She stands on the stairs, thinking of his bare, freckled arms wrapped around her, his sleeping face on her pillow. It had been perfect. Perfect. A small voice wonders whether one day, if only he’d think about it hard enough, he’ll realize that their whole life could be like that.
It’s a short taxi ride to the post office in Langley Street. Before she leaves the office, she takes care to tell Melissa’s secretary. “Here is my mobile number, if she wants me,” she says, her voice dripping with professional courtesy. “I’ll be about an hour.”
Although it’s lunchtime, the post office isn’t busy. She walks to the front of the nonexistent queue and waits obediently for the electronic voice to call, “Till number four, please.”
“Can I talk to someone about PO boxes, please?”
“Hang on.” The woman disappears, then reemerges, pointing for her to move to the end, where there is a door. “Margie will meet you down there.”
A young woman sticks her head around the door. She’s wearing a name tag, a large gold chain with a crucifix, and a pair of heels so high that Ellie wonders how she can bear to stand in them, let alone spend a whole day working in them. She smiles, and Ellie thinks briefly how rare it is that anyone smiles at you in the city anymore.
“This is going to sound a little strange,” Ellie begins, “but is there a way of finding out who rented a PO box years ago?”
“They can change pretty frequently. When are you talking about?” Ellie wonders how much to tell her, but Margie has a nice face, so she adopts her confidential tone. She reaches into her bag and pulls out the letters, carefully enclosed in a clear plastic folder. “It’s a bit of a strange one. It’s some love letters I found. They’re addressed to a PO box here, and I want to return them.”
She has Margie’s interest. It’s probably a nice change from benefit payments and catalog returns.
“PO box thirteen.” Ellie points at the envelope.
Margie’s face reveals recognition. “Thirteen?”
“You know the one?”
“Oh, yes.” Margie’s lips are compressed, as if she’s considering how much she’s allowed to say. “Apart from a short break, that PO box has been held by the same person for, ooh, almost forty years. Not that that’s particularly unusual in itself.”
“So what is?”
“The fact that it’s never had a letter. Not one. We’ve contacted the holder lots of times to give her the chance to shut it down. She says she wants to keep it open. We say it’s up to her if she wants to waste her money.” She peers at the letter. “Love letter, is it? Oh, how sad.”
“Can you give me her name?” Ellie’s stomach tenses. This could be a better story even than she’d envisaged.
The woman shakes her head. “Sorry, I can’t. Data protection and all that.”
“Oh, please!” She thinks of Melissa’s face if she can come back with a Forbidden Love That Lasted Forty Years. “Please. You have no idea how important this is to me.”
“Sorry, I really am, but it could cost me more than my job.”
Ellie swears under her breath and glances behind her at the queue that has suddenly appeared. Margie is turning back to her door.
“Thank you anyway,” Ellie says, remembering her manners.
“No problem.” Behind them a small child is crying, trying to escape from the restraints of its pram.
“Hang on.” Ellie’s rustling in her bag.
“Yes?”
She grins. “Could I—you know—leave a letter in it?”
Dear Jennifer,
Please excuse the intrusion, but I have come across some personal correspondence that I believe may be yours, and I’d welcome the opportunity to return it to you.
I can be contacted on the numbers below.
Yours sincerely,
Ellie Haworth
Rory looks at it. They’re sitting at the pub across from the Nation. It’s dark, even so early in the evening, and under the sodium lights green removal lorries are still visible outside the front gate, men in overalls traveling backward and forward up the wide steps to the Nation’s entrance. They have been an almost permanent fixture for weeks now.
“What? You think I’ve got the tone wrong?”
“No.” He’s sitting beside her on the banquette, one foot angled against the table leg in front of them.
“What, then? You’re doing that thing with your face.”
He grins. “I don’t know, don’t ask me. I’m not a journalist.”
“Come on. What does the face mean?”
“Well, doesn’t it make you feel a bit . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know . . . It’s so personal. And you’re going to be asking her to air her dirty linen in public.”
“She might be glad of the chance. She might find him again.” There’s a note of defiant optimism in her voice.
“Or she might be married, and they’ve spent forty years trying to get over her affair.”
“I doubt it. Anyway, how do you know it’s dirty linen? They might be together now. It might have had a happy ending.”
“And she kept the PO box open for forty years? It didn’t have a happy ending.” He hands back the letter. “She might even be mentally ill.”
“Oh, so holding a torch for someone means you’re mad. Obviously.”
“Keeping a PO box open for forty years, without getting a single letter in it, is on the far side of normal behavior.”
He has a point, she concedes. But the idea of Jenny and her empty PO box has taken hold of her imagination. More important, it’s the closest thing she has to a decent feature. “I’ll think about it,” she says. She doesn’t tell him she posted the good copy that afternoon.
“So,” he says, “did you have a good time last night? Not too sore today?”
“What?”
“The ice-skating.”
“Oh. A little.” She straightens her legs, feeling the tightness in her thighs, and reddens a little when she brushes his knee with her own. In-jokes have sprung up between them. She is Jayne Torvill; he is the humble librarian, there to do her bidding. He texts her with deliberate misspellings: Pls will the smart ladee com and hav a drink with the humble librarrian later?
“I heard you came down to find me.”
She glances at him, and he’s grinning again. She grimaces. “Your boss is so grumpy. Honestly. It was as if I’d asked him to sacrifice his firstborn when all I was doing was trying to get a message to you.”