Untold Story Read Online Free PDF

travel. It’s all arranged. I fly to Washington to “continue my researches” and drive from there, or hire a driver if that’s what it takes. I said, “I promise you that if I don’t arrive on that day, it can mean only one thing.” She said, “Oh, Lawrence.” She held my hand. She’s had a lot of practice in that area. Holding hands with the dying—it never made her a saint, but it made her an angel in this world.
    Is it the tumor making me apathetic? I don’t know. I know I felt alive when I wrote that paragraph just now.
    Go on, Lawrence, go on. There’s no betrayal here.
    17 January 1998
    Cynthia comes in to clean. She would never touch my papers. She’s been trained. Friends I see only at restaurant lunches or, very infrequently these days, dinner at someone else’s house. They ask about the book, with such bloody tact, such solicitous low-voiced delicacy, as if the book were what is killing me. Gail has been to see me once. Hard to believe we were almost engaged at one time. Who else comes? Only Patricia who, it has to be said, might be tempted to read my diary, were she to find one lying around. Discover if it’s true what they say, what some say, that I never “came out.” She probably heard, too, the other rumor that was once in vogue, that when I was working at Kensington Palace, there was a period when I was sleeping with the boss. Not that Patricia would ever mention either possibility, not even in jest.
    She might sneak a look at a diary, but will she ever read seven hundred pages of manuscript while I am in the bath, or on the loo, and so stumble inadvertently upon this insert? Not a hope.
    Have you convinced yourself now? Given yourself permission? What are you waiting for?
    18 January 1998
    Six months to a year, Dr. Patel tells me, is my allotted span. Although, as she always says, it is impossible to make accurate predictions and, as I always say, I quite understand. That’s on top of the ten months I’ve had already so quite a good innings in the brain-tumor world. Only thirty percent of us get over a year. Fourteen percent of us get a full five. Some lucky bastards, the ten percent club, get ten whole big ones. My tumor is higher grade than that. I said to Dr. Patel, “Higher grade, that means a better quality of tumor, right?” She didn’t laugh.
    What will happen to this manuscript, in any case, after my death? Even if these pages were to remain here by some calamitous turn of events, it is vanity on my part to fear their being read. Tom, good old Tom, the clubbable viper, already has his regrets composed, and will be deeply sorry to be unable to publish what, very sadly, is only a partial manuscript.
    Patricia will pack it up in a box and put it in the attic. Perhaps she’ll take it into Tom’s office, slam it on his desk. Maybe she’ll throw it away. No, she won’t.
    But these pages won’t exist by then. I will make sure of that.
    19 January 1998
    I used to encourage her to write. Writing can be a form of therapy, but it was one of the few that she wasn’t willing to try. She had her own way of getting her story into print, more dramatic than the one I was advocating. She’s a high-stakes kind of girl. I remember, someone once asked her if she ever gambled. She said, “Not with cards.”
    She wrote a lot of thank you letters. As soon as she got home from an evening out she’d sit down at her desk in Kensington Palace with a card propped up in front of her with all the words she found difficult to spell and write one of her gracious thank you notes. People were always surprised at how she found the time. “Lawrence,” she said, “what do they imagine I’m going to do all alone in these empty rooms?”
    20 January 1998
    The last time I saw her was in November. When I left her in September she had been manic, hysterical with grief and fear, and one of the few things that calmed her was when I begged her forgiveness for what I had done, for what I had helped her to do.