The Lost Letters of William Woolf Read online

  If only it was as easy to close the door on Winter, he thought; images of her quietly invaded his mind each day. As he walked the streets of London, his eyes searched for her, convinced that he would recognize her if she appeared. What would he do if she did? He was looking for a sign that these letters were brought to him specifically by some higher power, an entity greater than his common sense could control, something that would force his hand in the crucial moment.

  William sat at his desk and sorted through a new bundle destined for the Supernatural Division: a letter to Godot, one for ‘The Fairy Godmother of Lucy Sparrow’ and a tired old envelope addressed in blue colouring pencil to ‘The Ringmaster of the Circus’. He sliced through the top of this last envelope with the bone-handled letter opener Clare had given him to commemorate his ten-year anniversary at the depot. It was inscribed ‘A decade of lost letters, 1979–1989’. It always felt so heavy in his hand that he felt infused with a sense of great purpose and importance when he used it. He prised out a sheet of grey paper that was almost as fine as tissue and began to read.

  Dear Ringmaster of the Circus,

  My name is Harvey and I am 10 and ¾ years old. You might think I am younger than that because I am a bit small but I really am almost 11. I might already even be that age before you read my letter so maybe I should have just said that’s how old I am but I didn’t want to tell a fib.

  I don’t know how long letters take to get to the circus but I hope not too long. We only have four days left in school before we break up for the summer. Everyone in my class is really looking forward to us getting out and they’re all showing off about going on aeroplanes and summer camps and having lessons in all sorts of things. My dad doesn’t believe in lessons, not those kinds anyway – just what he can teach me himself. Which I’m beginning to think won’t be much good for me.

  I’m writing to you because I’m hoping you might have a job for me this summer (and I wouldn’t mind not going back to school in September if you wanted to keep me on). I’ve made a list of things you might need to know and tried to think up all the questions you might ask if you were standing here in your top hat and stripy coat.

  I haven’t ever been inside the circus but every year I watch you from the bridge bringing all the animals off the trailers and I know every one you’ve got. The elephant is my favourite but I would treat them all the same. I’m not even frightened of the lion but don’t fancy feeding him being my first job if that would be ok with you.

  I’m stronger than other 10, nearly 11, year olds because one of my jobs at home is bringing in the firewood and it’s made me tough so I’m good for lifting and carrying.

  I’m not a fussy eater and don’t need much feeding. Spuds give me cramps but I’ll eat them if that’s all there is.

  I have my own tent and sleeping bag that I’ve hidden in my friend Polly’s shed. I won it at the sports day but couldn’t bring it home in case my dad needs money for his stuff and sells it. Polly’s mam lets me put it up in their garden sometimes when I need to get out of our house.

  I’m not bothered about making much money but if you could give me enough for stamps to send a letter to my nan now and then it would be great cos I know she’ll worry about me.

  I’d be happy to do any work that you have but if I could work with the animals I’d really like that best. I’ve a way of talking to them that they like and I trained my nan’s spaniel to do all sorts of tricks. I wouldn’t like having to use the whip, though. I hope I could just coax them along instead.

  I’ll keep my bag packed in case you need me so I’m ready to run if you send a note to my nan’s house. Please don’t come to my house because my dad wouldn’t like it. There’s no mam to notice me gone though, so don’t worry about that.

  Thanks very much, Mr Ringmaster. I promise I’ll do my best if you’ll have me.

  From,

  Harvey Lawless

  William rocked back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. What happens when a little boy whose only hope lies in running away with the circus doesn’t get an answer? William looked at the postmark; the letter was two years old. He made a note of the boy’s name, age and the sorting office that first processed it to share with Social Services. It wasn’t a lot of information to go on, but maybe they could find him. There was a lady he had dealt with before when worrying letters such as these came his way; she was relentless in her efforts to track down a child in trouble. He couldn’t know to what extent the boy was being neglected, but he wasn’t prepared to presume the best. If Harvey was still hoping for an answer, she was the best person he could send his letter to, and the best chance he had for intervention. He put Harvey’s letter to one side and opened his second envelope of the morning.

