After three weeks of radiation therapy, Dick learned that the last of the malignant tissue had yet to be eradicated. He was now completely hairless and no longer bothered to wear his NASA cap or conceal his ravaged neck. Leaning on my arm, he walked with difficulty to the ambulance that would take him to what, in a moment of brave but tired humour, he described as the “Caesar’s Palace of cancer therapy”—the Royal Marsden Hospital to the south of London.

As it happened, this ultra-modern hospital might well have been a hotel-casino on the Las Vegas strip. Its airy corridors were hung with Pop Art posters, and Dick was given a ward to himself, with telephone, television, and disposable toilet. In fact, this room was an isolation cell, in which he was imprisoned for nine days, watched by the Geiger counter above his bed, until he had excreted the last of the radioactive iodine. When he spoke to us on the telephone, as Cleo and I stood by the lead-glass windows under the warning neon sign, his voice seemed to lift from a tape played at wavering speeds. The nurses who entered his room to take his blood and urine samples wore heavy gloves and protective overalls, and left him as quickly as they could, like conspirators setting a lethal device with the shortest of fuses.

Despite some success in eradicating the tumour, malignant cells had rooted themselves in his spine and liver. Too weak to bear any further treatment at the Marsden, Dick was returned by ambulance to Kingston Hospital and the chemotherapy ward of last resort.

Here, left to recover and without medication, he began to improve. I felt a surge of affection for him as he rallied himself, sitting up in bed to try on his new wig, shuffling along the landings with us as he craned through the windows for a distant view of the river and his Richmond house, even asking Cleo about her publishing career. When he was strong enough to submit to chemotherapy he would be moved to a sterile room, which would give his depressed immune system the best chance of fighting off any passing infection.

Making sure that the nurses were elsewhere, he showed me briefly into the small, sterilised cell that was being prepared for him, a cubicle stripped of all furniture and fittings that might harbour bacteria, with a sealed door and windows and a ventilation system that resembled a midget submarine’s. Eerily, the screen of a TV set was set into the wall behind a thick glass plate, as if even television was withdrawing from Dick.

“Cosy, isn’t it?” Hunched inside his dressing gown, Dick straightened his wig and beckoned me away. “Just the place to take your last view of the world. Did you notice the TV screen? Like a retina seen from the rear.”