Elephant and compass on a forearm

The boarding house at Saltmere has a sink in every room now, which Mrs Pell considers a great improvement and I consider a cruelty, since the water runs brown for the first minute and then tastes of pennies. I am writing by the window because the lamp smokes. Below, the tide is out so far that the fishing boats lie on their sides like tired dogs.

You will want to know about the elephant. Mr Okonedo, who keeps the lighthouse accounts and lodges on the top floor, swears his grandfather brought a stuffed one back from Madras in 1889 and that it stood in the hall until the damp got into its ears. He has been drawing it for me on the backs of tide tables, always the head and never the body, saying a head is enough to point a man home if he knows which way it faces. Last night he gave me the drawing with a compass rose pressed into one corner, the needle bent where he had leaned on it.

I asked him what the dots were. He said they were the towns he had walked, one dot for each, the red ones for the places where he had been happy and the black ones for the rest, and that he had run out of ink before he ran out of towns. I have decided to think this is a joke, though his face says otherwise.

He leaves on Thursday's coach. I have promised to walk him to the end of the pier and read him the line he asked me to copy from the back of the almanac, the one about the wind and the north star, which I suspect he knows better than I do. I will post this before the tide turns so it reaches you before the summer does.

Your loving brother, Tom