The Last Letter from Your Lover(99)
Author: Jojo Moyes

Needles. Urgent voices. The pain. Oh, Jesus, the pain.

“What the hell is going on, O’Hare?”

In the next bed, the man had started coughing again.

“Was it that woman? She turn you down?” Don was physically uncomfortable discussing feelings. This manifested itself in a jiggling leg, in the way his hand ran backward and forward over his balding head.

Don’t mention her. Don’t make me think about her face. “Not as simple as that.”

“Then what the hell is all this about? No woman’s worth . . . this.” Don’s hand waved distractedly above the bed.

“I—I just wanted to forget.”

“So go and sling your leg over someone else. Someone you can have. You’ll get over it.” Perhaps saying it would make it true.

Anthony’s silence lasted just long enough to contradict him.

“Some women are trouble,” Don added.

Forgive me. I just had to know.

“Moths to a flame. We’ve all been there.”

Forgive me.

Anthony shook his head. “No, Don. Not like this.”

“It’s always ‘not like this’ when it’s your own—”

“She can’t leave him because he won’t let her take the child.” Anthony’s voice, suddenly clear, cut through the curtained area. Just briefly, the man in the next bed stopped coughing. Anthony watched his boss grasp the implication of the sentence, the creeping frown of sympathy.

“Ah. Tough.”

“Yes.”

Don’s leg had begun to jiggle again. “Doesn’t mean you had to try and kill yourself with drink. You know what they said? The yellow fever screwed your liver. Screwed it, O’Hare. One more drinking session like that, and you . . .”

Anthony felt infinitely weary. He turned away on his pillow. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

For half an hour after he’d returned from the hospital, Don sat at his desk, thinking. Around him the newsroom was waking slowly, as it did every day, a sleeping giant spurred into reluctant life: journalists chatting on telephones, stories rising and falling on the newslists, pages formed and planned, the first being mocked up on the production desk.

He rubbed his hand across his jaw, called over his shoulder toward the secretary’s desk.

“Blondie. Get me the number of thingy Stirling. The asbestos man.”

Cheryl listened in silence. Minutes later, she handed him the number she had scribbled down from the office Who’s Who. “How is he?”

“How’d you think?” He stubbed his pen on the desk a few times, still deep in thought. Then, as she walked back to her desk, he picked up the phone and asked the switchboard to put him through to Fitzroy 2286.

He coughed a little before he spoke, like someone uncomfortable with using the telephone. “I’d like to speak to Jennifer Stirling, please.”

He could feel Cheryl watching him.

“Can I leave a message? . . . What? She doesn’t? Oh. I see.” A pause. “No, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” He put the phone down.

“What happened?” Cheryl was standing over him. She was taller than him in her new heels. “Don?”

“Nothing.” He straightened up. “Forget I said anything. Go and get me a bacon sandwich, will you? And don’t forget the ketchup. I can’t eat it without.”

He screwed the scribbled number into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket at his feet.

The grief was worse than if someone had died; at night it came in waves, relentless and astonishing in their power, hollowing him out. He saw her every time he closed his eyes, her sleepy-lidded pleasure, her expression of guilt and helplessness as she had caught sight of him in the hotel lobby. Her face told him they were lost, and that she already knew what she had done by telling him so.

And she was right. He had felt anger, at first, that she should raise his hopes without telling him the truth of her situation. That she should force her way back into his heart so ruthlessly when there was no chance for them. What was the saying? It was the hope that would kill you.

His feelings swung wildly. He forgave her. There was nothing to forgive. She’d done it because, like himself, she couldn’t have not done it. And because it was the only bit of him she could reasonably hope to have. I hope the memory of it keeps you going, Jennifer, because it has destroyed me.

He fought the knowledge that, this time, there really was nothing left for him. He felt physically weakened, left frail by his own disastrous behavior. His sharp mind had been hijacked, its lucid parts shredded, just the steady pulse of loss beating through it, the same relentless beat he had heard back in Léopoldville.

She would never be his. They had come so close, and she would never be his. How was he supposed to live with that knowledge?

In the small hours, he worked through a thousand solutions. He would demand that Jennifer get a divorce. He would do everything he could to make her happy without her child through the sheer strength of his will. He would hire the best lawyer. He would give her more children. He would confront Laurence—in his wilder dreams, he went for his throat.

But Anthony had been for years a man’s man, and even then some distant male part of him could not but feel what it must be like for Laurence: to know that his wife loved someone else. And then to have to hand over his child to the man who had stolen her. It had crippled Anthony, and he had never loved Clarissa like he loved Jennifer. He thought of his sad, silent son, his own constant ache of guilt, and knew that if he imposed that on another family, any happiness they gained would lie over a dark current of grief. He had destroyed one family; he could not be responsible for destroying another.

He rang the girlfriend in New York and told her he wouldn’t be returning. He listened to her astonishment and barely disguised tears with only a distant sense of guilt. He couldn’t return there. He couldn’t sink into the steady urban rhythms of life in New York, the days measured by journeys backward and forward to the UN building, because now they would be tainted by Jennifer. Everything would be tainted by Jennifer: her scent, her taste, that she would be out there, living, breathing, without him. It was worse, somehow, to know that she had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. He couldn’t employ the necessary anger against her to propel himself away from thoughts of her.

Forgive me. I just had to know.

He needed to be in a place where he couldn’t think. To survive, he had to be somewhere where survival was the only thing he could think about.