The Last Letter from Your Lover
Page 54“What are you so fidgety about?” Nicky had said that morning. “This means you’ve got what you wanted, doesn’t it?”
“It’s just . . .”
“You’re not sure you want him anymore.”
“No!” She had scowled at the phone. “Of course I want him! It’s just that everything’s changed so swiftly I haven’t had a chance to get my head around it.”
“You’d better get your head around it. It’s entirely possible that he’s going to turn up to lunch with two suitcases and a couple of screaming kids in tow.” For some reason this idea had amused Nicky hugely, and she had giggled until it had become a little annoying.
Ellie had the feeling that Nicky still hadn’t forgiven her for “messing things up,” as she put it, with Rory. Rory had sounded nice, she said repeatedly. “Someone I’d be happy to go to the pub with.” The subtext: Nicky would never want to go to the pub with John. She would never forgive him for being the kind of man who could cheat on his wife.
She glances at her watch, then signals to the waiter for a second glass of wine. He’s now twenty minutes late. On any other occasion she would have been mutely furious, but she’s so nervous now that a small part of her wonders whether she might throw up at the mere sight of him. Yes, that’s always a good welcome. And then she glances up to find a woman standing at the other side of her table.
Ellie’s first thought is that she’s a waitress, and then she wonders why she isn’t holding the glass of wine. Then she realizes that not only is the woman wearing a navy coat, rather than a waitress’s uniform, but she is staring at her, a little too intently, like someone about to start singing to themselves on the bus.
“Hello, Ellie.”
Ellie blinks. “I’m sorry,” she says, after her mind has flicked through a mental Rolodex of recent contacts and turned up nothing. “Do we know each other?”
“Oh, I think so. I’m Jessica.”
Jessica. Her mind is blank. Nicely cut hair. Good legs. Perhaps a little tired. Suntan. And then it explodes onto her consciousness. Jessica. Jess.
The woman registers her shock. “Yes, I thought you might recognize my name. You probably didn’t want to put a face to it, did you? Didn’t want to think too much about me. I suppose John’s having a wife was a bit of an inconvenience to you.”
Ellie can’t speak. She’s dimly aware of the other diners as they glance her way, having picked up on some strange vibration emanating from table 15.
Jessica Armor is going through text messages on a familiar mobile phone. Her voice lifts a little as she reads them out: “‘Feeling very wicked today. Get away. Don’t care how you do it, but get away. Will make it worth your while.’ Hmm, and here’s a good one. ‘Should be writing up interview with MP’s wife, but mind keeps drifting back to last Tues. Bad boy!’ Oh, and my personal favorite. ‘Have been to Agent Provocateur. Photo attached . . .’” When she looks at Ellie again, her voice is shaking with barely suppressed rage. “It’s pretty hard to compete with that when you’re nursing two sick children and coping with the builders. But, yes, Tuesday the twelfth. I do remember that day. He brought me a bunch of flowers to apologize for being so late.”
Ellie’s mouth has opened but no words come out. Her skin is prickling.
“I went through his phone on holiday. I’d wondered who he was ringing from the bar, and then I found your message. ‘Please call. Just once. Need to hear from you. X.’” She laughs mirthlessly. “How very touching. He thinks it’s been stolen.”
Ellie wants to crawl under the table. She wants to shrink to nothing, to evaporate.
“I’d like to hope you end up a miserable, lonely woman. But actually, I hope you have children one day, Ellie Haworth. Then you’ll know how it feels to be vulnerable. And to have to fight, to be constantly vigilant, just to make sure your children get to grow up with a father. Think about that the next time you’re purchasing see-through lingerie to entertain my husband, won’t you?”
As he approaches, she mutters something about having to leave unexpectedly. She isn’t sure what she’s saying: her voice no longer seems to belong to her. “The bill?” she says.
He gestures toward the door. His smile is sympathetic. “No need, madam. The lady paid for you.”
Ellie walks back to the office, impervious to traffic, to jostling commuters on pavements, to the rebuking eyes of the Big Issue sellers. She wants to be in her little flat with the door shut, but her precarious position at work means that’s impossible. She walks through the newspaper office, conscious of the eyes of other people, convinced deep down that everyone must see her shame, see what Jessica Armor saw, as if it were drawn upon her, like a scarlet letter.
“You okay, Ellie? You’re awfully pale.” Rupert leans around from behind his monitor. Someone has fixed an “incinerate” sticker to the back of his screen.
“Headache.” Her voice sticks in the back of her throat.
“Terri’s got pills—she has pills for everything, that girl,” he muses, and disappears behind his monitor again.
She sits at her desk and turns on her computer, scanning the e-mails. There it is.
