The Love Letter (53 page)

‘Aren’t they two of the seven dwarves?’ She heard her own voice coming from some strange place in her head.

The man pretending to be a doctor – or was it Francis? – stooped over her and asked her if she knew what day it was.

‘Of course I know.’ Her voice now appeared to be coming from the other side of the room. ‘It’s the first day of the rest of my life.’

Why was she saying these things? Dreams were so weird. She tried to voice a few more random observations about how she felt like Alice in Wonderland and how much she wanted to talk to the mad hatter, but the razor blades in her throat soon stopped her.

She could hear Francis laughing gently and explaining to the pretend doctor that they had just had an emotional reunion and he would take the utmost care of her.

In her dream, she very much wanted to have the utmost care taken of her. Francis’s handsome face moved closer, those eyes as blue as Neal’s Yard Remedies bottles, full of soothing tincture.

‘We love each other,’ he said in a voice as soft as a caress.

*

The next time she woke it was dark. She could hear the sea, and a distant storm offshore. The window had been opened a fraction and the breeze shifted the heavy curtains like a Victorian nursemaid’s skirts.

Her throat was still full of razorblades and her chest seemed weighed down by molten lead. Swallowing was agony. She was desperately thirsty.

Flailing her hand blindly around her in the hope of finding a drink, she hit something soft and heard a groan.

She let out a croak of alarm in turn.

A light went on, making her flinch away.

‘What is it Legs darling?’

Francis was in bed with her, although he was at least still fully clothed and lying on top on the counterpane.

‘Drink!’ she managed to splutter, sounding like Father Jack.

As he busied himself with a water jug and glass on the bedside table, she took in the nudes frolicking on the walls around her and remembered where she was, although she couldn’t remember for the life of her how she had got there.

She looked at her wrist to see what time it was, but her watch was missing as usual.

‘It’s after midnight,’ Francis turned back with a glass of water. ‘I must have nodded off while I was sitting with you. How are you feeling?’

Fireworks were going off in her head. When she took a gulp of water, it was like trying to swallow a fireball. Her vision was tunnelling again. It took all her effort to rasp, ‘Not feeling too hot.’

‘Au contraire,
you’re still far too hot.’ He brushed damp tendrils off her sweaty forehead. ‘My poor darling. It’s time for your medicine.’ He reached behind him for two packets of pills.

Seeing a look of panic cross her face, he smiled reassuringly. ‘Just antibiotics and paracetamol. The doctor came again this evening. There was talk of admitting you to hospital, but I won’t
let them take you from me.’ He helped her to some more sips of water as she swallowed back tablets that felt like boulders. ‘I’m looking after you. I have a private nurse coming tomorrow to help.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ she managed to rasp.

‘Pneumonia.’

‘Thank God for that,’ she sighed, sinking back into the pillows and closing her eyes. ‘I thought I might be really ill.’

She woke again in the early hours, whimpering with terror. Francis was at her side within seconds. ‘Darling, what is it? Is it your poor head?’

‘Pneumonia is really bad! I want to go to hospital.’ Her voice was so hoarse she sounded like Tom Waits.

‘You’ll get better care here.’

Nothing made any sense. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Her head was caving in. She couldn’t breathe. ‘I want to talk to the Mad Hatter!’

Francis held her in his arms until the panic subsided, replaced by feverish, muted confusion.

He’d brought in a scuffed leather wing chair that she recognised from his bedroom and placed it near the window. There were blue pages of writing paper by its side, covered with her own handwriting.

‘I’m never going to let you go again,’ he breathed into her hair.

Legs lost all sense of time. Her fever seemed out of control. At its height, she thought she might die. Incoherent with pain, she was vaguely aware of ranting deliriously about her childhood, her
family, Farcombe and the Protheroes. The early hours were the worse, the suffocating claustrophobia of battling for breath, her throat and chest on fire. She begged the darkened room around her to turn into a nice clean hospital ward.

By day, a super-efficient Indian nurse called Gopi tended to her every need.

‘You don’t want to go hospital. Dirty places. Come back very sick.’

At all other times, Francis did everything for her. He bathed her face and hands, helped her clean her teeth, and he even brushed her hair.

Ironic, she thought in a more lucid moment, that her bedhead mop had never been silkier and sleeker than when bedbound. The feverish torpor of being an invalid appalled her, but she had no voice to argue nor the strength to do anything for herself; the shame of letting him carry her into the bathroom and lower her onto the loo before retreating discreetly behind the door broke through her delirium, making her cry.

Most of the time, she was too ill to think straight. She soon developed a cough that ripped through her hour after hour, bringing up phlegm and even blood. She’d never felt this weak in her life. Just the tiniest of efforts left her reeling with fatigue. Thankfully, she slept a lot of the time. She had no idea when or if Francis slept at all. He sat up with her night after night, moving from his chair to the bed to hold her when she started to panic. She could never remember what she raged about afterwards, but she raged a lot.

Francis allowed no visitors. Legs had no idea where her phone was. London could have been washed away in a tsunami in the past week for all she knew. He wouldn’t even let her have a radio in the room.

‘You need complete rest,’ he insisted, and for a while she was content to surrender to the order. He was so kind and attentive, reading her poetry for hours, telling her what was happening on
the estate, the last of the hay being baled, the lambs being weaned onto aftermath grazing, the preparation of shearlings for the sales. She guessed he might be avoiding the topics of the festival and the family, but she was too wiped out to care. Her sense of reality flitted back and forth from their long years together to the muddled present, which she couldn’t work out at all.

When it became clear that the first course of antibiotics and analgesics weren’t taking effect, the doctor pumped her full of a more potent mix, but it was still two more days before she felt strong enough to sit up and tackle anything more ambitious than a sip of water. Even then, she needed Francis’s steadying hand to stop the glass of juice she was holding from shaking everywhere.

