‘I was moved by it,’ he replied in a slight tone of surprise. ‘I wasn’t particularly expecting to be. I suppose I was rather suspicious of the message-in-a-bottle formula, thinking it very, very improbable that anything of note should emerge on the seashore, washed up on the Channel coast. But I found the inventiveness of the writing, its rhythm and straightforwardness, the sense of a very simple personal tale being unfolded paragraph by paragraph, haunting. And I too wanted to know more about this person and how Maurice came to be lost, how the mourning came to be instigated. And how writing of this kind came to be thought an appropriate response to that personal tragedy. So my curiosity was tickled by the whole thing. But more than that, my human sympathies. And I showed the letter to my wife and she had the same sort of response.’ He paused for a moment. ‘In fact it moved her to tears straight away.’

As I walked across First Court, the chapel bells rang out over centuries of college tranquillity, and I thought about the strange journey of the letter which, from a desolate beach in Kent, had made the wife of a professor in Cambridge weep.

13

‘Who is my reader? . . . Every book is a message in a bottle tossed into the sea with the hope it will reach a different shore. I feel very grateful when someone finds it and reads it, particularly someone like Noriega.’

Isabel Allende, My Invented Country, on hearing that General Noriega had been arrested with two books: the Bible and her novel The House of the Spirits

The Professor had said that the letter-writer was imbued with the spirit of Hugo, Rimbaud and other nineteenth-century authors. I realized that my lack of knowledge of French literature was so complete that I had not even seen the musical Les Misérables. There was a cultural abyss to fill. In my ignorance, Victor Hugo seemed the most accessible.

I started with Les Misérables. There were phrases that jumped out at me – in so far as anything can jump from a book over a thousand pages long. A man who has slipped overboard swims on for hours in a desperate struggle for life. ‘He feels at once buried by these two infinities, the sea and the sky; one is a tomb, the other a shroud.’ The letter-writer had used the imagery of sky and sea, but for her the sky was an escape rather than a shroud. It was not much to show for the many pages consumed.