The Sweet-Shop Owner

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I have the £15,000. The bank notified me last week. Thank you for sending it at last. I’m sure this is for the best and how Mother would have wanted it. You will see in the end.

I think we can call everything settled now. Don’t bother about the rest of my things. You said I should come — do you really think that’s a good idea? After all that you say I’ve put you through, I should have thought you’d be glad to be finished with me at last.

Dorothy

He sat up, in the double bed, holding the letter before him, looking at it fixedly as if it were really a code in need of breaking. It had come four days ago. He’d read it perhaps fifty times, so that he could remember the words without needing to see them.

‘— finished with me at last.’

So he had seen her perhaps for the last time. And there was not even, before that final signature, a farewell, a ‘take care’, a ‘with love, your daughter’.

He looked at his wrist-watch on the bedside table. Four-thirty. Light spread behind the pale green curtains.

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