To my surprise, the friend provided a completely different interpretation of the letter. For her, a gay woman, it was clearly a confession of a long-suppressed sexuality and an explanation to Maurice of the letter-writer’s decision to live with her friend Christine. Although it is a truism that people project their own desires on to texts, the difference in our two interpretations was so striking that I realized I had approached the search in a very specific way. My reaction to the letter initially had been emotional, and my immediate response – pragmatic, shallow and very speedy – was entirely consistent with my own character. I decided to read the letter yet again, trying as far as possible to strip out my preconceptions and prejudices. It was, of course, impossible, but perhaps the awareness was progress in itself.

‘Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slid through my fingers . . .’

Attempting to reread the letter with an open mind and a greater awareness of the palimpsest of possible interpretations, I was suddenly no longer certain that Maurice had drowned. I had been easily influenced by the watery imagery of the letter and had jumped to conclusions in a manner I now found breathtakingly foolish. Had I really visualized a boy in a tempestuous sea, his mother leaning far over the gunnels, her arms outstretched, their hands meeting through the foam, clasping, then being torn apart by the cruel seas as he ‘slides from her fingers’? My preferred version had been less dramatic: a vicious teenage argument with an overprotective mother, in the aftermath of which Maurice had turned to the beach for solace, and taken his tiny sailing boat too far out to sea, or had simply swum too far out and been unable to make it back to the shore. In my imagination – and I had used my imagination for there was no mention of a boat, for instance – I had constructed this death, surrounded by water, sparked off by an argument (‘Forgive me for being so angry . . .’) caused by his impetuosity, his ‘excess of desires’. It was natural to superimpose some version of the story on to the few available clues and, after all, others had jumped to the same conclusions. Or had I unconsciously projected my own interpretation without letting the other readers of the letter form their own opinions?

Had I simply watched too many films? Wasn’t the letter-writer more likely to be a mother sitting by her sick child in hospital, seeing him slip slowly away from her? Perhaps his ‘excess of desires’ had led to a drug overdose, maybe as a result of a row? Or was it just that they had grown apart as he entered adolescence?

Now the letter seemed to me to be so unclear as to the cause of Maurice’s death that I was horrified at my earlier certainty of judgement, based on so little evidence. Gathering statistics about the number of children drowned in France may have been a red herring. Trying to work out what happened to bodies lost at sea had been useless. I reassured myself that the time I had spent reading the regional press was not entirely lost, since I had anyhow concentrated more on the obituaries than on looking for articles about drowning.