Do get in touch and let me know how you are.
Love,
Fred
From:
Date:
12 December
To:
Subject:
Re: Absence
Well! I thought you had forgotten about me.
Don’t tell me that even in the Yemen you can’t wander into an Internet cafe and send a quick email. I just don’t believe you can go anywhere these days and be that cut off.
Since you ask, I am fine. I have lost a little weight as I tend to forget to eat, living on my own as I do. Do you find that?
Or perhaps you are with Ms Chetwode-Talbot and your friend the sheikh all the time. I imagine you must be leading a grand sort of life in such eminent company and eating restaurant food twice a day?
My job is going very well, thank you for remembering to ask about it. My contribution to the Geneva office is being recognised, and the hard work I have put in over the last few months is paying off. It is gratifying to see both the result and the recognition one has received for one’s efforts. I shall be coming to London in the fairly near future for a review meeting at the European head office there, and possible promotion is in the air. I trust my visit will give us an opportunity to meet and spend some time together. I feel it is important that we have some fairly serious discussions about our life together and our future.
I will let you know my plans as soon as I have some firm dates for this visit.
Mary
PS: You don’t say anything at all about how the salmon project is getting on. Have you finally realised just how irrational the whole idea is? I always wondered how you could let yourself be taken in by the idea in the first place. I would have supposed your scientific training would have made it impossible for you to allow yourself to become involved in something like that. One is constantly surprised by the elasticity of people’s standards, but I am surprised you have been so quick to compromise. As for when people ask me what you do, which they sometimes do as I am still relatively new here, I don’t know what to tell them. I did once admit to someone (thankfully not in this office) that you were being paid to introduce salmon into the Yemen and she screamed with laughter for about five minutes and wouldn’t believe I wasn’t joking.
As you know, I find jokes and facetiousness childish and don’t tend to indulge myself in that way, so if colleagues ask what you do, or if I have to supply the information to human resources, I just say you are a fisheries scientist and leave it at that. But then, how do I explain why you are working for an estate agent?
From:
Date:
13 December
To:
Subject:
Salmon project
Mary,
Thank you for asking about my work in the Yemen, even if I found some of your remarks somewhat negative. You almost appeared to be questioning my scientific integrity, although I am sure you did not intend to.
Anyway, since you ask, allow me to reassure you that the Yemen salmon project is going to work. We may not live to see Yemeni anglers catching salmon on the fly as they run up the Wadi Aleyn, although even that is far from impossible, but we will see salmon run up the Wadi Aleyn. Of that I am confident. And I think there is every chance that the fish will run all the way up the wadi, and some of them will manage to spawn in the headwaters before the waters recede. What will happen after that we cannot say.
Will any salmon fry actually be produced in the gravel beds at the head of the wadi, and will any of them survive long enough to head downstream before the waters evaporate? Probably not. Will we succeed in catching some of the hen fish in order to strip their eggs and rear salmon fry in the more controllable conditions in the little experimental hatchery we have built alongside Holding Basin N°1? Yes, I think we may succeed in that. Will we be able to catch enough live salmon running back down the wadi to restock Holding Basin N°2 (which is now going to be doped with salt to mimic the salinity of seawater)? Time alone will tell.
If we can trick the salmon into wanting to run upstream to follow the smell of freshwater, if we can trick the salmon returning downstream to smell the saltwater in Holding Basin N°2 and swim into the salmon trap-then we will have achieved a scientific miracle. And I use the word miracle because that is what the sheikh believes it will be: a scientific achievement which has come about through divine inspiration and intervention. I am not sure, when it finally happens, that I will want to disagree with him.
I look forward to telling you more about it all when we meet, and I am delighted that you may be finding some time in your busy schedule to come and see your husband. Please give me as much advance notice as possible as I have a heavy travel schedule myself at present between London, Scotland and the Yemen.
Fred
PS: Your remarks about my supposedly extravagant lifestyle provoke me to comment that the sheikh lives simply, but well. He and I and Harriet Chetwode-Talbot dined together every night at his house, and we dined well but on the kind of healthy Arabic food that does not tend to fatten one up. In the daytime Harriet and I made do with copious amounts of water and fruit, to keep us going through our busy schedule.
From:
Date:
14 December
To:
Subject:
(no subject)
Fred,
Are you having an affair with Harriet Chetwode-Talbot? I would be interested to know where I stand.
Mary
From:
Date:
14 December
To:
Subject:
Harriet
Mary,
If you knew the full situation, then you would not ask such an insensitive question. Harriet Chetwode-Talbot is, or was, engaged to a soldier called Robert Matthews. You may or may not have seen stories about him in the press. To cut a long story short, Harriet came back from the mountains of Heraz (where she, like me, had no access to the Internet for most of the time, or any other
