Sarah Ibbotson

Sarah Ibbotson is an absent but consequential figure in Anthony Brown’s account of a relationship he had taken to be the great love of his life. The novel introduces her through his recollections and through post that reaches Ellie Thomas at an address associated with Sarah; as the mismatch between that address and Anthony’s memories emerges, affection, expectation, and concealment become difficult to separate.

Identity and Introduction

Sarah appears first as a name Anthony recognizes in the notebook Ellie returns. He asks whether anything has happened to her, and Ellie realizes that S. Ibbotson must be Sarah. The question conveys Anthony’s lingering concern, but he is startled when Ellie tells him that Sarah does not live at the address where the notebook and postcards had been delivered. His response is not that the discrepancy is impossible, but that it fits a pattern of deception he had not fully faced.

The account of Sarah is therefore mediated twice: Anthony recalls their life together, and Ellie receives that account while explaining why she kept the misplaced material. Sarah does not speak for herself in these scenes. Readers learn what Anthony believed about her, what he remembers doing with her, and what the address discrepancy leads him to question, but not her explanation for the false details.

Relationship with Anthony

Anthony says he thought Sarah was the love of his life. They were together for eighteen months, and she regularly spent weekends at his home. Yet she never invited him to her own place, explaining that she shared it with her sister and that they would not have privacy there. The arrangement gave the relationship a familiar rhythm while keeping a substantial part of Sarah’s life beyond Anthony’s view.

Sarah worked part-time at a friend’s gallery in Notting Hill. The job did not prevent her from making impromptu visits to exhibitions, and she sometimes accompanied Anthony to the British Museum, where he was conducting research. Their connection thus included shared attention to art as well as time together at weekends. These particular memories make the relationship feel lived and specific, even as Anthony comes to doubt how much of Sarah’s identity he actually knew.

One museum visit became the beginning of a larger plan. In front of the Parthenon Marbles, Sarah said she wanted to see the rest of the sculptures and the place they had originally come from. Anthony agreed, and they spent the next six months planning a trip to Greece, with the Acropolis Museum intended as its finale. The plan gave their shared interest a future-facing form: they were not simply visiting exhibitions but imagining a journey together. In Anthony’s recollection, it remains a good moment, made more poignant by what he later learns about the person with whom he planned it.

Concealment and Recognition

The address attached to the mail contradicts the arrangement Sarah had described. Ellie recognizes the basement flat as her own home and remarks that it seems an unlikely place for the woman Anthony remembers. Anthony confirms that it was the address Sarah gave him, then wonders whether she might once have known someone there. That possibility remains speculation; what he states more firmly is that he no longer believes Sarah was the person she presented herself as being.

His recognition is not limited to discovering that she did not live at the stated address. Anthony describes the false address as hardly her only lie and concludes that he had persuaded himself she was one kind of person when she was another. The distinction matters: the novel supplies a concrete inconsistency, but not a full inventory of Sarah’s deceptions or an account of her motives. Her characterization rests on the gap between Anthony’s former confidence and his present uncertainty, rather than on a definitive explanation of who she was.

The Mail and the Relationship’s Afterlife

The misplaced materials extend that gap into Ellie’s story. Ellie explains that the postcards and notebook came to her home, that she kept the postcards, and that the notebook arrived just as she was leaving. Because the objects seemed connected, she felt it was acceptable to keep them together. Anthony understands the connection and is glad the notebook has returned, but its arrival also makes the false address newly significant: even the route by which the stories reached Ellie now seems entangled with Sarah’s concealment.

Later, a landlady tells Ellie that someone identifying herself as an old tenant, whose name she recalls uncertainly as Abbotson, has called to ask whether there is any post for her. Ellie associates the call with Sarah and asks Anthony what to say. He tells her to report that there was nothing. The scene does not establish the caller’s identity beyond Ellie’s inference, but it shows that the question of Sarah’s mail has not simply ended with the notebook’s return. Anthony’s instruction leaves Ellie between a person seeking correspondence and a man who chooses not to pass it on.

Anthony eventually describes the returned stories as having had nowhere else to go except onto his pages and nowhere to be sent except Ellie’s address. Their arrival had brought the private account to an unexpected reader; returning the notebook gives the exchange a sense of closure for him. Yet that closure rests not on recovering Sarah or resolving the truth of her life, but on acknowledging that she never lived at the address and that this, too, was a lie. Sarah’s narrative role is consequently defined by both intimacy and absence: she inspires Anthony’s plans and memories, while the unanswered questions around her identity shape what those memories can mean.