The Last Letter From Your Lover (41 page)

“Yes.” Her mouth has gone dry. She begins to babble. “But I do want to assure you that his name is not necessarily going to get used in what I’m writing about. I just really want to find out what happened to him for a friend of his who—

“The
Nation
?”

“Yes.”

There’s a short silence.

“And you say you want to find out about my father?”

“Yes.” Her voice is draining away.

“And you’re a journalist?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Yes, a journalist. Like you. Are you saying you’re uncomfortable giving any information to a rival newspaper? I’ve told you that—”

“My father is Anthony O’Hare.”

“Yes. That’s who I’m—”

The man at the other end of the line is laughing. “You’re not in the investigative unit, by any chance?”

“No.”

It takes him a moment to gather himself. “Miss Haworth, my father works for the
Nation
. Your newspaper. He has done for more than forty years.”

Ellie sits very still. She asks him to repeat what he has just said.

“I don’t understand,” she says, standing up at her desk. “I did a byline search. I did lots of searches. Nothing came up. Only your name at the
Times
.”

“That’s because he doesn’t write.”

“Then what does—”

“My father works in the library. He has done since . . . oh . . . 1964.”

Chapter 25

OCTOBER 1964

“And give him this. He’ll know what it means.” Jennifer Stirling scribbled a note, ripped it from her diary, and thrust it into the top of the folder. She placed it on the subeditor’s desk.

“Sure,” Don said.

She reached over to him, took hold of his arm. “You will make sure he gets it? It’s really important. Desperately important.”

“I understand. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get on. This is our busiest time of day. We’re all on deadlines here.” Don wanted her out of the office. He wanted the child out of the office.

Her face crumpled. “I’m sorry. Please just make sure he gets it. Please.”

God, he wished she’d just leave. He couldn’t look at her.

“I’m—I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She appeared suddenly self-conscious, as if she was aware of the spectacle she had created. She reached for her daughter’s hand and, almost reluctantly, walked away. The few people gathered around the sub’s desk watched her go in silence.

“Congo,” said Cheryl, after a beat.

“We need to get page four off stone.” Don stared fixedly at the desk. “Let’s go with the dancing priest.”

Cheryl was still sawing at him. “Why did you tell her he’d gone to Congo?”

“You want me to tell her the truth? That he drank himself into a bloody coma?”

Cheryl twisted the pen in her mouth, her eyes drifting across to the swinging office door. “But she looked so sad.”

“She should look bloody sad. She’s the one who’s caused him all the trouble.”

“But you can’t—”

Don’s voice exploded into the newsroom. “The last thing that boy needs is her stirring things up again. Do you understand? I’m doing him a favor.” He tore the note from the folder and hurled it into the bin.

Cheryl stuck her pen behind her ear, gave her boss a hard look, and sashayed back to her desk.

Don took a deep breath. “Right, can we get off O’Hare’s bloody love life and on with this bloody dancing-priest story? Someone? Shove some copy over sharpish or we’re going to be sending the paperboys out with a load of blank pages tomorrow.”

In the next bed a man was coughing. It went on and on, a polite, staccato tattoo, as if something was caught at the back of his throat. He did it even in his sleep. Anthony O’Hare let the sound recede to some distant recess of his consciousness, just like everything else. He knew the tricks now. How to make things disappear.

“You have a visitor, Mr. O’Hare.”

The sound of curtains being pulled back, light flooding in. Pretty Scottish nurse. Cool hands. Every word she said to him was spoken in the tone of someone about to bestow a gift
. I’m just going to give you a little injection, Mr. O’Hare. Shall I get someone to help you to the lavatory, Mr. O’Hare? You have a visitor, Mr. O’Hare.

Visitor? For a moment hope floated, and then he heard Don’s voice through the curtains and remembered where he was.

“Don’t mind me, sweetheart.”

“I certainly won’t,” she said primly.

“Lie-in, is it?” A moon-sized ruddy face somewhere by his feet.

“Funny.” He spoke into his pillow, pushing himself upright. His whole body ached. He blinked. “I need to get out of here.”

His vision cleared. Don was standing at the end of his bed, arms folded, resting on his stomach. “You’re not going anywhere, sonny Jim.”

“I can’t stay here.” His voice seemed to come straight from his chest. It croaked and squeaked like a wooden wheel in a rut.

“You’re not well. They want to check your liver function before you go anywhere. You gave us all a fright.”

“What happened?” He could remember nothing.

Don hesitated, perhaps trying to judge how much to say. “You didn’t turn up at Marjorie Spackman’s office for the big meeting. When nobody had heard from you by six p.m. I got a bad feeling, left Michaels in charge, and shot over to your hotel. Found you on the floor, not too pretty. You looked worse than you do now, and that’s saying something.”

Flashback. The bar at the Regent. The wary eyes of the barman. Pain. Raised voices. An endless careening journey back to his room, clutching at walls, swaying upstairs. The sound of things crashing. Then nothing.

“I hurt all over.”

“So you should. God knows what they did to you. You looked like a pincushion when I saw you last night.”

Needles. Urgent voices. The pain. Oh, Jesus, the pain.

“What the hell is going on, O’Hare?”

In the next bed, the man had started coughing again.

