‘It feels like forever’ is such a hackneyed phrase, but in this case it does seem an eternity since we saw each other. Nonetheless I hope you are well – have you given birth yet? – for I am wilting away in this summer without any of my friends to hand. When are you to leave the web, to leave the loom? – your confinement is a worse curse than the Lady of Shalott’s.

That is to say I wish you were not with child; what do you want with another one? I could never be a mother, not after reading Mary Shelley as a girl – but speaking of horror and monstrousness, have you been reading the news? Mutilated bodies in Irvingly, beasts on the loose, all sorts... but you must tell me if I’m being coarse and alarming, I don’t know what your nerves are like in pregnancy.

I am impatient to see you, at any rate – in the package* you will find a mirror to the outside world whilst you (presumably) recover. Or, if not the world, at least to me; I have another just like it, so if you say my name into it we might talk in them.

Of course, it also works the other way around, so if you so greatly offend me by not using yours, I shall have to seek you out through

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