one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. I did not know my host well, and as I read along the titles on the walls I thought that if I had a week among these books I might get to know something about this book collector. Then the thought hit me, slunk in sideways when I was least thinking of home and the issues that preoccupied me day and night: I do not know the man who is my husband. I may have known the man he once was, perhaps, but I do not know the man he has become. His illness consumed him to the exclusion of so much else. Perhaps if I looked more closely at his books, these books that now surround me, I would get to know the man I married.

As the role of wife transmutes to that of carer, love transforms to all-consuming pity. The prime activity of the carer is vigilance, day and night. My exhaustion was held at bay by Harold’s constant need for help with medication, with food, with that idle chatter that soothed more than anything else. He could not cope with anything emotional, or deep, about the meaning of life and death. It was idle chatter and gossip that raised flickers of interest, and laughter that helped the most. Looking back now, I do not know how I survived that state of continual high alert to every tremor of his hands, every shudder of his body, each triggering in me the response, what to do next? What powerful drug to select from the pharmacopoeia with which I had been entrusted? Palliative care will work as long as there’s someone there twenty-four hours a day, watching.

There are worse aspects to terminal disease than pain, I discovered. Pain can be helped. Harold endured pain like the Latin poets he so admired. He adopted their language for pain. Once he said, nearly collapsing as he walked away from the last social event he was able to attend, the launch of a book written by a former student: ‘I feel as if I have been pierced by a spear, and someone is turning it round in my stomach.’ In those last few months, Harold had little quality of life. He struggled against the process of dying. He could not be consoled. He could not console others. He did not give in. Not one inch. To no avail.

I did not know this person he had become. If I read his books, I may learn more.

In life, time passes, everything changes and it becomes hard to remember what things were once like. In adapting each day to a ‘new normal’, the unspoken contract of how to live reasonably together with another person turns from everyday normality to something that in retrospect now seems very weird indeed.

I have one of those dreams the bereaved have, when there is a close sense of physical presence. In the dream I tell myself: I have so many questions to ask Harold. What’s my problem? It’s so simple. All I have to do is find him and ask him. Then I wake up, and what seemed so obvious in the dream world is what can never happen. I have to laugh. The simple solution isn’t going to work for me. If he were here, I could share the joke with him. Then I’d give him a piece of my mind.

I am going on a quest. I shall stay within the walls of this house, and I shall embark on a hunt for someone who has gone and will never come back. I shall search for clues that may be here, within Harold’s books.

As I wander round the house trying to get a grip on things, I pick out books at random. It seems that every book I open has some kind of message, shows something I hadn’t seen in quite the same light before. Inside his books Harold left souvenirs: a theatre ticket, a tram ticket, a letter, a postcard, a supermarket bill, each marking significant places and leaving for me, the surviving spouse, a trail of times and places. He wrote in pencil in margins, words of agreement, amazement or ridicule: ticks, crosses, multiple exclamation and question marks. Whenever he got another book, he wrote his name in pencil on the flyleaf. I live in a house full of signatures.

I pick up the Complete Essays of Montaigne. Marking an essay on ageing and death is a theatre ticket dated six months before my husband’s death, which was fast approaching, though he thought he would have more time than he had. ‘The diseases of the body become clearer as they increase,’ wrote Montaigne, while ‘the diseases of the soul grow more obscure as they grow stronger: the sickest man is least sensible of them’. Montaigne wrote on the price of keeping secrets, and on the value of confession as reparation. This was my husband, exactly: the keeper of secrets. He read these words and more, to which I shall return, but it seems he did not heed their advice. He took his secrets to the grave.

As I prowl the house I reach into a filing cabinet and take out the last piece of writing Harold published in his lifetime, the lead review in the Times Literary Supplement of 6 July 2007. The book under review was by the argumentative Shakespeare scholar Brian Vickers: Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint and John Davies of Hereford (2007). Harold was asked for the review in February that year. He wrote it quickly and sent it some weeks later. It was published in July as the lead review, with Harold’s name on the cover, and with the heading ‘Why Shakespeare didn’t do it’. The editor knew how ill Harold was and gave him pride of place, and a jokey sub-heading.

The book on Shakespeare was on the attribution of authorship in historical writing in English, a subject in which Harold was expert. In 2002 he had published Attributing Authorship with Cambridge University Press, and earlier in 1999 he had published an edition of the works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the seventeenth-century rake and libertine. Authors such as Rochester deliberately chose to circulate their poems anonymously and clandestinely; to publish in more official ways would have been asking for trouble. Scurrilous, libellous, often obscene, funny, treasonable and thus dangerous, Rochester’s satires and lampoons had an avid readership. Harold was interested in how, even after the invention of printing, important literary material still circulated in manuscript form, independent of the press.

