I wrote two letters this evening. One to my brother and his wife who I will see in Scotland for his milestone birthday in April and the other to my old friend, R.
I met R 30 years ago this month when we both went to work in Tripoli. I was totally unprepared for life in Libya (how could you prepare for living in a nutty, totalitarian regime though, lord knows, life is grim there now?) Anyway, she was older than me, beautiful (she still is), whip smart having just finished her doctorate on some arcane 17th century writer, worldly wise and astonishly glamorous. I was lucky to meet her. We lived through some precarious adventures and perils together in those reckless days, she shaped many of my tastes and broadened my horizons.
When we both left Libya for the first time, she went back to Australia and me to London. We met in Boston some months later and travelled around America together. We saw each other frequently over the next five years, on her flying visits to London or her visiting my parents who adored her. I have aerograms she wrote me from Turkey, from Italy, from Malta, from Libya where she eventually returned with her then husband. I went to visit her in 1990 and helped her leave that husband smuggling her jewellry out of Libya and persuading her husband to let her visit me in London. She never went back. I made my first visit to Australia to her property in Kangaroo Valley where she lives with her present husband. And then, the years just passed without me seeing or talking to her.
I am not sure what happened but it was a gap that seemed harder and harder to bridge the longer it went on. I saw her a couple of years ago but I felt fragile and the intimacy wasn't there though we both looked at each other like we were scared to speak of how close we had been. Then, this week I looked at some of her letters from twenty five years ago and thought, as my most prolific correspondant after my father, she deserved me writing to her. I'd like to renew that connection and I hope the letter helps.
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