There is this flower in a pot in the mean little courtyard out back, and a tiny, whirring bird called a sunbird who comes every morning to sip nectar from it. Of course, I can’t be sure it’s the same sunbird, but I feel that it is. He flies in purposefully and spends some time just hovering about, inspecting the flower (what sort of flower? you naturally ask yourself, reading this from the slipper chair in the corner of your bedroom while the cool rain falls on your window, and I’m afraid I’m damned if I know—it’s odd and beautiful, worships sunshine, has clusters of tiny tubelike flowers that graduate in color from yellow to orange to a vivid pink-red)—well as I said, he inspects the flower lovingly, I should say enamored, choosing where to start, until he darts in at last and plunges his long beak inside one of the buds, then the next, then the next. Eventually, having taken his fill, he flies drunkenly away. The courtyard is hot and dry and dusty, and I have taken to leaving out a dish of water to cleanse his palate, but the bird won’t touch it. He must be shy of humans, I think. Anyway, I tell you all this because last night I dreamt of you lying asleep on a cushion in the courtyard, wearing nothing at all because of the heat. You were drenched in the most radiant sunshine, and a hundred tiny birds surrounded you, all hovering and not daring to touch you, though they badly wanted to. I’m not sure if I was one of the sunbirds or merely an observer, trying to glimpse you behind the blur of desperate wings. Make of this dream what you like, dearest. But this morning I sit here at the table in the courtyard with my pen and paper and the sunbird has just spurted over the wall and I’m seized by the most intense longing imaginable. Damn the rascal. He communes daily with his chosen flower. I wonder how far he flies each morning to reach her, and whether he visits any others. It seems to me that a flower so extraordinary ought to be sufficient for a single devoted sunbird. But I am not an expert on birds or flowers.

As she read these words again, just last night, the same heat spread over her skin as it always did. She wanted to know what she looked like in his dream, how she looked when Wilfred imagined her without any clothes. She wanted to know where this hot, dusty courtyard existed—surely not in England, surely not during those spring months when he would have written it—and if not England, where and why? The postmark was always the same, London. No other place name ever appeared. As if he existed nowhere at all, or maybe everywhere.