Sarah Ferguson

“So much of what we talked of can never be written. It was born and grew and developed but not visibly. There was no theatre. What was, remains within me, and will never leave it for it has become part of me. There are great regions in what I write to you that must stay unexpressed. The poles of feeling, the best or worst, have to be left unsaid. There must be areas of silence. It has to be.”

“If I was late, I became so anxious that I might miss one single minute of my time with you that I would close my eyes at the red traffic lights, or look around for people who wore wrist watches to see the seconds ticking by as the traffic came to a standstill. Then I would run and run through all the people, and finally up the stairs, until I reached your room. 'I am not late' I would shout and I would hide myself in a corner by your cupboard and refuse to speak to you. 'Exaggerated behaviour' perhaps, but it is only those who have experienced it, who can know what it is.”

“You said how strange it was that people were prepared to buy expensive material objects, but when it came to making an investment in their souls they refused to do so, considering it a monstrous indulgence and a waste of money!”

“I pretended it was nothing. That day I told you about my baby, and why I had had an abortion. It would have damaged other lives. I had killed my own real baby ten years before, but it remains my living child, and will always be so. It is worse when there is no grave. I wanted you to recognize its existence. No one else does, and that is what I cannot bear.”

“I was more anxious about leaving you than last time. Supposing you did not come back, and I would never be in your room again? Separation was an agony for me which, as soon as one holiday ended, started again in anticipation of the next.”

“I woke with a dreaded pain of hunger this morning, but it was not for food. You knew about hat. It was our most important secret, and because you knew, it kept me alive.”

“I had often tried to get out of your room, having travelled all the way there. It frightened me to be caught in a trap which was becoming painful, and one from which I had no escape.”

“Everyone fears catastrophes and disasters and crashes and deaths, and people who attack you in the dark. You made all that worse for me. I felt something might happen which would separate me from you, and I could not deal with life without you.”

“You telephoned me every evening. I was very grateful to you. Sometimes we would talk for five or ten minutes, and sometimes for three-quarters of an hour. I liked to be in bed before you rant at ten o’clock, and I always asked if everything was all right. Of course things were not, and never will be all right, but you were all right with me. That is what matters throughout the whole of the world. “You are all right with me.”

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off!”