Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’
A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die for four months I’ll have to find something to write. Any ideas?’ I replied that there was an episode in that last diary, about having to sack a talented young American actor from the cast of the New York revival of Butley, which might make a short play.
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