We had a few private places of our own in Silver’s flat, no sanctums, but I did have the old desk which was a reject of his father’s and which stood in a corner of our bedroom. On its scuffed red leather inlay I laid my notebooks and wrote my diary. It was there, the next morning, that I found the letter from Guy in its envelope, rather creased, lying on the red leather and precisely lined up alongside the right angle of its lower left-hand corner. I took it out and started reading it, immediately realizing that I hadn’t read it before. In it, in an old-fashioned courtly way, he proposed marriage.

Guy knew I had someone else, yet in this letter he had seemed to assume that Silver—he didn’t know him by name—was just a stopgap while he and I made up our minds, or else that he was someone used to make him jealous. He took it for granted I wanted to be married, that I was waiting for him to ask. When I read that I wondered how much he had talked to my mother and what she had said to him of her own hopes.

I read on, sitting on the bed in which Silver lay fast asleep. Guy wrote that he understood I needed time to make up my mind. But he reminded me that we had known each other a long time and that he alone (according to me) supported me when everyone turned against me after the pylon. He made it sound as if he had kept me, I mean given me money. Then he wrote about the job in his father’s firm and again he referred to this as if it had been seriously proposed and seriously considered by me. I had no real job, no training, only a truncated education, but if I married him I’d never need to work again, a way of life he put to me as if it was the answer to my prayers, the ideal, any woman’s ambition. Besides that, we loved each other. We had been so close, he wrote, that giving each other up now would be impossible and wrong. We belonged to one another.