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.’

The letter was dated October 23rd, 1926, and had been written to ‘My Darling’ by ‘forever your Edward’. But he wasn’t ‘forever her Edward’ because, according to the letter, he would not be seeing My Darling again. He wrote that he could deceive his wife no longer, and while it broke his heart ‘nevermore to see, hear and hold My Darling’, he felt he had no alternative. There was not only his wife to consider, a good woman who had done nothing to deserve his disloyalty, but there were also his three children, and his ageing mother. My Darling must have doubted his sincerity, given where she had kept the letter and the lines of the poem she had highlighted, but Sylvie had no doubts. She thought ‘forever your Edward’ came across as a self-justifying, self-pitying cheat. She guessed that My Darling was not his first indiscretion, nor would she be his last. In fact, he was probably dismissing My Darling not to make amends with his family, but to make way for My Darling’s replacement. But he would have been found out, of that, Sylvie was sure. And he would have ended up paying for his lies and deceits.