The Lost Letters of William Woolf

by Helen Cullen

  Where was Winter tonight? Whenever his mind turned to her, splashes of vibrant, energizing colours shot through him: crimson, sunburst, shades of the sea. He imagined a scarlet head bent in laughter over clinking cocktail glasses, saw her huddled under an old-fashioned black umbrella held by another, a long, green scarf dancing behind her in the breeze. He could not summon her face. Sometimes, when he hovered in half-sleep, a flash of apple-green eyes forced him awake. Where did he draw them from? Could you fall in love with scarlet hair, green eyes and words on a page intended for someone who might not be you? Could that be enough? Words rising in a smoke plume that curled down your throat, a searching light exposing cobwebs and evaporating shadows. He extended his forefinger and drew circles in the condensation on the glass, his nail hidden by a blackened bruise. A set of Russian dolls, porcelain dolls, paraded across the windowsill. Marjorie’s work, he presumed. He smeared his left hand across the pattern he had made, dried his palm on his corduroy trousers and turned back to the desk. The two letters glowed in the lamplight. He picked up his missive to Winter first.

  Dear Winter,

  Is that your real name? Since I’ve started reading your letters, the word has stopped meaning a season to me. Instead, it has become an answer to a question I did not know I had been asking. In my line of work, I endeavour every day to find resolution for undelivered letters, to help them find their homes. This is how your letters found me. In truth, it feels like something much more than a professional inevitability; that letters such as yours would always end up on my desk. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. The unlikelihood of each one reaching me is staggering, even with my determined searching every day. For I have come to believe that they were intended for me – only me – and that some divine or magical force guided them to my anxious hands. This, of course, may not have been your intention. You may have hoped for so much more than me. You may have expected nothing at all.

  I hope it doesn’t alarm you to hear that I have been searching for you. For a number of weeks, I have pieced together the clues you laced through your letters, little lighthouses that have helped me find you. But, now that I have, I cannot imagine walking up to you in the street, mouthing this confession and surviving the shock it would give you.

  Instead, I thought I would write these lines, explain where I have come from, introduce myself a little. Perhaps then we could arrange a time to talk, if it doesn’t all feel too peculiar for you. I know this is highly unorthodox: I have had months of getting to know you; you have just these few lines. Maybe it will be too strange for you; I can understand if that is so, and will not trouble you again. I shall return your letters, and you can save them for someone else you feel should have been standing at the shore when they washed up in a bottle.

  I hope you will choose to meet with me, though. Your letters have joyridden through the streets of my mind, and I long to meet the driver who disturbed my peace. I come with no expectations; I am not in a position to have any, other than a closing of a story that will otherwise haunt me. If you would like to sit with me a while, you can leave me a note at the Dead Letters Depot on Redchurch Street, letting me know where and when, and I will come to you.

  John Donne once wrote, ‘More than kisses, letters mingle souls.’ I believe he spoke the truth.

  Yours,

  William Woolf

  It was difficult for William to judge whether or not his letter hit the right tone. Would it frighten Winter to think that, in order to find her, a stranger had used private details she had innocently shared? His instinct told him no, that she would want him to reach out, that, on some level, Winter had hoped that the letters would lead someone to her. He squashed the lingering doubt that he may have projected more meaning upon this woman than was sensible and carefully folded it over on its original crease. He guided it back into the envelope before reaching for the letter to Clare.

  My dear Clare, my wife, my friend, my heart,

  I have lost you, and there is a great hole in my life where you should be.

  Since I came home alone, I have allowed myself to fantasize that true love is not this difficult, hurtful, destroying; that if we were meant to be together, then none of this would have happened. I have dreamed of starting again with someone else who understands me, where the loving comes easy and I have an unblemished heart to offer. The road back for us seemed too hard; surely it would be easier to go on alone.

  But I couldn’t make it ring true. Even these terrible months of anguish are better than no you at all, for at least it means our story continues, and continue it must.

