'Dear Derek
'Apologies for the lateness of this letter.
'You would have liked that joke. I can actually hear you laughing. Or rather, coughing your lungs out. Like most of the jokes you liked best in your last few years, it would have sent you into what sounded like mortal paroxyms of pulmonary distress, until you subsided into grim satisfaction, repeated the joke all wrong, then asked to hear it again. This is one less thing to worry about, as well as one less thing to love, for, as you wrote along ago: ‘I shall see love reclaim its things as I lie dying.’' (Introduction)
