Margaret. That was the connection. Directly I remembered, I twinged inside. I had done my best to forget the whole business with Margaret and succeeded pretty well. Only Lucinda was a part of it. I’d asked her advice. I’d told her about the mad, obscene letters I’d written Margaret, the only woman I’d wanted and couldn’t have, the accusations, the curses on her marriage, oh impossible, vile—I must have been mad, literally mad. When I recovered I was desperate to get the letters back—mad all over again.

Lucinda was full of contempt.

“It’s quite simple. The easiest thing in the world. You find a bent solicitor, give him her address and a hundred pounds. Go back after a month and he’ll hand you your letters in a plain envelope. Nothing said. It’s done every day. All finished, my dear little man. What a little man it is, den! God. I ought to charge you thousands for those pics.”

“It would be—illegal.”

“Criminal,” she agreed cheerfully, “but that’s the solicitor’s affair. You’re making a packet out of the film aren’t you?”

“A small packet.”

“If a man with money can’t indulge himself with such services,” said Lucinda with an air of calm reason, “what’s money for?”

“I don’t know a bent solicitor. Mine’s so unbent he’s rigid.”

“There aren’t any unbent solicitors. Only some less bent than others.”

Sitting opposite Rick Tucker, who now had snow and stars behind him, it came over me in a breathtaking swirl of astonishment. More than thirty years before I had indeed gone by long and devious ways to a bent solicitor. I had given him money. I had made myself an accessory after the act for nothing, for less than nothing. When, standing in my flat by the fire that was intended to consume my own disgusting and pitiable letters, I opened the manila envelope I stood dumb for whole minutes. The letters were tied up with pink ribbon. I surfaced then from what must have been months of drunken misconception. They weren’t my letters at all. They were her husband’s, turgid, inarticulate offerings from that stupid house agent; but she loved him and they were preserved like relics. Mine—in a skyhigh pride I had never dreamed that anyone could destroy my letters (mad, mad, mad) but she had done just that—charitably too, since she could have turned them over to the law—she had burnt the obscene things as they came. Or worse—had she kept them indeed? Were they now afloat in the world, the wrong world? If so, their disappearance together with the disappearance of her husband’s letters would be a clear lead, I was never free, should never be free from the surfacing of that possibility—

“I hope to God he broke the place up.”

Someone was looking at me—staring.

“Wilf?”

I pulled my eyes away from his, allowed them to track down, his nose, a little broad, the bridge slightly sunken, his long upper lip, the lower one dropped a fraction from it. His napkin came into view, patted his mouth, disappeared again. He was wearing a shirt with white and brown stripes, very broad. We’d have thought them so vulgar when I was his age.