The Last Letter from Your Lover(102)
Author: Jojo Moyes

On Sundays they were invited to Don’s house, where Viv would serve a roast dinner with all the trimmings, then insist that they play board games after she had cleared up. Watching the boy smile at her teasing, her bullish insistence that he join in, her enfolding of him into this strange extended family, made Anthony’s heart ache.

As they climbed into the car, he saw that even as Phillip waved at Viv, blowing kisses from the front window, a solitary tear rolled down his cheek. He grasped the steering wheel, paralyzed by such responsibility. He couldn’t work out what to say. What did he have to offer Phillip when he still wondered hourly whether it wouldn’t have been better if Clarissa had been the one to survive?

That night he sat in front of the fire, watching the first television pictures of the freed Stanleyville hostages. Their blurred shapes emerged from army aircraft and huddled in shocked groups on the tarmac. “Crack Belgian troops took a matter of hours to secure the city. It is still too early to count the casualties with any accuracy, but early reports suggest at least a hundred Europeans died in the crisis. There are many more still unaccounted for.”

He turned off the television, mesmerized by the screen long after the white dot had disappeared. Finally he went upstairs, hesitating outside his son’s door, listening to the unmistakable sound of muffled sobbing. It was a quarter past ten.

Anthony closed his eyes briefly, opened them, and pushed open the door. His son started and shoved something under the bedspread.

Anthony turned on the light. “Son?”

Silence.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” The boy composed himself, wiping his face. “I’m fine.”

“What was that?” He kept his voice soft, sat down on the side of the bed. Phillip was hot and damp. He must have been crying for hours. Anthony felt crushed by his own parental inadequacy.

“Nothing.”

“Here. Let me see.” He peeled back the cover gently. It was a small, silver-framed picture of Clarissa, her hands resting proudly on her son’s shoulders. She was smiling broadly.

The boy shuddered. Anthony laid a hand on the photograph and smoothed the tears from the glass with his thumb. I hope Edgar made you smile like that, he told her silently. “It’s a lovely photograph. Would you like us to put it downstairs? On the mantelpiece, perhaps? Somewhere you can look at it whenever you like?”

He could feel Phillip’s eyes searching his face. Perhaps he was preparing himself for some barbed comment, some residual charge of ill feeling, but Anthony’s eyes were locked on the woman in the picture, her beaming smile. He couldn’t see her. He saw Jennifer. He saw her everywhere. He would always see her everywhere.

Get a grip, O’Hare.

He handed the picture back to his son. “You know . . . it’s fine to be sad. Really. You’re allowed to be sad about losing someone you love.” It was so important that he get this right.

His voice had cracked, something rising from deep within him, and his chest hurt with the effort of not letting it overwhelm him. “Actually, I’m sad, too,” he said. “Terribly sad. Losing someone you love is . . . it’s actually unbearable. I do understand that.”

He drew his son to him, his voice lowering to a murmur: “But I’m so very glad you’re here now, because I think . . . I think you and I just might get through this together. What do you think?”

Phillip’s head rested against his chest, and a thin arm crept around his middle. He felt the easing of his son’s breathing and held him close as they sat, shrouded in silence, lost in their thoughts in the near dark.

He had failed to grasp that the week he was due to return to work was half-term. Viv said without hesitation that she would have Phillip for the latter part, but she was due to go to her sister’s until Wednesday, so for the first two days Anthony would have to make alternative arrangements.

“He can come with us to the office,” said Don. “Make himself useful with a teapot.” Knowing how Don felt about family life interfering with the Nation, Anthony was grateful. He had been desperate to work again, to restore some semblance of normal life. Phillip was touchingly eager to accompany them.

Anthony sat down at his new desk and surveyed the morning’s newspapers. There had been no vacant posts in Home News, so he had become reporter-at-large, the honorific title designed to reassure him, he suspected, that he would, once more, be so. He took a sip of the office coffee and winced at the familiar awfulness. Phillip was going from desk to desk, asking if anybody would like tea, the shirt Anthony had pressed for him that morning crisp on his skinny back. He felt suddenly—gratefully—at home. This was where his new life started. It was going to be fine. They would be fine. He refused to look at the foreign desk. He didn’t want to know just yet who they had sent to Stanleyville in his place.

“Here.” Don threw a copy of the Times at him, a story circled in red. “Do us a quick rewrite on the U.S. space launch. You’re not going to get any fresh quotes from the States at this hour, but it’ll make a short column on page eight.”

“How many words?”

“Two fifty.” Don’s voice was apologetic. “I’ll have something better for you later.”

“It’s fine.” It was fine. His son was smiling, bearing a loaded tray with almost excessive caution. He glanced toward his father, and Anthony nodded approval. He was proud of the boy, proud of his bravery. It was indeed a gift to have someone to love.

Anthony pulled his typewriter toward him, fed carbons between the sheets of paper. One for the editor, one for the subs, one for his records. The routine had a kind of seductive pleasure. He typed his name at the top of the page, hearing the satisfying snap of the steel letters as they hit the paper.

He read and reread the Times story and made a few notes on his pad. He nipped downstairs to the newspaper library and pulled up the file on space missions, flicking through the most recent cuttings. He made some more notes. Then he placed his fingers on the typewriter keys.

Nothing.

It was as if his hands wouldn’t work.

He typed a sentence. It was flat. He ripped out the papers, rethreaded them into the cylinder.

He typed another sentence. It was flat. He typed another. He’d shape it up. But the words resolutely refused to go where he wanted them. It was a sentence, yes, but nothing that would work in a national newspaper. He reminded himself of the pyramid rule of journalism: most important information in the first sentence, fanning out in lesser significance as you went on. Few people read to the end of a story.