Michael's suicide

Michael's suicide is recalled by Patrick Hazlewood as the devastating outcome of escalating blackmail against a man already living under the threat of exposure. The letters made silence a commodity, but the empty address behind the first demand offered no opponent Patrick and Michael could identify or confront. Patrick's account links the threat to Michael's death without claiming to know every part of his decision, and returns to it as a lasting wound in their eight-year relationship.

The blackmail demands

The first letter claimed that Michael had been seen at Plummer Rodis with another man and demanded five pounds by Friday in exchange for silence. It gave an address in West Hove. Patrick and Michael went there together on a Sunday, driven by indignation but with no plan for what to do. After walking past the house several times, they realized it was empty. The absence of anyone to question or challenge made the threat seem faceless and beyond their reach.

Michael paid. Patrick had tried to dissuade him, but understood that Michael felt he had no choice; he nevertheless saw himself as needing to voice opposition. Michael would not discuss the matter further. Some weeks later, Patrick found another note in Michael's flat: the price demanded for silence had doubled. Within two months of the first letter, Michael had died by suicide. Patrick does not identify the blackmailers or establish what happened after the second demand, leaving the connection between the pressure and the death stark but not fully explained.

Patrick's recollection of Michael

In a later account, Patrick describes Michael as his lover of eight years and recalls a relationship marked, toward its end, by increasing distance. Michael would not stay with him for more than a night at a time. Patrick's memory of eventually entering Michael's room and finding him dead gives the earlier letters their terrible consequence: the threat that had seemed impossible to fight is followed by a loss Patrick could not undo.

Patrick's response combines grief with anger. He felt that those who had threatened Michael had prevailed, and remained furious with Michael as well. That anger does not erase his tenderness or the depth of their history; it exposes the helplessness in a relationship shaped by fear, concealment, and the limited choices Michael believed were available to him.

Funeral and unresolved suspicion

At Michael's funeral, Esme Owens, his landlady, wore what Patrick considered a very expensive-looking fur stole and appeared, in his view, more distraught than the occasion required. He wondered about her discretion. The account presents this as Patrick's suspicion, not proof that Esme Owens had any part in the blackmail or knew who sent the letters.

Aftermath and significance

Michael's death becomes part of Patrick's later explanation of what life under social condemnation teaches: caution toward strangers, distrust even within close relationships, and the expectation of loneliness. The experience also gives weight to his later insistence that mere survival is something people manage as they can. His recollection makes clear that the danger was not only the demand for money. The blackmailers could exploit the need for secrecy, while the empty house and Michael's silence left Patrick without a person or institution to turn to. The suicide thus marks both a personal bereavement and the lethal vulnerability created by a society in which exposure could be used as a weapon.