I watched the sound engineer’s tape turning and looked up to find Dick watching me with surprisingly clear eyes, his long jaw raised to reveal his ravaged neck.

I replied clumsily: “I did see a lot of dead people—as you’d expect during a war. In some ways I think it was very corrupting…”

“Go on—you say corrupting, but how exactly?”

“Well … it wasn’t the dead who were devalued but the living. Our expectations of life were lowered.”

“Is that because they were too high in the first place?” Before I could reply, Dick continued in a last surge of breath: “Perhaps we have exaggerated ideas about life, expectations that we see are unrealistic only as it draws to an end? It may be that we’ve allowed life and death to become polarised, when they’re really much closer to each other than we realise. As I get nearer to my own death the distance seems to shrink…”

After the recording Dick held my hand in a friendly but absentminded way. He walked stiffly into the dining room, which overlooked his high-walled garden. Had he begun to forget me, along with the beer mats and the American licence plates? Yet his apparently impromptu question had made a telling point, addressed more to me than to the television audience, a brief but acute inquiry into my own motives and character.

The days between our recordings seemed to lengthen, as if I were applying some unconscious brake to time in an attempt to hold back the approaching end. A different man was emerging through Dick’s wasted features, far more self-reliant than the television performer he had seduced himself into becoming. At our third and fourth interviews he spoke to camera in a short-breathed and almost impatient tone, describing his pleasure in the everyday world around him, in the garden and fish pond, his sense of triumph at winning the affection of his neighbours’ cat. But these pleasures seemed as abstract as the moves in a chess game. I guessed that he was entering a realm where, seeing everything with absolute clarity, he no longer cared to be distracted by pleasures of any kind.