  My darling Nora,

  Where are you today as you turn twenty-one and take your first steps into the world as a young woman? I try to imagine how you might look if your hair had stayed as black as it was on the day you were born but grew into the curls I might have given you. I’m sure your eyes are still the cappuccino colour of your father’s and your skin the colour of caramel, but I find it hard to picture you all grown up. You were such a tiny baby, just five pounds, so I would guess you are petite now, like me and your grandma before us, but maybe your legs and arms grew tall like your daddy’s. It breaks my heart not to know and to think of you wondering which of your parents you took after, or worrying that we didn’t want you.

  I can’t say how your daddy felt, because he never knew, or at least I never told him, but I wanted you more than anything. When my belly grew big and they sent me away to the convent in Wales, I thought it was so I could bring you up there without anyone knowing. I had a story all made up in my head about your father passing away and leaving me a widow, that I’d had to sell my wedding ring to put a deposit on the flat, but that wasn’t what they had in mind.

  After you were born, they only left you with me for a day before Sr Assumpta in the hospital came to me and said your new parents would be there to collect you in the morning. I tried to explain there was some terrible mistake, but my father had signed the adoption papers. I was only fifteen, you see, and she said it was too late. I stayed up all night holding you in my arms, crying like the rain. I must have eventually dozed off because the next morning Sr Assumpta woke me as she snatched you and turned on her heel out of the ward. I raced after her, tripping up in my bed sheets as I ran, and made it halfway down the corridor before one of the orderlies grabbed me and wrestled me on to the floor. I could hear you crying through the sound of my own howls but, no matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t get free. I remember how cold the tiles on the floor felt as I crumpled into a pile at the feet of the orderly and lay my cheek on the ground. From where I fell, I could see his navy trousers were an inch too short for him and exposed his ankles in two odd socks, one dark grey with a black stripe and one just grey. He pulled me up on to my feet and half carried me back to the ward, where one of the nurses was stripping my bed. I stood at the window and watched a couple lifting a Moses basket into the back of a silver saloon car and knew it was you. He wore a dark-navy suit with a royal-blue tie and she had on a white dress with a pink bolero jacket, a white headkerchief holding back blonde curls from the wind. And that was all I knew of them, the people who took you from me, but I hoped they would give you a good life, a better life than you might have had with me.

  Not a day has gone by since when I haven’t thought of you, imagined you going on holidays in their silver car, holding hands with that lady as you walked to school, clambering on to those navy suit legs for a story. And I’ve tracked every milestone – when you would be walking, talking, sitting exams, every birthday, Christmas and New Year, wondering if you have a boyfriend yet and hoping, if you do, that he’s nice to you. I’d give anything to know what your plans are for the future, if you’ve gone to university, or have travelled to faraway places. And most of all, I just want to know that you are happy and that my great sadness resulted in great ha
ppiness for you. I wonder if sometimes you missed me, even if you didn’t understand the feeling of loss you had. On my good days, I hope you didn’t but, in my heart of hearts, I’m terrified that you didn’t miss me at all, that you might never ask the questions that could lead you back to me.

  I’ll be waiting for ever, just in case.

  All my heart and my hope,

  Mam

  William scanned the envelope again, desperately hoping he had missed the presence of a return address, but it was in vain. He would do some research later: try to identify the convent, see if there was still someone there who might be able to help – but he feared the worst. This was the hardest part of his job; when a letter that had the potential to change a life was irrevocably lost. He could only hope they found each other by some other means.

