Eagle in a tuxedo with lilies on a forearm

You will not believe who came through the side door of the Customs Hotel on Tuesday with a cardboard box tucked under one wing. It was Mr Harrow from room nine, back from wherever he goes on the first of each month. He wore the black dinner jacket and the red bow tie he keeps for the dining room, and the two medals he polishes with his own handkerchief, though nobody here has ever seen him earn them.

The box held lilies. Orange ones, speckled like a thrush's egg, wrapped in brown paper already going soft at the corners. He asked me, very politely, whether Mrs Okonedo at the florist's across the road would still be open. I said she shut at six. He looked at the clock above the desk, then back at me, and said that in his experience nothing shut before it had been asked properly.

So I walked across with him. Mrs Okonedo took one look at the bird in his good suit and didn't blink. She wrapped the flowers again, tighter, and he paid her in coins he counted onto the counter one at a time. Then he asked her for a second bunch, the same size, and told her they were for the widow Pryce on the coast road, whose husband worked the ferry for thirty years before he retired. Mrs Okonedo asked why he never delivered them himself. He said the widow had never once opened her door to him, and he had decided the flowers would have to wait on the step like everything else.

I am writing because I still don't know what to make of it, and because I thought you would. Mr Harrow left his key on my desk this morning and asked me to hold his room. Both bunches of lilies were gone from the step by the time I looked.

Love, Tom