The Last Letter from Your Lover

The briefest pause. And there it is. An actual pain, something like a punch, just under her ribs. Always the softest part of her.

“Nice for you.” She pulls her legs back. “Where are you going?”

“Barbados.”

“Barbados.” She can’t help the surprise in her voice. Barbados. Not camping in Brittany. Not some distant cousin’s cottage in rain-soaked Devon. Barbados doesn’t suggest the drudgery of a family holiday. It suggests luxury, white sand, a wife in a bikini. Barbados suggests a treat, a destination that implies their marriage is still of value. It suggests they might have sex.

“I don’t suppose there will be Internet access, and the phone will be difficult. Just so you know.”

“Radio silence.”

“Something like that.”

She doesn’t know what to say. She feels quietly furious with him, while conscious that she has no right to be. What has he ever promised her, after all?

“Still. There’s no such thing as a holiday with small children,” he says, taking a swig of his drink. “Just a change of venue.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff you have to cart around. Bloody prams, high chairs, nappies . . .”

“I wouldn’t know.”

They sit in silence until the wine arrives. He pours her a glass, hands it to her. The silence expands, becomes overwhelming, catastrophic.

“I can’t help the fact that I’m married, Ellie,” he says eventually. “I’m sorry if it hurts you, but I can’t not go on holiday because—”

“—it makes me jealous,” she finishes. She hates the way it makes her sound. Hates herself for sitting there like some sulking teenager. But she’s still absorbing the significance of Barbados, the knowledge that for two weeks she will be trying not to imagine him making love to his wife.

This is where I should walk away, she tells herself, picking up her glass. This is where any sensible person pulls together the remnants of their self-respect, announces that they deserve more, and walks off to find someone who can give them a whole self, not snatched lunchtimes and haunted, empty evenings.

“Do you still want me to come back to yours?”

He is watching her carefully, his whole face an apology, etched with the understanding of what he’s doing to her. This man. This minefield. “Yes,” she says.

There is a hierarchy in newspaper offices, and librarians are somewhere near the bottom. Not quite as low as canteen staff or security guards, but nowhere near the columnists, editors, and reporters who compose the action section, the face of the publication. They are support staff, invisible, undervalued, there to do the bidding of those who are more important. But no one seems to have explained this to the man in the long-sleeved T-shirt. “We’re not taking requests today.” He points up at a handwritten notice taped to what had been the counter.

Sorry—no access to archive until Monday.

Most requests can be answered online—pls try their first, and x3223 in an emergency.

When she looks up again, he’s gone.

She might have been offended, but she’s still thinking about John, the way he shook his head as he pulled his shirt back over his head an hour previously. “Wow,” he had said, tucking the tail into his waistband. “I’ve never had angry sex before.”

“Don’t knock it,” she had replied, made flippant by temporary release. She was lying on top of the duvet, staring out through the skylight at the gray October clouds. “It’s better than angry no-sex.”

“I liked it.” He had leaned over and kissed her. “I quite like the idea of you using me. A mere vehicle for your pleasure.”

She had thrown a pillow at him. He had been wearing that look, his face somehow softened, the look he’d worn when he was still locked into her. The look he’d worn when he was hers.

“Do you think it would be easier if the sex wasn’t so good?” she asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

“Yes. And no.”

Because you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the sex?

She had pushed herself upright, suddenly awkward. “Right,” she had said briskly. She had kissed his cheek, and then, for good measure, his ear. “I need to get to the office. Lock the door on your way out.” She padded into the bathroom.

Conscious of his surprise, she had closed the door behind her and turned on the cold tap so that it gushed noisily down the plughole. She perched on the rim of the bath and listened to him walking through to the living room, perhaps to get his shoes, then the footfall outside the door.

“Ellie? Ellie?”

She didn’t respond.

“Ellie, I’m going now.”

She waited.

“I’ll speak to you soon, gorgeous.” He rapped twice on the door, and then he was gone.

She had sat there for almost ten minutes after she’d heard the front door slam.

The man reappears as she’s about to leave. He’s carrying two teetering boxes of files and is about to push open a door with his rear and disappear again. “Still here?”

“You’ve spelt ‘there’ wrong.” She points at the notice.

He glances at it. “Just can’t get the staff these days, can you?” He turns toward the door.

“Don’t go! Please!” She leans over the counter, brandishes the folder he’d given her. “I need to look at some of your 1960s newspapers. And I wanted to ask you something. Can you remember where you found that stuff you gave me?”

“Roughly. Why?”

“I . . . There was something in it. A letter. I thought it might make a good feature if I could flesh it out a little.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t do it now. Sorry—we’re flat out with the move.”

“Please, please, please! I need to get something together by the end of the weekend. I know you’re really busy, but I only need you to show me. I’ll do the rest.”