Have lost phone. Picking up new one lunchtime. Will e-mail you new number. Jx
She checks the time. It had arrived in her in-box while she was interviewing Jennifer Stirling. She closes her eyes, seeing again the image that has swum in front of them for the past hour: Jessica Armor’s set jaw, the terrifying eyes, the way her hair moved around her face while she spoke, as if it was electrified by her anger, her hurt. Some tiny part of her had recognized that in different circumstances she would have liked the look of this woman, might have wanted to go for a drink with her. When she opens her eyes again, she doesn’t want to see John’s words, doesn’t want to see this version of herself reflected in them. It’s as if she’s woken from a particularly vivid dream, one that has lasted a year. She knows the extent of her mistake. She deletes his message.
“Here.” Rupert places a cup of tea on her desk. “Might make you feel better.”
Rupert never makes anyone tea. The other feature writers have run books in the past on how long it will take him to head to the canteen, and he’s always been a racing certainty. She doesn’t know whether to be touched by this rare act of sympathy or afraid of why he feels she’s in need of it.
“Thanks,” she says, and takes it.
It’s as he sits down that she spies a familiar name on a different e-mail: Phillip O’Hare. Her heart stops, the humiliations of the last hour temporarily forgotten. She clicks on it, and sees that it is from the Phillip O’Hare who works for the Times.
Hi—A little confused by your message. Can you call me?
She wipes her eyes. Work, she tells herself, is the answer to everything. Work is now the only thing. She’ll find out what happened to Jennifer’s lover, and Jennifer will forgive her for what she’s about to do. She’ll have to.
She dials the direct line at the bottom of the e-mail. A man answers on the second ring. She can hear the familiar hum of a newsroom in the background. “Hi,” she says, her voice tentative. “It’s Ellie Haworth. You sent me an e-mail?”
“Ah. Yes. Ellie Haworth. Hold on.” He has the voice of someone in his fifties. He sounds a little like John. She blocks this thought as she hears a hand placed across the receiver, his voice, muffled, and then he’s back. “Sorry. Yes. Deadlines. Look, thanks for calling me back.... I just wanted to check something. Where was it you said you worked? The Nation?”
“Yes.” Her mouth has gone dry. She begins to babble. “But I do want to assure you that his name is not necessarily going to get used in what I’m writing about. I just really want to find out what happened to him for a friend of his who—
“Yes.”
There’s a short silence.
“And you say you want to find out about my father?”
“Yes.” Her voice is draining away.
“And you’re a journalist?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Yes, a journalist. Like you. Are you saying you’re uncomfortable giving any information to a rival newspaper? I’ve told you that—”
“My father is Anthony O’Hare.”
“Yes. That’s who I’m—”
The man at the other end of the line is laughing. “You’re not in the investigative unit, by any chance?”
“No.”
It takes him a moment to gather himself. “Miss Haworth, my father works for the Nation. Your newspaper. He has done for more than forty years.”
Ellie sits very still. She asks him to repeat what he has just said.
“I don’t understand,” she says, standing up at her desk. “I did a byline search. I did lots of searches. Nothing came up. Only your name at the Times.”
“That’s because he doesn’t write.”
“Then what does—”
“My father works in the library. He has done since . . . oh . . . 1964.”
Chapter 25
OCTOBER 1964
“Sure,” Don said.
She reached over to him, took hold of his arm. “You will make sure he gets it? It’s really important. Desperately important.”
“I understand. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get on. This is our busiest time of day. We’re all on deadlines here.” Don wanted her out of the office. He wanted the child out of the office.
Her face crumpled. “I’m sorry. Please just make sure he gets it. Please.”
God, he wished she’d just leave. He couldn’t look at her.
“I’m—I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She appeared suddenly self-conscious, as if she was aware of the spectacle she had created. She reached for her daughter’s hand and, almost reluctantly, walked away. The few people gathered around the sub’s desk watched her go in silence.
“Congo,” said Cheryl, after a beat.
“We need to get page four off stone.” Don stared fixedly at the desk. “Let’s go with the dancing priest.”
Cheryl was still sawing at him. “Why did you tell her he’d gone to Congo?”
“You want me to tell her the truth? That he drank himself into a bloody coma?”
Cheryl twisted the pen in her mouth, her eyes drifting across to the swinging office door. “But she looked so sad.”
“She should look bloody sad. She’s the one who’s caused him all the trouble.”
“But you can’t—”
Don’s voice exploded into the newsroom. “The last thing that boy needs is her stirring things up again. Do you understand? I’m doing him a favor.” He tore the note from the folder and hurled it into the bin.
Cheryl stuck her pen behind her ear, gave her boss a hard look, and sashayed back to her desk.
Don took a deep breath. “Right, can we get off O’Hare’s bloody love life and on with this bloody dancing-priest story? Someone? Shove some copy over sharpish or we’re going to be sending the paperboys out with a load of blank pages tomorrow.”