He went back to the blue, tissue-like airmail letter and studied it again. It was the address that confused him. It had been sent to Mary, right enough, not to the house where she had lived all her life but to an address in Toronto.

‘Canada!’ he heard himself exclaim aloud.

Mary had never spoken of having left the country and nobody else in the family had ever mentioned such a thing.

Cal studied the envelope more closely. There was a bold, red ‘return to sender’ stamp on it. The smudged postmark indicated it had been posted in the 1960s. There didn’t appear to be a letter inside. Leafing quickly through the box, Cal searched for any others, but there was none. He turned the envelope over and over in his hand. He recognised his grandmother’s name and address in the box for sender’s details. The facts were there before him, but he was so confused that he couldn’t link them together coherently. Apparently, his grandmother had written a letter to her daughter, Mary, who was in Canada at the time. It didn’t make sense.

Cal placed the box back on the table and went through to the kitchen to check on the fire. The paper was smouldering, but the peats hadn’t caught. He packed in some chopped wood and added a couple of white Zip lighters.

‘Having problems?’ Mairi had come in unnoticed.

She smiled as he started in surprise, and a stunning smile it was too. 

‘I’m trying to get this damn fire going.’

Mairi crouched down beside him.

‘Let me have a look.’

She reorganised the structure of the fire, relaid the sticks, the paper, the lighters and the peat. Cal was close to her and tried not to look at her, but he found it difficult, taking in the freshness of her skin and the smell of her hair.

‘It’s all to do with the amount of air that’s getting in,’ she explained, oblivious to his interest. ‘So if we close the door and open this vent, that should do it.’

Mairi stood up and went back outside to pick up two grocery bags.

‘I went over to town to get some things for tonight. There’ll be quite a few coming.’

She busied herself emptying the contents, cakes and pastries, packets of biscuits, bread and sandwich fillings.

‘Let me pay you for that.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said firmly.

Cal watched her putting the shopping into cupboards and the fridge. Her sexuality was all the more alluring for being unselfconscious.

‘Did you ever know Mary to have travelled?’ he asked to stop himself from staring. ‘Abroad I mean.’

‘No,’ replied Mairi, checking a bash on a box of cakes.

‘She never spoke about being in Canada?’

‘No. Why?’ She continued what she was doing, but he had caught her attention.

‘I came across a letter that was addressed to her in Canada.’

‘Canada?’

‘Yeah. Come here, I’ll show you.’

Mairi followed Cal through to the living room and he picked up the airmail letter.

‘What d’you make of that?’

‘What does the letter say?’

‘There isn’t one in it.’

‘There will be. It’s one of those airmail letters that form an envelope when you fold it. They were cheaper to post.’ The blue envelope unfolded to an A4 size in her fingers. The page was covered in hesitant handwriting. Mairi gave it back to him.

‘That should tell you.’

As Cal began to read, Mairi came round beside him.

The letter was from a mother fussing over her daughter, concerned for her wellbeing so far from home. ‘Be sure to have warm clothes for the winter Canada is such a cold place.’ There was no punctuation and the spelling and grammar indicated an abbreviated education, but it scanned easily enough.

Mary’s mother spoke of what was happening in the village, the harvesting of the corn and the death of an old woman. Friends of Mary were sending their love, she said. ‘Take care of yourself my dear. Your loving mother.’

Frustratingly, there was no explanation of why Mary was in Canada, beyond a passing reference to her job.

‘I was beginning to think she’d maybe gone over to see some relatives, you know the way there so many over there. But she was working.