His voice, usually so measured, climbs to an unusually high register as if sensing the desolation ahead: ‘And it wouldn’t be the same/ If you ever should decide to go away’. The boy who lost his mother to breast cancer had got through it by ‘learn[ing] to put a shell around me’. For the 55-year-old father of four, thankfully, there were other means. On the night after Linda’s death, for instance, he didn’t have to face the yawning loneliness of the bed they’d shared almost without a break for 29 years. ‘I thought it would be too sad for Dad to sleep alone,’ his son James would recall, ‘so I kept him company.’ This time, he could admit his ‘total heartbreak’ and give way to the tears that kept welling up. He could talk of nothing but Linda. ‘Wasn’t she great?’ he sobbed down the telephone to her old journalistic crony, Danny Fields. ‘Wasn’t she beautiful? Wasn’t she smart and together and wonderful and loving?’ After returning from Arizona, he went to ground at Peasmarsh, his usual prodigious creative energy at a total standstill.
