2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “What symptoms?”

  “You have quite acute ocular ataxia, and gaze-evoked nystagmus.”

  “Do you want to put that in English?”

  “You can’t control your eye movements, some of the time. You’re doing it now.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, but I could not withdraw my gaze from the ceiling when I spoke.

  “Another thing is: you seem to have these periods of mental confusion. I think I interrupted one when we bumped into each other outside, just now. Do you find that you have vivid memories of places you have never been, or people you have never met? Do you sometimes imagine yourself to be someone quite different, Wilberforce?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, but we both knew I wasn’t telling the truth. There was something on the edge of my memory all the time these days: a rain-slicked street at night that I didn’t want to go down, but found myself walking along despite myself. Where was that? It wasn’t Newcastle, or even London. It was somewhere warmer and, at the same time, somewhere with thinner air.

  “You talked a lot in your sleep about Colombia, when I came in to look at you the other day. Do you remember that?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe I remember something—a dream I must have had.”

  Colin sipped at his wine again. My glass was empty. Colin said, “Go on, pour yourself another drink. You can’t do yourself much more harm than you already have.”

  I felt fear inside me. Colin wasn’t lecturing me any more. He was preparing me for some news I wasn’t going to like.

  “Wilberforce,” said Colin gently, as I poured myself a second glass of Fitou, “we think you have a condition called Wernicke’s encephalopathy.”

  “Werner’s what?”

  “Not Werner’s—Wernicke’s. It is a by-product of excessive alcohol intake. It causes a failure of thiamine production in your liver.” Colin folded his arms and looked at me, as if to say: You see what you’ve done?

  “Oh dear,” I said, because I seemed expected to say something. “What does that do?” I didn’t really want to know, but I knew Colin would not leave until he had told me.

  “Your liver produces thiamine, which is converted into a chemical called thiamine pyrophosphate. It’s a crucial component in nerve-impulse transmission. If you have Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which we think you have in a well-developed form, your liver stops producing thiamine. You may develop some quite distressing symptoms.” He paused, but I said nothing.

  “You will experience sensations of hypothermia. Your taste and sense of smell will be impaired. You’ll start to lose control of eye movement. Those are the early stages, and well developed in your case. The later stages include mental confusion, retrograde amnesia, and a strange side effect called Korsakoff’s psychosis. In Korsakoff’s psychosis, the patient starts to suffer from severe confabulation: the confusion of invented memory with real memory. Eventually, he loses any ability to distinguish his real-life experiences from his invented ones. In the final stages, just before coma and death, he may slip entirely into the delusional world he has constructed.” Colin stopped speaking.

  “What delusional world?”

  “It might be constructed around a film you once saw, a magazine article you read a dozen years ago, a chance remark someone once made to you. Stuff that the brain has dumped, and is sitting in some remote archive of your memory, suddenly fires through into your consciousness. Your brain is losing its ability to distinguish those false memories from real ones.”

  I sat at the kitchen table, poured myself a last glass of wine and regarded Colin with horror. Supposing I forgot the real world, forgot about my wine, forgot about Francis, or even forgot about Catherine. Then I would cease to exist. I might go on living, but I would no longer have an existence.

  What would happen to all the wine?

  “Is it treatable?” I asked Colin.

  “In most cases, it’s treatable if caught early enough. But it gets harder to reverse the changes in body chemistry in its later stages, though not impossible. The odds in your case are not as good as I would like.”

  Would they sell the wine when I died? Would it simply be forgotten about, or would the undercroft be broken into by vandals once it became known I was no longer returning to Caerlyon. I had a dark vision of bottles of Château Margaux being traded on street corners on Tyneside, in exchange for drugs.

  “How is it treated?” I asked again.

  “The treatment involves an intensive course of intramuscular injections of thiamine. But there’s no point even starting with all that unless you stop drinking.”

  “And if I don’t stop?”

  Colin tipped the last drop of wine down his throat, and stood up. “I must go,” he said. “Think about it, and I’ll come and see you at the same time on Monday. I’m away for the weekend in Hampshire.” He pulled his wallet from his coat pocket and extracted a card, then underlined a number with his pen. “That’s my number in the country. Call me there if you have an emergency.”

  What sort of emergency? I wondered. I repeated my earlier question. “And if I don’t stop drinking?”

  “If you don’t stop drinking, the confabulation gets stronger. The false memories take over your life. You slip more frequently into coma; while you are in coma your body temperature will drop and in one of those episodes you’ll simply die. Think about what you want to do, Wilberforce, and we’ll talk again on Monday.”

  I sat staring at the table. In some ways it didn’t sound a bad way to go. But what would happen to my wine?

  FOUR

  I awoke the next morning feeling cold. I got out of bed and checked to see if the central heating was on. There was a faint warmth coming from the radiator; perhaps it wasn’t working properly. Or perhaps I wasn’t. I went downstairs. There was a brown envelope on the doormat, which I opened and read. It was from the electricity company and announced that, as my direct-debit payment had been refused by the bank, supplies would be interrupted unless immediate payment of the outstanding amount could be made.

