The Last Letter from Your Lover

our mystery lovers.’ She smiled hopefully. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do to help me?’
    ‘Sorry. Stacked up myself. I’ll dig out the 1960 newspaper files for you when I go back downstairs.’
    ‘That’s your job,’ she protests.
    He grins. ‘Yup. And writing and researching is yours.’
    ‘It’s my birthday.’
    ‘Then happy birthday.’
    ‘Oh, you’re all heart.’
    ‘And you’re too used to getting your own way.’ He smiles at her, and she watches him gather up his book and MP3 player. He salutes as he heads towards the door.
    You have no idea, she thinks, as it swings shut behind him, just how wrong you are.
    I am 25 and I have quite a good job but not a good enough job to do all the things I would like to do – to have a house and a car and a wife.
    ‘Because obviously you acquire one of those along with the house and the car,’ Ellie mutters at the faded newsprint. Or perhaps after a washing-machine. Maybe that should take priority.
    I have noticed that many of my friends have got married and their standard of living has dropped considerably. I have been going fairly regularly with a girl for three years and I would very much like to marry her. I have asked her to wait three years until we can get married and live in rather better circumstances, but she says she is not going to wait for me.
    Three years, Ellie muses. I don’t blame her. You’re hardly giving her the impression that yours is a great passion, are you?
    Either we get married this year or she won’t marry me at all. I think this is an unreasonable attitude since I have pointed out to her that she will have a rather lower standard of living. Do you think that there is any other argument that I can add to the ones I have made already?
    ‘No, pal,’ she says aloud, as she slides another old sheet of newspaper under the lid of the photocopier. ‘I think you’ve made yourself quite clear.’
    She returns to her desk, sits down, and pulls the crumpled, handwritten letter from her folder.
    My dearest and only love . . . 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.
    She rereads the words again and again. They hold passion, force, even after so many years. Why would you suffer the priggish ‘I have pointed out to her that she will have a rather lower standard of living’ when you could have ‘Know that you hold my heart, my hopes in your hands’? She wishes the unknown girlfriend of the first correspondent a lucky escape.
    Ellie makes a desultory check for new email, then mobile-phone messages. She is thirty-two years old. She loves someone who is married to someone else. Her friends have begun to suggest that this – she – is ridiculous, and she hates them because she knows they’re right.
    She chews the end of a pencil. She picks up the photocopied problem page and puts it down again.
    Then she clicks open a new message on her computer screen and, before she can think too hard about it, she types:
    The one present I really want for my birthday is to know what I mean to you. I need for us to have an honest conversation, and for me to be able to say what I feel. I need to know whether we have any kind of future together.
    She adds:
    I love you, John. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone in my whole life, and this is starting to drive me crazy.
    Her eyes have filled with tears. Her hand moves to ‘send’. The department shrinks around her. She is dimly aware of Caroline, the health editor, chatting on the phone at the next desk, of the window-cleaner on his teetering cradle outside the window, of the news editor having an argument with one of his reporters somewhere on the other side of the office, the missing carpet tile at her feet. She sees nothing but the winking cursor, her words, her future, laid bare on the screen in front of her.
    I love you more than I have ever loved anyone my whole life.
    If I do this now, she thinks, it will be decided for me. It will be my way of taking control. And if it isn’t the answer I want, at least it’s an answer.
    Her forefinger rests gently on ‘send’.
    And I will never touch that face, kiss those lips, feel those hands on me again. I will never hear the way he says, Ellie Haworth, as if the words