He’s lying in a hospital bed looking back on his life. He knows he hasn’t got much time left, so doesn’t feel encumbered by the need to say the right thing. He has a combative relationship with the nurses who patronise him, for instance, and he’s not entirely civil to his mother, the coolly unemotional Sarah, whom he has struggled to understand his whole life. And he makes it entirely clear he does not want to see his brother-in-law Robert, whom he detests, although his sister, Margaret, is welcome.