The Last Letter from Your Lover

She watches Mrs Stirling’s face as she takes them. ‘I would have sent them to you,’ she continues, ‘but . . .’
    Jennifer Stirling is holding the letters reverently in both hands.
    ‘I wasn’t sure . . . what – well, whether you would even want to see them.’
    Jennifer says nothing. Suddenly ill at ease, Ellie takes a sip from her cup. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, drinking her coffee, but she keeps her eyes averted, she isn’t sure why.
    ‘Oh, I do want them.’
    When she looks up, something has happened to Jennifer’s expression. She isn’t tearful, exactly, but her eyes have the pinched look of someone beset by intense emotion. ‘You’ve read them, I take it.’
    Ellie finds she’s blushing. ‘Sorry. They were in a file of something completely unrelated. I didn’t know I’d end up finding their owner. I thought they were beautiful,’ she adds awkwardly.
    ‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? Well, Ellie Haworth, not many things surprise me at my age, but you have succeeded today.’
    ‘Aren’t you going to read them?’
    ‘I don’t have to. I know what they say.’
    Ellie learnt a long time ago that the most important skill in journalism is knowing when to say nothing. But now she’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable as she watches an old woman who has in some way disappeared from the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says carefully, when the silence becomes oppressive, ‘if I’ve upset you. I wasn’t sure what to do, given that I didn’t know what your –’
    ‘– situation was,’ she says. She smiles, and Ellie thinks again what a lovely face she has. ‘That was very diplomatic of you. But these can cause no embarrassment. My husband died many years ago. It’s one of the things they never tell you about being old.’ She gives a wry smile. ‘That the men die off so much sooner.’
    For a while they listen to the rain, the hissing brakes of the buses outside.
    ‘Well,’ Mrs Stirling says, ‘tell me something, Ellie. What made you go to such efforts to return these letters to me?’
    Ellie ponders whether or not to mention the feature. Her instincts tell her not to.
    ‘Because I’ve never read anything like them?’
    Jennifer Stirling is watching her closely.
    ‘And . . . I also have a lover,’ she says, not sure why she says this.
    ‘A “lover”?’
    ‘He’s . . . married.’
    ‘Ah. So these letters spoke to you.’
    ‘Yes. The whole story did. It’s the thing about wanting something you can’t have. And that thing of never being able to say what you really feel.’ She’s looking down now, speaking to her lap. ‘The man I’m involved with, John . . . I don’t really know what he thinks. We don’t talk about what’s happening between us.’
    ‘I don’t suppose he’s unusual in that,’ Mrs Stirling remarks.
    ‘But your lover did. Boot did.’
    ‘Yes.’ Again, she’s lost in another time. ‘He told me everything. It’s an astonishing thing to receive a letter like that. To know you’re loved so completely. He was always terribly good with words.’
    The rain becomes briefly torrential and thunders against the windows, people shouting below in the street.
    ‘I’ve been mildly obsessed by your love affair, if that doesn’t sound too strange. I desperately wanted the two of you to reunite. I have to ask, did you . . . did you ever get back together?’
    The modern parlance seems wrong, inappropriate, and Ellie feels suddenly self-conscious. There’s something graceless in what she was asked, she thinks. She has pushed it too far.
    Just as Ellie is about to apologise, and make to leave, she speaks: ‘Would you like another cup of coffee, Ellie?’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much point in you leaving while the rain is like this.’
    Jennifer Stirling sits on the silk-covered sofa, her coffee cooling on her lap, and tells the story of a young wife in the South of France, of a husband who, in her words, was probably no worse than any others of the age. A man very much of his time, in whom expression had been driven out – had become a sign of weakness, unbecoming. And she tells a story of his opposite, a crabby, opinionated, passionate, damaged man, who unsettled her from the first night she met him at a moonlit dinner party.
    Ellie sits, rapt, pictures building in her head, trying not to think about the tape-recorder she has turned on in her handbag. But she no longer feels graceless. Mrs Stirling talks