I’m looking out over a beautiful blue and silver sea. I’ve calculated that you are a mere one thousand, one hundred and thirty miles away from me, as the RAF flies. That’s almost nothing, isn’t it? I’m tempted, very tempted, to go down to the docks, take one of the little fishing boats and start rowing east. They are beautiful, those boats: blue and red, green, egg-yolk yellow. I can’t quite believe that there are things like them left in the world, where everything seems to be reduced to the gloomy shades of mud, brick dust, grease and dirty cloth. I loved the boats in Greece, with their painted eyes that made even the dingiest craft look like something from the Odyssey. The boat that took me over to Turkey had eyes, big, swooping eyes from a pharaoh’s coffin. I would have felt like Odysseus himself if I hadn’t been so bloody miserable, leaving my Penelope – that’s you, in case you nodded off over my strained classical analogy. Actually, you’re Circe and Calypso as well, so there. There’s a sort of magic, here around this sea, in the ordinary things. I’m pretty ordinary: surely it would give me safe passage across to you.

But I’m stuck here, I’m afraid. Lots to do. We arrived in North Africa almost a month ago and it’s been a slog, a bloody one, almost since we landed. We’ve been pulled back now and are cooling off in Algiers. It’s calm here, untouched by the war if you don’t look too hard. Very French. I came across a stall in the old souk yesterday piled high with old copies of Vogue Paris, and I thought of your mother, what you told me about her. Algiers is cosmopolitan in a minor key, faded sort of way, and I wonder if I might catch a glimpse of old Smyrna if I sniff around enough. There is a small community of posh French ladies here, trying terribly hard to keep up appearances. Succeeding, too, for the most part. But they couldn’t hold a candle to your effortless beauty, or your style. I bought one of the Vogues and painted your face over the cover, but it wasn’t a good effect and I chucked it away. Remember when I told you that you were too beautiful for a cigarette box? Turns out you are too beautiful for Vogue as well.