The Solicitor's Letter

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, which Marta would later think was fitting, because nothing interesting had ever happened to her on a Tuesday. It was thick and cream-colored, and it bore the name of a firm of solicitors in Harrogate: Pembridge, Holt and Fairweather. She turned it over twice in the narrow hallway of her terraced house in Leeds, still in her uniform after a twelve-hour shift, and wondered whom she had offended. In Colombia, in her experience, a letter from a lawyer was rarely good news. In England, she suspected, it was not much better.

She read it standing up, then sitting down, then again with a cup of tea. Her English was excellent; she argued with consultants, calmed frightened patients and filled in incident reports that would have defeated many native speakers. But this was something else. "We write further to the instructions of the late Mrs. Dorothy Ellen Whitcombe (hereinafter the Deceased)," it began, and things only got worse from there. There were clauses, and clauses within clauses. There was one sentence that seemed to run on for most of a page without once pausing for breath.

"Mum, you look like someone's died," said Mateo, her fifteen-year-old, wandering into the kitchen in search of food. "Someone has," Marta said. "I think. A woman called Dorothy. I have never heard of her." Mateo read over her shoulder with the confidence of a teenager who had grown up in Yorkshire and considered himself the household's official interpreter. Within a minute, the confidence had gone. "Notwithstanding the foregoing," he read aloud. "What does that even mean? Is that English?" "It is lawyer," said Marta. "Lawyer is a different language."

They agreed that they needed help, and help, on their street, meant Mr. Ingham. He lived at number fourteen, he was eighty-three, and before he retired he had spent forty years as a clerk in a legal office in Bradford, a fact he mentioned with some regularity. He received them in a front room full of clocks, put on two pairs of glasses, one over the other, and read the letter in silence. Then he laughed, a short, dry sound. "Well, it's not a summons, love," he said. "You can stop looking so worried. Nobody's suing you. Somebody's left you something."

He took them through it line by line, like a teacher walking children across a busy road. "Hereinafter" simply meant "from now on in this letter", he explained; the solicitors called Mrs. Whitcombe "the Deceased" so that they would not have to keep repeating her full name. "Notwithstanding the foregoing" meant "in spite of what we've just said". "The said property" was the thing they had already mentioned. "Pursuant to" meant "in accordance with", or, as Mr. Ingham put it, "because the will says so". "They don't write like this to confuse you," he added. "They write like this so that nobody can ever argue about what they meant. The trouble is, nobody can understand what they meant either."

Slowly, the shape of the thing emerged from the fog. Dorothy Whitcombe, it turned out, had been the sister of Marta's grandfather's first wife, an Englishwoman who had gone to Colombia in the nineteen-fifties to teach and had died young, long before Marta was born. Marta had seen her once, in a single faded photograph. Dorothy, apparently, had never forgotten her sister's Colombian family. She had followed them from a distance for more than sixty years, through Christmas cards that Marta's grandmother had always answered, and later through a cousin's photographs online.

The bequest itself was modest: a sum of money that might pay for a decent second-hand car, together with "the contents of the walnut writing box referred to in Schedule B". Marta read the last clause three times before she was sure of what it said, and then, quite unexpectedly, she cried. The writing box, the schedule explained in its dry, careful way, contained the letters her grandfather's first wife had sent home from Bogota, and Dorothy had wished them "to be returned to the family in whose company my sister was happiest".

"That's lovely, that," said Mr. Ingham, taking off both pairs of glasses. "You don't often see a line like that in a will. They're usually all about who gets the house." Mateo, who had gone very quiet, asked if he could read the letters when they came. Marta said of course he could, and then added, with a look he recognized, that he could start by writing a thank-you note to the solicitors, in his very best English, and without a single "notwithstanding".

The box arrived three weeks later. That evening, at the kitchen table, Marta and her son opened the first letter together. It was written in plain, warm, slightly old-fashioned English, and it began, "Dearest Dot, you would not believe the color of the sky here." Nobody needed an interpreter for that.