The Last Letter from Your Lover

laughed. ‘What sort of things do you write about?’
    ‘Oh, war, famine, disease. The cheerful stuff.’
    ‘I don’t think there is much cheerful about those.’ The elderly Frenchwoman sipped her wine.
    ‘For the last year I’ve been covering the crisis in Congo.’
    ‘Lumumba’s a troublemaker,’ Stirling interjected, ‘and the Belgians are cowardly fools if they think the place will do anything but sink without them.’
    ‘You believe the Africans can’t be trusted to manage their own affairs?’
    ‘Lumumba was a barefoot jungle postman not five minutes ago. There isn’t a coloured with a professional education in the whole of Congo.’ He lit a cigar and blew out a plume of smoke. ‘How are they meant to run the banks once the Belgians have gone, or the hospitals? The place will become a war zone. My mines are on the Rhodesian–Congolese border, and I’ve already had to draft in extra security. Rhodesian security – the Congolese can no longer be trusted.’
    There was a brief silence. A muscle had begun to tick insistently in Anthony’s jaw.
    Stirling tapped his cigar. ‘So, Mr O’Hare, where were you in Congo?’
    ‘Leopoldville, mainly. Brazzaville.’
    ‘Then you know that the Congolese army cannot be controlled.’
    ‘I know that independence is a testing time for any country. And that had Lieutenant General Janssens been more diplomatic many lives might have been saved.’
    Stirling stared at him over the cigar smoke. Anthony felt he was being reassessed. ‘So, you’ve been sucked into the cult of Lumumba too. Another naïve liberal?’ His smile was icy.
    ‘It’s hard to believe that the conditions for many Africans could become any worse.’
    ‘Then you and I must differ,’ Stirling retorted. ‘I think that there are people for whom freedom can be a dangerous gift.’
    The room fell silent. In the distance, a motorbike whined up a hillside. Madame Lafayette reached up anxiously to smooth her hair.
    ‘Well, I can’t say I know anything about it,’ Jennifer Stirling observed, laying her napkin neatly on her lap.
    ‘Too depressing,’ Yvonne Moncrieff agreed. ‘I simply can’t look at the newspapers some mornings. Francis reads the sport and City pages, and I stick to my magazines. Often the news goes completely unread.’
    ‘My wife considers anything not in the pages of Vogue to not be proper news at all,’ Moncrieff said.
    The tension eased. Conversation flowed again, and the waiters refilled the glasses. The men discussed the stock market and developments on the Riviera – the influx of campers, which led the elderly couple to complain of a ‘lowering in tone’, the endless building work, and which awful newcomers had joined the British Bridge Club.
    ‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ said Moncrieff. ‘The beach huts at Monte Carlo cost fifty pounds a week this year. I shouldn’t think too many Butlin’s types are going to pay that.’
    ‘I heard that Elsa Maxwell proposed covering the pebbles with foam rubber so the beach wouldn’t be uncomfortable for one’s feet.’
    ‘Terrible hardships one faces in this place,’ Anthony remarked quietly. He wanted to leave, but that was impossible at this stage of the meal. He felt too far from where he had been – as if he had been dropped into a parallel universe. How could they be so inured to the mess, the horror of Africa, when their lives were so plainly built upon it?
    He hesitated for a moment, then motioned to a waiter for some wine. Nobody at the table seemed to notice.
    ‘So . . . you’re going to write marvellous things about my husband, are you?’ Mrs Stirling was peering at his cuff. The second course, a platter of fresh seafood, had been laid in front of him, and she had turned towards him. He adjusted his napkin. ‘I don’t know. Should I? Is he marvellous?’
    ‘He’s a beacon of sound commercial practice, according to our dear friend Mr Moncrieff. His factories are built to the highest standards. His turnover increases year after year.’
    ‘That’s not what I asked you.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘I asked you if he was marvellous.’ He knew he was being spiky, but the alcohol had woken him up, made his skin prickle.
    ‘I don’t think you should ask me , Mr O’Hare. A wife can hardly be impartial in such matters.’
    ‘Oh, in my experience there is no one more brutally impartial than a wife.’
    ‘Do go on.’
    ‘Who else knows all her husband’s faults within weeks of marrying him, and