His voice lifts sarcastically. “ ‘It was bigger than both of us.’ I think you’ve been more affected by those love letters than you think.”
“Oh, well, good for you, Mr. Practical. Bully for you that you can turn your emotions on and off like taps. Yes, I let myself fall into it—okay? Immoral, yes. Ill-advised? Well, judging by your response, obviously. But I felt something magical for a bit and—and don’t worry, I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“But you’re not the only one, are you? Every act has a consequence, Ellie. In my view the world divides into people who can see that, and make a decision accordingly, and those who just go for what feels good at the time.”
“Oh, Christ! Have you any idea how bloody pompous you sound?” She’s shouting now, barely conscious of the curious commuters who file past, fed into the tunnels of the District and Circle lines.
“Yes.”
“And no one in your world is allowed to make a mistake?”
“Once,” he says. “You can make a mistake once.”
He stares off into the distance, his jaw set, as if working out how much to say. Then he turns to face her. “I was on the other side, okay, Ellie? I loved someone who found someone else that she couldn’t resist. Something that was ‘bigger than both of them.’ Until, of course, he dumped her. And I let her back into my life, and she burned me a second time. So, yes, I do have an opinion on it.”
She’s rooted to the spot. There’s a rush of noise, a blast of hot, disturbed air as a train approaches.
Passengers surge forward.
“You know something?” he says, his voice lifting over the din. “I’m not judging you for falling in love with this man. Who knows? Perhaps he’s the love of your life. Perhaps his wife really would be better off without him. Perhaps the two of you really were meant to be. But you could have said no to me.” Suddenly she sees something unexpected, something raw and exposed, in his face. “That’s what I’m having trouble getting my head round. You could have said no to me. That would have been the right thing to do.”
He hops lightly into the packed carriage just as the doors close. It pulls away, with a deafening whine.
She watches his departing back in the illuminated window until it disappears. The right thing for who?
Hey, babe,
Thought of you all weekend. How is uni? Barry says all birds who go to uni eventually find someone else, but I told him he was talking out of his backside. He’s just jealous. He went out with that girl from the estate agent’s on Tuesday and she blew him out after the main course. Just said she was going to the ladies’ and went!!! He said he sat there twenty minutes before he realized. We were all killing ourselves down at the Feathers . . .
Wish you were here, babe. Nights seem long without you. Write to me soon.
Clive XX
Ellie sits in the middle of her bed, a dusty cardboard box on her lap, the correspondence of her teenage years spread out around her. She is in bed at nine thirty, trying desperately to think of some way of salvaging the love-letters feature for Melissa without exposing Jennifer to public view. She thinks of Clive, her first love, a tree surgeon’s son who had gone to the same secondary school. They had agonized over whether she should go to university, sworn that it wouldn’t affect their relationship. They lasted about three months after she went to Bristol. She remembers how the appearance of his battered Mini in the car park outside her halls of residence morphed frighteningly swiftly from being glorious, a signal for her to spray on perfume and belt down the corridor, to a sinking feeling of dismay when she knew she no longer felt anything for him, except a sensation of being pulled back into a life she no longer wanted.
Dear Clive,
I have spent much of the night trying to work out how to do this in a way that is going to cause each of us as little pain as possible. But there is no easy way to.
Dear Clive,
This is a really difficult letter to write. But I have to come out and say that I
Dear Clive,
I’m really sorry but I don’t want you to come down anymore. Thanks for the good times. I hope we can still be mates.
Ellie
She fingers her crossed-out versions, folded in a neat pile among other correspondence. After he had received the final letter, he had driven 212 miles just to call her a bitch in person. She remembers being curiously untouched by it, perhaps because she had already moved on. At university, she had scented a new life far from the small town of her youth, far from the Clives, the Barrys, the Saturday nights at the pub, and a life where everyone not only knew you but what you’d done at school, what your parents did, the time you sang in the choir concert and your skirt fell down. You could only truly reinvent yourself far from home. On trips to see her parents, she still feels a little stifled by all that communal history.
She finishes her tea and wonders what Clive is doing now. He’ll be married, she thinks, probably happily; he was an easygoing sort. He’ll have a couple of children, and the high point of his weekend will still be Saturday nights at the pub with the lads he has known since school.
Now, of course, the Clives of this world won’t be writing letters. They’d text her. All right babe? She wonders whether she would have ended the relationship by mobile phone.
She sits very still. Looks around her at the empty bed, the old letters strewn across the duvet. She hasn’t read any of Jennifer’s since her night with Rory; they are somehow uncomfortably linked to his voice. She thinks of his face as he stood in the Tube tunnel. You could have said no to me. She remembers Melissa’s face, and tries not to think about the possibility of having to return to her old life. She could fail. She really could. She feels as if she’s balanced on a precipice. Change is coming.
And then she hears her phone chime. Almost relieved, she stretches across the bed for it, her knee sinking into the pile of pastel paper.
No reply?
She reads it again and types:
Sorry. Thought you didn’t want me to text you.
Things have changed. Say whatever you want now.
She murmurs the words aloud into the silence of the little room, hardly able to believe what she’s seeing. Is this what actually happens outside romantic comedies? Can these situations, the ones everyone counsels against, really work out? She pictures herself in the café on some unspecified future date, telling Nicky and Corrine: Yes, of course he’ll be moving in here. Just till we can find somewhere bigger. We’ll have the children on alternate weekends. She pictures him returning in the evenings, dropping his bag, kissing her lengthily in the hallway. It’s such an unlikely scenario that her mind spins. Is this what she wants? She scolds herself for her moment of doubt. Of course it is. She couldn’t have felt like this for so long if it isn’t.