  I could leave you for ever but you will never leave my heart. We can part, if we choose it, both leave this marriage, broken and bruised, try to build ourselves anew somewhere else. Or we can build our marriage anew together.

  We had so many years of happiness before things went wrong. Surely it is naïve to think that nothing testing would ever come our way, that we wouldn’t fail at some point. What you did? It makes me feel like you have become a stranger to me. I want to decide instead that it was the deed that was strange and not you – that I am still your husband. For I am.

  We can come back from this, my darling Clare.

  Please don’t give up on us. Let us put the world to rights.

  We should be together again.

  All my love,

  Your William

  He lined up Clare’s letter beside Winter’s. Did he believe what he had written? Or was he fighting for her because he felt he should? Was his heart more deceitful, or his head? Could he really be so sure that Winter was just an escape pod? A fantasist reaction to a horrible reality? Was it just immaturity that made him believe in Winter? Or was it immature to think his love with Clare was valid only if it endured?

  He flicked the desk lamp off and moved through the sleeping office with just the spill from the corridor light to guide him. As he passed Ned’s desk, he paused to run his fingers over the final draft of the Volume of Lost Letters that awaited him there. One hundred and eleven pages. Forty-one letters, and the stories that accompanied them. To think, in a matter of months, the Supernatural Division would be immortalized for ever in hardback books. The name gave him pause: was it quite right? He ignored the niggling doubt. Just two hundred copies, initially, to be distributed to libraries across the country, but it was a start. He longed to show Clare, but had waited to show her the finished product, had planned to wrap it and present it to her as a fait accompli. He hoped he would still get the chance.

  He couldn’t resist taking a detour past the fourth floor, teasing himself with the sight of three new sacks awaiting his attention. He was tired, too tired to think of tackling one now. He knew that, if he started, he would feel compelled to empty them all. He turned out the light and left the room in darkness. On the landing, he paused as prescient instinct tingled; the idea that a letter from Winter could be lying there waiting for him was more than he could bear. His antennae were erect, his gut urging him onwards.

  The contents of the first bag spilled across the floor. William raked through impatiently, allowing the envelopes to sieve through his fingers like flour. Nothing. He hastily shuffled them together and poured them back into the mouth of the mail sack. How his attitude towards these little mysteries had changed. No delicate hands now, or slow, respectful movements. All tenderness lay in reserve for just one type of letter. And there it was, buried deep down in the second batch. Brazen and shocking in its sudden appearance, as if he had summoned it out of sheer will. Goosebumps marched a slow beat down his spine. How had he known there would be one? Hadn’t he wished and willed for one before, with no results? William felt a quiver run through him as he picked it up.

  He slid his back down the pale-mint wall and leaned uncomfortably against the rickety cast-iron radiator. He could feel the cold metal hugging him through his clothes but did not wriggle away from it. He just wanted to read what she had written.

  My Great Love,

  Should I be posting this to
you or handing it to you? Now that I’ve found you. Now that I must believe you have found me. These last few months have been a miracle. My mother said I was just the type to be swept away in a whirlwind romance. How that galled me. As if my fondness for you was born of nothing more than a romantic predisposition or lack of independent thought. When I think of all the secrets we have shared, the unravelling of old lives, the threading together of a new one, it feels like there is no good reason to wait. The only cloud that lingers around me is these letters. Why haven’t I told you about them? Isn’t it silly to think if you were he – the love – you would have found them somehow? Of course it is. Of course it is.

  So why do I feel confused, writing this letter? I feel as if I am writing to a wish of a man and hoping the real man grants it. Is this one last chance for the universe to allow me to marry the wish and the reality both? Before I marry you, or him? Oh, how I hope it is you. I am in a muddle. On the last Saturday of April, I will don a white dress and my father will walk me down the little aisle of the chapel in Hoxton Square. I hope the right man will be waiting for me there. I have waited so very long for you.