He has untidy hair, and his long-sleeved T-shirt is tracked with dust. An unlikely librarian—he looks as if he should be surfing on books, rather than stacking them.

He blows out his cheeks, dumps the box on the end of the counter. “Okay. What kind of letter?”

“It’s this.” She pulls the envelope out of her pocket.

“Not a lot to go on,” he says, glancing at it. “A PO box and an initial.”

He’s curt. She wishes she hadn’t made that crack about the spelling. “I know. I just thought if you had any more in there, I might be able to—”

“I haven’t got time to—”

“Read it,” she urges. “Go on. Just read it . . .” She tails off as she remembers she doesn’t know his name. She’s worked there for two years and she doesn’t know any of the librarians’ names.

“Rory.”

“I’m Ellie.”

“I know who you are.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Down here we like to be able to put a face to a byline. Believe it or not, we talk to each other, too.” He looks at the letter. “I’m pretty busy—and personal correspondence isn’t the kind of thing we hold on to. I don’t even know how it ended up in there.” He pushes it back to her, looks her in the eye. “That’s t-h-e-r-e.”

“Two minutes.” She shoves it at him. “Please, Rory.”

He takes the envelope from her, pulls out the letter, and reads, lingering. He finishes, and looks up at her.

“Tell me you aren’t interested.”

He shrugs.

“You are.” She grins. “You are.”

He flips open the counter and motions her through with an expression of resignation. “I’ll have the newspapers you want on the counter in ten minutes. I’ve been putting all the loose stuff in garbage bags for throwing away, but yes, come on through. You can plow through them, and see if you can put anything else together. But don’t tell my boss. And don’t expect me to help.”

She’s there for three hours. She forgets the 1960 newspaper file, and instead sits in the corner of the dusty basement, barely noticing as men pass her carrying boxes marked “Election 67,” “Train Disasters,” or “June – July 1982.” She works through the garbage bags, peeling apart reams of dusty paper, sidetracked by advertisements for cold cures, tonics, and long-forgotten cigarette brands, her hands blackened with dust and old printing ink. She sits on an upturned crate, stacking the papers around her in chaotic piles, searching for something smaller than A3, something handwritten. She’s so lost in it that she forgets to check her mobile phone for messages. She even forgets, briefly, the hour she had spent at home with John that normally would have stamped itself on her imagination for several days afterward.

Above, what remains of the newsroom is rumbling on, digesting and spewing out the day’s news, its newslists changing again and again within the hour, whole stories written and discarded, according to the latest digital alterations of the newswires. In the dark corridors of the basement, it might as well have been happening on a different continent.

At almost five thirty Rory appears with two polystyrene cups of tea. He hands one to her, blowing on his own as he leans against an empty filing cabinet. “How’d you get on?”

“Nothing. Plenty of innovative health tonics, or cricket-match results from obscure Oxford colleges, but no devastating love letters.”

“It was always going to be a long shot.”

“I know. It was just one of those . . .” She lifts her tea to her lips. “I don’t know. I read it and it stayed with me. I wanted to know what happened. How’s the packing going?”

He sits on a crate a few feet from her. His hands are ingrained with dust, and there’s a smudge on his forehead.

“Nearly there. I can’t believe my boss wouldn’t let the professionals handle this.”

The chief librarian had been at the newspaper for as long as anyone could remember, and was legendary for being able to pinpoint the date and copy of any newspaper from the most vague description.

“Why not?”

Rory sighed. “He was worried they’d put something in the wrong place or lose a box. I keep telling him it’s all going to end up digitally recorded anyway, but you know how he is about hard copies . . .”

“How many years’ worth of newspapers?”

“I think it’s eighty of filed newspapers, and something like sixty of clippings and associated documents. And the scary thing is, he knows where every last one belongs.”

She begins to move some of the papers back into a garbage bag. “Perhaps I should tell him about this letter. He could probably tell me who wrote it.”

Rory whistles. “Only if you don’t mind giving it back. He can’t bear to let go of a single thing. The others have been sneaking the real junk out after he’s gone home, or we’d have to fill several more rooms with it. If he knew I’d given you that file of old papers, he’d probably sack me.”

She grimaces. “Then I’ll never know,” she says theatrically.

“Know what?”

“What happened to my star-crossed lovers.”

Rory considers this. “She said no.”

“Oh, you old romantic.”

“She had too much to lose.”

She cocks her head at him. “How do you know it was addressed to a she?”

“Women didn’t have jobs then, did they?”

“It’s dated 1960. It’s hardly the bloody suffragettes.”

“Here. Give it to me.” He holds out his hand for the letter. “Okay, so maybe she had a job. But I’m sure it said something about going on a train. I should think a woman would be much less likely to say she was headed off to a new job.” He reads it again, pointing at the lines. “He’s asking her to follow him. A woman wouldn’t have asked a man to follow her. Not then.”