I was sitting next to my old friend Annabel Goldsmith last month at Hum Fleming and Zac Goldsmith’s wedding. I was suddenly very close to her, and I realized an extraordinary thing (when you’re near to somebody, you see something in them that you don’t see from a distance). Annabel looked like a painting, both in her colors and the shape of her features; from the line of her eyes, to her nose and her cheeks. It was a look not of beauty but of exquisiteness. There was something in her that radiated.
After the wedding, I wrote to her about it and she said, “Thank you so much”. Then I found a passage of Tennyson about how people who are close up have a much more interesting effect on one, which I told her about. She replied to me: “He’s my favorite author, I read him every night in bed”. And so her last words to me, after nearly seven decades of conversations about less lofty matters, were about Tennyson.
