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camera, and got into the car.

Chapter Four
    1 January 1998
    One pays a premium for a sea view but on days like today I wonder why. Those tight-lipped waves rubbing at the pebbles, that mean gray emptiness beyond. A crashing surf, a raging sea, can lift the spirits. This blank indifference is always the worst.
    2 January 1998
    Patricia came down for New Year’s Eve. I tried to persuade her to stay in London with John and the kids but she wouldn’t be put off. I opened a bottle of champagne and we sat on the balcony wrapped in blankets staring into the dark. She said, “Brighton’s lovely, isn’t it? Sea air’s probably doing you good.” I said, “For God’s sake, Pat.” Then she cried. I apologized, of course.
    She wants me to move back up to London and live with her. John’s in favor, apparently, as are my niece and nephew. I blamed the work, said that we historians, we writers, need our splendid isolation, need to be alone with our thoughts. That seemed to cheer her up.
    I’m not getting much done.
    4 January 1998
    Yesterday I worked all day and had little enough to show for it. Two hundred words on the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and some light revision of the Belgian Indemnities Controversy paragraphs. My mind is elsewhere.
    5 January 1998
    Illusions of Conflict: A History of Anglo-American Diplomacy, by Dr. Lawrence Arthur Seymour Standing. How does that sound? Stuffy enough?
    My magnum opus. My legacy. My only begotten child.
    Nine years in the gestation, and doubtless it will be a stillbirth. If birth there is to be. Tom came down in December and took me out to lunch. I told him the manuscript is running at seven hundred pages and counting. He didn’t blink. “It’ll be great,” he said. “We’ll throw a party at the Carlton, no, at the Reform. Maybe the Garrick, whatever you want.” The bastard. He’s hoping I’ll die before it’s finished and that he won’t have to honor the contract.
    6 January 1998
    Have been working on my “bio,” as Tom insists on calling it.
    Lawrence Standing was born in Norfolk in 1944 and educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he received a First Class Honours in History. After graduating he joined the Foreign Office and served in numerous foreign postings, including Turkey, Brazil, Germany, and Japan. (Should I spice it up a bit by talking about my brief innings as a spy?) In 1980 he left the Foreign Office to take up the role of Private Secretary to the Princess of Wales, a position he held until 1986. He continued to act as her informal adviser until the princess’s untimely death in 1997. In 1987 Lawrence returned to academia, completing a PhD in Anglo-American History and becoming a Senior Lecturer at University College, London. Lawrence was a keen sportsman, taking a blue in cricket at Oxford and running nearly every day of his life, until he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in March 1997. He died in 1998. He died in 1999. (Delete as appropriate.)
    8 January 1998
    Another wasted day. Fiddled with the “bio.” Like writing my own obituary.
    12 January 1998
    Kept my appointment with Dr. Patel though I couldn’t really see the point. She said, “Apathy is a common symptom with frontal lobe tumors. Are you experiencing any aggression, irritation, loss of inhibitions?” I said, “Mind your own fucking business, bitch.”
    I didn’t, of course. I’m not sure Dr. Patel can take a joke.
    I gave her a full report on the headaches, sickness, a touch of blurriness in the left eye. I told her I can’t smell anything anymore. She made a note.
    13 January 1998
    All I want to write about is
    What else matters?
    What have I done in my life that matters, except that?
    14 January 1998
    What is it that prevents me? If I get it down (get it down then get rid of it straightaway) maybe I shall be able to concentrate again. Go on, Lawrence, you fool.
    16 January 1998
    I’m going to see her one last time, in March, before I’m too weak to