6 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

After that moment of terrible suspicion, finding Marie with Barry at his flat on Rayners Road I never thought of him in the same way again. The long friendship in which I had shared with him the most intimate of secrets of my life, the darkest of my dreams, the most erotic of my desires was now tainted with an edge of distrust from which it never fully recovered.

With Marie, when we resumed our now tenuous relationship after her father’s death, the tables were turned. I became ever more possessive. The more I felt her slipping away from me, the more desperate was my need to keep clinging on. And then one day she told me she was leaving. She had accepted the offer of a job at one of the British military schools in then still-occupied Germany. Devastated, I realized belatedly that I could not conceive of life without her, and it took me only a month or two before I devised a way to follow her. Do you remember how I walked away from my good job in Wimbledon in the middle of the school year, Harry? How I sold that Ford Anglia you had helped me buy and reneged on my share of the lease in the house on Mercier Road? The pretext I offered to anyone who asked was that I needed to test my talents as a writer. I may have convinced even myself that this was true. The part-time evening job I had taken, teaching English to adult students at a language school in Düren, would allow me the time to write all day and every day, I told myself. Besides, I thought, it would be a huge relief to exchange my teenage tormentors at Rutlish for reasonable, grown-up people who signed up for classes because they actually wanted to learn.

I suspect that you and Peggy never knew the real reason for my sudden flight. You may not have been aware that Düren was a mere fifty miles from the military base where Marie was now employed. I could not imagine otherwise than that she would be delighted, impatient as I was to be back (in bed!) together. To my chagrin and surprise, it seemed she wasn’t. Through weeks of increasingly desperate telephone calls there was nothing from the other end of the line but excuses, prevarications, protestations and delays. Eventually I managed to prevail on her to drive down. I couldn’t wait to get her into bed, and made urgent love to her in the single room I had rented—the best I could afford on a part-time teacher’s pittance. As I strove mightily, repeatedly, to satisfy my need, I’m sure I failed to notice that her part in our love-making had turned from desire to tolerance.

Or rather, to be truthful, it was my choice not to notice this; denial was more acceptable to my anguished mind than was acknowledgment.

After that first weekend the length of time between her visits stretched out interminably. She bought herself a steel blue Renault Dauphine, an all too popular model at the time. Every time I saw one on the streets, my heart leapt with anticipation, followed at once by frustration, despair, and jealous rage. I was obsessed with thoughts of her submitting to the bestial attentions of all-too-charming British officers at her army base. On the increasingly rare occasions of her visits, I began to feel more like a supplicant than a lover. Then on one final weekend she told me she was pregnant. And the baby wasn’t mine.

Oh, Harry, believe me, your son had never felt so miserable. There he was, stuck in a tiny room looking out on a bland and frigid street somewhere in Germany, in mid-winter, pounding away on his portable Royal typewriter (a parting gift from Peggy) and churning out dreadful poems that no one would ever read. I had nothing but an immersion heater to make tea or coffee, and an electric hotplate to warm up a bowl of soup or make a melted cheese sandwich on a slice of thick German rye bread topped with a slab of Emmentaler.

I had fallen so far into despair, I could no longer imagine a way up or out.

And then there was Winden. I found a new place to live in a small village at the edge of the Eifel Forest with an endless view out over a long green valley to the edge of the trees, an easy bus ride from my job Düren. Reinvigorated by the springtime sun, I abandoned poetry and started on the novel that was guaranteed to bring me fame and fortune. Frau Hennes, a widow, was my landlady. Her husband was one of those tens of thousands of German soldiers who never returned from the Russian gulags after the war, and she treated me like the son she never had. I loved the meals she cooked, Sauerbraten, Rindfleisch, delicious “Eintopf” stews…

At work there was greater responsibility and better salary when I was made Director as the school expanded to serve more students with more classes and different languages.

And before long there was the arrival of my first new colleague. I fell in love.

Your ever-peripatetic son, Peter