‘I trust the two of you enjoyed yourselves last night?’ Stafford looked at me over the easel. I was surprised by the sudden sound of his voice. Rather than launching into the past he had been completely focused on the work before him, and the morning had passed in relative silence. It was almost as if his enthusiasm for the subject had waned. Or perhaps, I thought, he was simply tired.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was fun.’ And it had been – or certainly less terrible than I had expected. ‘We even got a free firework show from one of the boats.’
‘Oh?’ Stafford smiled. ‘Well, you must come back in July. Bonifacio is famous for its Bastille Day display.’
I tried not to set too much store by the fact that he had once again mentioned my returning to Corsica. I told myself that it could have been nothing more than a turn of phrase. Yet despite my best efforts, some disobedient part of me chose to hold on to it, and hope.
Stafford got to his feet then, stretching awkwardly, and I saw the stiffness of his first few movements. These moments were rare with him, in which one suddenly remembered that he was elderly, even frail. Most of the time he hid it so well.
He disappeared through the internal door into the main part of the house. The minutes passed, and I began to look about me. It occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from turning the canvases stacked against the walls to gaze at their painted fronts – to have the first glimpse, perhaps, of new, never-before-seen Staffords, works that people like Agnes dreamed of.
Nor was I prevented from walking around to the other side of the easel and taking a look at the work-in-progress – the portrait of myself. Naturally, I was curious as to how it was developing. Yet I understood that it would be a betrayal of trust, and not something a friend should do. For I had come, I realized, to consider Thomas Stafford a friend.
He returned presently with a plastic wallet that he handed to me carefully.
‘These are from Alice,’ he said. ‘From when she was in Venice.’
I looked at the envelopes within. The paper had yellowed with age, and the colour of the ink had faded markedly. They seemed like ancient relics. How strange for Stafford, I thought, to see that something from his own lifetime – something that he remembered receiving, the ink fresh, the paper stiff and white – had become antique.
He bade me take them away to read in my own time, so I carried them down to the cove with me that afternoon after lunch. I sat on a large rock – flat and sun-warmed, but, by four o’clock, pleasantly shaded by the cliff face behind. I kept the pages in the wallet, for fear of harming them – or worse, losing them to a sudden breeze. The hand was immediately familiar. Sloping, italic, with that slightly debonair flourish. If I had needed any further proof that Tom’s Alice was the same woman who had written to Evie, this alone would have convinced me.
I was about to begin reading when I paused, struck by an odd, almost guilty feeling. Stafford had entrusted me with these letters, had invited me to read them, but still the idea of poring over these private words seemed an invasion. I knew how much anything from her must have meant to him and I felt unworthy. So it was with no small hesitation that I started to read.