  Winter

  The information slapped William like waves on a sailboat. Winter was getting married. Tomorrow. To someone else. And he knew where to find her. Was she hoping he would? Or was she just a nervous bride, full of anxiety as her wedding day drew closer? Imagine the shock she would get if he did try to intercept her at the chapel.

  The Dead Letters Depot shrank around his shoulders. The walls and ceiling and floor inched closer until he was afraid to open his eyes, lest the room had become a cell with no windows, no doors. William scraped his back up the wall and stood. He returned, at a funereal pace, to the front door of his flat. The light was glowing from the hallway, even though he was sure it was off when he left that morning. He pushed the door open, and knew Clare had been and gone. The scent of cinnamon lingered in the air, but the rooms were too quiet for her to still be there. The flat sounded different when Clare was home, even when she was completely silent. He walked into the kitchen and saw a crisp white envelope sitting on the table; his name, written in Clare’s handwriting, on the front. He turned it nervously over and back in his hands, unsure what to hope for inside.

  Still standing, wearing his coat, scarf and gloves, his woolly fingers clumsily prised it open. He had to shake the contents free, and a folded sheet of dove-grey paper floated to the floor. William tore off his gloves and knelt down to rescue it from beneath the table. He stayed sitting there as he read it.

  William,

  I am more sorry than you can ever know. Please don’t let all that we shared be reduced to that one awful happening. I don’t know if we have moved too far away from each other to find our way back. Maybe we have grown into versions of ourselves that can’t connect in the way we once did, but the memory of those two people gives me hope. Do you remember how it used to be? Do you believe our love can endure and heal the rift that has separated us? Before you decide, I’ve left you something in the living room that I made for us. Open your heart, William, and let me back in.

  All my love,

  Clare

  William swallowed hard as he moved to the living room and cautiously swung the door open. A white sheet was draped over the window; his old super-8 projector resting on a pile of poetry books, e e cummings on top. He flicked the switch to let the film play, and the picture crackled into life. He knelt behind the projector as Clare’s face glowed on the screen. It was their wedding day: scenes from the ceremony, the reception, the dancing, all edited together. It cut to William on a boat on their honeymoon in Sorrento; they were searching for the local resident dolphin and he was gesturing madly at Clare to where it swam behind her. She swung around too late to catch him and the camera wobbled as she lost her balance. To the Isle of Man, where Clare blew him a kiss from the back of a motorbike as she spun past along the cliff road. Next, William waved a bottle of cheap champagne at her as he climbed the rocky road to Edinburgh Castle, weighed down by a backpack and too many layers of clothes. The film cut to Clare and William dancing on a bandstand in Kent; he remembered Flora had filmed them when they went to a Carpenter family wedding. Memory after memory flashed before him. The final scene was Clare making snow angels outside his college bedsit on the night of their first date. The picture crackled and the screen turned to white.

  William slumped on to his side on the carpet. A draught from the chimney danced a lock of hair across his forehead, but he did not brush it away. The sky was lightening before he finally creaked up to sitting. He spread four letters on the floor in front of him: two written to him, two written by him. Was what had gone before with Clare enough to see them through? Would he ever forgive himself if he let Winter go? He felt torn in two, with only blind instinct to guide him.

  XXVI

  William abandoned the idea of sleep and climbed out of bed still wearing his clothes from the night before. He pulled the curtains wide and stood in the flood of weak dawn light. He stripped the bed of all its linen and bundled it into the washing basket with the other clothes that had been discarded haphazardly throughout the room. He stretched fresh sheets across the bed and made it perfectly, collected the half-empty water glasses and coffee cups from the bedside locker and swept the floorboards with more enthusiasm than he had ever shown them before. Even under the rug. The bathroom was next; he scrubbed the tiles, polished the taps, tossed the hard, gnarled soap that rested on a ceramic dish shaped like a fish. He mopped the floor until it gleamed, slipping on the wet surface in his haste to move on. His cleaning frenzy carried through the living room, the kitchen and hallway; it shocked him to see how filthy the flat had become while he had been distracted by his calamitous affairs of the heart. He folded the sheet that had been hanging over the window in the living room and placed it on top of the projector; tidied both away in the upstairs cupboard. The film Clare had made rested on top. He reached out to touch it again before he returned downstairs to vacuum, dust and polish. He angled the sweeping brush upwards to disturb each of the cobwebs that had gathered in the ceiling corners of the kitchen. There would no longer be any evidence of heartache in this flat. It was time for a new beginning.

