I woke up remembering that I now wore glasses. In theory, at least. They are somewhere in the spare room, buried deep among things I wear twice a year and others I have not yet worn.

The collapse in my book-reading had been in my mind throughout the night, triggered by her shelves. This Westhampton cottage rental is hosted by Erica; she runs a tight ship and recognises a fine writer.

I used to love the rough touch of paper between one’s fingers, the pleasure of a dog-eared bookmark, the pathos of knowing matters would soon resolve because the pages were running thin.

Her volumes might have been in my own home. There was an exquisite short story from Annie Proulx, an exposé of the Johnson Administration, and Bill’s long and winding narration on politics, the opening chapters of which are golden, before falling to spin and self-regard.

And then there was Capote.

I recently gifted In Cold Blood to my niece, in the hope that her tastes might turn sanguine and I might find a partner in crime.

Human beings in extremis are perhaps the most honest of all. How might we act when a man holds a gun to our head in the dark early hours? And how can anyone countenance such grand invasion of another’s integrity?

It seems that we are animals tautly drawn between honour and depravity. The tension keeps the pages turning.

Figuratively, that is.

Although I indeed did read a hard copy of the Kansas murder of the Clutter family, I am long a hostage to my earbuds, and acquire a nervous twitch when those shiny white captors declare ‘ten percent remaining’.

But the origin of last night’s book dreams was Capote’s other masterpiece, pinched on the shelf between Mockingbird and Kitty Kelley’s Nancy Reagan. There was something quintessential in its vivid New York story, slim like a youth in June.

It spoke to me; drew me in. Told me that my eyes might do the work so long delegated to the ears.

***

I arrived yesterday from Manhattan, for the wedding of a friend, by cannonball.

Well, that’s incorrect on two counts.

The wedding is for the son of friends. I have not seen the groom since his Dad and I visited the school at which he boarded, admiring the sports grounds and – this detail may be apocryphal – the minutiae of his fencing schedule.

Incorrect also because I arrived not through the intercession of munitions, but by the rolling stock of Long Island Rail Road. The ‘Cannonball’ is what New Yorkers call the direct train which departs eastward from Penn Station every Thursday and Friday of summer, drawing no breath until it arrives at a station ending in ‘hampton’.

That’s ninety minutes to sip martinis and fraternise with well-heeled Manhattanites whose weekly tumble from high rise to beach cabin is so perfectly canonical, it has risen to global lore.

‘Will you come?’, Ashley had asked, by phone, six months back. We had met – he, his wife Karen and me – when we were young in London, and our bond is strong despite the absences which distance commands. ‘We’re a small family. We could do with the backup’.

What a pleasure it is to see one’s friends’ children become women, become men; become themselves.

Yes, I said. Yes. Yes.

***

I have taken to travelling with slippers.

This, clearly, is a marker of decline – but the comfort brings solace. I swing out of a bed pitched inordinately high from the ground, fumbling for them, and for a linen dressing gown which, too, has made the pack list.

Erica said the cottage might see some deer, rabbits and turkeys on its early morning lawns. This was reason enough to open the blinds. But I needed light to procure the virgin reading glasses too.

‘They will feel strange for a day or two’, the young man had said at the point of collection. ‘Some people describe it as a swimming sensation. Or like you’re seeing more than you deserve’.

The thought made me smile, though I wasn’t sure if he meant it so.

I am expected in my finery this evening, for Book One of the nuptials. Every wedding is a trilogy in the New World.

This means I have the whole day to mosey. I’m not a beach person. But some hours with Holly Golightly in the shade of the neatly trimmed lawn, which encompasses a perfectly picketed cottage, is my new, high-concept plan.

‘Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation’, Norman Mailer had said. ‘He writes the best sentences word for word, and rhythm upon rhythm’.

I prepare some drip coffee and slice a cucumber into salted soldiers; the process of acquiring new outfits has been a humbling experience at the mirror.

With the veranda door open, and a certain peace falling softly about me, I place my retrieved reading glasses on, with intention.

Content to be here, and soon to be in the company of old companions and new love, my fingers open the book, carefully paging past the preface.

Breakfast begins.