Though sparsely furnished, the small flat where I lived was comfortable and quiet. The block was in poor condition; the paintwork was flaking and the decrepit cage-lift often broke down between floors. Built the year I was born, the building was falling apart at the same rate as myself.
It was spring 2000. The money I’d borrowed from Ernest was gone, but since Christmas I’d been receiving a state pension of £124 a month. I used this to pay for electricity and council tax, little went on food. For the last five weeks I’d been living on only boiled cabbage.
I already owed £200,000, there was nowhere to borrow more. I’d ceased making social security and pension payments when I moved to France in the ’seventies, I qualified for no form of benefit. My rent was in long arrears, soon I would be evicted from this flat. Jamie, friends, or my brothers might be willing to put me up for a while, but without prospects, penniless, lacking even the means to move on, truly I would be the houseguest from the abyss. That was not an option. Brahmins believe hell is nothing less than a state of bondage to others; Marcus Aurelius says very much the same, but that truth I knew already.
Jamie did not like what was going on, but she understood where I was and had come to accept my situation. But it can’t have been easy for her.
‘Conform to Nature’ was the founding principle of stoicism. And to them Nature and God were the same. ‘Accept. Accept the seasons and whatever comes. Death is but a part of Nature, seasonable and natural. So be ready and willing to leave all things when the day of your departure dawns.’
But the Stoics say you may choose that day. Suicide is an honourable option and a number of them died from starvation. If plants and beasts receive no nourishment they conform to nature by departing life. Likewise a man. On hunger strike in Northern Ireland it had taken Bobby Sands sixty-six days. I’d already lost thirty-five pounds from a body-weight of eleven stone. From the day I ceased eating altogether I estimated it would take me two to three weeks.
Surprisingly, the decision freed me of every trace of anxiety. Having taken it, I came to understand what I think Thomas à Kempis meant by ‘liberty of mind’. It is similar to the experience of a man who throws himself from a high window; though he is doubtless hurtling down to shatter into fragments on the ground below, to him it feels like flight. And, while it lasted, it was an extraordinarily exhilarating sensation.
I lay on my bed reading. It was Easter, and in the last eight days I had eaten nothing except a single apple, and never once felt hungry. I’d drunk vast quantities of unsweetened tea, walked daily, and peed a lot.
I was physically weak. If I walked for long I became faint and had to sit down and suck a barley sugar to recover. But my mind and all my senses were acute, my awareness of everything felt heightened and intense. Observing the body language of strangers in the street I believed I knew how they were feeling, sometimes even what was in their mind.
Four or five years before, when confronted by loss of the mill, homelessness and poverty, I’d felt I was drowning in chaos and dread. Now to my astonishment I slept well. I dreamt, I dreamt vividly, but my dreams were adventures, never nightmares. I woke calm. I felt physically and mentally light, lucid, detached and high. Once you have accepted the worst that can happen, you are in a manner free.
Now, as I lay on my bed reading, the telephone rang, and unusually I picked it up. It was Fisher. I’d seen him a couple of weeks before; he’d asked why I was so thin and I’d told him. At once he pressed money on me and I’d explained that to live by continuing to borrow was no longer tenable. He accepted this after a while and we turned with relief to other subjects. But I’d had few to turn to. Ignorant of current events and having no gossip, I rabbited on far too much about stoicism and Marcus Aurelius. ‘No, it’s useful,’ he said. ‘The ground we all walk can give way beneath our feet – shit happens in people’s lives. This helps, you should give a talk about it.’ Not possibly, I’d told him.
Now on the line on Easter Sunday he said, ‘I’ve booked a lecture room in ten days’ time. Are you up for it?’
‘Of course,’ I answered. The response was instinctive, spoken without reflection; but in the circumstances it would have been churlish to refuse.
The rest is brief. I got up, had something to eat and started to make a few notes. I gave the talk to the thirty or forty people the Fishers had press-ganged into attending. It seemed to work, I talked again. And again, in the remorseless way ageing cranks tend to once they get a bee in their outmoded bonnet.
One day Peter Mayle called. ‘So what are you up to?’ he enquired. I told him. ‘Hmm, might make a how-to book,’ he said.
I put one together. Ernest Chapman telephoned. ‘There’s this publisher Franklin …’ he began. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked. ‘Harry Potter, doesn’t wear a tie, rides a bicycle,’ he answered. Ernest is economical with words.
Franklin published Marcus Aurelius as a slim volume in a package with three others I assembled. One day while I was in his office he mused, ‘You seem to have led a rather … how shall I put it, varied life. Have you ever thought of writing a memoir …?’
Ramage took Jamie and myself to the Dorchester to celebrate. In the high-ceilinged retro opulence of the swanky restaurant he treated us to a lunch of bélons, sole Véronique and Krug as I related to him the above tale and its denouement. ‘So what do you make of that, then?’ I asked, when I had finished.
Ramage sipped, set down his wineglass and considered sagely. ‘I always think,’ he said after a long moment, ‘That you cannot ever entirely trust a man who rides a bicycle.’