As soon as she had drunk it, she threw up everywhere.

He made no complaint as he changed the bedding while she shivered and shook on the wing chair beneath the window, noticing her letter still beside it, now acting as a bookmark in a volume of twentieth century poetry.

‘Why are you doing this for me?’ she asked groggily.

‘Because you wrote the truth about us and I love you for it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look after you for the rest of your life.’

Sick as she was, Legs could feel panic join the infection in her veins, stoking the coals of her lingering fever. As she lay sweating on her crisp, clean bedding, she tried to piece together the clues through the fog of nausea and tremors. She’d sent him that letter a year ago. Surely even by the GPO’s occasionally wayward standards that was a very long delivery time. It was possible she had forgotten to add a stamp after all. Or had he kept it all along and not read it until now? It felt like it had been written in a different lifetime and language. She couldn’t even remember exactly what she had said in it. She longed to read it again.

That evening, while Francis recited W. H. Auden, she spent a long time plucking up the courage to risk the bathos of saying: ‘Could you read my letter to me?’

He seemed amused. ‘Why?’

‘I want to talk about it.’

‘Wait until you feel better.’

She started coughing as she struggled to sit up, ‘we
must
talk about the letter, Francis.’

‘Listen to you; you can hardly speak, my poor darling. Wait until you feel better.’

The more wound up she got about it, the harder she found it to express herself. Eventually, when she was left so raw from coughing she couldn’t speak at all, Francis gave her a double dose of codeine linctus.

He settled down in his wing chair to recite Auden again, then stopped as he noticed she was crying.

‘Please carry on,’ she croaked. ‘It’s a beautiful poem. It was so perfect when John Hannah’s character read it in the film.’

‘What film?’

‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’
Legs and Daisy had been to see it together three times, and both now kept a DVD version on standby in the cupboard in case of crisis – like chocolate, white wine or Lemsip. Francis had always refused to see it, thinking Richard Curtis far too asinine.

Now he closed the book. ‘Let’s revisit a text we both adore.’

That evening, the volume of twentieth-century poetry was replaced by
Ulysses,
which he read aloud as a special treat.

‘I know how much you love it.’

Oh how she regretted her pretentiousness now, remembering through the foggy soup of analgesia that when he’d been set it as a text at university, she’d lovingly taken the James Joyce classic out of the library at home, immediately telling him it was her favourite book of all time and then battling to get beyond the first few pages. They’d had long, stimulating conversations about it during the Christmas holidays, largely based upon her mugging up with York Notes and agreeing with everything Francis said. He’d even taken her to Dublin on Bloomsday the following summer as a birthday treat.

Tonight, she fell asleep after five minutes.

The next day, feeling stronger, she tried to get at the letter again, but Francis was insistent that she needed more rest. It became like a mad circular poem:

‘I want to see the letter.’

‘When you’re feeling better.’

Her mind kept telling her there was something really big at stake now, a life-changing event, a birth or a death, and a mammoth change of heart. But when she tried to concentrate on what exactly it was, all she could see were fictional characters: the Mad Hatter, Ptolemy Finch, the Wizard of Oz and even Toto the dog kept walking through her head, the latter with a strange limp. Her dreams featured endless battles and sword-fights, and the alarming repetitive theme of Hector Protheroe riding a unicorn into the Book Inn wearing nothing but a kimono. And then there was Byrne, the man with the coal-furnace eyes, playing constant tricks with her memory and trust. Was he fact or fiction? She half believed she’d dreamed him.

Asking Francis about Byrne bought the portcullis down even faster. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting you well again, darling.’

He read out another long tract of
Ulysses
that evening, focusing on the affair Leopold Bloom’s concert-singer wife Molly has with her sleazy manager, Blazes. Legs could see exactly what he was doing. He was quoting at her instead of talking as usual, but at least his message was being spelled out as clearly as those York Notes she’d once read instead of the book itself. She was Molly to his Bloom. Discuss.

Her year-long affair with Conrad was dead in the water, she knew that much as fact, but every time she thought about Conrad she started crying, which didn’t help. Hardly pausing in his narrative, Francis handed her a box of tissues.

She blew her nose loudly.

He’d skipped ahead to Penelope now, the final episode of the impenetrable book, far beyond anywhere Legs had managed to
reach in her school days. Known as Molly’s Monologue, it was a series of long unpunctuated sentences in which Molly’s stream of consciousness is let loose.

Legs’ mind, meanwhile, was stuck on the same page. With Conrad out of the picture and Kizzy given the kiss off, there was nothing to stand between her and Francis reconciling amid great family approbation, she realised, hysteria mounting. God, what
had
she written in that letter? Her own stream of consciousness had none of Joyce’s timeless lyrical brilliance, but Francis had obviously taken it very seriously indeed.

She found she couldn’t shake the melody from Kate Bush’s ‘The Sensual World’ from her head. Had Kizzy sung it as part of her clifftop medley? She wondered, her thoughts jumping randomly around the page now as her mind tired and lost concentration.

I am so shallow, she thought wildly. If someone quotes Eliot at me, I think of
Cats.
If it’s
Ulysses,
I think Bush. God forbid Francis starts reciting Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ because it’ll be Olivia Newton-John and sweatbands all the way.

She found laughter catching in her throat, making her cough more, tears running even faster.

On Francis droned. He’d adopted a Dublin brogue, trying to capture the essence of Molly with jaunty banks-of-the-Liffey cadences. Legs couldn’t follow it at all. His Irish accent was very strange indeed, she realised. He sounded like a cross between Graham Norton and Mrs Doyle from
Father Ted,
which was fitting given that she still sounded like Father Jack. It was nothing like Byrne’s lovely deep, peaty burr.