I saw the following example sentence in a dictionary:
It would ease my mind to know you had arrived safely.
I'm curious about what the context could be, and why the past perfect is used. There is no simple past tense to act as an anchor for the past perfect.
The following is a brief dialogue. Do you think the sentence is correctly used here?
Mary: Why do you want me to give you a call when I arrive in Paris?
John: It would ease my mind to know you had arrived safely.
Best Answer
"It would ease my mind to know you had arrived safely" is good American English -- but it's not past perfect. It just looks like past perfect!
It's actually a subjunctive form to express a hypothetical future situation.
The same example in an actual past perfect form would require a different, past-of-the-past context:
"It eased my mind to know you had arrived safely."