The Professor had put his finger on the essential bleakness of the letter, the inexorable fact of Maurice’s death.

Did he think she was a professional writer? ‘I would say not. She is somebody who has written before, and read a lot. Possibly she’s a teacher, used to helping others with their writing, used to writing personal letters to friends and family. She prides herself on her literary craft. But she is not somebody who works at this for a career. There are no real indications of professionalism; the handwriting, the punctuation, occasionally the spelling suggests a sort of spontaneous overflow of literary language directed towards the expression of personal feelings.’

I then told the Professor about the film from which the writer had drawn some paragraphs. I had first let him dig a hole for himself with his literary analysis, but he had avoided the trap. He expressed his relief at not having made any erroneous deductions about the literary sources of those particular lines from Message in a Bottle, and without missing a beat he absorbed the information into his analysis. ‘Of course knowing that there’s a Hollywood movie in the background causes one to ask all sorts of further questions about authenticity or otherwise. Now, it could be that the film produced a sudden sense of empowerment, suggested an available format for saying something that was highly personal. So it could give one the licence to make statements that otherwise would be impossible. Or could it be that the message-in-a-bottle formula, being a cliché, is just a part of the general ebb and flow of human communication that doesn’t mean anything in particular? It’s the clichédness of the message-in-a-bottle formula that I would question. These are forms that have the power to imprint themselves on our imagination.’

I wasn’t sure I could cope with the direction of this line of thought, so I drew the Professor’s attention to the handwriting, but he shrugged it off, saying that to him it looked just like that of an average French schoolgirl. He was concerned to give me a warning: ‘One needs to exercise a sort of methodological suspicion when faced with documents of this kind if one is doing the forensic task that you seem to have set yourself, that is to say understanding the emotional world that this writer inhabits. If one is going to undertake such a task, one needs to ask oneself, “Is what I see really there? Is what I think is happening in the here-and-now really happening in the more remote past?” You must be wary of false leads, and attaching straightforward solutions to the problem. I’m saying nothing more than what Hercule Poirot would say to the local vicar.’

By now I was a little lost. How would you go about finding the writer, I queried, but the Professor turned the question on its head and began to analyse my motivation. ‘I think your wish to find her is interesting in itself. Finding any anonymous manuscripts, whether from a period when these were common, as in the Middle Ages in France, or from the modern world, tends to set one off on a quest for an author. If I find a sheet of orchestral music without a signature, without clues to help identify the composer, I want to know by internal or external evidence whether this is Schubert or Beethoven or Mozart . . . and that wish itself is quite interesting and worth speculating about. Another way of approaching the question would be to say that the world is full of texts, of disclosures, confessions of feeling. As one travels on the London Underground, one overhears fragments of other people’s conversations and one is momentarily drawn into other people’s lives. Take mobile phone conversations, for instance. It would be odd in cases like that to want to identify the speakers, to track them down, to give them a biography, a personal place in history. It would be a better approach to such material to let it all happen, to let it wash over one, as part of the ebb and flow of meaning in the human world.’