Nathan and his former lover speak by phone again after years apart

Nathan and his former lover speak by phone again after years apart in a conversation that reopens their relationship without resolving it. The call joins a practical separation—Nathan has returned to the United States and his old England number no longer works—to a more unsettled one: whether the intimacy preserved in his book belongs to the woman herself or to the writer’s remembered and imagined version of her.

The Silence Before the Call

By the time the call comes, Nathan is living in the United States for good, no longer at the studio in England where his former lover had tried to reach him. The old number is out of service, and her question about which country she had been calling makes the distance between them briefly concrete. She has been trying to contact him, but the failed attempts have left their silence open to interpretation rather than proving that either has forgotten the other.

Nathan understands the years without contact as the result of a decision. At their last conversation, he recalls, she had made clear that she needed to go her way; he concluded that he should go his, too. The separation had lasted a couple of years. The woman offers another part of the history: for a long time, she did not call because Nathan had said he no longer wanted to see her once the relationship was no longer a love affair. Their recollections do not cancel each other out. They show how an ending can be remembered as both a mutual parting and a boundary one person believed the other had set.

The call also follows the publication of Nathan’s book. The Unnamed English woman has read it and had repeatedly wondered whether to call, in part because she thought about what the book might do to her marriage. Her husband, she says, did not read it. The novel has therefore reached her, but the evidence does not show it becoming a conversation within her marriage; instead, it becomes a reason for her to hesitate before reopening contact with Nathan.

A Conversation That Reopens the Affair

The opening is tentative and recognizably ordinary: greetings, recognition of each other’s voices, and a question about how each is doing. Yet the exchange quickly tests what the intervening years mean. Nathan says he is fine and asks how she is; she answers that she is well, then explains that she has been thinking about him since reading the book. Her hesitation is not a lack of feeling so much as uncertainty about whether speaking again would intrude on the life she has since resumed.

When she asks why he never called, Nathan does not present the silence as a punishment or an attempt to erase her. He says he thought she had made a decision and that each of them had to continue separately. Her answer—that she had believed he did not want to see her because he no longer considered their relationship a love affair—reveals how the same break could leave them with different accounts of who withdrew. The call supplies no simple correction in which one memory is declared false. Instead, each speaker gives the other a missing piece, and the old relationship reappears through the act of comparing those accounts.

The woman’s admission that she has missed Nathan makes the contact more than a discussion of the book. She had not called for years, but she now says she is glad she did. Nathan, in turn, acknowledges that he has thought about the book’s effect on her marriage. Their renewed intimacy is thus mediated by the work that records their earlier intimacy: she approaches him after reading it, while he is already conscious that publication may have consequences beyond his own memory of the affair.

The Woman and the Written Version

The call returns to a central tension in Nathan’s account of writing: a fictional character can carry the traces of a real relationship while remaining a construction. Before the reunion, he is challenged about how he could know so much about English life and intimate conversation if the English woman in his studio did not exist as a present, independent partner. Nathan explains that he has lived in England, has paid attention, and has learned from experience; he describes the woman as a repository for what he knows. That explanation makes the imagined figure a gathering place for observation, not proof that the affair in the studio occurred as a literal event.

The earlier discussion of secrecy gives the same tension a practical form. When the woman explains why she had to leave before her husband grew curious, she says that maintaining the affair required lies, while she still wanted to preserve some sense of truth. She resented having to devise a hundred small red herrings. The later call takes place after that hidden life has been transformed into a book and made available to her as a reader. What once required concealment now creates a different risk: she must consider how the written account may bear on her marriage, even though her husband has not read it.

In the call, Nathan addresses the difference between lived attachment and literary representation directly. The woman notes that he has another child, and Nathan’s former lover says she loved him terribly. Nathan cautions that distance may have idealized him, and that the remembered man may not compare with the one she now recalls—or with the version preserved in the book. He then insists that the woman he wrote about came from her: he could not have written her that way without having known her. His account does not make the fictional figure identical to the living woman. Rather, he describes writing as a second life with her, continuing during the hours when she was absent as well as during the time they spent together, including the hours in a terrible room.

What the Reunion Leaves Open

The exchange ends not with a declaration that the affair has resumed, but with an acknowledgment of what has endured. Nathan says he may not have got over it. He tells her that he has missed talking to her; she adds that she has missed having him take down what she says. That final remark brings the writer’s role back into the relationship. The conversation is affectionate, but its intimacy includes the act of listening and recording—the very process through which Nathan made their history into a book.

The call therefore renews contact while preserving the unresolved boundary between the person and the text. The woman can recognize herself in Nathan’s account and still question the transformation that writing performs. Nathan can say that his love was for her while admitting that the imagined life of writing was itself powerful. Neither claim settles whether the book faithfully preserves their shared experience or reshapes it; the conversation makes that uncertainty part of their renewed intimacy.

Earlier, Nathan had described taking notes as a way to invite a woman to begin speaking, and had asked his former lover to tell him what he did wrong as a writer. The reunion echoes both practices: she speaks, he listens, and her words become inseparable from the literary attention she once helped educate. The phone call’s ending is consequently both personal and self-reflexive. She has missed the conversation, but also the writer’s act of taking it down; he welcomes her voice without establishing that they will recover the relationship they had. The years apart remain real, as does the connection that survives them.