Letters from elsewhere

Edith was, in those weeks after the yellow chair, more interested in postage than was usual for her. She had begun to look at letters the way a botanist looks at unfamiliar leaves — that is, with the conviction that there is a logic to them, even if the logic does not announce itself. The first thing she did, the morning after her return from the small room with the clock in it, was open the third drawer of the bureau in the hall, which she had not opened in almost six years.¹

The drawer contained, in no particular order: a creased postcard from Trieste; a string of receipts from a bakery she could no longer locate on the map; an unopened envelope addressed to her in her own handwriting; a square of newsprint folded so many times its creases had become permanent; and seven letters, of which five had been opened.

She read them, one at a time, in the order she found them. The first was the longest:

My dear E. —

I am writing this in the dining room at the inn, which has the absurd dignity of a room that knows it is being looked at. The wallpaper is a kind of blue I have only ever seen here; if I came across it elsewhere I would think it was a mistake. The proprietor — a woman with extraordinary forearms, who is unfailingly kind — has just brought me a glass of something which, on inspection, is hot wine. I had not asked for it. I had not even thought of it. She brought it as one brings a draught to a horse: with an expression that is half affection, half judgement, and that does not invite debate.

I have been thinking about your last letter for some days now. I do not have an answer for you. What I have, I think, is a different question, which I will set down here in the hope that you will recognise it as the more useful one. The question is not, as you put it, whether one ought to wait, but rather what is being waited for. The two are not the same. One can wait for years for a letter, and find — when it comes — that it is not from the person one had thought; that the thing one was waiting for had already arrived, in another envelope, six months ago.

I send you this from a country I am too tired to name properly. The rain is reasonable. The food is mostly potatoes.

Yours, B.

Edith read it twice and put it down. Then she walked to the kitchen, made a cup of tea she did not particularly want, and came back. She read it a third time. The phrase the thing one was waiting for had already arrived, in another envelope, six months ago held her, very gently, by the elbow, and did not let go.

The second letter was shorter, and undated:

I will be in town on the 18th. There is a coffee place near the station — green awning, slightly too ambitious in its pastry. Three o’clock if you can. Don’t reply if you can’t; I’ll know.

— M.

She did not, on reading it, remember whether she had gone to the coffee place near the station that 18th, nor whether the M. in question was Marta from the yellow-chair room or some other M. that the years had since smoothed over. The undatedness of it, in retrospect, struck her as a kind of cowardice; or perhaps as a kind of kindness, since being undated meant the letter could not, technically, be late.²

The third letter she did not read. It was sealed, and she resealed it, gently, with the heel of her hand.