I can’t drink it all, try as I might. It would be a breach of a sacred trust to sell any. In any case, I could not bear to part with a single bottle. I will drink what I can while life remains in me.
‘You were a little tough on poor Nurse Susan,’ said Colin, sipping his cup of tea. Nurse Susan was at the sink, washing up the plates I had used for lunch. She could have used the dishwasher but she explained she didn’t want to waste all that electricity for a few plates.
‘Oh, don’t mind about me, flower; worse things happen at sea,’ said Nurse Susan, turning and grinning at me over her shoulder. I sat drinking the remains of my tea-time bottle.
‘I told you not to drink that stuff,’ said Colin, ‘but I suppose you can’t help yourself.’
‘Colin,’ I told him, ‘it’s not a matter of ‘‘can’t help’’. It’s a matter of choice. I choose to drink wine. It is my hobby, as you well know.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Colin, ‘you no doubt have a perfectly good set of reasons for going on doing what you are doing. Addicts always do.’
There was a silence. Colin looked at his watch. He measured out the minutes of his day as carefully as I tried to measure out my glasses of wine.
‘About those tests,’ he said. I braced myself for the usual lecture. ‘Most of it is nothing new,’ Colin went on. ‘You have all the gastrointestinal problems one would expect. You have acid reflux into the oesophagus, which might tend towards producing cancer in a few years’ time, if you don’t get it somewhere else first. Your cholesterol level is extremely high, because of free radicals. In layman’s terms, your liver is disintegrating and as it does so your cholesterol level goes up, increasing the risk of a stroke or heart attack. I dread to think what the condition of your bowels is.’
‘Not great,’ I admitted.
‘Are you taking any of the tablets I gave you for any of those things?’ asked Colin.
‘No, they made the wine taste odd, so I threw them away.’
‘Then you have a lot of the other symptoms of alcoholism, such as sweating, weight loss, and mental confusion. You’re sweating now - rather a lot, as it happens.’
I wanted to stand up and open a window, but it seemed like too much effort; so I simply said, ‘It’s very hot in the kitchen.’
‘Why are you dressed up in a suit?’ asked Colin. ‘Are you going to a meeting?’
‘No, I just wanted to make an effort.’
Colin drummed his fingers on the table, then moved his chair around and said, ‘You’re not looking me in the eye.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it. My eyes seem to be wandering a bit since I woke up this morning.’
Colin took a small torch from the leather bag that he always carried, and came and shone it in both of my eyes. He peered into them. I flinched. He went and sat down again and said, ‘Do you know how alcohol works?’
There he went again. ‘Stop calling it alcohol,’ I said. ‘This isn’t chemistry; this is wine we’re talking about.’
‘Well, I’m talking about chemistry. Actually I want to tell you about brain chemistry. No, just listen for a few minutes, while you can still understand some of what I tell you. The kind of habitual drinking you indulge in is no different in degree from the addiction of a heroin addict. In both cases the brain becomes progressively more damaged, probably irreversibly, by an excessive consumption of a harmful substance. Your ability to produce important neurotransmitters, such as dopamine or serotonin, is being damaged. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that enables you to feel either pain or pleasure. In your case, your tolerance of pain is growing: you never complain to me about your physical state, which must be becoming more wretched every day. A normal person would be asking to be admitted to hospital if they felt like you must feel.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Don’t be flippant,’ admonished Colin. He held up a finger as if to place it against my lips, to seal them, but he lowered it again and said, ‘The sad part is that your ability to feel pleasure is disappearing at the same rate, perhaps for ever. The pleasure you think you feel in drinking wine is, on the whole, a delusional construct. Another thing that is happening to you is the destruction of your ability to produce serotonin. That’s the happy chemical. If you don’t have enough of it, you become depressed, you take more of whatever your poison is to counter that depression, and you get into a loop that eventually kills you, but not before you experience the most utter wretchedness it is possible to feel. That’s part of what is going on in your nervous system right now, and you won’t do anything to stop it. Maybe you don’t want to. I’m not a psychiatrist.’
