The Last Letter from Your Lover

She would send no letter. What was there to say, other than what she had already said? He’ll forgive me in time, she told herself. He’ll have a good life.

She tried to shut her mind to the obvious question: How would she live? How could she carry on, knowing what she now knew? Her eyes had reddened again. She pulled her handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed them again, turning away so that she wouldn’t attract attention. Perhaps she would pay a quick visit to her doctor, after all. Just a little help to get her through the next couple of days.

Her attention was drawn to the tweed-coated figure walking across the grass toward the play park. The woman’s feet tramped determinedly forward with a kind of mechanical regularity, despite the muddiness of the grass. She realized, with surprise, that it was her husband’s secretary.

Moira Parker walked right up to her and stood so close that Jennifer had to take a step backward. “Miss Parker?”

Her lips were tightly compressed, her eyes bright with purpose. “Your housekeeper told me where you were. May I have a quick word?”

“Um . . . yes. Of course.” She turned briefly. “Darlings? Dottie? Esmé? I’ll just be over here.”

The children looked up, then resumed digging.

They walked a few paces, Jennifer positioning herself so that she could see the little girls. She had promised the Moncrieffs’ nanny she would have Dorothy home by four, and it was nearly a quarter to. She pasted on a smile. “What is it, Miss Parker?”

Moira reached into a battered handbag and wrenched out a fat folder.

“This is for you,” she said brusquely.

Jennifer took it from her. She opened it, and immediately placed her hand on top of the papers as the wind threatened to whip them away.

“Don’t lose any of them.” It was an instruction.

“I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand. What are these?”

“They are the people he has paid off.”

When Jennifer looked blank, Moira continued, “Mesothelioma. Lung disease. They are workers he paid off because he wanted to hide the fact that working for him has given them terminal illnesses.”

Jennifer lifted a hand to her head. “What?”

“Your husband. The ones who have already died are at the bottom. Their families had to sign legal waivers that stopped them saying anything in order to get the money.”

Jennifer struggled to keep up with what the woman was saying. “Died? Waivers?”

“He got them to say he wasn’t responsible. He paid them all off. The South Africans got hardly anything. The factory workers here were more expensive.”

“But asbestos doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s just troublemakers in New York who are trying to blame him. Laurence told me.”

Moira didn’t seem to be listening. She ran her hand down a list on the top sheet. “They’re all in alphabetical order. You can speak to the families, if you want. Most of their addresses are at the top. He’s terrified that the newspapers will get hold of it all.”

“It’s just the unions . . . He told me . . .”

“Other companies are having the same problem. I listened in on a couple of telephone conversations he had with Goodasbest in America. They’re funding research that makes asbestos look harmless.”

The woman was speaking so fast that Jennifer’s head reeled. She glanced at the two children, now throwing handfuls of sand at each other.

Moira Parker said pointedly: “You do realize it would ruin him if anyone found out what he’d done. It’ll come out eventually, you know. It’ll have to. Everything does.”

Jennifer held the folder gingerly, as if it, too, might be contaminated. “Why are you giving this to me? Why on earth do you think I’d want to do anything that might harm my husband?”

Moira Parker’s expression changed and became almost guilty. Her lips had pursed into a thin red line. “Because of this.” She pulled out a creased piece of paper and thrust it into Jennifer’s hand. “It came a few weeks after your accident. All those years ago. He doesn’t know I kept it.”

Jennifer unfolded it, the wind whipping it against her fingers. She knew the handwriting.

I swore I wouldn’t contact you again. But six weeks on, and I feel no better. Being without you—thousands of miles from you—offers no relief at all. The fact that I am no longer tormented by your presence, or presented with daily evidence of my inability to have the one thing I truly desire, has not healed me. It has made things worse. My future feels like a bleak, empty road.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say, darling Jenny. Just that if you have any sense at all that you made the wrong decision, this door is still wide open.

And if you feel that your decision was the right one, know this at least: that somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Your

B.

Jennifer stared at the letter as the blood drained from her face. She glanced at the date. Almost four years ago. Just after the accident. “Did you say Laurence had this?”

Moira Parker looked at the ground. “He made me shut down the post-office box.”

“He knew Anthony was still alive?” She was shaking.

“I don’t know about any of that.” Moira Parker hoisted up her collar. She managed to look disapproving.

A cold stone had settled inside Jennifer. She felt the rest of herself harden around it.

Moira Parker clipped her handbag shut. “Anyway, do what you want with it all. He can go hang for all I care.”

She was still muttering to herself as she began to walk back across the park. Jennifer sank onto a bench, ignoring the two children, who were now joyfully rubbing sand into each other’s hair. She read the letter again.

