The Last Letter from Your Lover

didn’t seem to want to volunteer anything. Where was the wit? The passion? That simmering sense she had held within her of something threatening to erupt out of her, whether unexpected laughter or a flurry of kisses? She seemed flattened, buried under glacial good manners.
    In the corner, the string quartet paused between movements. Frustration rose in Anthony. ‘Jennifer, why did you invite me here?’
    She looked tired, he realised, but also feverish, her cheekbones lit by points of high colour.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he continued, ‘but I don’t want a sandwich. I don’t want to sit in this place listening to ruddy string music. If I’ve earned anything through being apparently dead for the last four years it must be the right not to have to sit through tea and polite conversation.’
    ‘I . . . just wanted to see you.’
    ‘You know, when I saw you across the room yesterday I was still so angry with you. All this time I’d assumed you chose him – a lifestyle – over me. I’ve rehearsed arguments with you in my head, berated you for not replying to my last letters—’
    ‘Please don’t.’ She held up a hand, cutting him off.
    ‘And then I see you, and you tell me you were trying to come with me. And I’m having to rethink everything I believed about the last four years – everything I thought was true.’
    ‘Let’s not talk about it, Anthony, what might have been . . .’ She placed her hands on the table in front of her, like someone laying down cards. ‘I . . . just can’t.’
    They sat opposite each other, the immaculately dressed woman and the tense man. The thought, brief and darkly humorous, occurred to him that to onlookers they appeared miserable enough to be married.
    ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Why are you so loyal to him? Why have you stayed with someone who so clearly cannot make you happy?’
    She lifted her eyes to his. ‘Because I was so disloyal, I suppose.’
    ‘Do you think he’d be loyal to you?’
    She held his gaze for a moment, then glanced at her watch. ‘I need to leave.’
    He winced. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t say another thing. I just need to know—’
    ‘It’s not you. Really. I do need to be somewhere.’
    He caught himself. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I’m the one who was late. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’ He couldn’t help the anger in his voice. He cursed his editor for losing him that precious half-hour, cursed himself for what he already knew were wasted opportunities – and for allowing himself to come close to something that still had the power to burn him.
    She stood up to leave and a waiter appeared to help her with her coat. There would always be someone to help her, he thought absently. She was that kind of woman. He was immobilised, stuck at the table.
    Had he misread her? Had he misremembered the intensity of their brief time together? He was saddened by the idea that this was it. Was it worse to have the memory of something perfect sullied, replaced by something inexplicable and disappointing?
    The waiter held her coat by the shoulders. She put her arms into the sleeves, one at a time, her head dipped.
    ‘That’s it?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Anthony. I really do have to go.’
    He stood up. ‘We’re not going to talk about anything? After all this? Did you even think of me?’
    Before he could say more, she had turned on her heel and walked out.
    Jennifer splashed her reddened, blotchy eyes with cold water for the fifteenth time. In the bathroom mirror her reflection showed a woman defeated by life. A woman so far removed from the tai-tai of five years ago that they might have been different species, let alone different people. She let her fingers trace the shadows under her eyes, the new lines of strain on her brow, and wondered what he had seen when he looked at her.
    He’ll squash you, extinguish the things that make you you.
    She opened the medicine cabinet and gazed at the neat row of brown bottles. She couldn’t tell him that she had been so afraid before she met him that she had taken twice the recommended dose of Valium. She couldn’t tell him that she had heard him as if through a fog, had been so dissociated from what she was doing that she could barely hold the tea-pot. She couldn’t tell him that to have him so close that she could see every line on his hands and breathe the scent of his cologne had paralysed her.
    Jennifer turned on the hot tap and the water rushed down the plughole, splashing off