The Last Letter from Your Lover

gone, leaving Jennifer to a silent house, and dreams of an imaginary breakfast far preferable to her own.
    Do you remember that first dinner? I was such a fool, and you knew it. And you were so utterly, utterly charming, darling J, even faced with my ungracious behaviour.
    I was so angry that night. Now I suspect I was in love with you even then, but we men are so thumpingly incapable of seeing what is before us. It was easier to pass off my discomfort as something else entirely.
    She had now unearthed seven letters from their hiding-places around her house; seven letters that laid out before her the kind of love she had known, the kind of person she had become as a result of it. In those handwritten words, she saw herself reflected in myriad ways: impulsive, passionate, quick to temper and to forgive.
    He seemed her polar opposite. He challenged, proclaimed, promised. He was an acute observer; of her, of the things around him. He kept nothing hidden. She seemed to be the first woman he had ever truly loved. She wondered, when she read his words again, whether he was the first man she had truly loved in return.
    When you looked at me with those limitless, deliquescent eyes of yours, I used to wonder what it was you could possibly see in me. Now I know that is a foolish view of love. You and I could no more not love each other than the earth could stop circling the sun.
    Although the letters were not always dated, it was possible to place them in some kind of chronology: this one had come soon after they had first met, another after some kind of argument, a third after a passionate reunion. He had wanted her to leave Laurence. Several of them asked her to. She had apparently resisted. Why? She thought now of the cold man in the kitchen, the oppressive silence of her home. Why did I not go?
    She read the seven letters obsessively, trawling for clues, trying to work out the man’s identity. The last was dated September, a matter of weeks before her accident. Why had he not made contact? They had plainly never telephoned each other, or had any specific meeting-place. When she observed that some of the letters shared a PO box, she had gone to the post office to find out if there were any more. But the box had been reallocated, and there were no letters for her.
    She became convinced that he would make himself known to her. How could the man who had written these letters, the man whose emotions were suffused with urgency, just sit and wait? She no longer believed it might be Bill; it was not that she couldn’t believe she’d had feelings for him, but the idea of deceiving Violet seemed beyond her, if not him. Which left Jack Amory and Reggie Carpenter. And Jack Amory had just announced his engagement to a Miss Victoria Nelson of Camberley, Surrey.
    Mrs Cordoza entered the room as Jennifer was finishing her hair. ‘Could you make sure my midnight blue silk is pressed for this evening?’ she said. She held a string of diamonds against her pale neck. He loved her neck:
    I have never yet been able to look at it without wanting to kiss the back.
    ‘I’ve laid it out on the bed there.’
    Mrs Cordoza walked past her to pick it up. ‘I’ll do it now, Mrs Stirling,’ she said.
    Reggie Carpenter was flirting. There was no other word for it. Yvonne’s cousin was leaning up against Jenny’s chair, his eyes fixed on her mouth, which was twitching mischievously as if they had shared a private joke.
    Yvonne watched them as she handed Francis a drink where he sat, a few feet away. She stooped to murmur into her husband’s ear, ‘Can’t you get Reggie over with the men? He’s been virtually sitting in Jennifer’s lap since she got here.’
    ‘I tried, darling, but short of physically hauling him away, there wasn’t a lot I could do.’
    ‘Then grab Maureen. She looks as if she’s going to cry.’
    From the moment she had opened the door to the Stirlings – Jennifer in a mink coat and apparently already loaded, he grim-faced – her skin had prickled, as if in anticipation of something awful. There was tension between them, and then Jennifer and Reggie had latched on to each other in a way that was frankly exasperating.
    ‘I do wish people would confine their quarrels to home,’ she muttered.
    ‘I’ll give Larry a large whisky. He’ll warm up eventually. Probably a bad day at the office.’ Francis stood up, touched her elbow and was gone.
    The cocktail sausages had hardly been tried. With a sigh, Yvonne picked