It was November. Although it was not yet late, the sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage. Father had finished for the day, switched off the shop lights and closed the shutters; but so I would not e home to darkness he had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the glass in the door it cast a foolscap regle of paleness onto the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that regle, about to turn my key in the door, that I first saw the letter. Another white regle, it was on the fifth step from the bottom, where I couldn’t miss it.
I closed the door and put the shop key in its usual place behind Bailey’s Advanced Principles of Geometry. Poor Bailey. No one has wanted his fat gray book for thirty years. Sometimes I wonder what he makes of his role as guardian of the bookshop keys. I don’t suppose it’s the destiny he had in mind for the masterwork that he spent two decades writing.
A letter. For me. That was something of a. The crisp-ered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded tents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble. Although the style of the writing was old-fashioned, with its heavily embellished capitals and curly flourishes, my first impression was that it had been written by a child. The letters seemed untraiheir urokes either faded into nothing or were heavily etched into the paper. There was no sense of flow iters that spelled out my name. Each had been uaken separately—M A R G A R E T L E A—as a new and dauntierprise. But I knew no children. That is when I thought, It is the hand of an invalid.
It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person—
some stranger—had goo the trouble of marking my o this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind’s eye on me while I hadn’t suspected a thing?
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever sihe age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of uer life that I unsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being field buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I still feel the ;car under my fringe now. Reading be dangerous.)
I opehe letter and pulled out a sheaf of half a dozen pages, all written in the same laborious script. Thanks to my work, I am experienced in the reading of difficult manuscripts. There is no great secret to it. Patiend practice are all that is required. That and the willio cultivate an inner eye. When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye o study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of produ. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you awake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying over vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tig your surface. Then you read it. The iion of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You read as clearly as if you were the very dlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.
Not that this letter was anything like as challenging as some. It began with
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