There are a handful of pencils, variously sharpened. Some of them are barely more than an inch long. He remembers how he had scrounged for pencils, how important the act of committing to paper once was, and how she has just told him that he was a fool to have done that. “How can you have been so stupid, Harry? How can you have been so careless?” But how was he meant to have got from day to day otherwise? He tests the leads of the pencils, sorts those that are worth salvaging, and carves a point with his penknife, thinking of an identical knife that his brother once held to his throat.

He sits at the dressing table, his writing hand reflected in the cheval glass. When he glances up between sentences he is obliged to look himself in the eye. He remembers Francis’s face reflected in the mirror of the looted house, how their eyes had met in that moment, just before the trinkets and violets had all exploded around him. He has revisited that scene in his own diary today, concerned that she has now seen it too, but how glad he is that there are other parts that his diary couldn’t show her. He knows that there are sections of time that he needs to account for, though, and questions that she will have, and so he puts pencil on paper now and gives her a version of what happened in the days either side of Francis’s death. He folds the ribbon into the letter. As an afterthought he adds a photograph of Will and Francis, laughing in Boulogne, right back at the start.