The Last Letter from Your Lover(79)
Author: Jojo Moyes

She hears Rory’s voice as she says this, and discovers she’s no longer sure what she thinks. She’d been unprepared for how much he disliked the idea of the letters being published. She’s used to the idea that everyone on the Nation shares a mind-set. The paper first. Old school.

“I’d want to blow it up and put it on a billboard. I don’t know anyone who gets love letters anymore,” Nicky says. “My sister did, when her fiancé moved to Hong Kong back in the nineties, at least two a week.” She snorts. “Mind you, most of them were about how much he missed her bum.”

They break off from laughing as another woman enters the sauna. They exchange polite smiles, and the woman takes a place on the highest shelf, carefully spreading her towel beneath her.

Ellie smooths her hair off her face. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. On my birthday.” She lowers her voice. “About John’s wife.”

“Ah.”

“I know you’re right, Nicky, but it’s not like I know her. She’s not like a real person. So why should I care what happens to her?”

“Interesting logic.”

“Okay. She has the one thing I really, really want, the one thing that would make me happy. And she can’t be that much in love with him, can she, and pay so little attention to what he needs and wants? I mean, if they were that happy, he wouldn’t be with me, would he?”

Nicky shakes her head. “Dunno. When my sister had her kid, she couldn’t see straight for six months.”

“His youngest is almost two.” She feels, rather than hears, Nicky’s shrug of derision.

“You know, Ellie,” Nicky says, lying back on the bench and putting her hands behind her head. “Morally, I wouldn’t care either way, but you don’t seem happy.”

That defensive clench. “I am happy.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow.

“Okay. I’m happier and unhappier than I’ve ever been with anyone else, if that makes sense.”

Unlike her two best friends, Ellie has never lived with a man. Until she was thirty she had assigned marriageandchildren—it was always one word—to the folder of things she would do later in life, long after she had established her career, along with drinking sensibly and taking out a pension. She didn’t want to end up like some girls from her school, exhausted and pushing prams in their mid-twenties, financially dependent on husbands they seemed to despise.

Her last boyfriend had complained that he had spent most of their relationship following her while she ran from place to place “barking into a mobile phone.” He had been even more pissed off that she’d found this funny. But since she’d turned thirty, it had become a little less amusing. When she visited her parents in Derbyshire, they made conspicuous efforts not to mention boyfriends, so much so that it had become just another form of pressure. She’s good at being on her own, she tells them and other people. And it was the truth, until she met John.

“Is he married, love?” the woman asks, through the steam.

Ellie and Nicky exchange a subtle glance.

“Yes,” Ellie says.

“If it makes you feel any better, I fell in love with a married man, and we’ve been married four years next Tuesday.”

“Congratulations,” they say in tandem, Ellie conscious that it seems an odd word to use in the circumstances.

“Happy as anything, we are. Of course his daughter won’t talk to him anymore, but it’s fine. We’re happy.”

“How long did it take him to leave his wife?” Ellie asks, sitting up.

The woman is pushing her hair into a ponytail. She has no boobs, Ellie thinks, and he still left his wife for her.

“Twelve years,” she says. “It meant we couldn’t have children, but like I said, it was worth it. We’re very happy.”

“I’m glad for you,” says Ellie, as the woman climbs down. The glass door opens, letting in a burp of cold air as she leaves, and then it’s the two of them, sitting in the hot, darkened cabin.

There’s a short silence.

“Twelve years,” says Nicky, rubbing her face with her towel. “Twelve years, an alienated daughter, and no kids. Well, I bet that makes you feel loads better.”

Two days later the phone rings. It’s a quarter past nine, and she’s at her desk, standing up to answer it so that her boss can see she’s there and working. What time does Melissa come to work? She seems to be first in and last out in Features, yet her hair and makeup are always immaculate, her outfits carefully coordinated. Ellie suspects there’s probably a personal trainer at six a.m., a blow-dry at some exclusive salon an hour afterward. Does Melissa have a home life? Someone once mentioned a young daughter, but Ellie finds that hard to believe.

“Features,” she says, staring absently into the glass office. Melissa is on the phone, walking up and down, one hand stroking her hair.

“Do I have the right number for Ellie Haworth?” A cut-glass voice, a relic from a previous age.

“Yup. This is she.”

“Ah. I believe you sent me a letter. My name is Jennifer Stirling.”

Chapter 20

She walks briskly, head down against the driving rain, cursing herself for not thinking far enough ahead to bring an umbrella. Taxis follow in the slipstream of steamy-windowed buses, sending sprays of water in graceful arcs over the curb. She is in St. John’s Wood on a wet Saturday afternoon, trying not to think of white sands in Barbados, of a broad freckled hand rubbing sun cream into a woman’s back. It is an image that pops into her head with punishing frequency, and has done for the six days John has been gone. The foul weather feels like some cosmic joke at her expense.

The mansion block rises in a gray slab from a wide, tree-lined pavement. She trips up the stone steps, presses the buzzer for Number 8, and waits, hopping impatiently from one soaked foot to the other.

“Hello?” The voice is clear. She thanks God that Jennifer Stirling suggested today: the thought of negotiating a whole Saturday without work, without her friends, who all seem to be busy, was terrifying.

That freckled hand again.

“It’s Ellie Haworth. About your letters.”

“Ah. Come in. I’m on the fourth floor. You may have to wait a while for the lift. It’s terribly slow.”

It’s the kind of building she rarely goes into, in an area she hardly knows; her friends live in new-built flats with tiny rooms and underground parking, or maisonettes squashed like layer cakes into Victorian terraced houses. This block speaks of old money, imperviousness to fashion. It makes her think of the word dowager—John might use it—and smile.