  The final cleansing was of his own body; he stood beneath the shower spray and washed any last remnants of indecision away. He felt focused. Clear and confident. After today, there would be no unfinished business. William left the bathroom spotless, as if it had not been used, and returned to the bedroom to dress. He paused in front of his wardrobe while considering what would be appropriate to wear that day, idly flicked through the shirts that hung there, rifled through the pullovers and T-shirts on the shelf, before it came to him. He wrestled free a hanger that housed in plastic the plum velvet blazer from his wedding day and laid it on the bed. Nothing else would do. He dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, then eased himself into the blazer. It felt a little tight across his shoulders, but the buttons still closed. He looked at himself in the mirror as he smoothed the velvet on his lapels – how much had changed since the first time he wore it. How much he had changed.

  XXVII

  William’s socks grew damp inside his leather brogues as he stood in the park; the grass was doused in morning dew and long enough to creep inside the hem of his suit legs. Small mounds of freshly cut blades were scattered behind him, their fragrance drenching the air, but the perimeter remained wild and unmown. With both hands, he gripped the black iron railings that encircled the park, his knuckles white with the cold, blue veins transparent. Across the street, people peacocked in their wedding attire, adjusting their posture in new shoes, fingers fidgeting at hats with feathers. Spring flowers spilled from weather-beaten crates, ceramic pots, hanging baskets; ropes of daisies entwined the church gates; an archway of yellow roses bordered the door. Columbia Road Flower Market decamped to Hoxton Square, William thought, with a small smile of acknowledgement. A swing-band trio – double bass, saxophone and guitar – in turquoise line
n suits performed acoustically in the churchyard. They followed guests in serenade as they passed by, encouraging them to sing along. It was a spirited ensemble, and their enthusiasm was contagious; William caught laughter on the breeze and watched folk clutch each other for photographs and scan the new arrivals for familiar faces. He recognized the manager from the Clapton Working Men’s Club walking up the path in a pristine double-breasted burgundy suit and pulled back into the shadow, lest he himself be seen.

  William clenched and released his toes inside his shoes. A Volkswagen campervan spluttered to a stop in a cloud of black smoke, the horn beeping wildly as white balloons tied to blue ribbons strained to take flight from where they were tied to the door handles and rear-view mirrors. A cluster of guests in the porch cheered and applauded before the van struggled away, leaving a tall, slim man with a mop of golden curls posing shyly for photographs in its wake. This must be the groom. He wore a midnight-blue suit. As he turned to greet the arrival of a black taxi, William saw his silver silk tie fluttering in the breeze and felt as if it were tightening around his throat. Had Winter chosen that suit for him? It must be so.

  The groom opened the passenger door of the taxi; the lady who emerged took William’s breath away in a cloud of confusion. Were the gods playing a cruel joke on him? A fragile woman engulfed in a sea of moss-green chiffon, a long, red braid snaking down her spine, placed her hands on the groom’s shoulders and leaned forward to whisper something to him. William watched him blush and pull her close into an embrace. His memory searched for her name before he called it to mind in a moment of clarity. Could that truly be Alice-Ann? His photographer friend from Clovelly? What a sonic boom to the soul! Haphazard realization buzzed inside him: was she the grandmother Winter had spoken of who had pursued her passions and inspired her so? Could he have solved this mystery all those weeks ago if he had trusted his instinct to tell Alice-Ann his story? He started coughing as a teenage boy, awkward in an old man’s tuxedo, stood at the doorway and beckoned everyone inside.