The Last Letter from Your Lover

she couldn’t recall the plot when she had been able to do so with many of the books on her shelves.
    Perhaps I bought it and decided against it, she thought, flicking through the first few pages. It looked rather lurid. She’d skim a little tonight and perhaps give it to Mrs Cordoza, if it wasn’t her cup of tea. She placed it on her bedside table and dusted off her skirt. Now she had more pressing matters to attend to, such as tidying this mess away and working out what on earth she was going to wear this evening.
    There were two in the second post. They were almost carbon copies of each other, Moira thought, as she read them, the same symptoms, the same complaints. They were from the same factory, where each man had started work almost two decades before. Perhaps it was something to do with the unions, as her boss had said, but it was a little unnerving that the faint trickle of such correspondence several years ago had become a regular drip, drip, drip.
    Glancing up, she saw him returning from lunch and wondered what to tell him. He was shaking hands with Mr Welford, their faces wreathed in the satisfied smiles that told of a successful meeting. After the briefest hesitations, she swept both letters from the table and into her top drawer. She would put them with the others. There was no point in worrying him. She knew, after all, what he would say.
    She let her gaze rest on him for a moment, as he saw Mr Welford out of the boardroom towards the lifts, recalling their conversation of that morning. It had been just the two of them in the office. The other secretaries rarely turned up before nine, but she regularly arrived an hour earlier to start the coffee machine, lay out his papers, check for overnight telegrams and make sure his office was running smoothly by the time he stepped into it. That was her job. Besides, she preferred eating her breakfast at her desk: it was less lonely somehow than it was at home, now that Mother was gone.
    He had motioned her into his room, standing and half raising one hand. He knew she would catch the gesture: she always had half an eye open in case he needed something. She had straightened her skirt and walked in briskly, expecting a piece of dictation, a request for figures, but instead he had crossed the room and closed the door quietly after her. She had tried to suppress a shiver of excitement. He had never closed the door behind her before, not in five years. Her hand had reached unconsciously to her hair.
    His voice dropped as he took a step towards her. ‘Moira, the matter we discussed some weeks ago.’
    She had stared at him, stunned into paralysis by his proximity, the unexpected turn of events. She shook her head – a little foolishly, she suspected afterwards.
    ‘The matter we discussed’ – his voice carried a hint of impatience – ‘after my wife’s accident. I thought I should check. There was never anything . . .’
    She recovered, her hand fluttering at her collar. ‘Oh. Oh, no, sir. I went twice, as you asked. And no. There was nothing.’ She waited a moment, then added; ‘Nothing at all. I’m quite sure.’
    He nodded, as if reassured. Then he smiled at her, one of his rare, gentle smiles. ‘Thank you, Moira. You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you?’
    She felt herself prickle with pleasure.
    He walked towards the door and opened it again. ‘Your discretion has always been one of your most admirable qualities.’
    She had to swallow hard before she spoke. ‘I . . . You can always rely on me. You know that.’
    ‘What’s up with you, Moira?’ one of the typists had asked, later that day in the ladies’ powder room. She had realised she was humming. She had reapplied her lipstick carefully, and added just the lightest squirt of scent. ‘You look like the cat that got the cream.’
    ‘Perhaps Mario in the post room’s got past her stockings after all.’ An unpleasant cackle followed from the cubicle.
    ‘If you paid half as much attention to your work as you do to silly tittle-tattle, Phyllis, you might actually progress beyond junior typist,’ she said, as she left. But even the giggling catcall as she walked out into the office couldn’t dampen her pleasure.
    There were Christmas lights all around the square, large white tulip-shaped bulbs. They were draped between the Victorian lampposts and strung in jagged spirals around the trees that bordered the communal gardens.
    ‘Earlier every year,’ Mrs Cordoza remarked,