The Last Letter from Your Lover

the trimmings, then insist that they play board games after she had cleared up. Watching the boy smile at her teasing, her bullish insistence that he join in, her enfolding of him into this strange extended family made Anthony’s heart ache.
    As they climbed into the car, he saw that even as Phillip waved at Viv, blowing kisses from the front window, a solitary tear rolled down his cheek. He grasped the steering-wheel, paralysed by such responsibility. He couldn’t work out what to say. What did he have to offer Phillip when he still wondered hourly whether it wouldn’t have been better if Clarissa had been the one to survive?
    That night he sat in front of the fire, watching the first television pictures of the freed Stanleyville hostages. Their blurred shapes emerged from army aircraft and huddled in shocked groups on the tarmac. ‘Crack Belgian troops took a matter of hours to secure the city. It is still too early to count the casualties with any accuracy, but early reports suggest at least a hundred Europeans died in the crisis. There are many more still unaccounted for.’
    He turned off the television, mesmerised by the screen long after the white dot had disappeared. Finally he went upstairs, hesitating outside his son’s door, listening to the unmistakable sound of muffled sobbing. It was a quarter past ten.
    Anthony closed his eyes briefly, opened then and pushed open the door. His son started and shoved something under the bedspread.
    Anthony turned on the light. ‘Son?’
    Silence.
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘Nothing.’ The boy composed himself, wiping his face. ‘I’m fine.’
    ‘What was that?’ He kept his voice soft, sat down on the side of the bed. Phillip was hot and damp. He must have been crying for hours. Anthony felt crushed by his own parental inadequacy.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Here. Let me see.’ He peeled back the cover gently. It was a small, silver-framed picture of Clarissa, her hands resting proudly on her son’s shoulders. She was smiling broadly.
    The boy shuddered. Anthony laid a hand on the photograph and smoothed the tears from the glass with his thumb. I hope Edgar made you smile like that, he told her silently. ‘It’s a lovely photograph. Would you like us to put it downstairs? On the mantelpiece, perhaps? Somewhere you can look at it whenever you like?’
    He could feel Phillip’s eyes searching his face. Perhaps he was preparing himself for some barbed comment, some residual charge of ill-feeling, but Anthony’s eyes were locked on the woman in the picture, her beaming smile. He couldn’t see her. He saw Jennifer. He saw her everywhere. He would always see her everywhere.
    Get a grip, O’Hare.
    He handed the picture back to his son. ‘You know . . . it’s fine to be sad. Really. You’re allowed to be sad about losing someone you love.’ It was so important that he get this right.
    His voice had cracked, something rising from deep within him, and his chest hurt with the effort of not letting it overwhelm him. ‘Actually, I’m sad too,’ he said. ‘Terribly sad. Losing someone you love is . . . it’s actually unbearable. I do understand that.’
    He drew his son to him, his voice lowering to a murmur: ‘But I’m so very glad you’re here now, because I think . . . I think you and I just might get through this together. What do you think?’
    Phillip’s head rested against his chest and a thin arm crept around his middle. He felt the easing of his son’s breathing and held him close as they sat, shrouded in silence, lost in their thoughts in the near-dark.
    He had failed to grasp that the week he was due to return to work was half-term. Viv said without hesitation that she would have Phillip for the latter part, but she was due to go to her sister’s until Wednesday, so for the first two days Anthony would have to make alternative arrangements.
    ‘He can come with us to the office,’ said Don. ‘Make himself useful with a teapot.’ Knowing how Don felt about family life interfering with the Nation , Anthony was grateful. He had been desperate to work again, to restore some semblance of normal life. Phillip was touchingly eager to accompany them.
    Anthony sat down at his new desk, and surveyed the morning’s newspapers. There had been no vacant posts in Home News, so he had become reporter-at-large, the honorific title designed to reassure him, he suspected, that he would, once more, be so. He took a sip of the office coffee, and