And then the more I didn’t do it, and the more you started adapting to your life there and changing, I felt like – well, what the hell do I have to tell her anyway? She’s going to these fancy balls and country clubs and riding around in limousines and having the time of her life, and I’m riding around in an ambulance in east London, picking up drunks and lonely pensioners who have fallen out of bed.
Okay, I’m going to tell you something else now, Lou. And if you never want to hear from me again I will understand but now we’re talking again I have to say it: I’m not glad for you. I don’t think you should marry him. I know he’s smart and handsome and rich and hires string quartets for when you’re eating dinner on his roof terrace and stuff, but there’s something there I don’t trust. I don’t think he’s right for you.
Ah, crap. It’s not even just about you. It’s driving me nuts. I hate thinking of you with him. Even the thought of him with his arm around you makes me want to punch things. I don’t sleep properly any more because I’ve turned into this stupid jealous guy who has to train his mind to think about other stuff. And you know me – I sleep anywhere.
You are probably reading this now and thinking, Good, you dickhead, serves you right. And you’d be entitled.
Just don’t rush into anything, okay? Make sure he really is all the things you deserve. Or, you know, don’t marry him at all.
Sam
x
I didn’t respond for a few days that time. I carried the letter around with me and I looked at it in the quiet moments at the Vintage Clothes Emporium and when I stopped for coffee in the dog-friendly diner near Columbus Circle. I reread it when I was getting into my sagging bed at night and thought about it when I was soaking in Margot’s little salmon-coloured bathtub.
And then, finally, I wrote back:
Dear Sam,
I’m not with Josh any more. To use your phrase, we turned out to be very different people.
Lou
PS For what it’s worth, the thought of a violinist hovering over me while I’m trying to eat makes my toes curl.
31
Dear Louisa,
So I had my first decent night’s sleep in weeks. I found your letter when I got back from a night shift at six a.m. and I have to tell you it made me so bloody glad that I wanted to shout like a crazy person and do a dance, but I’m crap at dancing and I had nobody to talk to so I went and let the hens out and sat on the step and told them instead (they were not massively impressed. But what do they know?).
So can I write?
I have stuff to say now. I also have a really stupid grin on my face for about eighty per cent of my working day. My new partner (Dave, forty-five, definitely not about to bring me French novels) says I’m scaring the patients.
Tell me what’s going on with you. Are you okay? Are you sad? You didn’t sound sad. Maybe I just want you not to be sad.
Talk to me.
Love,
Sam x
The letters arrived most days. Some were long and rambling, some just a couple of lines, a few scribbles, or a photo of him showing different parts of his now-completed house. Or hens. Sometimes the letters were long, exploratory, fervent.
We went too fast, Louisa Clark. Perhaps my injury accelerated it all. You can’t play hard to get with someone after they’ve literally held your insides with their bare hands, after all. So maybe this is good. Maybe now we get to really talk to each other.
I was a mess after Christmas. I can tell you that now. I like to feel I’ve done the right thing. But I didn’t do the right thing. I hurt you and it haunted me. There were so many nights when I just gave up on sleep and went to work on the house instead. I’d fully recommend behaving like an arse if you want to get a building project completed.
I think about my sister a lot. Mostly what she’d say to me. You don’t have to have known her to imagine what she’d be calling me right now.
Day after day they came, sometimes two in twenty-four hours, sometimes supplemented by email but most often just long, handwritten essays, windows into the inside of Sam’s head and heart. Some days I almost didn’t want to read them – afraid to renew an intimacy with the man who had so comprehensively broken my heart. On others I found myself running downstairs barefoot in the mornings, Dean Martin at my heels, standing in front of Ashok and bouncing on my toes as he flicked through the wedge of post on his desk. He would pretend there was nothing, then pull one from his jacket and hand it over with a smile as I bolted back upstairs to enjoy it in private.
I read them over and over, discovering with each one how little we had really known each other before I left, building a new picture of this quiet, complicated man. Sometimes his letters made me sad:
Really sorry. No time today. Lost two kids in an RTA. Just need to go to bed.
X
PS I hope your day was full of good things.
But mostly they did not. He talked of Jake and how Jake had told him that Lily was the only person who really understood how he felt, and how each week Sam would take Jake’s dad on a walk along the canal path or make him help paint the walls of the new house just to try to get him to open up a bit (and to stop eating cake). He talked of the two hens he had lost to a fox, the carrots and beetroot that were growing in his vegetable patch. He told me how he had kicked his bike exhaust in desperation and fury on Christmas Day after he had left me at my parents’ and hadn’t had the dent repaired because it was a useful reminder of how miserable he had felt when we weren’t talking. Every day he opened up a little more, and every day I felt I understood him a little better.
Did I tell you Lily stopped by today? I finally told her that you and I had been in touch and she went bright pink and coughed out a piece of gum. Seriously. I thought I was going to have to do the Heimlich on her.
I wrote back in the hours when I was neither working nor walking Dean Martin. I drew him little vignettes of my life, my careful cataloguing and repairing of Margot’s wardrobe, sending photographs of items that fitted me as if they had been made for me (he told me he pinned these up in his kitchen). I told him of how Margot’s idea of the dress agency had taken root in my imagination and how I couldn’t let it go. I told him of my other correspondence – spidery little cards from Margot, still radiant with joy at her son’s forgiveness, and from her daughter-in-law, Laynie, who sent me sweet flowered cards updating me on Margot’s deteriorating condition and thanking me for bringing her husband some closure, expressing her sadness that it had taken so long for it to happen.
I told Sam how I had begun to look for apartments, how I had headed, with Dean Martin, into unfamiliar new neighbourhoods – Jackson Heights, Queens, Park Slope, one eye trying to assess the risk of being murdered in my bed, the other trying not to balk at the terrifying differential between square footage and cost.
I told him of my now weekly dinners with Ashok’s family, how their casual insults and evident love for each other made me miss my own. I told him how my thoughts returned again and again to Granddad, far more so than when he was alive, and how Mum, freed from all responsibility, was still finding it impossible to stop grieving him. I told him how, despite spending more time by myself than I had in years, despite living in the vast, empty apartment, I felt, curiously, not lonely at all.
And, gradually, I let him know what it meant to me to have him in my life again, his voice in my ear in the small hours, the knowledge that I meant something to him. The sense of him as a physical presence, despite the miles that separated us.
Finally I told him I missed him. And realized almost as I pressed send that that really didn’t solve anything at all.