This brought the head waiter back. ‘I really must ask you not to sing quite so loudly, sir,’ he said. ‘It is disturbing the other customers.’
‘And I really must ask you not to interrupt me while I am drinking my wine,’ I replied. ‘It is impossible to enjoy it properly if I keep being distracted like this, and I feel I have paid a fair price for the goods in question and am entitled to a proper enjoyment of them.’
It sometimes happens that my mannerisms of speech become a little strange under the influence of a lot of wine. I find my language tends to become ornate, almost flowery, and sometimes bends and even breaks under the weight of the complex ideas I wish to express. I stopped humming for a while, and after a moment the head waiter went away again. But by now I was the object of some attention around the restaurant. I think that, by then, everyone in the room knew that I was sitting drinking my way through more than six thousand pounds’ worth of expensive wine on my own.
I heard, or I imagined that I heard, snatches of conversation: ‘He doesn’t look like he could afford a can of Special Brew, let alone one of the most expensive wines in the world.’ ‘He’s probably a hedge-fund manager having a blow out after making a few million quid.’ ‘Or after losing it, more likely.’
‘What an odd-looking creature,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘He’s so pale,’ said another. ‘I hope he’s not going to be sick all over the place.’
‘Darling! I’m trying to enjoy my dinner, thanks very much.’
It was too much. I stood up and turned around to try and catch sight of Catherine, to ask her what to do. My chair fell over backwards. I raised my glass of wine in the direction where I thought Catherine might have been standing a moment or two ago, before I turned around, and sipped it and said, ‘Darling, come and try some of this. It’s really very good.’
The room moved sideways and I found the head waiter had put his arm around me affectionately. That was very nice of him. I had begun to form the impression he did not really like me.
‘Get him a taxi,’ I heard him say to someone, as we both slid towards the floor. He was trying to hold me up, I realised, but I was just a bit heavy for him.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked me. Now he was staring down at me from somewhere far above, and his voice sounded very remote. The great claret was exercising a strong narcotic effect on me. My eyes felt heavy.
‘What do we do about the bill? We’re down more than six grand if he doesn’t pay,’ whispered another man nearby. I realised it was the sommelier’s voice, and he was no longer French, but from Birmingham.
I reached into my pocket. I didn’t want any trouble. It was odd how often these difficulties arose when I ate out. I thrust the bundle of notes in the direction of the voice and managed to say, ‘Do take what I owe from these notes. And do remunerate yourselves for the trouble and inconvenience I may be causing you. Please convey my sincere apologies to my fellow guests for any disturbance.’
How much of this I actually managed to speak out loud, I do not know, but the notes were snatched from my hand. I found that if I moved my head a little to the left I could pillow it on the head waiter’s shoes. They were black and well polished and surprisingly comfortable to nestle against.
‘What’s his name?’ someone asked.
‘Table booked in the name of Wilberforce.’
‘Do we know his address?’
‘No, he’s never been here before.’
‘I think we would have remembered if he’d been here before,’ said a sarcastic voice.
‘Has he got any ID?’ asked the first voice. I think it was the head waiter’s.
A hand snaked its way into the inside pocket of my suit jacket and found my wallet. ‘Found a card here in the name of Wilberforce, address Half Moon Street.’
Then everything went black.
Two
‘You’ve been out of it for three days,’ a voice said. I recognised the voice. It was a kind voice, but also a voice that I associated with someone telling me things for my own good. Confusion swarmed in my head. I opened my eyes and saw a cream ceiling. Well, that meant nothing. After a moment I found the energy to turn my head, and realised I was in a place I knew.
I let my head flop back on the pillow and tried to make sense of my life. I had been away on a trip to South America. There had been trouble in a café in Medellín, in Colombia. I chased away these remarkably convincing images, which flashed on and off deceitfully in my head, and made a mental effort. Then I knew, or thought that I knew, that I was in my own bedroom.
Of course, it might not have been my own bedroom. That might have been another one of those odd memories. Of one thing I now felt sure: the voice was Colin’s.
‘Colin?’ I said faintly.