  I went into the kitchen and looked in the fridge for something for breakfast. There was the same in the fridge that there had been yesterday and the day before: nothing. Of course, one had to shop if one wanted to find things in the fridge. Somehow I had not got around to shopping for food, even though the shop on the corner was open at all sorts of hours. I thought I would go there later, when I got up. I did not really want to go out in the street, though, in case I met someone I didn’t want to meet.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was half past ten. I must have slept for more than twelve hours. I yawned. The kitchen was rather depressing to be in. The plates never seemed to get washed and the whole place smelled rather stale. I cleared some dirty wine glasses from the table and took them as far as the sink. I took two empty bottles and pushed them into the bottle bin, which was full. Someone ought to empty that, I thought. There seemed little point in having breakfast this late. I decided I would open a bottle of wine and take a glass up to bed, and get up later. I opened a bottle of red wine from the Murrumbridge Irrigation Area of New South Wales that I had found in the basement, and took it upstairs with a glass. I climbed back into bed, poured the wine and put the bottle on my bedside table. I stared at the label for a moment and wondered why Francis, a lover of Bordeaux, had allowed this stranger into his cellar. I decided it must have been part of a parcel of wines he had picked up at auction somewhere.

  As I sipped the wine, which was young, I considered my affairs. It was clear I was going to have to find some money. I supposed I could sell the flat, which must be worth quite a lot; but then where would I live? I had taken out some fairly large loans against the security of the flat some time last year, in order to pay off an overdraft at the bank. Still, it was worth looking into, when I got the time. Then there was Catherine’s jewellery, which her family kept asking me to return. I supposed I could sell that. It was my property really, and she didn’t need it. That might at least pay off
a few bills while I sorted myself out.

  Sorting myself out was a silent conversation I had with myself every now and then. Sometimes it progressed as far as writing a number of proposed actions down on a sheet of paper, for example:

  Talk to bank about second mortgage being increased

  Consider working as an IT consultant to bring in some income

  Get out and meet people

  Do not drink at breakfast or before the middle of the day

  Go for at least an hour’s walk in Hyde Park every day

  There were several such sheets of paper in and on my desk at present, for the simple reason that the waste-paper basket was so full there was no point trying to throw them away.

  I supposed the wine at Caerlyon was worth quite a lot—at least a million pounds. It was a comfort to me that it was still there, that it would always be there. I wondered whom I should leave it to. It sounded from what Colin was saying as if I ought to make another will. I had made one when Catherine and I married, and in it I had left everything for life to her, and then afterwards to the children that we never had. It was probably a good idea to have another look at that. To whom would I leave the wine?

  The thought was discomforting. There was no one. No one except Francis understood wine and cared for it as I did. He was dead, and Colin was trying to convince me that I was dying. Trying? He was making a good job of it.

  What was it that he had said I had? Werner’s philosophy? That wasn’t it, but it was like it. Whatever the condition was called, it didn’t sound very appealing: falling into an endless sleep, haunted by dreams of a life I had never had, my own memories pushed into far corners of my mind from where they could never escape, eternal prisoners in nightmare oubliettes.

  I found I was perspiring heavily, and my pyjamas and the sheets were damp. I climbed out of bed and went and looked at myself in the mirror. I was tall and once had black hair and a pale face and blue eyes. My hair was now streaked with grey and plastered to the top of my head, shining with sweat. My face was no longer pale but dead white, decorated with a few patches of rough red skin, and covered in a sheen of perspiration. Catherine had once told me, in the first effusions of our love, that she found me physically attractive. I do not remember that I looked different from anyone else. No one except my foster-mother had ever commented on my physical appearance until Catherine did. My foster-mother had told me I had been a beautiful baby, but she had spoken as if all those charms were in the past.

  If I had been attractive either as a baby or as the man whom Catherine married, I was very far from being so now. My skin was the colour of old newspaper. There were dark circles under my eyes and their whites were no longer the brilliant white they had once been, but a yellowish-grey colour, the colour of milk gone bad. I looked nearer to seventy than thirty-seven.

  Not too bad, considering everything. I decided to get up and have a shower.

  §

  In my sitting room, on the mantelpiece, are two photographs. One is in colour and is of Francis Black, standing with one arm around Catherine and the other around Ed Simmonds. Ed, a few years younger than he is now, is wearing tweed plus fours and an old khaki jersey. His face is almost split in two in an urchin grin that makes him look much younger than thirty, which is about the age he was when I took that photograph. His unruly, tightly curled blond hair is sticking out all over the place, mostly upwards. He looks more like the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist than the future Marquess of Hartlepool, heir to twenty thousand acres and Hartlepool Hall. He is enjoying himself enormously, and it shows. In the middle stands Francis, exactly like Francis always looks: silvery grey hair still streaked with black brushed straight back from his high forehead; an aquiline nose jutting from his face, deep laughter lines on either side. Francis is not smiling, though. I don’t remember him ever smiling much, but his thin mouth has that familiar, ironic expression that he adopted for the company of younger friends such as Ed and me. Francis is wearing a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper over an open-necked, check shirt, and baggy tweed trousers. His complexion is tanned—surprising for someone who spent a lot of his life in a wine cellar. The adoring Campbell, his spaniel, is at his master’s feet, looking upwards with a rolling eye.