She took Dorothy Moncrieff home to her nanny, and asked Mrs. Cordoza if she would walk Esmé to the sweet shop. “Buy her a lollipop, and perhaps a quarter of a pound of boiled sweets.” She stood at the window to watch them go down the road, her daughter’s every step a little bounce of anticipation. As they turned the corner, she opened the door to Laurence’s study, a room she rarely entered, and from which Esmé was banned, lest her inquisitive little fingers presume to displace one of its many valuable items.

Afterward she was not sure why she had even gone in there. She had always hated it: the gloomy mahogany shelves, full of books he had never read, the lingering smell of cigar smoke, the trophies and certificates for achievements she could not recognize as such—“Round Table Businessman of the Year,” “Best Shot, Cowbridge Deer Stalk 1959,” “Golfing Trophy 1962.” He rarely used it: it was an affectation, a place he promised his male guests where they might “escape” the women, a refuge in which he professed to find peace.

Two comfortable armchairs stood on each side of the fireplace, their seats barely dented. In eight years a fire had never been lit in the grate. On the sideboard the cut-glass tumblers had never been filled with fine whiskey from the decanter that stood beside them. The walls were lined with photographs of Laurence shaking hands with fellow businessmen, visiting dignitaries, the South African trade minister, the duke of Edinburgh. It was a place for other people to see, yet another reason for the men to admire him. Laurence Stirling, lucky bugger.

Jennifer stood in the doorway beside the caddy of expensive golf clubs, the shooting stick in the corner. A knot, tight and hard, had formed in her chest, just at the point of her windpipe where air was meant to expand her lungs. She realized she could not breathe. She picked up a golf club and walked into the center of the room. A small sound escaped her, like the gasp of someone ending a long race. She lifted the club above her head, as if to imitate a perfect swing, and let it go so that the full force met the decanter. Glass splintered across the room, and then she swung again, at the walls, the photographs shattering in their frames, the dented trophies knocked from their stands. She swung at the leather-bound books, the heavy glass ashtrays. She hit fiercely, methodically, her slim frame fueled by an anger that even now continued to build in her.

She beat the books from their cases, sent the frames flying from the mantelpiece. She brought the club down like an ax, splintering the heavy Georgian desk, then sent it whistling sideways. She swung until her arms ached and her whole body was beaded with sweat, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts. Finally, when there was nothing left to break, she stood in the center of the room, her shoes crunching on broken glass, wiping a sweaty frond of hair off her forehead as she surveyed what she had done. Lovely Mrs. Stirling, sweet-tempered Mrs. Stirling. Even, calm, tamped down. Her fire extinguished.

Jennifer Stirling dropped the bent club at her feet. Then she wiped her hands on her skirt, picked out a small shard of glass, which she dropped neatly on the floor, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Mrs. Cordoza was sitting in the kitchen with Esmé when Jennifer announced that they were going out again. “Does the child not want her tea? She’ll be hungry.”

“I don’t want to go out,” Esmé chimed in.

“We won’t be long, darling,” she said coolly. “Mrs. Cordoza, you can take the rest of the day off.”

“But I—”

“Really. It’s for the best.”

She scooped up her daughter, the suitcase she had just packed, the sweets in the brown-paper bag, ignoring the housekeeper’s perplexity. Then she was outside, down the steps and hailing a taxi.

She saw him even as she opened the double doors, standing outside his office, talking to a young woman at his desk. She heard a greeting, heard her own measured response, and was dimly surprised that she could be responsible for such a normal exchange.

“Hasn’t she grown!”

Jennifer looked down at her daughter, who was stroking her string of pearls, then at the woman who had spoken. “Sandra, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, Mrs. Stirling.”

“Would you mind terribly letting Esmé have a little play on your typewriter while I nip in to see my husband?”

Esmé was delighted to be let loose on the keyboard, cooed and fussed over by the women who immediately surrounded her, delighted by a legitimate diversion from work. Then Jennifer pushed her hair off her face and went to his office. She walked into the secretary’s area, where he was standing.

“Jennifer.” He raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“A word?” she said.

“I have to go out at five.”

“It won’t take long.”

He shepherded her into his own office, closing the door behind him, and motioned her toward the chair. He seemed mildly irritated when she declined to sit and sank heavily into his own leather chair.

“Well?”

“What did I do to make you hate me so much?”

“What?”

“I know about the letter.”

“What letter?”

“The one you intercepted at the post office four years ago.”

“Oh, that,” he said dismissively. He wore the expression of someone who had been reminded that he had forgotten to pick up some item from the grocer.

“You knew, and you let me think he was dead. You let me think I was responsible.”

“I thought he probably was. And this is all history. I can’t see the point of dragging it up again.” He leaned forward and pulled a cigar from the silver box on his desk.

She thought briefly of the dented one in his study, shimmering with broken glass. “The point is, Laurence, that you’ve punished me day after day, let me punish myself. What did I ever do to you to deserve that?”

He threw a match into the ashtray. “You know very well what you did.”