Leonard had offered to swap his room for hers, given his was far more comfortable and within the main flow of the house. But that was the crucial factor: in her eyrie she was far removed from the domestic domain, far removed from everyday life. She would climb the creaky stairs to the solitude of her room, and work on her letters — transcribing, cataloguing, or searching for background material. Or she would read, hours every week spent in the pages of books. And sometimes she would just sit, her hands idle, her mind conjuring up other lives — fully imagined companions, if she so desired — while her own life lay quietly to one side.

When Andrew was a little boy she had read him Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books. These stories told of a group of friends who climbed to the top of a magic tree, where they entered fantastic places and had gripping adventures. Mounting the stairs to her room was like climbing her own faraway tree; her letters provided the adventures.

Perhaps all housewives superimpose dreams on their plain-Jane lives. This was not something Sylvie had ever discussed with her friends, nor would she. They were, like her, living uncomplicated lives with normal happy children, and steady dependable husbands. If they had problems, she assumed they would do as she did and keep them in-house. And just as she used letters to escape domestic drudgery, she expected her friends had their own outlets.

Her collection had started by accident, perhaps most collections do. She had found her first letter pressed between the pages of a second-hand book she had bought during her third pregnancy. This was her Latin pregnancy: Latin poetry, in translation, to distract her from her hopes and fears. (The first pregnancy was all joy until the miscarriage; the second pregnancy was her Henry James one, with only two of his shorter novels finished before the miscarriage occurred.) She’d enjoyed Latin at school, and Virgil, in particular, seemed the right sort of guide and protector for this new pregnancy. As it happened, the second-hand book that yielded her first letter was not Virgil, but a collection of Propertius’s love poems, a beautiful old book with a spongy maroon leather cover and gold-rimmed pages. The letter marked a poem called ‘Gone’, a short poem that began, ‘The girl I loved has left me.’ Two lines of the poem had been marked in pencil: ‘love’s king of yesterday becomes by fate/Tomorrow’s Fool. That is the way of love.’