The Thirteenth Tale [antikvár]

The Letter 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 come home to darkness he had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the te^ glass in the door it cast a foolscap rectangle of paleness onto ^ . the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that \j ^ rectangle, about to turn my key in the door, that I first saw (' ; the letter. Another white rectangle, 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, grey 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 an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded ' , contents, 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 ; ¦ i capitals and curly flourishes, my first impression was that it had been written by a child. The letters seemed untrained. Their uneven strokes either faded into nothing or were heavily etched into the paper. There was no sense of flow Q^ 3 ^^