She returned to her task, eventually selecting seven letters and slipping them into a manila folder; she marked the file with a red asterisk, and placed it on a shelf. Leaning back in her chair, she gazed at the liquidambar through the small window set in the roof. The leaves were still fresh and young, and brilliantly green at this time of year, and the sky beyond was chocolate-box perfect, with plump white clouds suspended in a smooth azure blue. Gradually her regrets receded, and the niggling complaints too. After a few minutes, she straightened up and reached for Mrs Payne’s cigar box. She’d had a quick look this morning while Leonard was taking a shower; now, with a whole afternoon ahead of her, she could read the letters properly.

Sylvie had several love letters in her collection. She also read the published love letters of famous people — at this very moment a volume of Keats’ letters to Fanny Brawne was on her desk — but nothing quite compared to these letters from the Frenchman Lucien Barbier to Miss Sophie Herbert. There were fourteen letters in all: the earliest was dated 1918, the latest 1920. She read them through in chronological order and pieced together their story. Sophie and Lucien had met in Egypt, when he was stationed with his French battalion and she was an army nurse. Their love had fired up quickly in the urgency of war, and it continued once Sophie returned to Australia. The three earliest letters had been sent to a London address, and all the others to Glen Iris, a suburb not far from here.

Lucien Barbier was a passionate, expressive man, even in a language not his own. And he was a poet, too, just like her own husband had been. What would she give for a new sonnet from Leonard now? One of Lucien’s letters, the fourth, and the first to be sent to Sophie at the Melbourne address, was nearly all poetry, a lovers’ duet in a poetic form called haiku. Not having heard of haiku before, she consulted the encyclopaedia and learned that it was an old and revered form of Japanese poetry, with a strict form of three lines comprising a total of seventeen syllables, with nature and the seasons being favoured themes. Structure, brevity and depth: it seemed like a perfect combination.

‘Ma chérie,’ his letter began: