London

London is less a destination than a pressure point in the novel: the city Ellie hopes will lead her somewhere better, the place the narrator fears returning to after heartbreak, and the setting of Anthony’s past relationship with Sarah Ibbotson. Against the imagined brightness of Greece, London gathers stalled ambitions, private grief, and the question of whether home is somewhere to return to or somewhere to leave.

A city of deferred expectations

Ellie has moved from Cardiff to London expecting its lights to offer possibility, but her life in a gloomy Kensal Rise flat and a job selling advertising space in a trade magazine falls short of that hope. She leaves for work before dawn and returns at seven in the evening, keeping the curtains closed through winter; when spring comes, the sun still seems unable to reach her. Around her, coworkers in anonymous rows include actors and singers waiting for their next opportunity, and the West End represents their imagined future. Ellie’s own longing points elsewhere, toward a place much farther away.

The postcards signed simply with an A give that longing a shape. Ellie pins them to a large corkboard in her London home, where their blue-and-white scenes—sea, skies, boats, and whitewashed buildings—form a growing mosaic. She adds the names of places to it and, when several cards arrive together, tears a page from an atlas to mark their locations and trace the writer’s route. The cards cannot return to their unknown sender, and their images cannot reproduce the smells or sounds of Greece; nevertheless, they make a country she has never visited part of her daily life. In a flat where sunlight feels absent, their colours become a source of cheer and an invitation to imagine another life.

When the cards stop arriving, Ellie feels their absence as a fresh disappointment. Back in London after visiting her parents in Cardiff, she sees that the postcards have begun to curl on the board, though their colours remain vivid. She wonders whether the bright skies are real or exaggerated, then checks her passport and finds an inexpensive flight to Athens. A week in a resort near Nafplio costs £120, and she chooses it partly because A has visited the place. The decision is spontaneous, but the months spent collecting and studying the images have prepared it. London is where the journey begins: not through a dramatic break with the city, but through a small choice prompted by the life its routines have left her wanting.

A return shadowed by loss

For the unnamed travelling narrator, London represents the life waiting beyond an extended stay in Greece, but that prospect is painful. After being left at Kalamata Airport, the narrator spends time in Methoni overwhelmed by the silence and by the absence of the expected message. Returning to London would mean looking for the former partner’s face in crowds, while staying in Greece offers both distance from that grief and time to work on a book. With research gathered in Athens and an advance from the book contract to support the journey, the narrator chooses not to hurry home.

London also remains an imagined destination for the narrator’s future, not a place erased from consideration. The narrator’s travels are finite: money will not last indefinitely, and the first draft of a book still needs attention. But in the immediate aftermath of the airport abandonment, the city is associated with the return of melancholy, while the road through Greece makes solitary movement possible. This contrast becomes especially stark around Christmas. Alone in a sparsely occupied hotel in Messolonghi, the narrator hears children singing in the background during a call to a brother in England and nearly gives up the travels. The moment exposes the cost of distance without resolving it: home offers family connection, but the journey has become a way to endure a loss that London would bring close again.

Anthony’s London and the story of Sarah

London enters Anthony’s account through the beginning and shape of his relationship with Sarah Ibbotson. They meet in the bar at the Curzon in Mayfair, where she is waiting for someone who has not arrived and Anthony is spending time before a film. Their conversation turns to Greece, which Sarah had visited as a child. She later works part-time at a friend’s gallery in Notting Hill and sometimes accompanies Anthony to the British Museum, where he is doing research. In front of the Parthenon Marbles, she says she wants to see the sculptures that remain in Greece and the places from which they came. The idea leads the pair to plan a trip for six months.

Anthony lives in a mansion block in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum, with a view of the building’s large pillars. On clear days, that view allows him to imagine himself in Athens. The city thus holds both his intellectual interests and the early promise of a shared journey. Yet the relationship is unequal in ways Anthony only recognizes later: during their eighteen months together, Sarah stays with him at weekends but never invites him to her home, explaining that she lives with her sister. Ellie, hearing the story in Greece, points out that Sarah’s supposed address—the basement flat where Ellie lives—does not sound like a plausible home for the woman Anthony describes. Anthony concludes that he had persuaded himself Sarah was someone she was not.

The planned journey to Greece is therefore more than an itinerary. It gathers Anthony’s research, his interest in classical art, and his hopes for a future with Sarah, but the relationship ends before that imagined shared experience can fulfill its promise. Anthony eventually returns a ring he had bought, and its value is enough to cover a year’s rent. His account to Ellie connects London’s museums and rooms with a love story whose apparent plans concealed a widening gap between what he believed and what he later understood.

London as a point of departure

The city’s significance comes from the different kinds of movement its characters make in relation to it. Ellie leaves because the everyday life she has built there feels dim beside the bright places on her board; the narrator postpones a return because London would make the abandoned relationship difficult to escape; Anthony looks back on London as the setting for a romance shaped by mistaken confidence and unrealized plans. In each case, Greece first appears through distance—on a postcard, in research, or in an imagined view from Bloomsbury—and then becomes a place where established expectations can be tested.

Ellie’s encounter with Anthony brings the city’s role into focus. She tells him how the postcards accumulated in her flat and how their disappearance helped prompt her to travel. By then she has spent much of her savings, and the prospect of returning to London feels hard. Anthony encourages her to stay, and she recognizes that the journey has already enriched her life. London remains her point of origin, but it no longer dictates the next step: the story leaves her weighing an uncertain future in Greece against the familiar routine she left behind.