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By Root 10569 0

Bourani... I was woken at four by the bell that a prefect always came across and rang with vindictive violence in the wide stone corridor outside our rooms. There was the usual chorus of angry shouts from my colleagues. I lay on my elbow and read Lily's letter twice more. Then I remembered the other one I had thrown on my desk and went yawning to open that. Inside was a typewritten note and another, airmail, envelope slit open, but I hardly looked at them because two newspaper cuttings were pinned on to the top of the note. I had to read them first. The first words. The first words. The whole thing had happened to me before, the same sensations, the same feeling that it could not be true and was true, of vertiginous shock and superficial calm. Coming out of the Randolph in Oxford with two or three other people, walking up to Carfax, a man under the tower selling the _Evening News_. Standing there, a silly girl saying "Look at Nicholas, he's pretending he can read." And I looked up with the death of parents in my face and said "My mother and father." As if I had just for the first time discovered that such people existed. The top cutting was from some local newspaper, from the bottom of a column. It said: AIR HOSTESS SUICIDE Australian air hostess Alison Kelly, 24, was found yesterday lying on her bed in the Russell Square flat they both share by her friend Ann Taylor, also Australian, when she returned from a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. She was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital but found to be dead on admission. Miss Taylor was treated for shock. Inquest next week.

The second cutting said:

UNHAPPY IN LOVE SO KILLS HERSELF PC Henry Davis told the deputy Holborn coroner on Tuesday how on the evening of Sunday, June z9th, he found a young woman lying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side. He had been called by the dead girl's flat-mate, Australian physiotherapist Ann Taylor, who found the deceased, Alison Kelly, air hostess, aged 24, on her return from a weekend at Stratford-on-Avon. A verdict of suicide was recorded. Miss Taylor said that although her friend had been subject to fits of depression and said she could not sleep properly she had had no reason to suppose the deceased was in a suicidal frame of mind. In answer to questions, Miss Taylor said, "My friend was recently depressed because of an unhappy love affaire, but I thought she had got over it." Dr. Behrens, the deceased's doctor, told the coroner that Miss Kelly had led her to believe that it was her work which gave her insomnia. Asked by the coroner whether she normally prescribed such large quantities of tablets, Dr. Behrens replied that she took into account the difficulty the deceased might have in getting to a chemist frequently. She had no reason to suspect suicide. The coroner stated that two notes found by the police threw no light on the real motive of this tragic business. The typewritten note was from Ann Taylor. _DEAR NICHOLAS URFE,_ _The enclosed cuttings will explain why I am writing. I am sorry, it will be a great shock, but I don't know how else to break it. She was very depressed when she came back from Athens, but she wouldn't talk about it, so I don't know whose fault it was. She used to talk a lot about suicide at one time but we always thought it was a joke._ _She left this envelope for you. The police opened it. There was no note inside. There was a note for me, but it said nothing--just apologies._ _We are all heartbroken about it. I feel I am to blame. Now she is gone we realise what she was. I can't understand any man not realising what she really was underneath and not wanting to marry her. But I don't understand men, I suppose._ _Yours very sadly,_ _ANN TAYLOR_ _P. S. I don't know if you want to write to her mother. The ashes are being sent home. Her address is--Mrs. Mary Kelly, 19 Liverpool Avenue, Goulburn, N. S. W._ I looked at the airmail envelope. It had my name outside, in Alison's handwriting. I tipped the contents out on the desk. A tangle of clumsily pressed flowers: two or three violets, some pinks.