A La Carte by Jeffrey Archer

Author:Jeffrey Archer [Archer, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: lady diana, poetry, Anthologies (multiple authors), charity
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2017-07-20T23:00:00+00:00

OLD FLAME

William Trevor

Grace died.

As Zoë replaces the lid of the electric kettle – having steamed the envelope open – her eye is caught by that stark statement. As she unfolds the plain white writing-paper, another random remark registers before she begins to read from the beginning. We never quarrelled not once that I remember.

The spidery scrawl, that economy with punctuation, were once drooled over by her husband, and to this day are not received in any ordinary manner, as a newspaper bill is, or a rates demand. Because of the sexual passion there has been, the scrawl connects with Charles’s own neat script, two parts of a conjunction in which letters have played an emotional part. Being given to promptness in such matters, Charles will at once compose a reply, considerate of an old flame’s due. Zoë feared this correspondence once, and hated it. As ever my love, Audrey: in all the years of the relationship the final words have been the same.

As always, she’ll have to reseal the envelope because the adhesive on the flap has lost its efficacy. Much easier all that is nowadays, with convenient sticks of Pritt or Uhu. Once, at the height of the affair, she’d got glue all over the letter itself.

Zoë, now seventy-one, is a small, slender woman, only a little bent. Her straight hair, once jet-black, is almost white. What she herself thinks of as a letter-box mouth caused her, earlier in her life, to be designated attractive rather than beautiful. ‘Wild,’ she was called as a girl, and ‘unpredictable’, both terms relating to her temperament. No one has ever called her pretty, and no one would call her wild or unpredictable now.

Because it’s early in the day she is still in her dressing- gown, a pattern of dragons in blue and scarlet silk. It hugs her slight body, crossed over on itself in front, tied with a matching sash. When her husband appears he’ll still be in his dressing-gown also, comfortably woollen, teddy-bear brown stitched with braid. Dearest, dearest Charles the letter begins. Zoë reads all of it again.

This letter is special, of course, because of Grace’s death. Others have been different. Grace and I wondered how you are getting along these days … Grace and I have finally taken retirement … I’m to give you this address Grace says. Just in case you ever want to write … A seaside house. Grace always wanted that … In 1985, in 1978 and ’73 and ’69, Grace always had a kind of say. A quick lunch some time? each letter – this one too – suggests before the As ever my love and the single cross that’s a reminder of their kissing. Somehow, Zoë has always believed, the quick-lunch suggestion came from Grace. Did she, she wonders, make it again on her deathbed?

The affair has developed in Zoë an extra sense. Without making an effort she can visualise a tall woman she has never met, now the lone occupant of a house she has never entered.

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