There was a silence while I tried to take in what Colin had just told me.
‘You mean, I’m not very well?’
‘Yes,’ said Colin gently, and for the first time his smile disappeared and a rare look of concern replaced it; for the first time I felt real worry about what he had been telling me. The worst thing was that I had already forgotten most of what he had just said. ‘Yes,’ Colin repeated, ‘you’re not well. In fact you are dying, although whether you will die tonight, or next week, or next year, I can’t tell. I imagine we will need to hospitalise you in a year at the latest, based on your present test results. I hope you still have plenty of money and can afford to go private. It would be a fairly grim outlook in the NHS. Victims of self-abuse are low on their priority list just now.’
‘Don’t worry about my money,’ I said: ‘I’ve got endless amounts of the stuff. And don’t worry about hospital. I’m drinking the healthiest drink invented by man: red wine. I think I know a thing or two about this as well, you know.’
‘Have you ever been to Colombia?’ asked Colin.
‘What?’ I asked, startled by the abrupt change of subject. But as Colin spoke I was somehow in two places at once. In my kitchen, in my home, it was warm and stuffy and Nurse was next door in my sitting room, watching television; Colin was drumming his fingers again, waiting for my reply. At the same moment I was walking quickly along a rain-soaked street in Bogotá. It was always raining in Bogotá - never for too long, but it never stopped for long either. The pavements were slick with rain and the lights of passing cars gleamed on the wet stone. I was heading for the Hotel Bogotá Plaza. I had just flown in on the Avianca flight from Medellín, and I’d had the taxi drop me two blocks from my hotel in case anyone had picked up on me at the airport. Footsteps echoed behind me, and in the silences between their echoes I thought I could smell that awful odour of putrefaction. It was probably nothing.
‘Why do you ask?’ I said again.
‘You talked about it a lot while you were out for the count: about travelling to Bogotá from Medellín, and about people following you. It sounded like a bad script for a bad movie except that you went into a creepy amount of detail.’
‘I’ve never been to Colombia in my entire life - as far as I know,’ I said.
‘As far as you know,’ said Colin. ‘I mean, you would know, wouldn’t you? You don’t travel ten thousand miles to another continent and then forget you’ve been there - do you?’
‘I don’t know what I mean,’ I said angrily. ‘You’re confusing me. Why are we talking about Colombia?’
‘We’re really talking about why you were talking about Colombia.’
I gave up and said, ‘Look, is there anything else I should know?’
Colin got to his feet and said, ‘I’m sending Nurse Susan away now. There doesn’t seem any point in having her here if you don’t want her.’
‘Nothing personal,’ I said.
‘There’s something else wrong with you,’ said Colin, abruptly. ‘It’s not a condition I have ever come across before, and I need to talk to a specialist I know before I can confirm my opinion. I hope I’m wrong.’
‘You’re being very depressing, Colin,’ I told him. I tried to smile but couldn’t.
‘I’ll call again tomorrow if you’re in - at about this time?’
‘I’m always in,’ I said.
Three
When I had told Colin that I had endless amounts of money to pay my medical bills, I was being optimistic about my financial position. I used to have a lot of money, which I made from the sale of the software-development business I had built up. We had been going to take the company public, on the AIM market, but a trade buyer had nipped in at the last minute, offering a reasonable price. I ended up with a small fortune when the sale went through. The company that bought us gave my job as managing director to Andy, my finance director, and I resigned. I wasn’t enjoying it any more, in any case. I didn’t think I needed the salary, and I felt sure Andy did not want me to stay on. He had not wanted me to sell the company in the first place. So I left.
Some of the money went on buying Caerlyon, Francis’s family home, from his executors, including the vast store of wine in the undercroft beneath it. I spent a lot more buying the flat in Half Moon Street in London, for Catherine and me to live in.
