Open book with Loving on the Edge banner

The road has been shut since Tuesday, so I am writing this at the kitchen table with the lamp turned low and Mrs Pryce snoring by the range. Four guests are stuck here, and the only book left among them is the one a commercial traveller left in room six. It has a pink cover the colour of boiled sweets, and its pages have been bent into a fan so the middle stays open. The spine reads Loving on the Edge. I have been reading it in the mornings while the bread proves.

It is not the sort of novel you would like. A widow runs a ferry across a grey estuary and falls for a surveyor who keeps measuring the tide. Every chapter ends with him leaving something on the jetty: a pencil, a folded map, once a glove. I expected it to be dull. Instead I have found myself checking the tide tables in the kitchen drawer like a fool.

Yesterday the glove turned up on the jetty in the book, and I looked up from the page to the window, where the snow had stopped at last and the lane was dug out as far as the gate. The traveller came down the stairs with his bag already packed and asked whether I had seen his copy. I told him it was on the shelf above the flour, where I had hidden it so the guests would stop arguing over the ending.

He laughed and said he had never got to the ending either. Then he left it with me, and I have not finished it yet. I am saving the last chapter for when you come up in spring, so we can read it together by the fire.

Love, Nell