‘It seems there was an intense conflict with his mother when Maurice reached his teens but there are no clues as to the form this took, no references to the elements of the conflict. Yes, I do think, given all the watery language of the letter, it is probable that he drowned – or that there was some accident in the water, as a result of which he later died.

‘The letter has an ornate, almost ritualistic quality. I get a picture of the mother as a Catholic woman, from a high-class French family, one of those families which takes its holidays on the coast. She used her son to fill the vacuum left by an unhappy marriage and an empty life. When she says that her life ‘began with his birth’, she hints at the revelation of having a first son; of being blessed at last with what has long been felt to be missing. A loss of this magnitude would take years to come to any kind of terms with. Yes, I would say more than five years. Given what he meant to her it is, in fact, amazing that she is still alive at all. I am pretty confident from the vocabulary and the detached tone of the writing that she has had some kind of help such as counselling.

‘To have achieved the level of detachment that she strives for – although cannot maintain – the ability even to make this effort towards poetry, is impressive. It is written for an audience of herself. If she had not had some kind of therapy, the language would be more raw, and there would be more specific details – real clues about her identity and actual events – the things that happened. The literary language, the metaphorical style of the writing is her way of keeping her distance. It is as though she is always aiming for temperance.

‘Now she has turned away from men and – it seems – towards a lesbian relationship. She lived in a world without a husband and father for her child and then she loses her son. With his loss, she loses the imaginary phallus that she temporarily acquired with his birth and it is as though she had to renounce the masculine in order to allow herself any kind of sexual life, a sexual life which until this point was sublimated in the love of her child.

‘The mention of her friend Christine is a momentous step. This letter is a confessional to her son that allows her to make that move. He is the only one whose opinion she values. In her mind, she needs her son to be onside. The final sentence has a conversational tone that suggests he is still there, that she still needs to explain things directly to him. The unconscious reality expressed here is that he is still the one that matters. For her, he will always be the one. The real deal.’ The counsellor had provided me with a great deal of food for thought. I agreed that the absence of any mention of a father or partner in the letter was interesting and perhaps significant, though I could have done without the Lacanian interpretations. I thought she had put her finger on the suffocating nature of the relationship between mother and son, and managed to understand some of the intensity of that feeling. She had explained to me how the mother had managed to achieve a level of detachment from her grief by using beautiful imagery to push the experience further into the distance. And she had intellectualized what my gay friend had instinctively realized, that she was trying to replace the void left by Maurice’s departure with a new lesbian relationship.