Anthony

Anthony is the anonymous A whose postcards from Greece gradually become a presence in Ellie Thomas’s London life. Behind their blue-and-white views lies a traveller writing to Sarah Ibbotson after she has failed to meet him at Kalamata Airport. His journey begins in rejection and disorientation, but the postcards and notebook also preserve a growing attention to the people, landscapes and stories encountered along the way. Through this one-way correspondence, his private grief becomes a route by which Ellie, too, comes to know Greece.

Identity and Epistolary Presence

Anthony’s postcards are signed only with A, leaving their sender unidentified to Ellie at first. Their intended recipient is S. Ibbotson, whose stray mail Ellie assumes belongs to a former tenant. She pins the cards to a corkboard, where their recurring blue and white skies, seas, boats and shuttered buildings form a growing visual map. Place names that are unfamiliar to her—among them Kalamata, Kalavrita and Kosmas—begin to occupy her imagination. The cards do not simply report Anthony’s travels: their images and place names make a distant country part of her daily surroundings.

The message Anthony sends is intimate but restrained. He writes that the place is nothing without the person he addresses and wishes that person were there with him. The simple sign-off carries more than travel information: it reveals the distance between the solitary writer and the absent recipient. Later, Anthony’s notebook gives Ellie a fuller account of the experiences behind the postcards. Its first-person recollections preserve the immediacy of a traveller trying to make sense of events as he moves through them, while his admission that some of the stories he records may be exaggerated or invented leaves their truth deliberately unsettled.

The Abandoned Meeting and the Journey’s Beginning

Anthony’s account of the journey’s decisive rupture begins at the small airport in Kalamata. He had gone there to meet Sarah, but when she did not arrive he waited for twenty-four hours, imagining possible explanations and hoping she might come on a later flight. He spent the night on a seat behind the luggage trolleys. A cleaner swept around him and offered him spinach pie that the cleaner’s wife was about to discard; the cleaner described the airport’s interlinked family jobs with pride. Even at the point of abandonment, Anthony notices the people around him and the kindness they offer.

The next morning, with the charter season ending and no prospect of Sarah arriving, Anthony left the arrivals area. Her phone did not answer. A message appeared on his damaged mobile phone, which had fallen from his shaking hand: Sarah could not make it. He called the number repeatedly and received no reply. The abruptness of the message contrasts with the elaborate explanations he had supplied himself while waiting. Anthony was left with no account of what had happened and no conversation in which to confront Sarah.

He could have returned to Athens, but could not face retracing the road he had driven in anticipation. Numb and unsure where he was going, he drove until he reached the sea and found a room by the beach. For days he did little but gaze at the Ionian Sea; he could not eat or speak. The setting offered no quick cure: in the Peloponnese, the landscape’s fullness and apparent vitality sharpened, rather than eased, his sense of loss. He later describes drinking to numb himself and dreading sleep, which brought nightmares severe enough that a guesthouse’s owners rushed into his room after hearing him scream.

Correspondence, Solitude and Encounters

When Anthony leaves the beach, he pauses at a rusty carousel of postcards and chooses one showing the Venetian Castle, a place he had not visited despite staying nearby. He writes not because he expects a reply, but because addressing Sarah gives his solitude a form. The postcard allows him to speak without waiting for an answer: communication continues, but now on terms that do not depend on her response. He then sits in his car for at least an hour, staring at a map before setting out east without a fixed destination. His freedom to go anywhere initially feels disorienting rather than liberating.

As he travels, strangers’ voices begin to fill the silence left by Sarah’s absence. Anthony says that people talk to him in the places where he stops; many are warm, and attempts to speak Greek often help break the ice. They tell him stories, which he listens to and writes down. He describes being invited into homes, to local festivals and baptisms, and to share tables in cafés. These encounters give his journey a social texture that contrasts with the solitary act of writing to Sarah. He learns about Greece, but also says that he learns new things about himself.

Anthony does not present this hospitality as proof that every encounter or story is straightforward. He recognizes that memory can soften the truth and that some tales may be fabrications or exaggerations. His notebook therefore records both the stories and the uncertainty around them. Rather than claiming authority over everything he hears, he leaves room for doubt, making the reader’s assessment part of the experience of reading.

Recovery and the Meaning of Travel

The change in Anthony is gradual and uneven. After a period in Preveza, he describes himself beginning to thaw during the warm early days of January. Leonidas explains the tradition of the halcyon days, and Anthony stays to share evening meals with Leonidas and Dora. Dora’s cooking helps him regain weight lost after Sarah’s non-appearance; by the time he leaves, he is beginning to look healthy again. The improvement is concrete, but the passage does not make it a final resolution of his grief.

On the drive east from Preveza toward Karpenisi, a wrong turn takes Anthony onto an unmade mountain road, where he is lost for hours, far from civilisation. The mistake brings him into landscapes he would not otherwise have seen and leaves him exhilarated by solitude. He begins to wonder whether errors that first seem disastrous might lead to better things. That thought marks a change in what he can imagine: after the cancelled meeting made his journey feel like the wreckage of an expectation, an accidental route gives him reason to consider possibility again.

Anthony’s writing also travels beyond its original, private purpose. Ellie reads his notebook during her stay in Greece, spending her days swimming near Tolon and visiting Nafplio before reading a few of his stories each evening. She cannot reach every place he describes, so his account supplies experiences her own short trip cannot contain. His postcards first drew her toward Greece; the notebook then offers a more complicated country than the bright images alone could show. Anthony’s narrative significance lies in that double record: it holds the unresolved hurt of a man writing to someone absent, while carrying the voices and places he encounters toward another reader.