He spoke in a confident and matter-of-fact way, sitting comfortably at his desk as if he were back in his old office at the Institute of Psychology. I was impressed by his easy command of his situation—he had found a role for himself, which I considered to be quietly heroic but which he saw as merely the most interesting way of using the time left to him. He had lost even more weight and wore a high-collared shirt and silk scarf to cover his chin. A smaller and neater wig allowed him, in a certain light, to resemble his former self, but I felt once again that he had begun to reject the affable and good-humoured personality I had known for so many years.

Altogether he had made a marked recovery from the months of medical treatment. Was he enjoying one of those periods of remission that give false promise to the victim or, as I still hoped, had he made a genuine return to health? As for his macabre documentary, at its worst this was a last gamble that his own survival would invalidate the project. Or, perhaps, having rid himself of all illusions in the radio-iodine room at the Marsden, he was now free to choose whatever maverick notion he needed to fill his last days.

As we soon learned, the improvement in Dick’s condition was a brief upward tremor on a steadily downward graph. The specialists at the Marsden had arranged with Dick’s doctor in Richmond to provide the drugs that would hold back the metastasising tumours. Now the cure, rather than the disease, would kill him. The cancer would not spread, but the increasing doses of chemotherapy would destroy his immune system, so that the smallest respiratory infection would turn into a fatal pneumonia.

But Dick was beyond the reach of these ironies. He was conserving what strength was left to him in order to carry out an important psychological experiment that would test his audience as much as himself. During our first recorded conversation, a trial run of the equipment, I found it difficult to speak at all, as if my throat were trying to mimic Dick’s ravaged larynx. Our second appointment was cancelled when I developed a heavy head cold. But Dick was insistent; for reasons of his own he had decided that I should be the moderator, in part because I had first suggested the documentary to him, but also because he wanted to involve me directly in his death.