The Letter

He had not written to Eliza since December — a brief note, three lines, sent with the Christmas parcel of Setúbal moscatel and the lace collar she had asked for in October. The note had said: all well here, the city continues its improvements, I expect to be home in the spring. He had meant it when he wrote it. He still meant it. The passage was booked for the fifteenth of March.

He sat down on a Tuesday evening with a clean sheet and the intention of writing a proper letter — the kind she was owed, the kind he had been composing in his head, in various drafts, for the better part of a month.

He told her first about the arrangements: the passage from the Cais das Colunas on the fifteenth, Vigo and then Bristol, weather permitting in both legs, arrival he estimated no later than the end of the month. He told her the firm's Lisbon affairs would pass to Hargreaves, who was young but had proved himself with the insurance adjustment, and that the counting house lease would transfer on the same date. He told her to tell his sister that he would need his room for a week at least before he found his own arrangements, and that he was not incapable of making his own arrangements.

Then he stopped. He dipped the pen and held it over the paper for a moment.

He told her about the new streets.

He told her that the city he had spent thirty years in was gone — not dramatically, not in the sense of having been swept away in a single morning, though that had happened too, three and a half years ago, but in the more thorough sense that the city that now existed in its place was a different city, organised on a different principle, made of different materials, with streets that ran at different angles than the old ones had. He told her that the Baixa — the old Baixa, the one she had visited as a child when she came out one summer with her mother, where they had eaten grilled fish at the place near the waterfront and she had refused to look at the eels in the bucket — that Baixa was gone entirely, and in its place was a grid of streets so regular that you could stand at one end of the Rua Augusta and see, in a single line of sight, all the way to the river.

He told her the facades were identical from one end to the next. He had found this strange at first — the suppression of individual variation, the deliberate refusal of ornament that had characterised every building in the old city — and now found it, on reflection, not strange at all. It was a decision, he wrote: a decision about what a street was for, which was movement and commerce and the orderly transaction of business, and not the display of private wealth. He was not certain he agreed with this as a principle. He was fairly certain the streets were correct regardless.

He told her about the light.

He had noticed it first in November, the quality of the morning sun on the new limestone facades — a pale, even illumination that the old city, with its irregular frontages and overhanging upper stories and crooked lanes, had never permitted. The new streets were wide enough and straight enough that the light reached the pavement directly. In the morning, before the merchants arrived, walking through the grid was like walking through a place that had been arranged for the purpose of letting light in. He did not know whether this had been intentional. He suspected it had. The engineers who had designed the grid were not men who missed things.

He would not see it in the spring. He would see Bristol's light instead, which he remembered as grey and diffuse and perfectly adequate, and which he had not missed, particularly, but which was home.

He stopped there. He read back through what he had written — three pages, the letter long by his usual standard, longer than it needed to be for the information it contained.

He did not write about Bristow. He did not write about the settlement, or Figueiredo, or the private ledger sitting in the bottom of his trunk with a hundred and twelve pages of entries made over three years. He did not write about the letter that was not in his trunk, that he had decided not to put in his trunk, that Bristow was keeping in his own papers at the lodgings in the upper Chiado.

He did not write about any of this because it was not the kind of thing you put in a letter, and because Eliza did not know about any of it and it was not necessary that she should, and because what you wrote in a letter to your daughter was what could survive the crossing — the light on the streets, the passage date, the request about his room.

He dipped the pen again. He wrote: I look forward to seeing you in April. Yr affectionate Father, E. Croft.

He read this back. It was adequate. It was what he meant.

He sanded the page and folded it and wrote the direction on the outside and set it with the morning's outgoing papers.

He did not sit for long after that. He went to the window — the one that faced the Rua Garrett rather than the street below, the window he had opened every morning for eleven years to admit whatever air the Chiado had to offer. The lodgings were not the counting house, which was closed and packed; he had taken two rooms here in January when the handover to Hargreaves had begun in earnest, and he had grown accustomed to the different angle. Through this window you could see, if you leaned slightly to the right, the edge of the rebuilt Baixa two streets down — a sliver of new limestone at the corner where the Rua Garrett met the descending lane, pale against the older stone of the surrounding buildings.

He had been looking at this sliver of limestone for six weeks without particularly registering it. He registered it now.