2화Dear Thomas

The letter was short. Someone called Anna wrote that the garden had come through the winter, that the dog had died in March, that she would not be coming out in the boat this year because her knees would not allow it. She hoped he was keeping the log. She signed it with a single line: Still here. June read it four times. Then she went up to the lamp room and looked at the painted names and did the sums. If Anna had been Thomas Hale's wife she would be eighty by now. If the letter was from 1986 the paper should be yellow. It was not. She had rules for the island. No radio after dark. No counting the days. No letters to anyone who had not written first. The third rule was the one she broke. Dear Thomas, she wrote, and stopped, and crossed it out, and wrote Dear Anna. I am the keeper now. I found your letter. I don't know how to say the next part. She said it anyway. Then she wrote about the lamp hours and the tinned food and the four hundred metres, because it seemed unkind to send someone only bad news. On Thursday she gave the envelope to the boatman. He turned it over, read the name, and put it in his coat without a word. The boat pulled away. June stood on the jetty and realised she had not written a return address, and that she had not needed to.