The voice spoke again from somewhere behind me: ‘How are you feeling, dear boy?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sleepy. Cold.’
There was a pause and then Colin came into view: tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed and good-looking, as slender as when I had first known him at university twenty years ago, his face set in that expression of detached and reproachful kindness that some doctors acquire.
He handed me a glass of water. ‘Sip this,’ he told me. ‘You must be quite dehydrated. We’ve had you on a drip but there’s no substitute for water.’
I sipped the water. It tasted disgusting but I made myself swallow some. After a while I found I could half-sit up on the pillow. I looked around and, after all, the room was familiar. It was my own bedroom.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked. Colin pulled up a chair. He was wearing a tweed jacket over a checked shirt, a spotted blue tie and twill trousers. On anyone else these clothes would have looked old-fashioned. On Colin almost anything looked elegant. It was a professional asset, I used to think. He made all his patients feel inadequate and so more inclined to do everything that he told them to do. He had been just another unruly medical-school undergraduate when I had first met him, although even then his clean-cut English-public-schoolboy looks had marked him out as different from the parade of spots, straggly beards and unwashed ringlets that had characterised many of the rest of us.
Then he had managed to find a position in a practice in Pimlico; a couple of years later he had married the daughter of a very wealthy family of London rentiers and bought into a private practice in Eaton Place. His patients included most of the ruling families in the Middle East, the Ukraine and Russia. He had taken me on a couple of years ago, for old times’ sake.
‘You haven’t been asleep. You’ve been in a coma.’
I stared straight ahead of me at a picture on the opposite wall. I found it too much of an effort to turn and look at Colin, after the first glance. My eyes roved up to gaze at the ceiling and somehow, wouldn’t stop looking at it.
‘A coma?’ I replied. ‘Isn’t that the same thing as being asleep? - only for a long time?’
Colin took my wrist, felt for my pulse and said nothing, but I knew he would be looking at his watch. After a time he dropped my arm as if it had lost any further interest for him, and asked, ‘Do you remember anything about where you were and what you were doing before you woke up just now?’
Instantly the bees started humming in my head. Fragments of experience crowded in at the gates of my memory, clamouring for my attention. I had arrived in Bogotá on the Avianca flight from Medellín. I had had to leave Medellín in a hurry, but I couldn’t recall exactly why, in my present state, and somehow I felt thankful that I couldn’t. Someone had been following me in Medellín, and the same someone was following me in Bogotá. I went into one of the better hotels and whoever it was did not like to come in after me and I managed to get out of the side entrance and go down a back street. But then a few blocks from the hotel I heard hurrying footsteps behind me, echoing in the street, and that smell I had noticed in Medellín. I hadn’t liked the smell. I hadn’t liked it at all. I turned, but the street was empty behind me. The pavements gleamed slick with recent rain. I could taste the fear in my mouth. Then I remembered another taste: the spice and caramel of Pétrus; and I remembered how I had been drinking some of the 1982 only a moment or so ago.
‘I think I was in a restaurant,’ I told Colin. ‘Drinking some wine.’
‘Yes,’ said Colin, ‘you were. You were drinking quite a lot of wine, they tell me.’
‘It was Pétrus,’ I said simply.
Colin said, in a sharper tone of voice, ‘Wilberforce, look at me.’
I wanted to look at Colin, and explain to him how good the wine had been, but I found I could not move my gaze from the ceiling. It seemed like too much trouble to move my eyes.
‘I’m OK as I am,’ I said.
‘You’re not OK,’ replied Colin. I heard his chair scrape as he pushed it back and then he walked around to the front of the bed. Now I had to look at him, or rather the top of his head. My eyes still refused to travel down as far as his face.
‘We both know you are in an advanced stage of alcoholic addiction,’ said Colin, in his most reasonable voice. ‘After all, I’ve been telling you for some time how it would end, and you haven’t really ever tried to deal with this.’
‘I have tried,’ I said. ‘I did the Twelve Steps when you booked me into the Hermitage. I did the detox, and the rehab. I did all those things, but it always seemed such a waste not to drink some of the wine Francis gave me. I’m not an alcoholic. I just love Bordeaux.’
