Can you see her from wherever you are now? Can you see me, sitting here on the hard stones of the shingle beach, my arms wrapped around my knees, my linen coat too light for the strange chill of the autumn afternoon? Forty-one this year, almost the same age you were when we first met. Too thin, a few strands of white in my hair, a little greyness creeping into the skin. ‘She remains in possession of her formidable beauty,’ an earnest journalist wrote rather obsequiously in a magazine profile last summer. As if beauty were something that might be carelessly misplaced and I should be commended for holding onto mine, however diminished. Still, a little thrill of satisfaction on reading that line, a little quiver of vanity. Formidable, though. It hardly seems the right word. My shaking hands, my pounding heart.

You gave me a stone from this beach, pale blue and perfectly oval. A parting gift, pressed into my hand like a coin or a key. We are so accustomed to leave-takings, you and I. So many departures and farewells, trains rolling out of station after station. India, London, Suffolk. I can never stand on a railway platform without a pang of remembered desolation, a sharp little stab of abandonment. Your hand on the glass of the window, your figure disappearing into the crowd, hurrying back into your real life. Sometimes it felt that I was always watching you walk away, Max. That even when I held you in my arms you were on the brink of departure, a part of you poised to go. I remember once thinking desperately, as I lay in bed watching you dress to leave, that if you were to die, if you were to no longer be in the world, then perhaps eventually it would be less painful than this. That then I could turn you into a memory, make you become the cleanly grieved past rather than a wound pressed on again and again. Something as simple as sorrow would surely be easier to withstand than this welter of pain and pathos and jealousy and yearning. But now you are gone and I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it. Since I have been in Dunwich, the reverse haunting you wrote of has come to seem entirely possible; our solid earthly lives rendered insubstantial and precarious. Because it is you, Max, dead these last three weeks, who seems the most potent of any of us.

So many times, over the years, in the minutes after you left me, I would imagine that you might return. A door banging or the sound of footsteps in the hall and I would be sure for a moment that, halfway down the stairs, or reaching the corner of the street, you had changed your mind and come back. That you had not been able to leave me.