The letter was addressed to me at the magazine where I then worked. Typed on four sheets of A4 paper, single-spaced and without errors of any kind, it had, I noticed, no home address. But no sooner had I noticed this than I forgot it. Listen . . .

“Sorry about the lack of tears. I do regret their absence as much as the lack of some emotions which may make me less of a woman.

“However, I had just undergone the most profoundly moving experience in my recollection . . . your hands and your eyes and your mouth and your tongue and your body had transported me to such realms of ecstasy that I had hitherto neither known nor even believed possible . . . ”

Eh?

The letter is yellowing and creased now, but then I have been reading it over and over for 28 years.

“On Thursday came the pain, and no hangover to cover it with. I got up and dressed and people came to sit with me, like you give your company to the bereaved to alleviate their grief or perhaps to hear something awful that may brighten by comparison your own life. I don’t know because I could not talk and I could not cry, and I was left locked in my own personal Hell.

“Every muscle ached for you, and all of me was burning for your touch. Then those rich juices of love that were longing to mingle with yours came pouring out of my . . . ”

I held the letter up to the window, but, no, I hadn’t made a mistake.

“Nothing that I had hitherto decreed I would or wouldn’t do was under consideration. I stripped my clothes off, I was empty and so alone.”

The letter was signed “Gina”. At first I thought it a hoax, but it was too elaborate for that. Hoaxes, like ransom notes, are to the point.

A fortnight later the second letter came, again addressed to me at the magazine, so it was clear that the writer, like Gina, had no home address for the recipient, and she did not give one for herself. It too was neatly typed, though this time just a note.

“You never told me you wrote for The Guardian as well, you cheeky devil . . . ”

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