In the last few years I seemed to have run through a huge amount of money, passing interesting wine-tasting evenings like the one I had just spent somewhere or other with a bottle or two of Château Pétrus. If you go out twice a week, and spend several thousand pounds on dinner and wine, it adds up after a while. Apart from the spending of my walking-around money of five or ten thousand pounds a week, other expenses were mounting up: Colin’s medical bills, for example. In the last two years, when Colin and one or two other members of my rapidly shrinking circle of acquaintances had pestered me, I had found myself splashing out on visits to health farms and drying-out clinics such as the Hermitage. I’d given that up now as a waste of time and money - time and money that could be better spent on Bordeaux.
All of this came to mind the following morning, when I was sitting at my desk in my sitting room, sipping a glass of Château Carbonnieux and reading a letter from my bank manager. It had been on the kitchen table for some days now, but I had learned, after having had the telephone and the electricity cut off a couple of times, that eventually one does have to get around to reading one’s post, especially anything in a brown envelope or from a bank.
The letter enquired after my health, and then went on to remark: ‘Your current overdraft of £50,327.09 is above the limit of £30,000 that was previously agreed. Unfortunately this means the Bank has had to charge an unauthorised-overdraft interest rate of 7 per cent. Please can you advise us at the earliest possible opportunity of when you will be able to remit funds into the account to reduce borrowings to below the agreed limit?’ The letter closed with the friendliest possible good wishes from the odious Mr Rawle, my Personal Banking Relationship Manager. Nevertheless, the tone of menace was unmistakable.
I found a felt-tipped pen and wrote on the letter: ‘Please increase overdraft limit to one hundred thousand pounds. Thanks, Wilberforce.’ Then I found both an envelope and a stamp in my desk and addressed the letter back to Mr Rawle.
I had forgotten I had started to go into overdraft. I was so used to having my account in credit, and just dipping into it for my weekly walking-around money, that it had seemed impossible I might ever be in debt. Now that griping anxiety came back to me that I remembered from the early days of my business, when we’d had to drive around to collect cheques from our customers and then go straight to the bank to cash them, just to keep on the right side of insolvency.
I opened the next letter, but it was only from some restaurant advising me that, following the recent unfortunate incident when I was dining with them, they regretted that they would be unable to accept any further reservations from me. I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that someone - not me - had been wearing very highly polished black shoes. In any case, there was no problem. If I wanted to go back, I would just make the reservation in the name of Francis Black. Then they could go and stand beside his grave and complain all they wanted to.
I returned to the more pressing problem of money, and poured myself another glass of wine to help me think. The only thought that occurred to me was that I had better sell some more shares and transfer the money I raised to the bank. I rang my stockbroker and said, when I got through to him, ‘Chris, I need to sell some shares.’
‘Good morning, Wilberforce,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
I had forgotten that Christopher Templeton was quite old-fashioned and one had to go through the ‘How’s the weather? How are the children?’ small talk before one could get down to business. He had originally been an adviser when we were thinking of floating my company on the stock market and, when we didn’t, I had given him some of my money to look after to make up for all the professional fees he hadn’t earned.
‘Never better. How’s the family?’
‘Oh, very well, thank you. Ivor is in the first eleven now and Maria . . .’ and he went on for some minutes with tedious details about his children whom I had once met when he asked me go to Lord’s to watch the cricket with him, in that period when I had had, for a while, a social life.
After a while he must have detected a lack of sufficient enthusiasm in my ‘Oh, really?’ responses, and said in a brisker tone, ‘How much were you wanting to raise, and by when?’
‘A hundred thousand would suit me, by the end of this week, if possible.’
‘Well, it’s Friday today, so that might be difficult.’
‘Oh, is it?’
‘Just a second, while I get your account details up on the screen.’ There was a pause and some tapping noises in the background and then Chris said, in a different tone of voice, ‘Wilberforce, you haven’t got a hundred thousand pounds with us. I hadn’t looked at your account for a while, but I see there have been regular sales and the balance has been reducing for a couple of years now.’
I paused to think. The information was disappointing, but not unexpected. I said, ‘Well, what can I raise?’
‘It depends on the market. You have some BP, and some Glaxo Smith Kline - both very good quality stocks. You’d probably get about fifty thousand. And then that’s the last of it.’