She had been shocked to discover Melissa already in the office. Features was otherwise empty, but for a silent cleaner, listlessly pushing a vacuum cleaner between the remaining desks, and Melissa’s door was propped open.
“I know, poppet, but Nina’s going to take you.” She had lifted a hand to her hair and was twisting a shining strand restlessly. The hair wove through her slim fingers, illuminated by the low winter sun, pulled, twisted, released.
“No, I told you on Sunday night. Do you remember? Nina’s going to take you there and pick you up afterward.... I know.... I know . . . but Mummy has to go to work. You know I have to work, sweetie—” She sat down, briefly rested her head in her hand so that Ellie struggled to hear.
“I know, I know. And I will come to the next one. But do you remember I told you we were moving our offices? And it’s very important? And Mummy can’t—”
There was a long silence.
“Daisy, darling, can you put Nina on? . . . I know. Just put Nina on for a minute.... Yes, I’ll speak to you afterward. Just put—” She glanced up, saw Ellie outside the office. Ellie turned away quickly, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping, and picked up her own phone, as if involved in some equally important call. When she looked up again, Melissa’s office door was closed. It was hard to tell, from that distance, but she might have been crying.
“Well, this is a nice surprise.” Jennifer Stirling is wearing a crisp linen shirt and a pair of indigo jeans.
I want to wear jeans when I’m sixty-something, Ellie thinks. “You said I could come back.”
“You certainly can. I must admit, it was a guilty pleasure unburdening myself last week. You remind me a little of my daughter, too, which is rather a treat for me. I do miss having her around.”
Ellie feels a ridiculous thrill of pleasure at being compared with the Calvin Klein woman in the photograph. She tries not to think about why she’s there. “As long as I’m not bothering you . . .”
“Not at all. As long as you’re not horribly bored by the ramblings of an old woman. I was going for a walk on Primrose Hill. Care to join me?” They walk, talk a little about the area, the places each has lived, Ellie’s shoes, which Mrs. Stirling professes to admire. “My feet are awful,” she says. “When I was your age we used to cram them into high heels every day. Your generation must be so much more comfortable.”
“Yes, but my generation never looked like you did.” She’s thinking of the picture of Jennifer as a new mother, the makeup and perfect hair.
“Oh, we didn’t really have a choice. It was a terrible tyranny. My husband wouldn’t have let me have my picture taken unless I was shipshape.” She seems lighter today, less bowed by the dredging of memories. She walks briskly, like someone much younger, and occasionally Ellie has to jog a little to keep up. “I’ll tell you something. A few weeks ago I went to the station to get a newspaper, and a girl was standing there in what were plainly her pajama bottoms and those enormous sheepskin boots. What do you call them?”
“Uggs.”
Jennifer’s voice is merry. “That’s it. Atrocious-looking things. And I watched her buy a pint of milk, her hair standing up at the back, and I was so horribly envious of her freedom. I stood there staring at her like an absolute madwoman.” She laughs at the memory. “Danushka, who runs the kiosk, asked me what on earth the poor girl had done to me. . . . I suppose, looking back, it was a terribly hemmed-in existence.”
“Can I ask you something?”
Jennifer’s mouth lifts slightly at the corners. “I suspect you’re going to.”
“Do you ever feel bad about what happened? Having an affair, I mean.”
“Are you asking if I regret hurting my husband?”
“I suppose so.”
“And is this . . . curiosity? Or absolution?”
“I don’t know. Probably both.” Ellie chews a fingernail. “I think my . . . John . . . may be about to leave his wife.”
There is a short silence. They are at the gates of Primrose Hill and Jennifer stops there. “Children?”
Ellie does not look up. “Yes.”
“That’s a great responsibility.”
“I know.”
“And you’re a little frightened.”
Ellie finds the words she hasn’t been able to say to anyone else. “I’d like to be sure I’m doing the right thing. That it’s going to be worth all the pain I’m about to cause.”
What is it about this woman that makes it impossible to keep back any truth? She feels Jennifer’s eyes on her, and wants, indeed, to be absolved. She remembers Boot’s words: You make me want to be a better man. She wants to be a better person. She doesn’t want to be walking here with half her mind wondering which bits of this conversation she’s likely to plunder and publish in a newspaper.
Years of listening to other people’s problems seem to have given Jennifer an air of wise neutrality. When she speaks, finally, Ellie senses she has chosen her words carefully. “I’m sure you’ll work it out between you. You just need to talk honestly. Painfully honestly. And you may not always get the answers you want. That was the thing I was reminded of when I reread Anthony’s letters after you left last week. There were no games. I never met anyone—before or afterward—that I could be quite so honest with.”
She sighs, beckons Ellie through the gates. They begin to walk up the path that will lead them to the top of the hill. “But there is no absolution for people like us, Ellie. You may well find that guilt plays a much larger part in your future life than you would like. They say passion burns for a reason, and when it comes to affairs, it’s not only the protagonists who are hurt. For my part, I do still feel guilty for the pain I caused Laurence. . . . I justified it to myself at the time, but I can see that what happened . . . hurt all of us. But . . . the person I have always felt most bad about is Anthony.”