  Then there is Catherine: at least a head shorter than the other two, she stands slightly at an angle to the others, with Francis’s arm draped loosely over her shoulder. She is laughing, I think at some joke of Francis’s, as I was taking the picture. Her thick blonde hair is wind-blown. Her usually pale face has colour in it, from the open air and the exercise of walking over heather. Her grey eyes are looking at me, the person taking the photograph. She is looking at me and, I believe, thinking about me perhaps for the first time as someone distinct and separate from most of Ed’s circle of friends. I always think she has the elegant, slightly drawn and fragile look of a film actress from the 19405 or 505: a younger Celia Johnson in BriefEncounter.

  Behind the three figures are rolling hills purple with heather, and above the heather the sky in the photograph is so white from a thin, bright overcast that the three people in the foreground have an etched, almost three-dimensional clarity, as if they might step out of the picture frame at any moment.

  The other photograph is in black and white, taken of Catherine dolled up for her coming-out dance. I think it was on an inside page of Country Life. She looks very young: she was probably only eighteen when it was taken. In this photograph her hair is carefully swept back, falling to her shoulders. She must have worn it a lot longer in those days. Her face is poised, reflective, the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. It is a studio photograph and it has an incongruous quality for me, as if she has been caught trying on her mother’s ball gown, her mother’s jewellery, and her mother’s make-up.

  I remember the day I took the photograph on the moor. Ed Simmonds had asked Francis and me to come and shoot grouse with him, on his moor at Blubberwick. Francis hadn’t shot, but had brought his spaniel, Campbell, to pick up behind the line. Catherine had been with Ed then, and she had spent most of the day standing with him. I didn’t know anything about shooting grouse, and I only shot for one drive, with a minder standing with me. When the brown birds rocketed over the horizon and whizzed through the line of butts I was too surprised to shoot, at first. At last one unlucky bird tumbled in the air and sped past me, to bounce in the heather behind the butt. Others followed. It was incredibly exciting to be out in the heather, shooting grouse. I remember that at lunch Catherine came and sat on the grass next to me, as we made a picnic by a small burn. For the first time, I became very conscious of Catherine’s nearness to me, her perfume, and the sound of her voice. That was when I first started to think about Catherine as somebody other than Ed’s friend.

  She gave me the portrait photo just before we married. “This was taken when I still had my looks,” she told me. She was smiling as she said it, her eyes dancing, inviting a compliment. She looked a thousand times more beautiful than in the photograph. I told her so.

  “You really do love me, don’t you?” she said breathlessly, for I had folded her into a tight embrace.

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’s hard to tell, because you never talk much.”

  I let go of her and said, “I’ve just been all work and no play for so many years, I’ve forgotten how.”

  Catherine picked the photograph up from the table where I had put it down and studied it. “It’s funny,” she said: “when that was taken all I was thinking about was parties, and you were already sitting behind a computer writing programs. You’ve never really had any fun in your life at all, have you?”

  “No, but that’s about to change.”

  That was when we were still undecided about where to live after we married, before we made the decision to come and live in London.

  §

  I decided I would get dressed, go out and buy something to eat. It seemed a long time since I had eaten, and I felt a little dizzy from lack of food. The wine I had
drunk lingered on my palate and in my brain, and when I stepped into the street I nearly fell over, misjudging the distance from my doorstep to the pavement. I walked down to Curzon Street, went into the shop on the corner and started to look along the shelves for something to eat that wouldn’t be too much trouble.

  I was just reaching for a box of oatcakes when an advertisement caught my eye, a white poster on the wall on which was printed, in heavy black type: TNMWWTTW. It occurred to me that it was not the first time I had seen those letters. They were familiar to me, in some way, but I could not recall why. Perhaps I had seen the advertisement before. It must be one of those ridiculous teaser campaigns, designed to mystify, intended to make you think, What’s all that about, then? so that when the name of the product or service being advertised was finally explained, it would be such a relief you would immediately go and buy some out of sheer gratitude.

  TNMWWTTW. It grated on me that I could not make the connection. The letters stood for something, but what? It looked like a mnemonic. Then I thought it was a mnemonic, and one that I knew, if I could only call it to the front of my mind.

  “Can I help you, sir?” asked somebody nearby. But I could not take my gaze from the poster. I gestured in its direction.

  I was beginning to feel distinctly odd, but I managed to ask, “What is that advertisement for?”

  “What advertisement is that, sir?”

  I waved my hand at the poster. I could not take my gaze from it. The letters grew larger, blurred and swam, turning into huge dots dancing across my vision. I felt sick and faint, as if all the blood had left my head in a rush. The room darkened and moved about. I heard a shout and then knew nothing more about it.

  When I awoke, I was lying on something hard and a voice was saying, “Can you remember who you are?”

  It was a good question: I could not. Then a name came into my head and I whispered, “Is it Wilberforce?”