After years of interviews with Yvonne Boyd, which were cross-referenced against the accounts of friends and acquaintances, and tallied against evidence contained in lengthy recordings made by journalists and art historians over decades, I had come to greatly admire her veracity, fairness and powers of recall.

Even though Niall recoiled from this new account of Martin Boyd’s death, she subsequently phoned its source, Yvonne, seeking to ‘get a clearer picture’. I spoke to Yvonne (8 January 2008) shortly after she had received Niall’s call, and found her recollection of these events unshaken: ‘We all thought it was suicide.’ Niall’s dudgeon stems principally from the fact that she wasn’t told. She wasn’t told by Martin – there was no suicide note, nor any diary record (his last diary entry, two days before his death, recorded ‘a dreadful night’). She wasn’t told by the Sisters (as Yvonne wryly commented: ‘The nuns certainly would not have advertised it’). Nor, over the years, was she told by any member of the Boyd family. Niall’s conclusion is that this report must have been fabricated at source. But what possible motivation could there be for anyone to do such a thing? This is implausible in the extreme.

Regrettably, many people commit suicide. Regrettably, their friends and others, especially for religious reasons, try to suppress that fact. These people see suicide, as does Niall, as ‘a stigma’ that would ‘endanger the Christian burial’. Niall offers, without evidence, that pain-racked Martin – suffering from stomach cancer, a man who found eating ‘torture’ and, by his own admission, was hoping to die -would have, in these circumstances, ‘seen [suicide] as the denial of God’s goodness’. Brenda Niall not only presumes to know the mind of Martin Boyd, but also the mind of God.

Niall boasts that ‘if anything was fully documented in my biography ... it was [Martin Boyd’s] final illness and death’. Yet she then admits that it is only now, twenty years

after publication, that she ‘makes a lucky guess’ and finally finds ‘a deathbed witness’. Her witness, Father John Guidera, wrote: ‘Poor old Martin passed away very peacefully

and quite suddenly in the end. I was with him a couple of hours before he died.’ Plainly and logically read, Guidera’s latter sentence reveals that the priest was with Boyd several hours before he died, not when he died. What we do learn as a concrete fact, is that Guidera is the same priest who had recently received Martin Boyd into the Catholic Church.

The important detail in Yvonne Boyd’s recounting of Martin Boyd’s death is that his body was found in the gardens below his hospital window. Niall obsesses about this

window. She challenges the very idea of Boyd having the strength to reach this window. Yet, in her account in Martin Boyd: A Life, she places him there: ‘He was just able to move from the bed to the window from which he looked beyond – the hospital grounds to the Caracalla Baths and the Appian Way.’ Niall now finds it ‘almost beyond belief’ that Boyd had the strength to open this window, much less lever himself to sit on the sill (it was at waist height, according to her calculations), to shift his body and tumble out. Ultimately, the only thing Niall’s measurements actually suggest is that an accidental fall was impossible.

A reader of Niall’s article would be forgiven for assuming that in Arthur Boyd: A Life I describe Martin Boyd as the wicked uncle: ‘Bungey makes Boyd ... a Wicked Uncle ...’; ‘As wicked uncle ... Bungey’s text bears out... .’ Not so. The word ‘wicked’ to describe Martin Boyd would never occur to me, and was never employed. In fact, while Niall, in The Boyds: A Family Biography (2002), describes Martin as ‘difficult and exacting’ and ‘touchy and impatient’, I describe him as a man whose writing influenced Arthur’s teenage years. I write that he is loyal – ‘he stood firmly by Merric’s tribe’ – and use the following descriptives: ‘trim, vital, elegant’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘civilised’ and ‘generous’, while repeating a quote heralding him as ‘a perceptive novelist’

He also, within the text, shown by his actions to be snobbish, pompous, jealous, censorious and opinionated. In short, a complicated, interesting man with strengths and weakness’ and certainly as Niall purports, simply a ‘minor character’ employed to advance my narrative.

In The Boyds, Niall writes of the death of Arthur’s grandfather Thomas Bunbury Gough. The account she gives of his character, and that of his wife, Evelyn Gough, belies the circumstances of his death, which she neglects to describe. He committed suicide, which presumably Niall knew, since it was reported in the Argus and elsewhere in some detail and was available to any researcher. More­over, Niall interviewed Beatrice Bewley, who told me in my interview that her grandfather had committed suicide. Yvonne Boyd said that the circumstances of Gough ‘s death were never spoken of in the family. Niall, however, finds it ‘incredible’ that younger members of the Boyd family didn’t know of Martin’s likely suicide.

Suicide is the final demonstration of will; it not only illuminates the character of its perpetrator but must influence the behaviour of those friends and family left behind. Certainly, Arthur’s mother, Doris, and his grandmother, Evelyn Gough, came into a much sharper focus for this writer when what they had lived through – and had to live with – was revealed. Suicide is not something a biographer can deny.

After all her presumptions, biased reporting, creative sleuthing and reliance on faith, Niall asks a rhetorical question towards the end of her musings. ‘How much do they matter, Martin Boyd’s last moments?’ They amount to two sentences and a footnote in my book, but apparently they are critical to her in that ‘a leap of imagination can get a biographer into trouble’.

Indeed it can.