Back to Vickers, and his book on ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. The poem was published in 1609, in the same collection as the sonnets normally attributed to the author known as William Shakespeare. Vickers argued that ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ was not written by Shakespeare but by his acquaintance, the poet and calligrapher John Davies of Hereford. Harold’s review was subtitled ‘Not by Shakespeare: mindless alliteration, unrescuable rhyme and other clues to what makes bad Jacobean poetry bad and good Jacobean poetry good’. Harold agreed with Vickers (and other Shakespeare scholars) that the poem was not by Shakespeare, but he did not accept the attribution to John Davies.

I went looking for the review copy of Vickers’s book and searched the margins for comments. There were plenty of exclamation and question marks in disagreement with Vickers’s evidence, and which provided ammunition for the review. But what grabbed me were some lines pencilled beside passages of Vickers’s exposition on the subject matter of the poem. The poem is the complaint of a woman seduced and abandoned, victim to the power a ruthless man exerts over unprotected women. The seducer, Vickers wrote, intends his words in praise of love’s power, but the woman sees them as the seduction ploy of a man she knows to be false.

When the review was published Harold was within a few weeks of death. As he leafed through his copy of TLS, I wasn’t sure how much he was able to read, and whether he was perhaps reading and rereading the same passage over and over. He looked up and said, ‘I could not write this now’. He read his words as if written by a stranger, the person whom he once was. That was one of the bad times.

As to ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ the questions kept coming. An oncologist Harold otherwise valued would come to have a friendly chat with him in the day oncology centre. Convinced by the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of Shakespeare, the oncologist was undeterred by the usually clinching argument that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, while new Shakespeare plays were produced for some years afterwards. Oncologist and patient squared off against each other, in unequal struggle. The way Harold saw it, if anyone argued that Shakespeare, ‘Will the player’ of Stratford, did not write any of Shakespeare’s plays, it was a sign of nuttiness and such people should be avoided like conspiracy theorists in other fields. And here was his oncologist, happily settling in for a few words of cheery discussion, with the patient caught, trapped by the powerful chemotherapy drugs coursing through his veins.

In the obituary published 12 October 2007 in the London paper The Independent, David McKitterick said of Harold: ‘He was still busily engaged in public debates even a few days before he died.’ The words were true, in a way. The response to his review raged in the TLS letters pages, but Harold was not aware of it. The reviewer dies, but the ideas live on. The words were understood more literally to mean that he was able to work to within days of his death, which was not true. It is something scholars like to believe: that their intellect will remain unscathed to the end.

Harold wrote or edited twelve of the books in this house. His edition of the verse of Rochester (1999) was published to vigorous attack from Germaine Greer in the Times Literary Supplement. Harold claimed in his defence that Greer had probably not read all the footnotes that might contradict her reviewly judgement, and I suspect he was right. Rochester, a member of the court of Charles II, died in 1680, at the age of thirty-three. He fitted so much into his short life: he fought pugnaciously in the Second Dutch War; he wrote scurrilous verse, sparing no one from the king and his courtiers to their women, and his own; he claimed he had once been continually drunk for five years. Rochester was celebrated for his wit and his exuberantly wild life. As death approached and his body began the horrific process of disintegration, Rochester repented and became as famous a penitent as he’d been a sinner. His death was attributed to an ulcer on the bladder, an affliction some of his biographers assume was syphilis. Whatever the cause, accounts of his death do not spare the horror. There are some parallels with the life of my husband, I am finding.

Itake down a biography of Rochester by James William Johnson: A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester (2004), which Harold reviewed in 2005. He was disappointed with the book; the margins bear scribbled points of disagreement. He objects to Rochester’s poems being taken as a description of events in Rochester’s life, to the autobiographical reading of poems that were more likely written for satirical effect, with words chosen for maximum shock, not literal truth. The biography assigned texts and events to years where there was no evidence of precise dates, in order to fabricate, for example, elaborate stories about Rochester’s relationship with the actress Elizabeth Barry.

Of course, this is what I am trying to do: searching texts for biographical references. I am secretly in sympathy with overzealous biographers.