  He swallowed the lump that formed in his throat. Why did Clare not have any of those maternal feelings? Had she so little confidence in him that she believed they wouldn’t be able to make it work? If a fifteen-year-old girl had wanted to try to raise a baby herself, like so many others, why couldn’t they, together? He absent-mindedly stirred the mail in the postbag while he tried to imagine it, he and Clare as parents, raising a child. What sort of person would be borne of the collision of their gene pools? He hoped their child would look like Clare; the very thought of a miniature version of her made his heart swell. He would speak to her again; maybe their relationship was stagnating because it hadn’t evolved and was stuck at this impasse. Perhaps if he finished A Volume of Lost Letters, or was able to write something new, she might have more faith in him. It still felt, after all these years, like she was waiting for him to prove himself. If she wasn’t monitoring his behaviour constantly, would he try harder without the scrutiny or give up the ghost altogether? The domino effect was impossible to predict; he had been holding everything so still for so long.

  He swooshed letters around in the half-empty trolley while questions joyrided through his mind. His fingers recognized the texture of the envelope before his brain fully understood what he had found: another letter from Winter. He edged it to the surface, heart racing, paranoia prickling his skin. He looked left and right to ensure he was alone, holding it lightly between his fingertips, hands trembling. He leaned on the windowsill, smoothed the midnight-blue pages out before him and allowed himself to nurse an idea that his heart always returned to. Maybe these letters really were destined for him. Why else was it he who found them? No. He would not surrender to the power of this letter. He could not allow some idealistic vision of a one, true love to sabotage the real-life love he had at home. He was going to see his wife and put a stop to this madness.

  He cringed a little at the crease he inflicted upon the envelope by folding it into the deep pocket of the Aran cardigan he wore. He closed the wooden button with determination and strode on to the fourth-floor landing. Should he go to Clare’s office? No, home first, to change into something more respectable, tame his hair; he wouldn’t suffer Maxi looking down his nose at him if he turned up looking like a middle-aged arts student. William wrapped a long tweed scarf about him and tucked it inside his cardigan. He scribbled a note about a minor emergency and dropped it on Marjorie’s desk before he left, grateful that she wasn’t there.

  The wind scattered London debris around his feet as he tried to tidy his mind. He clenched and released his hands against the cold February bite. Had he left his gloves at the party? No, he remembered pulling on a rogue strand of wool that dangled from the cuff on the drive home. He had teased it, daring it to unravel, but the knot just tightened and caused the stitches to wrinkle together. He paused on the pavement two doors away from their flat to watch as the postman leaned from his bicycle to deliver their mail; today was not the day for a lengthy tirade on the internal gremlins of Royal Mail. He waited for him to push on to number twelve, and the sight of a gleaming jet-black BMW parked at the end of the street caught his eye. They must be lost, he thought. No one around here drives a car like that. He walked the last few steps to their door at a funereal pace, beginning to question the wisdom of this impulse. His initial determination was replaced by a sinking sense of foreboding. He rested his forehead against their forest-green front door before opening it slowly. He pushed the letters that had just arrived across their welcome mat and stepped inside. Silence. No sound of life at all. No radio playing. No kettle boiling. No footsteps. And then he saw Clare. Sitting sideways, watching him from the top of the stairs, a pen in her hand poised over a pad balanced on her knee. Her hair, still damp, was bunched in a loose knot on the top of her head, although she was wearing her grey mac, as if ready to leave the house. Her eyes were dry but glass-like, on the verge of spilling over. Their questions collided.

  ‘Clare, what are you still doing here?’

  ‘William, why are you back?’

  She stood up and tied the belt on her mac tightly around her as she came down the stairs. He saw she was wearing his old Star Wars T-shirt underneath and took a strange comfort in it.

  ‘I was just leaving you a note,’ she said.

  ‘What on earth for? Where are you going? Clare, what’s going on?’

  She walked past him at the foot of the stairs without meeting his eye. He reached out his hand to grab her shoulder as she passed, but she shrugged him away. In the living room, she perched on the edge of the sofa. Her eyes didn’t rise to meet his when he came and sat beside her.

  ‘I know last night was awful, but please don’t do anything drastic. Maybe we just needed to have a blow-out, clear the air, so to speak.’

