Adam B0: The Next Letter Arrives
Joe collected the post on his way in and carried it through to the study. It was a raw grey morning, the lamp lit against it; Adam was in his usual spot, pencil in hand, the margins already black with it, a cup of coffee gone cold and forgotten at the corner of the desk.
He looked up, and his whole face opened. “Joe!” — as though a week were a year. He got up and shook his hand, and Joe gave him the post. He had noticed that Adam had stopped mentioning the letters some while back, and had taken the silence to mean the business was done with. He’d never asked; it wasn’t his place, and anyway the hunt had plainly run its course — though to this day he couldn’t have said which of them, in the end, had got the other.
Adam thumbed through the stack with a sentence half-begun — and stopped.
A plain envelope. Typed address. Ordinary stamp. No sender.
He looked up. Joe had known him a long time, and had seldom caught anything on his face that Adam hadn’t first given leave to be there; whatever was on it now had not asked. Joy, or the other thing — Joe couldn’t have told you.
“Is something the matter?”
“What? Oh — no. No, nothing’s the matter. Nothing at all.” He turned the envelope over once. “It’s only that business of the letters.” He held it up. “Seems to have started again.”
He sat down slowly, his eye somewhere past the wall.
“Shall I leave you to it?”
Adam considered it. “No,” he said. “Let’s go for our walk. It’ll keep.”
They took the long way, down by the river and back, Joe setting the pace and Adam letting him. The end of autumn, the planes half-bare, the light gone gold and thin the way it does at that hour — the cold coming off the water, the leaves wet and thick underfoot, a dog somewhere being called and not coming. Adam did not once mention the letter; Joe didn’t ask.
When he came back, the letter was where he’d left it, square in the middle of the desk. He hung up his coat. He saw to the fire, which did not need it, and carried the cold cup out to the kitchen, and was a good while finding nothing to do in there. The letter had not moved. He’d have sworn it was watching him.
He sat down at last, and squared the envelope to the edge of the blotter, and picked it up, and put it down, and picked it up again. Then — quickly, the way one goes into cold water — he got his thumb under the flap, drew out the page, and read before he could think better of it.