But nowhere on the website did I find a letter in a bottle like the one washed ashore on the Isle of Sheppey.

The only real, incontrovertible fact that I knew about the writer’s background was that she had watched the film Message in a Bottle. I began to wonder if she had copied other sections of the letter, perhaps from more literary sources unknown to me. I had been thinking about where to turn next for advice when the morning post brought the latest copy of my college alumni magazine.

I had been struggling for some hours with Lacan for Beginners, so the magazine seemed to offer light relief by comparison. The first article was a profile of the new Master, a renowned professor of French literature and, by a miracle of coincidence, an expert on Lacan. It seemed to me to be a propitious sign. A professor of French literature with a sideline in Lacanian psychotherapy – what more could I ask? My request for a meeting met with success. The Professor was intrigued.

12

The great wooden doors of the college were just as I recalled them. Ancient, heavy, impressive, designed to bar the hoi-polloi from the tranquil groves of Academe. Beyond lay the perfect O of the lawn and, in the far corner of First Court, the entrance to the Master’s Residence. During my time at Cambridge I had followed my own path and had never been invited to cross its portals. The twenty years since I had last been in that courtyard represented just a short breath in the history of the college but a large chunk of my own life. Now I hesitated outside the building, looking up at the college motto, founder Margaret Beaufort’s Souvent me souvient – I often remember. How uncannily appropriate in both language and content. I had no recollection of noticing it before.

The Professor was in his early sixties, his grey hair just skimming his collar, his manner welcoming as he came to greet me at the entrance of his lodge. His graciousness suited the antiquity and opulence of the establishment, with its Canalettos casually lining the walls. Before climbing the stairs to his drawing room, the Professor selected a book from an enormous set of shelves that filled a corridor leading to a further wing of the residence. I glanced at the title as we went upstairs. It was a book of verse by Rimbaud.

We settled into deep armchairs and the Professor began to speak, fluently and with a sensitivity and perception that impressed me, and made me wish I could talk and think with such coherence and eloquence. I had sent him a copy of the letter the previous week in the hope that he would find the time to prepare himself for our meeting.

‘We have to face the possibility,’ he began, ‘that this could be a work of fiction and that the writer is consciously or unconsciously immersing herself in a very active and vigorous French literary tradition in putting this text together. It is either a real message or an elaborate hoax, using various literary devices and the classic one of a message in a bottle, in order to titillate the finder, without providing an account of the actual family circumstances or emotions that are described.’