But have I succeeded? Will others see what it is I have struggled to show? Or will they simply find figures? Compositions. Clever slants of light or depths of shadow, but nothing more. Nothing more.

Moving to the bedside table he picks up the letter he received from Jane the previous week. Reading her words he can hear her warm but harassed voice in his ear.

“… so you simply must stay with us when you come up for your exhibition. Mangan will be so very pleased to see you. He has not yet recovered his health entirely. The months he spent in that dreadful place weakened his lungs forever, I fear. Thank heavens darling Lilith was able to come to our rescue and secure him a place working on a farm in Somerset. You know, he took to the work! Can you imagine?”

Indeed, Bram can imagine. He can just see Mangan coming to grips with plowing fields or milking cows and then setting about telling everyone else how it should be done. The image makes him smile, but he knows the reason he reads and rereads Jane’s letter is for the pleasure of reading of Lilith. To hear news of her is to feel a tiny bit closer to her once more. He resolved, while lying wounded in the hospital in Nairobi, that if he made it home he would seek out Lilith. Go to her and tell her how he felt. Make her see that the gap between them was bridgeable, and that there was no one else he could ever envisage being with. He would convince her that somehow they would find their place in the world, together. The war has changed things. What stood in their way a few years earlier surely did not, could not, matter so much now. He would find her. He would speak with her. He would make her see.

But men make plans and the gods laugh. Perhaps it was the fever I suffered after I was wounded that gave me such a ridiculous view of how things might be.

He forces himself to read on, make himself face the bleak reality that the second page of Jane’s letter contains.