“Of course I love you.”
“Are you sure?”
I used to torment Melanie like this a lot, unintentionally, constantly asking the same questions when the answer should have been abundantly clear: of course she loved me. She told me sometimes how irritating it was and in exasperation asked: “What do I have to do to convince you I love you?”
“Nothing,” I’d say. “Just keep on loving me.”
She’d reply: “But if you constantly doubt me, I feel undermined. It’s tiring.” An edge would have crept into her voice and I’d feel compelled to ask again: “Do you love me?”
Egerton spoke: “That company in Birmingham have paid, Alex.” He flashed me a proud smile as he passed on this information. Egerton was responsible for chasing up bad debts. “That means you can go ahead and process their festival entry. The check arrived in the lunchtime delivery.”
I couldn’t care less about the Birmingham company paying up—I’d already processed their festival entry in the knowledge that I could delete it in one keystroke if they failed to pay—but Egerton’s interruption reminded me of what had happened before I left home for work that morning.
Melanie lived in the Midlands, which accounted in part for my insecurity in our relationship: I lived in London and missed her during the week when we were not together. We wrote letters so I was always eager for the sound of the postman in the mornings. He often came when I was in the bath, gaining entry from the street by pressing the service bell, then climbing the stairs to deliver letters to the individual flats. I waited for the rattle of the letter box.
It had become one of my favorite sounds, and I invariably jumped out of the bath to see what the postman had brought, then got straight back in. Bills I dropped unopened on the bathroom floor where they generally stayed for at least a week. Circulars and marketing scams from
She wrote long, involved letters. They all said how much she loved me, but I still found it hard to believe anyone could love me as much as she claimed to. Does she love me? I used to ask the inflatable frog soapdish. Does she really love me?
The letter box rattled and I jumped up, quickly drying my feet before stepping out onto the bathmat. It was only three steps out of the bathroom and into the hall to reach the front door.
There was nothing lying on the Oh-No-Not-You-Again doormat. I lifted my leather jacket which hung on a hook on the back of the door, but there was nothing sticking out of the letter box. I unlocked the door and opened it a crack, the cold draft reminding me I was naked and wet. The postman sometimes left larger items outside in the hallway but there was nothing there today. Puzzled, I closed the door. I
I lifted the doormat. On the carpet underneath the mat were just the familiar brown stains left by the stenciled words.
Nothing.
It was impossible. I had heard it. I got down on my hands and knees and scanned the hall floor. I looked behind the storage heater and in the wardrobe cupboard in case the letter had broken the usual laws of movement through space.
Disconsolately I drained the bath and tried to come to terms with the possibility that the luxury of my bath had lulled me to sleep and I dreamed the rattling letter box out of wish fulfilment.
Egerton was always a source of acute irritation, but inadvertently reminding me of the morning’s phantom delivery was too much for me to bear. I cleared my screen with a short sequence of angry keystrokes and left the office. From behind his desk in his own office Whitehead saw me slamming out. I hoped I hadn’t incurred Whitehead’s displeasure. I tolerated him marginally better than Egerton, but Whitehead was the boss and I needed the job.
Across the road I bought a bar of chocolate in the shop and ate it sitting on a railing. There was a pay phone nearby and I contemplated ringing Melanie to see if she’d posted me a letter the day before. I still wasn’t completely satisfied by the dream theory. I wondered if maybe the postman had rattled my box in error or—and my chest tightened as I thought of this—on purpose to torment me because he knew how much I looked forward to receiving letters.
I didn’t phone Melanie because it seemed silly to pay when I could call her from the office for nothing.
“The Arsenal stuffed up their chances yesterday, eh, Alex?” Egerton asked just as I was reaching for my phone. He seemed to think that if he leavened his accountancy qualifications with a little authentic-sounding football chat and the odd reference to his heavy weekend drinking, people would not think him a boring bastard. But it didn’t seem to work.
“I really don’t know,” I replied with deliberate pomposity. I’d stopped indulging Egerton after only a couple of weeks in the same office, yet still the man persisted. He was either thick-skinned or completely mad; I hadn’t made up my mind. In any case, Arsenal’s cup chances were of no concern to me.
I rang Melanie’s number but she was in a meeting. I was glad to get away when 6 p.m. came around. I said goodnight to Whitehead on my way out. He gave me one of his weak smiles: it lurked behind his thick moustache and failed to light up his eyes.
I thought about Melanie on the way home: was it my imagination or was she writing fewer letters these days and saying less in them? It seemed to me that I used to get one a day. The relationship is changing, part of my mind told me, she doesn’t need to write so many letters. Another part of my mind told me: she’s starting to love you less. But she’ll deny it if you confront her with it. She’ll deny it and deny it then one day she’ll say you were right and she doesn’t love you any more.
While I was in the kitchen making some tea, the phone rang. I put down the knife I was using to slice some lemon and went to get the phone, but it rang off after the first ring. My hand hovered over the handset in case the caller redialed immediately. The apparatus remained silent. I went back to slicing lemon and it rang again. I ran to get it, but again it rang off. Someone was having trouble. Then I remembered that a similar thing had happened a week before. Twice in one night the phone had rung off before I had been able to get it. It could only have rung once on each occasion because my flat is hardly big enough to get lost in. I finished making my tea and sat down on the sofa by the open window. The street smelled of dogs, petrol and fish and chips. I felt on edge.
I wondered if it had been Melanie. I went and got the phone and carried it over to the sofa.
I punched in her number. “That wasn’t you, was it, just then?” I asked her when I got through. For some reason my question confused her, even when I repeated it, so I assumed it hadn’t been her and we just talked. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes. Why?” That slight catch was in her voice, the one that meant stop, don’t continue with this line of questioning. But I always did.
“You sound a bit funny, that’s all.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean until you started the cross examination.”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, but it’s so irritating. I’m all right, but you make me not all right when you ask so many questions. Don’t you see?”
I saw only too well. I had to stop it before she did. “Do you love me?” I asked meekly.
“I’m going,” she said abruptly and hung up.
I replaced the receiver and dithered for a minute or two, not knowing whether I should ring her back or not and apologize. I waited five minutes and made another cup of lemon tea, then I pressed the redial button.
