The Last Letter from Your Lover

It’ll be worse than if we’d never met again. Worse.’
    ‘Show me the letter,’ Ellie says.
    ‘I can’t do this. Don’t you think that sometimes it’s better not to do something?’
    ‘The letter, Jennifer.’
    Jennifer picks it up from the sideboard, holds it for a moment, then offers it to her.
    Dearest Jennifer,
    Are old men supposed to cry? I sit here reading and rereading the letter you sent, and I struggle to believe that my life has taken such an unexpected, joyous turn. Things like this are not meant to happen to us. I had learnt to feel gratitude for the most mundane gifts: my son, his children, a good life, if quietly lived. Survival. Oh, yes, always survival.
    And now you. Your words, your emotions have induced a greed in me. Can we ask for so much? Do I dare see you again? The Fates have been so unforgiving, some part of me believes that we cannot meet. I’ll be felled by illness, hit by a bus, swallowed whole by the Thames’s first sea monster. (Yes, I still see life in headlines.)
    The last two nights I have heard your words in my sleep. I hear your voice, and it makes me want to sing. I remember things I’d thought I’d forgotten. I smile at inopportune moments, frightening my family and sending them running for the dementia diagnosis.
    The girl I saw last was so broken; to know that you made such a life for yourself has challenged my own view of the world. It must be a benevolent place. It has taken care of you and your daughter. You cannot imagine the joy that has given me. Vicariously. I cannot write more. So I venture, with trepidation: Postman’s Park. Thursday. Midday?
    Your Boot X
    Ellie’s eyes have filled with tears. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘I really don’t think you need to worry.’
    Anthony O’Hare sits on a bench in a park he hasn’t visited for forty-four years with a newspaper he won’t read and realises, with some surprise, that he can recall the details of every commemorative tile.
    MARY ROGERS, STEWARDESS OF THE STELLA, SELF-SACRIFICED BY GIVING UP HER LIFE-BELT AND VOLUNTARILY GOING DOWN IN THE SINKING SHIP.
    WILLIAM DRAKE LOST HIS LIFE IN AVERTING A SERIOUS ACCIDENT TO A LADY IN HYDE PARK WHOSE HORSES WERE UNMANAGEABLE THROUGH THE BREAKING OF THE CARRIAGE POLE.
    JOSEPH ANDREW FORD, SAVED SIX PERSONS FROM A FIRE IN GRAYS INN ROAD BUT IN HIS LAST HEROIC ACT HE WAS SCORCHED TO DEATH.
    He has been sitting here since eleven forty. It is now seven minutes past twelve.
    He lifts his watch to his ear and shakes it. Deep in his heart he didn’t believe this could happen. How could it? If you spent long enough in a newspaper archive, you saw that the same stories repeated themselves over and over again: wars, famines, financial crises, loves lost, families divided. Death. Heartbreak. There are few happy endings. Everything I have had has been a bonus, he tells himself firmly, as the minutes creep past. It is a phrase that is achingly familiar to him.
    The rain is heavier and the little park has emptied. Only he is sitting in the shelter. In the distance he sees the main road, the cars sluicing their way along, sending sprays of water across the unwary.
    It is a quarter past twelve.
    Anthony O’Hare reminds himself of all the reasons he should feel grateful. His doctor is amazed he is alive at all. Anthony suspects he has long sought to use him as a cautionary tale to other patients with liver damage. His rude health is a rebuke to the doctor’s authority, to medical science. He wonders, briefly, whether he might indeed travel. He doesn’t want to revisit Congo, but South Africa would be interesting. Maybe Kenya. He will go home and make plans. He will give himself something to think about.
    He hears the screeching brakes of a bus, the shout of an angry bicycle courier. It’s enough to know that she had loved him. That she was happy. That had to be enough, didn’t it? Surely one of the gifts of old age was meant to be the ability to put things in perspective. He had once loved a woman who turned out to have loved him more than he’d known. There. That should be enough for him.
    It is twenty-one minutes past twelve.
    And then, as he is about to stand up, fold his newspaper under his arm and head for home, he sees that a small car has stopped near the gates of the park. He waits, shielded from view by the gloom of the little shelter.
    There is a slight delay. Then the door opens and an umbrella shoots open with an audible whoosh. It is up, and he can see a