The Last Letter from Your Lover(95)
Author: Jojo Moyes

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?”