her appearance. She made regular visits to the hairdresser, bought some new dresses, became chattier, “more your old self,” as Yvonne said approvingly. In the weeks after the accident she had hidden behind her girlfriends, but now she asked questions, quizzed them politely, but with some determination, seeking the chink in the armor that might lead to some answers. Occasionally she dropped clues into conversations, inquiring whether anyone might like a whiskey, then scanning the men’s faces for a spark of recognition. But Laurence was never far away, and she suspected that even if they had picked up on her clues, they could have conveyed little to her in response.

If her husband noticed a particular intensity in her conversations with their friends, he didn’t remark on it. He didn’t remark on much. He hadn’t approached her once, physically, since the night they had argued. He was polite but distant. She knew she should feel worse about it than she did, but increasingly she wanted the freedom to retreat into her private parallel world, where she could retrace her mythical, passionate romance, see herself through the eyes of the man who adored her.

Somewhere, she told herself, B was still out there. Waiting.

“These are to sign, and on the filing cabinet there are several gifts that arrived this morning. There’s a case of champagne from Citroën, a hamper from the cement people in Peterborough, and a box of chocolates from your accountants. I know you don’t like soft centers, so I was wondering if you’d like me to hand them round the office. I know Elsie Machzynski is particularly partial to fondants.”

He barely looked up. “That will be fine.” Moira observed that Mr. Stirling’s thoughts were far from Christmas gifts.

“And I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve gone ahead and organized the bits and pieces for the Christmas party. You decided it would be better held here than in a restaurant, now that the company is so much larger, so I’ve asked caterers to lay on a small buffet.”

“Good. When is it?”

“The twenty-third. After we finish for the day. That’s the Friday before we break up.”

“Yes.”

Why should he seem so preoccupied? So miserable? Business had never been better. Their products were in demand. Even with the credit squeeze predicted by the newspapers, Acme Mineral and Mining had one of the healthiest balance sheets in the country. There had been no more of the troublemaking letters, and those she had received the previous month still lingered, unseen by her boss, in her top drawer.

“I also thought you might like to—”

He glanced up suddenly at a sound outside, and Moira turned, startled, to see what he was looking at. There she was, walking through the office, her hair set in immaculate waves, a little red pillbox hat perched on her head, the exact shade of her shoes. What was she doing here? Mrs. Stirling gazed around her, as if she was looking for someone, and then Mr. Stevens, from Accounts, walked up to her, holding out his hand. She took it, and they chatted briefly before they looked across the office toward where she and Mr. Stirling were standing. Mrs. Stirling raised a hand in greeting.

Moira’s hand was reaching for her hair. Some women managed always to look as if they had stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine, and Jennifer Stirling was one of them. Moira didn’t mind: she had always preferred to focus her energies on work, on more substantial achievements. But it was hard when the woman walked into the office, her skin glowing from the cold outside, two fiery diamond studs glinting in her ears, not to feel the tiniest bit dull in comparison. She was like a perfectly wrapped Christmas parcel, a glittering bauble.

“Mrs. Stirling,” Moira said politely.

“Hello,” she said.

“This is an unexpected pleasure.” Mr. Stirling stood to greet her, looking rather awkward but perhaps secretly pleased. Like an unloved student who had been approached by the school sweetheart.