Chapter One26th October 1994
Throughout Melissa's educational life, from the early girls boarding school in York to her final days at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she had one great passion; English Literature. She had read all the so-called classics, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Dickens and Orwell, from Austen to Woolf and notably from Steinbeck to Hemingway. She could quote from them all or compare styles and influences effortlessly, but it was a series of American authors, she told me, who held the most powerful appeal for her and so it was, after leaving Italy, she not only settled in New York but started business as a book publisher.
The first time I heard from her since Rome was when an invitation to her twenty-fifth birthday bash arrived in the post at my London office. After Mia