  She turned to look at him, took his hand between both of hers.

  ‘William, listen to me. I’m going to go away for a few days so that we can both have some proper time to think. It doesn’t work, this passive-aggressive way we have of living here. We just skirt around our problems but never confront anything. Not properly.’

  He pulled his hand away and stood up to protest.

  ‘No, Clare. This is wrong. We should work things out together.’

  She stayed perfectly still, her voice level.

  ‘Why are you so afraid of me having some time on my own to think?’

  He was lost for a moment in her gaze: one green eye, one blue. Watching her now from across the room, William wondered when he had last really looked at her. He held such a fixed image of her in his mind from when they first met. He often nursed a memory from when they had just moved in together: Clare lying sleeping in their new bay window, wearing just her Blondie T-shirt, white cotton shorts and blue knee socks. Her nap interrupted them painting the living room a shade of moody plum. The paintbrush dangled from the tips of her long, delicate fingers but she had not let it go. The deep purple paint streaked down her arms, blobbed on her feet and slowly dried in her still-blonde hair. In the fading light, she had looked almost translucent. William stroked her hair; she brushed his hand away and her eyelashes batted open. The smile that spread across her startled face and the love in her eyes were photographed by his heart and filed for ever as an image he would often return to in his mind’s eye. They were never happier than at that time, when they had only hope for the future and no idea yet of how disconnected they would become.

  Now, he realized with a wave of remorse how much their faces had aged since they met aged twenty-one and twenty-two; the work of fourteen years looked like more. Their youth had fallen between the floorboards of their flat while they were looking elsewhere. Now, a few strands of grey were weaving from her temples, tracing a path through her mouse-brown bob, extending the lines that seemed to have appeared around her eyes overnight. The texture of his skin had taken on a strange pallor, a tint of yellow; only the sun could warm the bloom back into his face. The pink of her lips had become so pale; his muscles, softer. Her eyes remained unchanged, though. The face around them might crinkle, but she could never look old to him when he looked into those eyes. They didn’t grow older, only colder. As everything around them shifted, it was Clare’s eyes that remin
ded him she was the same girl he had fallen in love with. The eyes he had made sparkle, flash, soften, cry.

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t come home,’ he replied, his voice catching.

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Isn’t that all the more reason why we need this?’ she asked.

  In his heart of hearts, he knew it was true, but the panic mounting in him wouldn’t let him stand down.

  ‘No, Clare. This is madness. I swear nothing happened with that girl. You believe me, don’t you?’

  She stood up and walked towards him.

  ‘This isn’t about anyone else, William. We both know that, don’t we?’

  He nodded, but kept his eyes fixed firmly on her pointy blue shoes.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve told the office not to expect me for a few days, at least.’

  ‘But what about all your cases?’

  ‘After ten years with barely a holiday, they can’t really object to me finally taking some time off. And they know where to find me if there’s an emergency.’

  ‘And what about me? What if I need to find you?’

  ‘William, ask yourself this. If I didn’t leave and everything continued on as before, do you really think, in one year from now, we’d be somehow happy? Would anything have changed? Or would we still be stuck in the same place?’

  He looked at her, searched inside himself for an answer that wouldn’t come. The hopeful silence hung between them; if he could just find the right words to make her stay, he knew they would survive, but the atmosphere burst and the moment passed.

  Clare placed her hand on his arm and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. As she turned away, he noticed his volume of e e cummings’ poetry sitting open on the coffee table, where he had left it the night before. At the beginning of their relationship, Clare would often rest her head in the little dip between his shoulder and chest while William read his favourite poems softly aloud as he stroked her hair; cummings, Keats, Yeats, Blake, Wordsworth. For his wedding vows, William had threaded different lines of cummings’ poetry together to make his promises to Clare. As he worried the ivory wedding band over her freezing cold finger, his voice cracked as he recited, ‘i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)’. He picked the book up in his hands; a worry bead to give him strength.