I know you must be angry with me for not having written, but the answer is very simple. We’ve been at sea (in all ways) and today is our first in sight of a postbox. I must be quick, because the boat that takes the mail sails in half an hour. I am writing in a cafe' by the harbor and June is keeping watch.

We left Nauplia in the yacht on Thursday, we thought for a day or two’s cruise. I don’t know where to begin—well, first of all, June has refused to go on. He began to tell us the “script” on Friday evening. It involved my having a ridiculous quarrel with you. Then June trying to make it up—and trying to make love to you at the same time. Of course we demanded to know why—why everything, in the end. I can’t tell you all we said—except that when it had all been said, neither June nor myself was satisfied. He went back to this business of mystification, and some incomprehensible talk about time. Time with a capital T. I don’t think we were meant to understand. He was cunning, really, because he said that the more we demanded to know, the more impossible it was to go on.

June took all the initiative. She told him about you and me. He pretended to be amazed, but we didn’t believe his amazement (probably weren’t meant to). (I must hurry.) In the end he became very understanding, but once again too understanding. You know what I mean. Greeks, and fearing gifts.

When we went to bed we thought we were heading back for Nauplia—and then on to the island on Saturday. Instead when we got up we were out of sight of land—and we’ve stayed out of sight—reach, anyway—of land till now. All Maurice would say was that he had to revise all his plans. I think he may have been trying to soften us—show us how hurt he was, and remind us (me, sweet Nicholas) of what we were missing. But we stood firm.

What has been arranged is this: he has begged me to play my part for one more week. He says he wants to tell you the last chapter of his life and to play what he calls the “disintoxication” scene. He says you will now be expecting the last chapter (?). Whatever seems to be happening (he’s told us, so I tell you) on Saturday and Sunday, at the end no bell will ring. I shan’t have to go away… unless you want me to. Perhaps you do now.

It will be only one or two more days when you get this. He may play some last Maurician trick, so please pretend, remember that you haven’t read this, you know nothing—you must act a little now!—please. For my sake.

Nicholas.

June says I must finish.

I so want to see you. If you only knew how often I think of you. That night.

JULIE

P.S. There’s to be a present for you. A sort of surprise. At the very end. J.

I read the letter twice, three times.

I lay on the bed and thought of her coming to me; her nakedness; lying together, nothing other between us. I felt completely buoyant again, able to cope; as long as she was still in Greece, to be waiting for me at Bourani…

I was woken at four by the bell that a prefect always came across and rang with vindictive violence in the wide stone corridor outside our rooms. There was the usual chorus of angry shouts from my colleagues. I lay on my elbow and read Lily’s letter twice more. Then I remembered the other one I had thrown on my desk and went yawning to open that.

Inside was a typewritten note and another, airmail, envelope slit open, but I hardly looked at them because two newspaper cuttings were pinned on to the top of the note. I had to read them first.

The first words.

The first words.

The whole thing had happened to me before, the same sensations, the same feeling that it could not be true and was true, of vertiginous shock and superficial calm. Coming out of the Randolph in Oxford with two or three other people, walking up to Carfax, a man under the tower selling the Evening News. Standing there, a silly girl saying “Look at Nicholas, he’s pretending he can read.” And I looked up with the death of parents in my face and said “My mother and father.” As if I had just for the first time discovered that such people existed.

The top cutting was from some local newspaper, from the bottom of a column. It said:

AIR HOSTESS SUICIDE

Australian air hostess Alison Kelly, 24, was found yesterday lying on her bed in the Russell Square flat they both share by her friend Ann Taylor, also Australian, when she returned from a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. She was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital but found to be dead on admission. Miss Taylor was treated for shock. Inquest next week.

The second cutting said:

UNHAPPY IN LOVE SO KILLS HERSELF

PC Henry Davis told the deputy Holborn coroner on Tuesday how on the evening of Sunday, June z9th, he found a young woman lying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side. He had been called by the dead girl’s flat-mate, Australian physiotherapist Ann Taylor, who found the deceased, Alison Kelly, air hostess, aged 24, on her return from a weekend at Stratford-on-Avon.

A verdict of suicide was recorded.

Miss Taylor said that although her friend had been subject to fits of depression and said she could not sleep properly she had had no reason to suppose the deceased was in a suicidal frame of mind. In answer to questions, Miss Taylor said, “My friend was recently depressed because of an unhappy love affaire, but I thought she had got over it.”

Dr. Behrens, the deceased’s doctor, told the coroner that Miss Kelly had led her to believe that it was her work which gave her insomnia. Asked by the coroner whether she normally prescribed such large quantities of tablets, Dr. Behrens replied that she took into account the difficulty the deceased might have in getting to a chemist frequently. She had no reason to suspect suicide.

The coroner stated that two notes found by the police threw no light on the real motive of this tragic business.

The typewritten note was from Ann Taylor.

DEAR NICHOLAS URFE,

The enclosed cuttings will explain why I am writing. I am sorry, it will be a great shock, but I don’t know how else to break it. She was very depressed when she came back from Athens, but she wouldn’t talk about it, so I don’t know whose fault it was. She used to talk a lot about suicide at one time but we always thought it was a joke.

She left this envelope for you. The police opened it. There was no note inside. There was a note for me, but it said nothing—just apologies.

We are all heartbroken about it. I feel I am to blame. Now she is gone we realize what she was. I can’t understand any man not realizing what she really was underneath and not wanting to marry her. But I don’t understand men, I suppose.

Yours very sadly,

ANN TAYLOR

P.S. I don’t know if you want to write to her mother. The ashes are being sent home. Her address is—Mrs. Mary Kelly, 19 Liverpool Avenue, Goulburn, N.S.W.

I looked at the airmail envelope. It had my name outside, in Alison’s handwriting. I tipped the contents out on the desk. A tangle of clumsily pressed flowers: two or three violets, some pinks. Two of the pinks were still woven together.