The Last Letter from Your Lover

idea that a personal assistant’s job was not just a matter of typing personal correspondence and making sure the filing was in order. It was a far greater role than that. It was about making sure that an office didn’t just run smoothly but that the people within it felt part of . . . well, a family. A Christmas postbox and some cheerful decorations were what ultimately tied an office together, and made it a place one might look forward to coming to.
    The little Christmas tree she had set up in the corner looked nicer there. There was little point in having it at home, now that there was no one but her to see it. Here it could be enjoyed by lots of people. And if someone happened to remark on the very pretty angel at the top, or the lovely baubles with the frosted crystals, she might tell them casually, as if it had just occurred to her, that those had been Mother’s favourites.
    Moira put on her coat. She gathered up her belongings, tied her scarf and placed her pen and pencil neatly on the desk ready for the morning. She went to Mr Stirling’s office, keys in hand, to lock the door, and then, with a glance at the door, she moved swiftly into the room and reached under his desk for the wastepaper bin.
    It took her only a moment to locate the handwritten letter. She barely hesitated before she picked it up and, after checking again through the glass to make sure that she was still alone, she smoothed out the creases on the desk and began to read.
    She stood very, very still.
    Then she read it again.
    The bell outside chimed eight. Startled by the sound, Moira left Mr Stirling’s office, placed his bin outside for the cleaners to empty and locked the door. She put the letter at the bottom of her desk drawer, locked it and dropped the key into her pocket.
    For once, the bus ride to Streatham seemed to take no time at all. Moira Parker had an awful lot to think about.

I appreciate what you said. But I hope that when you read this letter you realise the magnanimity [sic] of my remorse and regret both at how I treated you and the path which I chose to take . . . My relationship with M is doomed and always has been. I wish it hadn’t taken me three years to realise that what began as a holiday romance should have remained just that.
    Male to Female, via letter

7
    They met every day, sitting outside sun-drenched cafés, or heading into the scorched hills in her little Daimler to eat at places they picked without care or forethought. She told him about her upbringing in Hampshire and Eaton Place, the ponies, boarding-school, the narrow, comfortable world that had comprised her life until her marriage. She told him how, even at twelve, she had felt stifled, had known she would need a bigger canvas, and how she had never suspected that the wide stretches of the Riviera could contain a social circle just as strictured and monitored as the one she had left behind.
    She told him of a boy from the village with whom she had fallen in love at fifteen, and how, when he discovered the relationship, her father had taken her into an outbuilding and thrashed her with his braces.
    ‘For falling in love?’ She had told the story lightly, and he tried to hide how disturbed he was by it.
    ‘For falling in love with the wrong sort of boy. Oh, I suppose I was a bit of a handful. They told me I’d brought the whole family into disrepute. They said I had no moral compass, that if I didn’t watch myself no decent man would want to marry me.’ She laughed, without humour. ‘Of course, the fact that my father had a mistress for years was quite a different matter.’
    ‘And then Laurence came along.’
    She smiled at him slyly. ‘Yes. Wasn’t I lucky?’
    He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages: an unburdened intimacy, resting on the unspoken understanding that they were unlikely to meet again. He told her about his three-year tenure as the Nation ’s Central Africa correspondent, how at first he had welcomed the chance to escape his failing marriage, but hadn’t adopted the personal armoury necessary to cope with the atrocities he witnessed: Congo’s steps to independence had meant the death of thousands. He had found himself spending night after night in Leopoldsville’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club, anaesthetising himself with whisky or, worse, palm wine, until the combined horrors of what he had seen and a bout of yellow fever almost did for him. ‘I