The Last Letter from Your Lover(42)
Author: Jojo Moyes

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just know that I love him. And that he loves me.”

“Oh, you do, do you? And what else do you know? Where he lives? What he does for a living? How he’s going to keep you, with your extravagant tastes? Will he buy you new frocks? Allow you a housekeeper? Jewelry?”

“I don’t care about any of that.”

“You certainly used to care about it.”

“I’m different now. I just know he loves me, and that’s what really matters. You can mock me all you want, Laurence, but you don’t know—”

He sprang up from his seat, and she shrank back. “Oh, I know all about your lover, Jenny,” he bellowed. He pulled a crumpled envelope from his inside pocket, brandishing it at her. “You really want to know what happened to you? You really want to know where your lover is?” Flecks of spittle flew, and his eyes were murderous.

She froze, her breath stalled in her chest.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve left me. Oh, no. I know, just like I know about him, because I found his letter in your bag after the accident.”

She saw the familiar handwriting on the envelope and was unable to tear her eyes from it.

“This is from him. In it, he asks you to meet him. He wants to run away with you. Just the two of you. Away from me. To start a new life together.” He grimaced, half in anger, half in grief. “Is it coming back to you now, darling?” He thrust it at her, and she took it with trembling fingers. She opened it and read,

My dearest and only love. I meant what I said. I have come to the conclusion that the only way forward is for one of us to make a bold decision.

I am not as strong as you. When I first met you, I thought you were a fragile little thing. Someone I had to protect. Now I realize I had us all wrong. You are the strong one, the one who can endure living with the possibility of a love like this, and the fact that we will never be allowed it.

I ask you not to judge me for my weakness. The only way I can endure is to be in a place where I will never see you, never be haunted by the possibility of seeing you with him. I need to be somewhere where sheer necessity forces you from my thoughts minute by minute, hour by hour. I cannot do that here.

I am going to take the job. I’ll be at Platform 4 Paddington at 7:15 on Monday evening, and there is nothing in the world that would make me happier than if you found the courage to come with me.

If you don’t come, I’ll know that whatever we might feel for each other, it isn’t quite enough. I won’t blame you, my darling. I know the past weeks have put an intolerable strain on you, and I feel the weight of that keenly. I hate the thought that I could cause you any unhappiness.

I’ll be waiting on the platform from a quarter to seven. Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

Your

B.

“Ring a bell, does it, Jenny?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Images flashed in her mind’s eye. Dark hair. A crumpled linen jacket. A little park, dotted with men in blue.

Boot.

“Yes, you know him? Yes, it’s all coming back to you?”

“Yes, it’s coming back to me . . .” She could almost see him. He was so close now.

“Obviously not all of it.”

“What do you—”

“He’s dead, Jennifer. He died in the car. You survived the crash, and your gentleman friend died. Dead at the scene, according to the police. So nobody’s out there waiting for you. There’s no one at Paddington Station. There’s nobody left for you to bloody remember.”

The room had started to move around her. She heard him speak, but the words refused to make sense, to take root in anything meaningful. “No,” she said, trembling now.

“Oh, I’m afraid so. I could probably dig out the newspaper reports, if you really wanted proof. We—your parents and I—kept your name out of the public eye, for obvious reasons. But they reported his death.”

“No.” She pushed at him, her arms swinging rhythmically at his torso. No no no. She wouldn’t hear what he was saying.

“He died at the scene.”

“Stop it! Stop saying that!” She launched herself at him now, wild, uncontrolled, shrieking. She heard her voice as if at a distance, was dimly aware of her fists coming into contact with his face, his chest, and then his stronger hands grabbing her wrists until she couldn’t move.

He was immovable. What he had said was immovable.

Dead.

She sank onto the chair, and eventually he released her. She felt as if she had shrunk, as if the room had expanded and swallowed her. My dearest and only love. Her head lowered, so that she could see only the floor, and tears slid down her nose and onto the expensive rug.

A long time later she looked up at him. His eyes were closed, as if the scene was too unpleasant for him to contemplate. “If you knew,” she began, “if you could see I was beginning to remember, why . . . why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

He was no longer angry. He sat down in the chair opposite, suddenly defeated. “Because I hoped . . . when I realized you remembered nothing, that we could put it behind us. I hoped we might just carry on as if none of it had happened.”

My dearest and only love.

She had nowhere to go. Boot was dead. He had been dead the whole time. She felt foolish, bereft, as if she had imagined the whole thing in a fit of girlish indulgence.

“And,” Laurence’s voice broke the silence, “I didn’t want you to have to bear the guilt of knowing that, without you, this man might still be alive.”

And there it was. A pain so sharp she felt as if she had been impaled.

“Whatever you think of me, Jennifer, I believed you might be happier this way.”

Time passed. She couldn’t say afterward whether it had been hours or minutes. After a while Laurence stood up. He poured and drank another glass of whiskey, as easily as if it had been water. Then he placed his tumbler neatly on the silver tray.

“So, what happens now?” she said dully.

“I go to bed. I’m really very tired.” He turned and walked toward the door. “I suggest you do the same.”

After he had gone, she sat there for some time. She could hear him moving heavily on the floorboards upstairs, the wearied, drunken path of his footsteps, the creak of the bedstead as he climbed in. He was in the master bedroom. Her bedroom.

She read the letter again. Read of a future that wouldn’t be hers. A love she had not been able to live without. She read the words of the man who had loved her more than even he could convey, a man for whose death she had been unwittingly responsible. She finally saw his face: animated, hopeful, full of love.