Rochester’s poems were irreverent, obscene and very funny. Many were written as daily commentary on the doings of the court, and were circulated clandestinely from person to person. They were handwritten, and copied and recopied. Once, it was said, Rochester was banished from Court because he reached into the wrong pocket and presented Charles II with a scurrilous poem about his august majesty. People like the wildness of Rochester’s poems, and read into them much about the wildness of his life. He scandalised, amused and titillated his audience. He still does. The film The Libertine, with Johnny Depp as Rochester, was a 2004 version of Rochester’s life, one so awful that Harold could only view it in small, shuddering glimpses when it screened on television.

Earlier in his career, Harold wrote a biography of the nineteenth-century pathologist and acerbic theatre critic, James Edward Neild: Victorian Virtuoso (1989). I find the biography of Neild. Nearby on the shelves is a nineteenth-century scrapbook. Was this compiled by Neild himself, when he was a young man in Sheffield and London, attending the theatre while serving his apprenticeship as a doctor? In the scrapbook, newspaper reviews of theatre productions have been cut and pasted into neat double rows, and each page of the scrapbook has been numbered, in ink, by hand. On the flyleaf Harold wrote, in pencil, ‘In view of the Sheffield material, I wonder if this may have been put together by J.E. Neild?’

Like many journalists, Neild had kept records of his theatre (and medical) work in scrapbook form. After his death, his books passed to his family, who preserved them until 1957, when it seemed they were destroyed. Is the Sheffield scrapbook one of the few to survive? Had he lived longer, Harold might have found the answer. As he lay in the hospice slipping into unconsciousness, an old friend tried to contact him to let him know that two new scrapbooks definitely belonging to Neild had recently been discovered, and were going to auction. But Harold was too ill to hear the news, and he died not knowing the State Library of Victoria would add them to its collection.

I visited the library to see the books, and as I leafed through the pages I knew Harold would have been delighted with them. The Sheffield scrapbook was a book of cuttings pasted without comment. By the time Neild came to compile one of these other books with cuttings of theatre reviews of the 1850s, he was in full flight as a theatre critic with violent likes and dislikes, and a talent for infuriating actors with his frank analysis of their shortcomings. In this book he collected a number of unsigned notices in Melbourne newspapers of an incident in which Neild, for once, was the victim.

On 10 July 1858, under the pen name of Christopher Sly, Neild published a somewhat unfair review of John Anderson’s magic show in which he revealed some of the tricks of the magician’s trade. When, on the night of 20 July 1858, Neild returned to his dress circle seat for another performance, Anderson berated him from the stage, with words of invective: ‘villain’, ‘liar’, ‘coward’, ‘fool’ and ‘seller of pills’. The Neild annotations on the shenanigans would have pleased Harold greatly. Neild knew who the anonymous authors were, and he wrote their names neatly at the end of each cutting. Then, possibly at some later date, he added short, vicious biographical summaries of his ‘enemies’, those who had taken delight in Anderson’s attack. Being a pathologist as well as a theatre critic, he reported how each critic died, usually horribly. Of T.L. Bright he wrote: ‘a clever, genial man, but thoughtless and shiftless.’ Of G.P. Smith: ‘he died miserably after a long and painful illness.’ Of J.B. Thomson: ‘he died in poverty and wretchedness.’ Of C. Whitehead: ‘he could not control his craving for drink and he was one day picked up insensible and died in the M. Hospital.’ Pollard ‘was a softly spoken sneak in the government service. He thought he knew most things. He died in misery.’ At whatever date or dates Neild added these comments, it was with the supercilious glee of one who has outlived his enemies.

I remember Harold saying that when he started writing Neild’s biography he began with interest in the historical person and admiration for his achievements. He ended by knowing too much about him and finding much in him to dislike.

Further down the shelves of books on theatre, I find a thesis by Beth Mary Williams on the teaching of singing in Australia. As Harold read it, he underlined his mother’s name, Nora Halford, listed as a pupil of the Brisbane teacher Mrs Gilbert Wilson. His mother had once been a pupil of promise. He was both happy and sad at the discovery: happy because he found her name, sad because, fifty years after her death, he could no longer remember the sound of her singing voice.

I find inclusions in the books, items tucked away. Inside one I find a poignant note from the author, who has written, ‘with highest regards’, and then explains it will be his last book: ‘I have been a manic-depressive since late 1976. I struggled for several years to keep working, but about four years ago I decided I couldn’t do much more.’