Colin shook his head and looked at his watch again. ‘There’s a nurse downstairs,’ he told me. ‘She’s called Susan. I’ve arranged for her to stay here for a few days. She’ll look after you and I’ve told her to make sure you have no alcohol. At the moment a drink - any alcoholic drink - might well kill you. I’ve got a consultation to go to, and then I’m going back to my office to get the results of some tests we did on you when they brought you home. I’ll come back this evening to see how you’re getting on, and we’ll see what the tests can tell us. Meanwhile, stay in bed, and keep as warm as possible. Nurse Susan will come up shortly to make sure you are all right.’
He gave me his kind and empty smile again, and then left the room. I heard him go down the stairs and then the front door was slammed briskly shut.
I lay in my bed feeling awful. The sense of confusion was beginning to lift but everything seemed to be in a faint haze - not just in my mind: my vision had been affected and the room looked as if a fog had crept in through the windows, blurring and dimming the outlines of everything that I looked at. I shook my head to clear it, but it did not clear. After a while I found that I could move my gaze from the curious, locked position it had assumed, managed to look down at the bed I lay in, and noticed the sticking plaster on the back of my left hand where the drip had gone in. I could hear someone boiling a kettle downstairs. My hearing seemed to have sharpened commensurately with the blurring of my vision.
I felt cold. I could feel the warmth coming from the radiators, yet it did not penetrate. I felt a deep chill, and shivered and pulled the bedclothes closer around me. How long had Colin said I had been asleep for? I tried to remember what I had been doing whenever it was I had fallen asleep. It was ridiculous to use a word like ‘coma’. Colin was always trying to intimidate me with medical claptrap of that sort, but it cut no ice with me. And another thing: referring to wine as ‘alcohol’ was so insensitive and crass I could only imagine he did it to annoy me.
Thinking about wine reminded me again about the Pétrus. How glorious that had been! I tried to remember where, and when, I had drunk it. All that I could recall was that Catherine had been there, and she had sung to me while I sipped the wonderful, heady wine.
Thinking about sipping the wine made me look at the clock on the bedside table, and I saw it was eleven in the morning. By now on any normal day I would be at least halfway through my first bottle. That was another reason it was wrong to describe me as an alcoholic: an alcoholic wouldn’t care whether his wine came from a box or a bottle. He wouldn’t wait until he had breakfast before he drank; his first drink would be breakfast. He would not sip what he drank meditatively, sometimes making tasting notes in a little black leather book bought from Smythsons. That was what I did. My drinking was, I supposed, capable of being described as a form of mania, but no different from collecting butterflies, or birds’ eggs, or rare books. Perhaps it was a more expensive mania than some, but it was the same passion: to know, to possess, everything that could be known about, or obtained for, one’s collection.
At that moment the person Colin had referred to as ‘Nurse Susan’ came into my bedroom carrying a cup of tea. I loathe tea. I could smell its hideous bouquet. I could smell, almost taste, the tannin, the unpleasing chalky notes of lactose from the milk she had splashed into it, the sickly undertones of sugar beet from the teaspoonfuls of white sugar she had shovelled into the cup. I felt nauseous.
Nurse Susan was a brisk-looking middle-aged lady in a white uniform. She saw that I was awake and said, ‘Now then, how are we?’ She spoke with the sharp accents of North-East England, which I remembered from a different era of my life.
I muttered something.
‘What you need is a nice hot cup of sweet tea,’ she told me firmly. Immediately, the nausea overwhelmed me and I started to retch. Before I could bring anything up, Nurse Susan had miraculously put the cup of tea down on the bedside table and produced from somewhere a plastic bowl and a damp towel. She had the bowl in position as I threw up into it, the beads of sweat starting from my forehead and running down my cheeks. Then she mopped my face with the towel and took the bowl away, returning in a second with a glass of water.
‘There now, petal, just drink this. I’ve put something in it to calm your stomach down.’
I tried to take the glass but my hands were trembling too violently, so she held it to my lips and I managed to take a few sips. At first I thought I was going to be sick again, but I wasn’t, and after a while my feelings returned to something like normal.