These were the last words that Dick spoke to me. He stood up and stepped quietly into his bedroom with a backward wave of the hand. He closed the door, leaving me to apologise to the film crew. He had spoken matter-of-factly of our “experiment,” and I realised that he had taken part in the documentary with one end in mind. The series had been a desperate stratagem that alone might have saved him. He had literally put his faith in my ironic prophecy that he would make the first great scientific discovery on television, and had gambled against all logic that the scientific discovery would be his recovery from inoperable cancer.

What was to have been our last interview never occurred. When I arrived at the house a fortnight later, an ambulance was parked outside. In the hall were Dick’s local doctor and the district nurse, his sister and her husband, all lit by the glare of the television lights through the door of Dick’s bedroom. He was to have taped his last reflections on his life before being taken to hospital, but it was clear that he was now too exhausted to speak. The producer had persuaded the reluctant doctor to allow a last shot of Dick lying on his bed in the dining room, beside the dark mahogany table and its straight-backed chairs, a scene set for a tribunal.

Standing in the doorway behind the cameraman, I waved to Dick as he lay with the oxygen mask over his face, a glucose drip in his arm, a catheter draining into a glass flagon under the bed. He no longer wore his wig, and his face seemed to have been sucked into the mask, as if his wasted body were about to drain away down these encircling tubes, their coils like the telephone wire looped around the chest of the young Chinese on the railway platform.

The Impossible Palace

16

THE IMPOSSIBLE PALACE

A funfair was visiting Shepperton. As I walked along the river I could see the chromium-panelled caravans through the trees, driving into the park beside the war memorial. There were trucks loaded with Dodg’em cars and sections of merry-go-rounds, a dismantled dream that these taciturn circus folk reassembled each weekend in one of the small towns of the Thames Valley, reminding the inhabitants of a forgotten corner of their imaginations. Already the children playing by the riverbank had left the water. Whooping to their mothers, they ran towards the park, where the dozen vehicles were drawn up in a circle, a magic fortress that only children could storm.