Inside one much loved book, the Loeb classical edition of the letters of St Jerome, I find a postcard of the Caravaggio image of Jerome in his study, which he’d picked up in Rome. The card marks a charming letter from Jerome to the infant girl Paticula. Being a saint in the early years of the Christian era, Jerome found it entirely reasonable that her parents should choose for her a career as a dedicated virgin, yet he wants Paticula to be happy in their choice. He makes suggestions for teaching her to read and write, such as rewarding her with honey cakes when she has successfully repeated her lessons. The Caravaggio image of Jerome shows an old man working in his study and surrounded by his manuscripts, on one of which a human skull rests, as memento mori.

There is a photograph of Harold that I treasure, taken by his brother Jim some six months before he died. Harold is sitting in his grandfather’s chair, in which he had also been photographed at two years of age. He holds in his hands a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first edition. A few weeks earlier, sorting through some of his early schoolwork, he was amused to find a 1954 essay on the subject of the censorship of literature. The big issue was whether a censorship board should be set up in Brisbane, to screen books such as Ulysses. In 1954 the book was banned in Australia, though it circulated nonetheless. In his essay, Harold came out in favour of the censorship of scurrilous literature (it was an essay written for school, after all) and raised the subject of Ulysses. Some boys of his acquaintance, he said, had got hold of the book and read it, passing it from hand to hand in a surreptitious manner. This was, of course, thoroughly reprehensible, though as he voiced his schoolboy’s opinion, he left open the question of whether he had glimpsed the contents of the book in passing. Harold did well. He was marked at eighteen out of twenty. Perhaps it sparked the interest in clandestine texts that remained with him for a lifetime.

I embarked on a treasure hunt, finding first one thing and then another. The final discovery marks the end of the chase and the beginning of something new. By the time I made the following discovery, I knew what I was seeing. On top of a row of tall books, packed tightly so their tops nearly reached the shelf above, I found a sheet of A4 paper slid in, invisible to the casual glance. Two photos were printed on it, rather fuzzily; two people posed in such a way to show their likeness. One is Harold, the other is his extra-nuptial son, a boy then thirteen years old, I think, judging from how Harold was looking in the photograph, thin, but not yet too thin. The two look happy together, relaxed and comfortable. The child is the treasure we found after Harold’s death. We are getting to know each other, and it is working out. For reasons I can only guess at, because in all my searching I found nothing left for me in explanation, this child was kept hidden from our family. He was a clandestine child. Now we know him, and he knows us. We like each other. The child has another family all his own. He is loved.

Bishop Gilbert Burnet came to Rochester in his last few months of life and left an account of their conversations: ‘He told me that the two maxims of his morality then were, that he should do nothing to the hurt of any other, or that might prejudice his own health, and he thought that all pleasure, when it did not interfere with these, was to be indulged as the gratification of our natural appetites ... This he applied to the free use of wine and women.’ Rochester confessed his sins, repented, and burned his manuscripts, to the chagrin of later scholars. He did not keep his secrets unto death. When he wrote on the diseases of the soul, Montaigne was clear on the value of confession as reparation. He quotes Seneca: ‘Why does no one confess his vices? Because he is still in their grip now; it is only for a waking man to tell his dream.’ Those who hide their vice from others, says Montaigne, ordinarily hide it from themselves. I know that keeping secrets unto death is the wrong way to live one’s life, and a terrible way to die.

I can never know Harold now. I learn from the words he wrote. They are fixed in time, more certain than words once spoken that now exist, unreliably, only in memory. He was an interesting person to know, if only partly, and if members of my family indulge in retrospective psychologising, trying to work out what on earth it was all about, we know he would be as disapproving of our speculations and slipshod reasoning as he was of the biographers of Rochester who attributed his behaviour to war trauma, or syphilis, or constipation.

I think I shall take as my alter ego Elisabeth Malet, who became Elisabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester when she married Rochester in 1667. She chose him from a number of richer suitors, to her family’s horror. She lived in the country and managed her family estates at Adderbury, while he mostly lived elsewhere. They seemed to get along all right, considering.

A few weeks before the end, Wallace, an old friend, dropped by with a book he wanted Harold to have, on the history of the book in Australia. Harold was lying on a couch with the winter sunshine streaming through the window. He rounded himself to sit up and greet his friend, pleased to see him. As he took the book in his hands, he held it with a certain puzzlement, as if he once knew what this object was. We could tell he was unable to read the words. It was a sad meeting. Wallace walked away down the hill just as my daughter Amy was driving up. When she came into the house, she told me she had seen him walking furiously, obviously in a state of high distress.

This last book bears no signature of the owner. It contains no words of commentary. There are no inclusions.

‘Treasure Hunt’ was longlisted for the 2009 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay.