I have been forced to read again. Forced is not the word; obliged, perhaps. Don’t think that I have been reading this drivel as I have been going along because I haven’t. No, Cass has obliged me to take up the practice again. There was that letter when she left, which I had indeed read, and now a post-card, on what I took to be that much anticipated Friday. The reading of the letter she had left I could have just passed off as an anomaly, a momentary lapse of judgment, and that is how I consoled myself at the time. ‘Do not worry,’ I had told myself, ‘a single read letter does not mean that you will start reading again. Relax,’ I had told myself, ‘all will be well and now this is read there will be no more need to read.’ When I say that I told myself I don’t actually mean that I told myself
