The Last Letter from Your Lover

arm and burst through the barrier, wailing, and pulled them to her. The family barely stirred. Then the young mother, crumpling to her knees, began to cry, her mouth a great O of pain, her head sagging on to the older woman’s plump shoulder.
    Frobisher stuffed his papers back into his folder. ‘The Ramseys. Excuse me. I must look after them.’
    ‘Were they there?’ she said, watching the grandfather hoist the little girl on to his shoulders. ‘At the massacre?’ The children’s faces, immobilised by some unknown shock, had turned her blood to iced water.
    He gave her a firm look. ‘Mrs Stirling, please, you must go now. There’s an East African Airways flight out this evening. Unless you have well-connected friends in this city, I cannot urge you more strongly to be on it.’
    It took her two days to get home. And from that point her new life began. Yvonne was true to her word. She did not contact her again, and on the one occasion Jennifer bumped into Violet, the other woman was so plainly filled with discomfort that it seemed unfair to pursue her. She minded less than she might have expected: they belonged to an old life, which she hardly recognised as her own.
    Most days Mrs Cordoza came to the new flat, finding excuses to spend time with Esmé, or help with a few household tasks, and Jennifer found she relied more on her former housekeeper’s company than she had her old friends’. One wet afternoon, while Esmé slept, she told Mrs Cordoza about Anthony, and Mrs Cordoza confided a little more about her husband. Then, with a blush, she talked about a nice man who had sent her flowers from the restaurant two streets along. ‘I wasn’t going to encourage him,’ she said softly, into her ironing, ‘but since everything . . .’
    Laurence communicated in notes, using Mrs Cordoza as an emissary.
    I would like to take Esmé to my cousin’s wedding in Winchester this coming Saturday. I will make sure she is back by 7p.m.
    They were distant, formal, measured. Occasionally Jennifer would read them and wonder that she could have been married to this man.
    Every week she walked to the post office on Langley Street to find out whether there was anything in the PO box. Every week she returned home trying not to feel flattened by the postmistress’s ‘No.’
    She moved into the rented flat, and when Esmé started school, she took an unpaid job at the local Citizens’ Advice Bureau, the only organisation that seemed unworried by her lack of experience. She would learn on the job, the supervisor said. ‘And, believe me, you’ll learn rather quickly.’ Less than a year later, she was offered a paid position in the same office. She advised people on practical matters, such as how to manage money, how to handle rent disputes – there were too many bad landlords – how to cope with family breakdown.
    At first she had been exhausted by the never-ending litany of problems, the sheer wall of human misery that traipsed through the office, but gradually, as she grew more confident, she saw that she was not alone in making a mess of her life. She reassessed herself and found that she was grateful for where she was, where she had ended up, and felt a certain pride when someone returned to tell her that she had helped.
    Two years later, she and Esmé moved again, to the two-bedroom flat in St Johns Wood, bought with money provided by Laurence and Jennifer’s inheritance from an aunt. As the weeks became months, and then years, she came to accept that Anthony O’Hare would not return. He would not answer her messages. She was overcome only once, when the newspapers reported some details of the massacre at Stanleyville’s Victoria Hotel. Then she had stopped reading them altogether.
    She had rung the Nation just once more. A secretary had answered, and when she gave her name, briefly hopeful that Anthony might, this time, happen to be there, she heard, ‘Is it that Stirling woman?’
    And the answer: ‘Isn’t she the one he didn’t want to speak to?’
    She had replaced the receiver.
    It was seven years before she saw her husband again. Esmé was to start at boarding-school, a sprawling, red-brick place in Hampshire, with the shambolic air of a well-loved country house. Jennifer had taken the afternoon off work to drive her, and they had travelled in her new Mini. She was wearing a wine-coloured suit and had half expected Laurence to make an unpleasant comment about it – he never had liked her in that