The post office in Brackenford shuts at half past five, but the shop stays open until six, because people want milk on the way home and because I have nowhere better to be.
I took it over from my aunt in January. She had run it for thirty-one years and left me the keys, the ledger and a radiator that knocks twice before it gives any heat.
The boxes are along the back wall, twelve of them, brass doors with the numbers worn down to shadows. Eleven stand empty. Number fourteen had not been cleared since before Christmas.
The box was rented to Edward Pryce, of Chapel House, though Chapel House had been a building site for two years and Edward Pryce had been dead since the spring. His son came in for milk most evenings and never once mentioned the box.
After the third week of squeezing other people’s post around a wedge of envelopes, I wrote a note and put it in the box.
“Dear Mr Pryce, number fourteen is full. If you would like me to hold the post at the counter, say so. Otherwise please collect. N. Garvey, postmistress.”
The reply came by post, which I thought was a joke at first. A single sheet, folded twice, the date underlined at the top.
“Miss Garvey, hold it, if you can. I am not ready for it yet. E. Pryce.”
I wrote back that I would hold them until Easter.
He answered within the week. He wrote about the weather, about the chapel roof, about the dog outside the shop. He did not write about his father. I wrote back about the ledger, the pension queue and the parish council’s plan to close us and put a car park where the loading bay is.
By the end of February we were writing twice a week. I told him things I had not told my sister: that I had left a job in Leeds, that I slept in the flat above the shop and could hear the fridge through the floor, and that I was not sure I had done the right thing coming here. He told me about the house he was restoring, a chapel with a cracked bell, and about the way his father used to read the newspaper aloud in the evenings, even when there was nobody in the room to hear it.
I never saw him. That is the part I find hard to explain now. Brackenford has six hundred people in it and I knew his handwriting better than my own.
Callum Pryce came in every evening at ten past five for a pint of milk and an argument. He was a joiner, broad through the shoulders, with a way of standing in the shop as though he were measuring it for a door. He thought the post office should move into the church hall. He thought the car park was a good idea. He thought I was too stubborn to listen to anybody, and that was rich, coming from a man who had spent two years rebuilding a chapel and would not name a finish date.
“You could sign the petition,” I said one evening, pushing it across the counter.
“Could,” he said. “Won’t.”
“Because you want somewhere to park.”
“Because the village needs the trade.” He counted out his coins. “And because you have been here five minutes and you think you know what it needs.”
I wrote to E. that night and told him about the joiner, and I was not kind. I called him a man who confused noise with sense. I said the village would still be arguing about that car park when the sea came over the hill.
The reply took four days, longer than usual.
“You are unfair to him,” he wrote. “He may have reasons you have not asked about. People are rarely only what they show at a counter.”
I read it twice, then a third time. Something in the shape of the words bothered me, the way a tune does when you cannot place it.
On Thursday Callum came in for his milk and a parcel. I gave him the slip to sign. He took my pen, wrote his name, and drew a small square around the postcode, the way you would box a sum on a page.
I looked at the slip. I looked at the last letter from E., still under the till, where I had left it because I had meant to answer it.
The date was underlined. The postcode was boxed. The pen was the same cheap blue biro I sell by the door.
“Callum,” I said.
He looked up. I have never seen a face change so slowly.
“How long?”
He put the pen down. “Since the first note. I came in to clear the box and you had already written to him. To my father. My father was Edward; so am I, in the middle. The box was his. I was going to explain, and then I read what you said about the radiator, and I thought, one letter. Just one.”
“Three months of one letter.”
“I know.”
“You could have said. Any evening. You stood there arguing about a car park.”
“Because you had already decided what I was. In the letters I could be something else. I meant to tell you. Then I kept not telling you, and after a while the not telling was the same as lying, and I did not know how to stop.”
I should have thrown him out. What stopped me was the sentence about his father reading the newspaper aloud to an empty room, written to a stranger because there was nobody left to say it to.
“Go home,” I said. “Write to me. Properly. Your name at the bottom.”
He went.
The letter came on Saturday, hand-delivered, through the shop door, with no stamp. Two pages. His name at the bottom, all three words of it, and under that, in the same blue biro, “I am sorry. I would like to start again at the beginning, if you will have me.”
I put it in box fourteen and left it there until Monday, because I wanted him to have to come and ask for it.
He came at ten past five, without the milk.
“Miss Garvey,” he said. “I believe there is post for me.”
“There is,” I said. “It will cost you a signature.”
He signed. This time he did not box the postcode.
