The Last Letter from Your Lover

said no.’
    ‘Oh, you old romantic.’
    ‘She had too much to lose.’
    She cocks her head at him. ‘How do you know it was addressed to a she?’
    ‘Women didn’t have jobs then, did they?’
    ‘It’s dated 1960. It’s hardly the bloody suffragettes.’
    ‘Here. Give it to me.’ He holds out his hand for the letter. ‘Okay, so maybe she had a job. But I’m sure it said something about going on a train. I should think a woman would be much less likely to say she was headed off to a new job.’ He reads it again, pointing at the lines. ‘He’s asking her to follow him. A woman wouldn’t have asked a man to follow her. Not then.’
    ‘You have a very stereotypical view of men and women.’
    ‘No. I just spend a lot of time here immersed in the past.’ He gestures around him. ‘And it’s a different country.’
    ‘Perhaps it wasn’t addressed to a woman at all,’ she teases. ‘Perhaps it’s to another man.’
    ‘Unlikely. Homosexuality was still illegal then, wasn’t it? There would have been references to secrecy or something.’
    ‘But there are references to secrecy.’
    ‘It’s just an affair,’ he says. ‘Obviously.’
    ‘What’s this? The voice of experience?’
    ‘Hah! Not me.’ He hands the letter back to her, and drinks some of his tea.
    He has long, squared-off fingers. Working hands, not a librarian’s, she thinks absently. But what would a librarian’s hands look like anyway? ‘So, you’ve never been involved with anyone married?’ She glances at his finger. ‘Or you are married and have never had an affair?’
    ‘Nope. And nope. Never had any kind of affair. With someone involved, that is. I like my life simple.’ He nods at the letter, which she’s tucking back into her bag. ‘Those things never end well.’
    ‘What? All love that isn’t simple and straightforward has to end tragically?’ She hears defensiveness in her voice.
    ‘That’s not what I said.’
    ‘Yes, it is. You said earlier that you thought she said no.’
    He finishes his tea, crumples his cup and throws it into the bin-bag. ‘We’ll be done in ten minutes. You’d better grab what you want. Show me what you haven’t had a chance to go through and I’ll try to keep it to one side.’
    As she gathers up her belongings, he says, ‘For what it’s worth, I do think she probably said no.’ His expression is unfathomable. ‘But why does that have to be the worst outcome?’

I love you anyway – even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life – I love you.
    Zelda to Scott Fitzgerald, via letter

17
    Ellie Haworth is living the dream. She often tells herself so when she wakes up, hung-over from too much white wine, feeling the ache of melancholy, in her perfect little flat that nobody ever messes up in her absence. (She secretly wants a cat, but is afraid of becoming a cliché.) She holds down a job as a feature writer on a national newspaper, has obedient hair, a body that is basically plump and slender in the right places, and is pretty enough to attract attention that she still pretends offends her. She has a sharp tongue – too sharp, according to her mother – a ready wit, several credit cards, and a small car she can manage without male help. When she meets people she knew at school, she can detect envy when she describes her life: she has not yet reached an age where the lack of a husband or children could be regarded as failure. When she meets men, she can see them ticking off her attributes – great job, nice rack, sense of fun – as if she’s a prize to be won.
    If, recently, she has become aware that the dream is a little fuzzy, that the edge she was once famed for at the office has deserted her since John came, that the relationship she had once found invigorating has begun to consume her in ways that are not exactly enviable, she chooses not to look too hard. After all, it’s easy when you’re surrounded by people like you, journalists and writers who drink hard, party hard, have sloppy, disastrous affairs and unhappy partners at home who, tired of their neglect, will eventually have affairs. She is one of them , one of their cohorts, living the life of the glossy magazine pages, a life she had pursued since she had first known she wanted to write. She is successful, single, selfish. Ellie Haworth is as happy as she can be. As anyone can be, considering.
    And nobody gets everything, so Ellie tells herself, when occasionally she wakes up trying to remember