30 SEPTEMBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

Among the many hurtful, harmful things Marie and I inflicted on ourselves and, worse, on others over the years, I can claim to have done at least one decent thing by her. It started with a late night telephone call I picked up at my Mercier Road flat. It was Marie’s roommate. She needed me.

I’m pleased to be able to tell you that I had not the slightest hesitation. Within minutes I was in the Anglia, driving over to the small house she shared with the friend who—as I have said—did not like me much. Perhaps she was right about me. Absent romantic or other social interest, she saw through the surface of my charm to the less admirable character who lay beneath. But this evening she was kinder than her usual self when she came to the front door and let me in. “She’s in her room,” she said.

I found Marie in tears. She’d had a call from her mother a short while ago: her father was dead, killed in an instant in a car crash caused by a drunk driving American from the local air force base. Quite aside from naturally being distraught, she felt helpless. She had no further details and there was nothing further she could do that night. She planned to take the first train home in the morning—she lived in a small village near Oxford—and in the meantime she needed me to stay with her.

Of course. I had never stayed overnight in her home before. She had only a single bed in her small, neatly furnished room, and we lay down together and stayed there all night long, my arms around her while she tried to sleep.

It was a long night. Marie cried through most of it, and I felt strangely privileged to be there, holding her, lying together for the first time without a thought of sex.

I thought of you, Harry. I thought about fathers, and the pain of final, irremediable separation that is death. I was twenty-two years old. I had never been bothered, I’m sure, by the thought that you or Peggy might die. It was in a way beyond my comprehension. And here was Marie, in bed with me, a living body, and her father was gone. I was not to know that it would be nearly a half-century before you were to die.

In the morning we woke early. I drove her to the train station and we waved goodbye.

Sadly, your son, Pete