Tim Cornwell had recently finished editing a volume of his late father’s letters when he died suddenly last year. His widow, Anna Arthur, pays homage to the legacy both men left behind
On 19 January 2019, David Cornwell, AKA John le Carré, wrote to his son, Tim, or Timo as he always called him: “My love for you is undivided and strangely, or not so strangely, I feel close to you and the pains you have endured. I love your courage, & your moral decency, & your questing brain & your uncompromising soul, and your lovely wit. I feel – arrogantly – like a companion in your solitude.”
This very personal, and much longer, handwritten letter from a father to his son lay by Tim’s bedside for the rest of his life – a life that ended abruptly on 31 May 2022, when Tim suffered a pulmonary embolism. He was 59. His death was sudden and unexpected. One minute we were lying side by side on a hotel bed in Northumberland and were talking about the book we’d been listening to on our journey back to London from a family visit to Scotland. Tim hadn’t been able to concentrate. His daughter, his son-in-law and his one-year-old grandson had all tested positive for Covid, so it was a natural assumption that he too had fallen ill. It explained the tightness in his chest, his need for my asthma inhaler. And then, to paraphrase Joan Didion, you get up to go to dinner and life as you know it ends.