“You were going to tell me the rest of the story.”
Jennifer’s smile is fading. “Well, Ellie, it’s not a happy ending.” She tells of an abortive trip to Africa, a lengthy search, conspicuous silence from the man who had previously never stopped telling her how he felt, and the eventual forging of a new life in London, alone.
“And that’s it?”
“In a nutshell.”
“And in all that time you never . . . there was never anyone else?”
Jennifer Stirling smiles again. “Not quite. I am human. But I will say that I never became emotionally involved with anyone. After Boot, I—I didn’t really want to be close to anyone else. There had been only him, for me. I could see that very clearly. And, besides, I had Esmé.” Her smile broadens. “A child really is a wonderful consolation.”
They have reached the top. The whole of north London stretches beneath them. They breathe deeply, scanning the distant skyline, hearing the traffic; the cries of dog walkers and errant children recede beneath them.
“Can I ask why you kept the PO box open for so long?”
Jennifer leans against the cast-iron bench, thinks before replying. “I suppose it must seem rather silly to you, but we had missed each other twice, you see, both times by a matter of hours. I felt it was my obligation to give it every chance. I suppose shutting down that box would have been admitting it was finally over.”
She shrugs ruefully. “Every year I’ve told myself it’s time to stop. The years crept by without my noticing how long it had been. But somehow I never have. I suppose I told myself it was a rather harmless indulgence.”
“So that was actually it? His last letter?” Ellie gestures somewhere in the direction of St. John’s Wood. “Did you really never hear from him again? How could you bear not knowing what happened to him?”
“The way I saw it, there were two possibilities. Either he had died in Congo, which was, at the time, too unbearable to contemplate. Or, as I suspect, he was very hurt by me. He believed I was never going to leave my husband, perhaps even that I was careless with his feelings, and I think it cost him dearly to get close to me a second time. Unfortunately I didn’t realize how dearly until it was too late.”
“You never tried to have him traced? A private investigator? Newspaper advertisements?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. He would have known where I was. I had made my feelings plain. And I had to respect his.” She regards Ellie gravely. “You know, you can’t make someone love you again. No matter how much you might want it. Sometimes, unfortunately, the timing is simply . . . off.”
The wind is brisk up there: it forces itself into the gap between collar and neck, exploits any hint of exposure. Ellie thrusts her hands into her pockets. “What do you think would have happened to you if he had found you again?”
For the first time, Jennifer Stirling’s eyes fill with tears. She stares at the skyline, gives a tiny shake of her head. “The young don’t have a monopoly on broken hearts, you know.” She begins to walk slowly back down the path so that her face is no longer visible. The silence before she speaks again causes a small tear in Ellie’s heart. “I learned a long time ago, Ellie, that ‘if only’ is a very dangerous game indeed.”
Meet me—Jx
We’re using mobiles? X
I have a lot to tell you. I just need to see you. Les Percivals on Derry Street. Tomorrow 1 pm x
Percivals?!? Not your usual thing
Ah. I’m all surprises these days Jx
She sits at the linen-clad table, flicking through the notes she has scribbled on the Tube, and knows in her heart that she can’t run this story, and that if she doesn’t, her career at the Nation is over. Twice she has thought of running back to the apartment in St. John’s Wood and throwing herself on the older woman’s mercy, explaining herself, begging her to let her reproduce her doomed love affair in print. But whenever she does, she sees Jennifer Stirling’s face, hears her voice: The young don’t have a monopoly on broken hearts, you know.
She stares at the glossy olives in the white ceramic dish on the table. She has no appetite. If she doesn’t write this story, Melissa will move her. If she does write it, she’s not sure she’ll ever feel quite the same about what she does or who she is. She wishes, again, that she could talk to Rory. He would know what she should do. She has an uncomfortable feeling that it might not be what she wants to do, but she knows he would be right. Her thoughts chase each other in circles, argument and counterargument. Jennifer Stirling probably doesn’t even read the Nation. She might never know what you did. Melissa is looking for an excuse to elbow you out. You really don’t have a choice.
And then Rory’s voice, sardonic: Are you kidding me?
Her stomach tightens. She can’t remember the last time it wasn’t tied in knots. A thought occurs: surely if she can find out what happened to Anthony O’Hare, Jennifer will have to forgive her? She might be upset for a while, but surely, ultimately, she will see that Ellie has given her a gift? The answer has dropped into her lap. She’ll find him. If it takes her ten years, she’ll find out what happened to him. It’s the flimsiest of straws, but it makes her feel a little better.
Five minutes away. Are you there? Jx
Yes. Table on ground floor. Chilled glass waiting. Ex
She lifts a hand unconsciously to her hair. She still hasn’t been able to work out why John doesn’t want to go straight to her flat. The old John always preferred to go directly there. It was as if he couldn’t speak to her properly, see her even, until he had got all that pent-up tension out of the way first. In the early months of their relationship, she had found it flattering, and later a little irritating. Now some small part of her wonders whether this restaurant meeting is to do with them finally going public. Everything seems to have changed so dramatically that it isn’t beyond the new John to want to make some kind of public declaration. She notices the expensively dressed people at the neighboring tables, and her toes curl at the thought.