Theirs, she thinks, was a love affair that meant something. He was a man who cracked himself open in front of the woman he loved; he sought to understand her and tried to protect her, even from herself. When he couldn’t have her, he removed himself to the other side of the world and, quite likely, sacrificed himself. And she mourned him for forty years. What did Ellie have? Great sex, perhaps once every ten days, and a host of noncommittal e-mails. She is thirty-two years old, her career is collapsing around her, her friends know she is heading full pelt down an emotional dead end, and every day it is getting harder to convince herself that this is a life she would have chosen.
It’s a quarter past nine. She knows she shouldn’t drink any more, but she feels angry, mournful, nihilistic. She pours another glass, cries, and rereads the last letter again. Like Jennifer, she now feels she knows these words by heart. They have an awful resonance.
Being without you—thousands of miles from you—offers no relief at all. The fact that I am no longer tormented by your presence, or presented with daily evidence of my inability to have the one thing I truly desire, has not healed me. It has made things worse. My future feels like a bleak, empty road.
She is half in love with this man herself. She pictures John, hears him saying the words, and alcohol makes the two blur into each other. How does one lift one’s own life out of the mundane and into something epic? Surely one should be brave enough to love? She pulls her mobile phone from her bag, something dark and bold creeping under her skin. She flips it open and sends a text, her fingers clumsy on the keys:
Please call. Just once. Need to hear from you. X
She presses send, already knowing what a colossal error she has made. He’ll be furious. Or he won’t respond. She’s not sure which is worse. Ellie’s head sinks into her hands, and she weeps for the unknown Boot, for Jennifer, for chances missed and a life wasted. She cries for herself, because nobody will ever love her like he loved Jennifer, and because she suspects that she is spoiling what might have been a perfectly good, if ordinary, life. She cries because she is drunk and in her flat and there are few advantages to living on your own except being able to sob uninhibitedly at will.
She starts when she hears the door buzzer, lifting her head and remaining immobile until it sounds again. For a brief, insane moment, she wonders if it’s John, in response to her message. Suddenly galvanized, she rushes to the hall mirror, wiping frantically at the red blotches on her face, and picks up the entry phone. “Hello?”
“Okay, smarty-pants. How do you spell ‘uninvited random caller’?”
She blinks. “Rory.”
“Nope, that’s not it.”
She bites her lip and leans against the wall. There is a brief silence.
“Are you busy? I was just passing.” He sounds merry, exuberant. “Okay . . . I was on the right Tube line.”
“Come up.” She hangs up the phone and splashes her face with cold water, trying not to feel disappointed when it so obviously couldn’t have been John.
She hears him taking the steps two at a time, then pushing at the door she has left ajar.
“I’ve come to drag you out for a drink. Oh!” He’s eyeing the empty wine bottle, and then, for a fraction longer, her face. “Ah. Too late.”
She manages an unconvincing smile. “Not been a great evening.”
“Ah.”
“It’s fine if you want to go.” He’s wearing a gray scarf. It looks like cashmere. She has never owned a cashmere jumper. How has she reached the age of thirty-two and never owned a cashmere jumper? “Actually, I’m probably not great company right now.”
He takes another look at the wine bottle. “Well, Haworth,” he says, unwinding the scarf from his neck, “it’s never stopped me before. How about I stick the kettle on?”
He makes tea, fumbling to locate tea bags, milk, spoons, in her tiny kitchen. She thinks of John, who just last week had done the same thing, and her eyes fill again with tears. Then Rory sits and places the mug in front of her, and as she drinks it he talks uncharacteristically volubly about his day, the friend he has just met for a drink who suggested some oblique route across Patagonia. The friend—he has known him since childhood—has become something of a competitive traveler. “You know the type. You say you’re headed for Peru. He says, ‘Oh, forget the Machu Picchu trail, I spent three nights with the pygmies of Atacanta jungle. They fed me one of their relatives when we ran out of baboon meat.’ ”
“Nice.” She’s curled up on the sofa, cradling her mug.
“I love the guy, but I’m just not sure I can take six months of him.”
“That’s how long you’re going for?”
“Hopefully.”
She’s buffeted by another groundswell of misery. Granted, Rory isn’t John, but it has been some compensation to have a man to call on for the odd evening out.
“So, what’s up?” he says.
“Oh . . . I had a weird day.”
“It’s Saturday. I assumed girls like you went out gossiping over brunch and shopping for shoes.”
“No stereotypes there, then. I went to see Jennifer Stirling.”
“Who?”
“The letter lady.”
She sees his surprise. He leans forward. “Wow. She actually called you. What happened?”
Suddenly she begins to cry again, tears pouring. “I’m sorry,” she mutters, scrambling for tissues. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being so ridiculous.”
She feels his hand on her shoulder, an arm around her. He smells of the pub, deodorant, clean hair, and the outside. “Hey,” he’s saying softly, “hey . . . this isn’t like you.”
How would you know? she thinks. Nobody knows what is like me. I’m not even sure I know. “She told me everything. The whole love affair. Oh, Rory, it’s heartbreaking. They loved each other so much, and they kept missing each other until he died in Africa and she never saw him again.” She’s crying so hard her words are nearly unintelligible.
He’s hugging her, his head dipping to catch the words. “Talking to an old lady made you this sad? A failed love affair from forty years ago?”
“You had to be there. You had to hear what she said.” She tells him a little of the story and wipes her eyes. “She’s so beautiful and graceful and sad . . .”
“You’re beautiful and graceful and sad. Okay, perhaps not graceful.”