My Darling
I am sitting over a glass of Sancerre, chilled just as you like it. It is half past two in the morning and I can’t sleep. I have scarcely slept since I drove fast back to London like something scuttling back to its hole, after you threw me out of your flat. Harsh? Yes … I’ll revise it. ‘Made me so unwelcome at your flat.’
I felt ashamed of myself. I felt a fool. I felt with the deepest certainty of my life that I am, and have long been, in love with you. I think it all began as a friendly game, didn’t it, on my side as well as on yours? I think we both wanted a companion for a pleasant evening out, a social partner isn’t it called? And some light-hearted sex. It worked like that for a time but I now realise that for me it was a very short time indeed.
I fell in love with you. I did not want to do so, and I barely admitted it to myself for a long time. Certainly I never admitted it to you. It spoiled things. It has spoiled things. But there we are. I came to see you out of desperation, after having left the messages you never returned. I wanted to know what I felt when I saw you again. Perhaps I had been wrong, and perhaps I would no longer love you and want you so much. It would have been a relief. But I did. The moment you opened the door, I knew nothing within me had changed, but only grown and strengthened.
We were so good together but we could be so much better. I think we should be. I think you are a lonely man who has no idea of the strength of his emotions. But if you admit them, you will find that you are a free person after all, free to be in love, free to be with me.
You mentioned in our brief meeting that there had been someone else. That stabbed into me like a blade until I realised, as I drove home, that it was not true. There was never anyone else, was there? I know you enough to know that you have never had a lover. You wanted to get rid of me, you were in a mild panic, and you invented the ‘someone’. It doesn’t matter. So long as you know how much I love you and will see me again, nothing matters. Please, Simon, phone me, come to me, anything. But don’t ignore me. I can’t bear the silence and the distance from you.
Ever, ever with love,
Diana
Simon Serrailler held the paper as if it were alight. When he had finished reading he banged open the kitchen pedal bin with his foot and dropped it inside. The lid clanged shut again. He went to the sink and drank a glass of water, then took out the Laphroaig bottle. It was nine thirty and he had been with first Marilyn and then Alan Angus for several gruelling hours. He had eaten a plate of canteen fried food and come home fit for nothing but a drink, and some time sorting carefully through his portrait drawings to find three to enter for a prize.
He had not recognised Diana’s writing. If he had he would have dropped the letter into the bin before, rather than after, opening it.
It felt like an invasion of his territory, his private space, another attempt to get under his skin, like her visit. He was angry with her for disturbing him, angrier that she hadn’t believed him when he had mentioned Freya. Angry.
He hesitated, took another shot of malt, and shoved the bottle back in the cupboard. It solved nothing and he had less time for drunkards than for most criminals.
He pulled out one of the flat portfolios from the drawer, began to undo the black ribbon ties, but then stopped. He couldn’t look at his work now. He would have no judgement. She had spoiled that for him too.
‘Fucking woman.’
He would not reply and at least now he knew her writing he could tear up any future letters unopened. ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing’ had been one of the few lessons he had learned from his father. So, no reply to the letter, no returning any telephone messages. He would do nothing and if he did nothing for long enough, she would leave him alone. He wished her no harm, he just wished her out of his life.
The cathedral clock struck ten, the grave, measured notes sounding through the room, cleansing it from the stain left by his angry swearing. It calmed him. He lay on his back on the long sofa.
Freya Graffham was in his mind, her neat cap of hair, her fine features. So that had been love and he had been too stupid to recognise it, too slow to act upon it, too … He imagined her in this room, not as a visitor but as a familiar part of it, her books on the shelves, the scores of whatever piece of choral music she had been learning for the St Michael’s Singers opened on the table. In his mind, it was no longer his room but theirs. ‘Have you asked yourself what she felt?’ Cat had asked him when he had told her about Diana’s visit. Now Diana had told him and it had not made him ashamed of himself or sympathetic towards her, it had simply annoyed him.
He got up. There was a team review of the Angus case at nine the next morning, a press conference at ten. The news of Alan Angus’s suicide attempt had not yet become public knowledge and Simon was anxious to brief the media and control their reaction to it. He needed to be fresh. He locked up, put the lamps out, and stood for a few moments looking out of the window at the floodlit cathedral. The sky was clear, the night immensely still. Gradually, Simon felt the calm seep into him. He went to bed to read another chapter of Hornblower before sleep.
But he did not sleep. At two he was still turning about in bed, his peace frayed. He read more, then got up and ate a couple of biscuits. He went back to bed and still did not sleep.
Half an hour later, he left the flat and ran down the hollow-sounding staircases past the darkened offices and out to his car. If he could not sleep and did not want to lie thinking about Diana’s letter, and least of all about Freya, then he might as well be working. The Audi slipped out of the close into the night streets.