Emma's letters and notes

Emma’s letters and notebooks are both a record of her life and a record of how intimacy changes: they preserve the urgent communications of her early friendship with Dexter, then become an archive he must sort after her death. Their contents carry the relationship across decades, but their physical presence also confronts Dexter with what the past cannot restore.

Correspondence and shared history

In the early years of their friendship, writing was an active part of Emma and Dexter’s closeness. Emma sent him ten-page letters late at night, full of passionate feeling and meanings barely concealed; for a time she also sent daily postcards, alongside phone calls that lasted an hour before bed. Their exchanges belonged to a wider habit of recording and preserving experience. Notebooks, letters, and photographs accumulated as evidence of a friendship neither had yet learned to take for granted.

The archive recalls particular occasions as well as a general intensity. Emma remembered staying awake with Dexter in a Dalston flat, talking and listening to records until sunrise; swimming in the river at his parents’ house on New Year’s Day; and drinking absinthe in a secret bar in Chinatown. In the early nineties they sometimes squeezed together into photo booths, taking pictures because their continuing presence in one another’s lives still felt remarkable. The papers and photographs thus represent not only what they said, but a period when their time together seemed worth continually documenting.

Private writing and unequal knowledge

Emma’s notebooks also hold a more private record of her attachments. In a letter to Dexter, Ian Whitehead admits that he used to read them while Emma was out. He says that they were full of Dexter and their friendship, a discovery that caused him pain and jealousy. His account makes the notebooks consequential beyond their role as personal writing: they reveal feelings Emma did not necessarily communicate directly to Ian and expose the imbalance between Ian’s place in her life and Dexter’s.

Ian’s letter is itself another piece of the archive’s human history. He describes how Emma left him, how he later met and married Jacqui, and how he came to understand that Emma had loved Dexter deeply. He recalls overhearing their phone calls and watching her brighten around him at parties. His testimony offers a retrospective reading of the relationship, but it also acknowledges its own limits: Ian writes from a position marked by earlier hurt, and his understanding develops over time. The notebooks matter partly because their contents outlast the moment in which they were written and can be encountered, interpreted, and regretted later.

Dexter sorts the boxes

After Emma’s death, Dexter carries her remaining belongings from the spare bedroom into the living room. Two of the seven or eight cardboard boxes are marked in Emma’s handwriting, and contain notebooks, letters, and wallets of photographs. He separates what he considers meaningless ephemera, which goes into a black bin-liner, from items to send to her parents and those he wants to keep. He works pragmatically and without tears, but the order in which the materials are packed makes him travel backward through their shared past: from their life as a couple, through the nineties, and eventually into the eighties.

Dexter avoids reading the journals and notebooks, which contain youthful poetry and plays. He imagines Emma would be distressed to see him reading them, or would try to take them away. Instead, he concentrates on letters and photographs. This distinction gives the archive an intimate boundary: sorting the papers is bearable, but entering the most private writing feels unfair to Emma. His handling of the collection is therefore not simply a search for information. It is also an effort to decide what he can keep, what must be returned to her parents, and what kinds of access to her inner life he can accept.

Layers of a life

The boxes preserve several different kinds of work and experience. Dexter finds dummy covers for the Julie Criscoll novels, correspondence with Emma’s editor Marsha, and press cuttings. Among material from Paris are photographs, Metro tickets, folded menus, and a rental agreement in French. One envelope contains a Polaroid taken during an amorous evening after Emma and Dexter watched Titanic in French on a black-and-white television. Emma had once taken the picture from Dexter and insisted she would destroy it; finding that she kept it gives him a moment of pleasure, immediately undercut by the force of her absence.

Other layers register relationships, employment, and ordinary administration. The boxes contain birth announcements, wedding invitations, orders of service, a farewell card from the staff and pupils of Cromwell Road Comprehensive School, and letters from Phil that Dexter finds sexually fixated and pleading. There are also flyers for Ian’s comedy-improv nights and solicitors’ paperwork concerning the purchase of the flat in E17. These items do not all carry the same emotional weight, but together they show how an intimate archive absorbs the mundane records that accumulate around a life.

Earlier still are postcards Dexter sent while travelling, including jokey messages about Amsterdam, Dublin, and Venice. He remembers the pale-blue airmail letters Emma sent in return and rereads them occasionally, embarrassed by his younger self. The box also holds a programme for Cruel Cargo, a play Emma wrote with Gary Cheadle, university essays, postcard reproductions marked by pinholes, and her graduation certificate, still rolled inside a cardboard tube. Its date, 14 July 1988, makes the age of these objects precise: Dexter discovers it eighteen years after the day it records.

An archive that remains present

The papers do not end Emma’s presence or make it fully recoverable. They give Dexter tangible evidence of her successive lives and of his own changing place within them, while repeatedly exposing the gap between keeping a record and keeping the person. Years later, when Jasmine asks whether he misses Emma, Dexter answers that he does every day and calls her his best friend. Jasmine remembers her only faintly, through pictures and the memory of Emma’s wedding. The archive’s photographs and papers belong to this continuing, unequal act of remembrance: Dexter’s detailed history and his daughter’s partial impressions meet around someone who is no longer there.