The hallway is lined with dark turquoise carpet, a color from another age. The brass rail that leads up the four marble steps bears the deep patina of frequent polishing. She thinks, briefly, of the communal area in her own block, with its piles of neglected mail and carelessly left bicycles.
The lift makes its stately way up the four floors, creaking and trundling, and she steps out onto a tiled corridor.
“Hello?” Ellie sees the open door.
Afterward she’s not sure what she had pictured: some stooped old lady with twinkling eyes and perhaps a nice shawl amid a house full of small china animals. Jennifer Stirling is not that woman. In her late sixties she might be, but her figure is lean and still upright; only her silver hair, cut into a side-swept bob, hints at her true age. She’s wearing a dark blue cashmere sweater and a belted wool jacket over a pair of well-cut trousers that are more Dries van Noten than Marks & Spencer. An emerald green scarf is tied round her neck.
“Miss Haworth?”
She senses that the woman has watched her, perhaps assessing her, before using her name.
“Yes.” Ellie sticks out her hand. “Ellie, please.”
The woman’s face relaxes a little. Whatever test there was, she seems to have passed it—for now, at least. “Do come in. Have you come far?”
Ellie follows her into the apartment. Again, she finds her expectations defied. No animal knickknacks here. The room is huge, light, and sparsely furnished. The pale wood floors sport a couple of large Persian rugs, and two damask-clad chesterfields face each other across a glass coffee table. The only other pieces of furniture are eclectic and exquisite: a chair that she suspects is expensive, modern, and Danish, and a small antique table, inlaid with walnut. Photographs of family, small children.
“What a beautiful flat,” says Ellie, who has never particularly cared about interior decorating but suddenly knows how she wants to live.
“It is nice, isn’t it? I bought it in . . . ’sixty-eight, I think. It was rather a shabby old block then, but I thought it would be a nice place for my daughter to grow up, since she had to live in a city. You can see Regent’s Park from that window. Can I take your coat? Would you like some coffee? You look terribly wet.”
Ellie sits while Jennifer Stirling disappears into the kitchen. On the walls, which are the palest shade of cream, there are several large pieces of modern art. Ellie eyes Jennifer Stirling as she reenters the room, and realizes that she’s not surprised that she could have inspired such passion in the unknown letter writer.
The photographs on the table include one of a ridiculously beautiful young woman, posed as if for a Cecil Beaton portrait; then, perhaps a few years later, she’s peering down at a newborn child, her expression wearing the exhaustion, awe, and elation seemingly common to all new mothers—her hair, even though she has just given birth, is perfectly set.
“It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble. I have to say, your letter was intriguing.” A cup of coffee is placed in front of her, and Jennifer Stirling sits opposite, stirring hers with a tiny silver spoon, a red-enamel coffee bean at the end. Jesus, thinks Ellie. Her waist is smaller than mine.
“I’m curious to know what this correspondence is. I don’t think I’ve thrown anything out accidentally for years. I tend to shred everything. And that PO box was . . . well, I thought it was private.”
“Well, it wasn’t actually me who found it. A friend of mine has been sorting out the archive at the Nation newspaper and came across a file.”
Jennifer Stirling’s demeanor changes.
“And in it were these.”
Ellie reaches into her bag and carefully pulls out the plastic folder with the three love letters. She watches Mrs. Stirling’s face as she takes them. “I would have sent them to you,” she continues, “but . . .”
Jennifer Stirling is holding the letters reverently in both hands.
“I wasn’t sure . . . what—well, whether you would even want to see them.”
Jennifer says nothing. Suddenly ill at ease, Ellie takes a sip from her cup. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, drinking her coffee, but she keeps her eyes averted, she isn’t sure why.
“Oh, I do want them.”
When she looks up, something has happened to Jennifer’s expression. She isn’t tearful, exactly, but her eyes have the pinched look of someone beset by intense emotion. “You’ve read them, I take it.”
Ellie finds she’s blushing. “Sorry. They were in a file of something completely unrelated. I didn’t know I’d end up finding their owner. I thought they were beautiful,” she adds awkwardly.
“Yes, they are, aren’t they? Well, Ellie Haworth, not many things surprise me at my age, but you have succeeded today.”
“Aren’t you going to read them?”
“I don’t have to. I know what they say.”
Ellie learned a long time ago that the most important skill in journalism is knowing when to say nothing. But now she’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable as she watches an old woman who has in some way disappeared from the room. “I’m sorry,” she says carefully, when the silence becomes oppressive, “if I’ve upset you. I wasn’t sure what to do, given that I didn’t know what your—”
“—situation was,” Jennifer says. She smiles, and Ellie thinks again what a lovely face she has. “That was very diplomatic of you. But these can cause no embarrassment. My husband died many years ago. It’s one of the things they never tell you about being old.” She gives a wry smile. “That the men die off so much sooner.”
For a while they listen to the rain, the hissing brakes of the buses outside.
“Well,” Mrs. Stirling says, “tell me something, Ellie. What made you go to such effort to return these letters to me?”
Ellie ponders whether or not to mention the feature. Her instincts tell her not to.
“Because I’ve never read anything like them?”
Jennifer Stirling is watching her closely.
“And . . . I also have a lover,” she says, not sure why she says this.
“A ‘lover’?”
“He’s . . . married.”
“Ah. So these letters spoke to you.”
“Yes. The whole story did. It’s the thing about wanting something you can’t have. And that thing of never being able to say what you really feel.” She’s looking down now, speaking to her lap. “The man I’m involved with, John . . . I don’t really know what he thinks. We don’t talk about what’s happening between us.”