13. If You Love Danny He Is Yours

Chapter 13: If You Love Danny He is Yours, focuses on Jim’s letters to Norah which, from early 1942, have come to focus on Norah’s relationship with his brother. The chapter opens with a strange letter from Jim that arrived during Danny’s Easter visit, in which he informs Norah that he won’t now be meeting her and assures her that he and his brother are ‘settled’ over her and if she loves Danny, ‘he is yours’. His next letter contains a torn-off scrap of paper, which – Jim says – is from a letter written to him by his brother, in which Danny urges Jim to visit Norah and describes her as ‘a grand, sweet, lovely and smashing lass.’ I explore this and later letters, which become increasingly prurient, and suggest that Danny has told Jim stories of an intimacy between himself and Norah that is far in advance of what had actually happened. As it is definitely Danny's hand-writing on the snippet that Jim sent on to Norah, it appears that Danny and Jim are somehow in cahoots, trying to hasten her seduction with words she would like to hear. After another sexually explicit letter of mid-July, Jim disappears from Norah’s life for a full year.