“I don’t suppose he’s unusual in that,” Mrs. Stirling remarks.
“But your lover did. ‘B.’ did.”
“Yes.” Again, she’s lost in another time. “He told me everything. It’s an astonishing thing to receive a letter like that. To know you’re loved so completely. He was always terribly good with words.”
The rain becomes briefly torrential and thunders against the windows, people shouting below in the street.
“I’ve been mildly obsessed by your love affair, if that doesn’t sound too strange. I desperately wanted the two of you to reunite. I have to ask, did you . . . did you ever get back together?”
The modern parlance seems wrong, inappropriate, and Ellie feels suddenly self-conscious. There’s something graceless in what she was asking, she thinks. She has pushed it too far.
Just as Ellie is about to apologize, and make to leave, Jennifer speaks: “Would you like another cup of coffee, Ellie?” she says. “I don’t suppose there’s much point in your leaving while the rain is like this.”
Jennifer Stirling sits on the silk-covered sofa, her coffee cooling on her lap, and tells the story of a young wife in the south of France, of a husband who, in her words, was probably no worse than any others of the age. A man very much of his time, in whom expressiveness had become a sign of weakness, unbecoming. And she tells a story of his opposite, an opinionated, passionate, damaged man, who unsettled her from the first night she met him at a moonlit dinner party.
Ellie sits, rapt, pictures building in her head, trying not to think about the tape recorder she has surreptitiously turned on in her handbag. But she no longer feels graceless. Mrs. Stirling talks animatedly, as if this is a story she has wanted to tell for decades. She says it’s a story she has pieced together over the years, and Ellie, although she doesn’t completely understand what is being said, doesn’t want to interrupt and ask her to clarify.
Jennifer Stirling tells of the sudden palling of her gilded life, the sleepless nights, her guilt, the terrifying, irrevocable pull of someone forbidden, the awful realization that the life you’re leading might be the wrong one. As she speaks, Ellie bites her nails, wondering if this is what John is thinking, right now, on some distant sun-drenched beach. How can he love his wife and do what he does with her? How can he not feel that pull?
The story becomes darker, the voice quieter. She tells of a car crash on a wet road, a blameless man dead, and the four years she sleepwalked through her marriage, held in place only by pills and the birth of her daughter.
She breaks off, reaches behind her, and hands Ellie a photo frame. A tall blond woman stands in a pair of shorts, a man with his arm around her. Two children and a dog are at her bare feet. She looks like a Calvin Klein advertisement. “Esmé’s probably not that much older than you,” she says. “She lives in San Francisco with her husband, a doctor. They’re very happy.” She adds, with a wry smile, “To my knowledge.”
“Does she know about the letters?” Ellie places the frame carefully on the coffee table, trying not to begrudge the unknown Esmé her spectacular genetics, her apparently enviable life.
This time Mrs. Stirling hesitates before speaking. “I’ve never told this story to a living soul. What daughter would want to hear that her mother was in love with somebody other than her father?”
And then she tells of a chance meeting, years later, the glorious shock of discovering she was where she was meant to be. “Can you understand that? I had felt out of place for so long . . . and then Anthony was there. And I had this feeling.” She taps her breastbone. “That I was home. That it was him.”
“Yes,” says Ellie. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa. Jennifer Stirling’s face is illuminated. Suddenly Ellie can see the young girl she had been. “I know that feeling.”
“The awful thing was, of course, that having found him again, I wasn’t free to go with him. Divorce was a very different matter in those days, Ellie. Awful. One’s name was dragged through the mud. I knew my husband would destroy me if I tried to go. And I couldn’t leave Esmé. He—Anthony—had left his own child behind, and I don’t think he ever really recovered from it.”
“So you never actually left your husband?” Ellie feels a sinking disappointment.
“I did, thanks to that file you found. He had this funny old secretary, Miss Thing.” She grimaces. “I never could remember her name. I suspect she was in love with him. And then, for some reason, she handed me the means to destroy him. He knew he couldn’t touch me once I had those files.”
She describes the meeting with the unnamed secretary, her husband’s shock when she revealed what she knew at his office.
“The asbestos files.” They had seemed so innocuous in Ellie’s flat, their power dimmed by age and hindsight.
“Of course nobody knew about asbestos then. We thought it was wonderful stuff. It was a terrible shock to discover that Laurence’s company had destroyed so many lives. That was why I set up the foundation when he died. To help the victims. Here.” She reaches into a bureau and pulls out a pamphlet. It details a legal-help scheme for those suffering work-related mesothelioma. “There’s not much money left in the fund now, but we do still offer legal help. I have friends in the profession who provide their services for free, here and abroad.”
“You still got your husband’s money?”
“Yes. That was our arrangement. I kept his name and became one of those rather reclusive wives who never accompanied their husbands to anything. Everyone assumed I’d dropped out of society to bring up Esmé. It wasn’t unusual in those days, you see. He simply took his mistress to all the social events.” She laughs, shaking her head. “There was the most astonishing double standard back then.”
Ellie pictures herself on John’s arm at some book launch. He has always been careful not to touch her in public, not to give any indication of their relationship. She has secretly hoped that they will be caught kissing, or that their passion will be so apparent they become the subject of damaging gossip.
She looks up to find Jennifer Stirling’s eyes on her. “Would you like more coffee, Ellie? I’m assuming you’re not in a hurry to be anywhere.”
“No. That would be lovely. I want to know what happened.”
Her expression changes. The smile fades. There is a short silence.