“Was it that woman? She turn you down?” Don was physically uncomfortable discussing feelings. This manifested itself in a jiggling leg, in the way his hand ran backward and forward over his balding head.

Don’t mention her. Don’t make me think about her face.
“Not as simple as that.”

“Then what the hell is all this about? No woman’s worth . . . this.” Don’s hand waved distractedly above the bed.

“I—I just wanted to forget.”

“So go and sling your leg over someone else. Someone you can have. You’ll get over it.” Perhaps saying it would make it true.

Anthony’s silence lasted just long enough to contradict him.

“Some women are trouble,” Don added.

Forgive me. I just had to know.

“Moths to a flame. We’ve all been there.”

Forgive me.

Anthony shook his head. “No, Don. Not like this.”

“It’s always ‘not like this’ when it’s your own—”

“She can’t leave him because he won’t let her take the child.” Anthony’s voice, suddenly clear, cut through the curtained area. Just briefly, the man in the next bed stopped coughing. Anthony watched his boss grasp the implication of the sentence, the creeping frown of sympathy.

“Ah. Tough.”

“Yes.”

Don’s leg had begun to jiggle again. “Doesn’t mean you had to try and kill yourself with drink. You know what they said? The yellow fever screwed your liver. Screwed it, O’Hare. One more drinking session like that, and you . . .”

Anthony felt infinitely weary. He turned away on his pillow. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

For half an hour after he’d returned from the hospital, Don sat at his desk, thinking. Around him the newsroom was waking slowly, as it did every day, a sleeping giant spurred into reluctant life: journalists chatting on telephones, stories rising and falling on the newslists, pages formed and planned, the first being mocked up on the production desk.

He rubbed his hand across his jaw, called over his shoulder toward the secretary’s desk.

“Blondie. Get me the number of thingy Stirling. The asbestos man.”

Cheryl listened in silence. Minutes later, she handed him the number she had scribbled down from the office
Who’s Who
. “How is he?”

“How’d you think?” He stubbed his pen on the desk a few times, still deep in thought. Then, as she walked back to her desk, he picked up the phone and asked the switchboard to put him through to Fitzroy 2286.

He coughed a little before he spoke, like someone uncomfortable with using the telephone. “I’d like to speak to Jennifer Stirling, please.”

He could feel Cheryl watching him.

“Can I leave a message? . . . What? She doesn’t? Oh. I see.” A pause. “No, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” He put the phone down.

“What happened?” Cheryl was standing over him. She was taller than him in her new heels. “Don?”

“Nothing.” He straightened up. “Forget I said anything. Go and get me a bacon sandwich, will you? And don’t forget the ketchup. I can’t eat it without.”

He screwed the scribbled number into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket at his feet.

The grief was worse than if someone had died; at night it came in waves, relentless and astonishing in their power, hollowing him out. He saw her every time he closed his eyes, her sleepy-lidded pleasure, her expression of guilt and helplessness as she had caught sight of him in the hotel lobby. Her face told him they were lost, and that she already knew what she had done by telling him so.

And she was right. He had felt anger, at first, that she should raise his hopes without telling him the truth of her situation. That she should force her way back into his heart so ruthlessly when there was no chance for them. What was the saying?
It was the hope that would kill you
.

His feelings swung wildly. He forgave her. There was nothing to forgive. She’d done it because, like himself, she couldn’t have not done it. And because it was the only bit of him she could reasonably hope to have.
I hope the memory of it keeps you going, Jennifer, because it has destroyed me.

He fought the knowledge that, this time, there really was nothing left for him. He felt physically weakened, left frail by his own disastrous behavior. His sharp mind had been hijacked, its lucid parts shredded, just the steady pulse of loss beating through it, the same relentless beat he had heard back in Léopoldville.

She would never be his. They had come so close, and she would never be his. How was he supposed to live with that knowledge?

In the small hours, he worked through a thousand solutions. He would demand that Jennifer get a divorce. He would do everything he could to make her happy without her child through the sheer strength of his will. He would hire the best lawyer. He would give her more children. He would confront Laurence—in his wilder dreams, he went for his throat.

But Anthony had been for years a man’s man, and even then some distant male part of him could not but feel what it must be like for Laurence: to know that his wife loved someone else. And then to have to hand over his child to the man who had stolen her. It had crippled Anthony, and he had never loved Clarissa like he loved Jennifer. He thought of his sad, silent son, his own constant ache of guilt, and knew that if he imposed that on another family, any happiness they gained would lie over a dark current of grief. He had destroyed one family; he could not be responsible for destroying another.

He rang the girlfriend in New York and told her he wouldn’t be returning. He listened to her astonishment and barely disguised tears with only a distant sense of guilt. He couldn’t return there. He couldn’t sink into the steady urban rhythms of life in New York, the days measured by journeys backward and forward to the UN building, because now they would be tainted by Jennifer. Everything would be tainted by Jennifer: her scent, her taste, that she would be out there, living, breathing, without him. It was worse, somehow, to know that she had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. He couldn’t employ the necessary anger against her to propel himself away from thoughts of her.

Forgive me. I just had to know.

He needed to be in a place where he couldn’t think. To survive, he had to be somewhere where survival was the only thing he could think about.