Evelyn
Was it too heavy? She suspected that she would end up regretting having encouraged him. But she had already pushed it through the postbox. It was gone now.
TWENTY-ONE
There were no more afternoon naps, and no more depression. His letters came quickly. He talked about his love for her, his dreams, his daily routine and how much brighter the world appeared through his eyes now that he was looking at everything around him but seeing only her. She hurried to post her replies. She told him how she was throwing herself madly into life with new gusto. How she’d had her hair done like Dynasty’s Linda Evans, how she’d shopped for clothes that she imagined he would like her in. How she’d gone to the opera and sat through Madama Butterfly without shedding one tear because she’d been fantasising about the life they might have together. By the time the opera was over, she’d seen it in all its full and glorious detail: Eddy conducting a successful landscape business to rich clients in London; Eddy and her dining with her friends on Fridays, whiling away their summer Sundays under trees in Hyde Park. She told him how she’d sold another article to the magazine, and had even begun her book, drumming up a rough outline from copious notes she had made over the last few months. She told him she would call herself Joanna Smart, if it ever got published. So that Mark would never know. She always signed off with, Your Constance Chatterley.
Then the letter came that changed everything.
My Constance Chatterley,
Your last letter was one I read over and over. I read all your letters multiple times – I can hear your voice in them and it makes me so happy. But this one was different. What you said has made me do a great deal of soul searching. The joy your letters give me, the joy I have from knowing you are still in my life, has changed my life. I’m not much of a writer. I spell as badly as I sing, and get clumsy and tongue-tied whenever I sit down with a pen. Yet you make me want to write better letters. You make me want to push myself to be a better man. Maybe if I’d moved away from here when I was younger, or tried harder in school, I would have amounted to something that would have made me worthy of you. If I could do it all over again, I would make that my mission. I always think of that knot I had in my stomach when I talked to you the first time in the garden – the same one I had when I thought we were going to go out, twenty years ago.
But I can’t do this any more.
Being back there every second week in your mother’s garden is too agonising for me. I think of you constantly, and I see you everywhere I look. I keep hoping that one day I’ll glance up and you’ll be there again, and you’ll have come home, come back to me. Sometimes, I even find myself driving past the house looking for you, even though I know it’s insane. But I realise I’m selling myself the same dream I sold myself briefly many years ago, and at some point I have to stop. You describe your life so beautifully, but that is your life – I was reminded of that in your last letter. Your life is there. It’s not here. And, let’s face it, I am never going to be a landscaper to rich people, dining out with your friends on weekends, which you tell me is how you would most like to see our story together play out. Evelyn, I will never stop wanting you. A part of me dies to think that Stanley won’t have any more letters to give me, and that you’ll find someone else to take care of the garden in my place, and then in time I will just be a distant memory. I will never let the passage of time allow me to forget you, or to love you any less. But I have to exercise whatever willpower I can manage to let you get on with your life, and somehow try to get on with mine.
It seems impossible to me that I may never see you again for as long as I live. But we can’t go on like this forever, can we? So I am making this very hard decision for both of us.
Goodbye, Evelyn. I love you more than I have ever been able to adequately say. But loving someone isn’t enough, is it? I realise that now.
PS. Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’ was just on the radio. Every time I hear it, I will think of us sitting in the sunshine in your garden, talking about our dreams. It’s up there with one of the best days of my life. Seems that nearly all of them have contained you.
A gasp, combined with a sob, came out of her so forcefully that she almost choked.
‘No!’
She was sitting in the same coffee house. She must have said it out loud because people at the next table looked at her in shock.
The response tumbled out of her so eagerly that she could barely hold the pen.
No, Eddy! I cannot let you do this. I wish I’d never written what I did. I suppose it was my unfortunate way of trying to impress upon you how much I think about you, how much I seem to exist only for you. You have taken me too literally. You living in London, being a part of my life here, is not how I see us at all – not really! I think I just thought that because it makes my being here more palatable to think of you with me. It doesn’t mean that I want to stay.
Please reconsider! I lost you once, through a very bad decision I made. I can’t lose you again because I have somehow managed to say the wrong thing. Please write back quickly and tell me you didn’t mean it, and that we can go on. I can’t bear it if you are gone from me . . .
She only had to wait an agonising two days. But she knew what he was going to say even before she read it.