The proximity and clarity of her voice sharpened his memory of her courage, of the pain she was in when she wrote her note in the overheated ward with the green curtains drawn around her narrow bed and the morphine pump’s tube fixed into the base of her thumb. Her brave words in loopy copperplate enhanced his awareness of the valley, its generous light and space, its sonorous river tumbling south-west, of the feel of the coarse grass under one hand and now, as he drank deeply, the cold water-bottle in the other. He was lucky to be alive.
