Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 7

November 1991.

London, Sunday 10th. The weather in the capital is typically gloomy. The weekend newspapers are rife with speculation over the death, just days earlier, of the controversial newspaper mogul Robert Maxwell off the coast of Tenerife. Church of England envoy Terry Waite has just been released from captivity in Lebanon. The films Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves are battling it out to rule the British box office. And Labour’s hopes of election success, under Neil Kinnock, are boosted by a MORI poll that shows them six points ahead of John Major’s ruling Conservatives.

None of this likely matters to the frail passenger inside the private jet as it touches down on British soil after a short flight from Switzerland. Unable to walk unassisted and with his eyesight beginning to fail, he is carefully led down the steps of the aircraft. He is afforded special exemption to bypass the queues at customs, meaning he avoids the public, the press, and the waiting cameras. Once through passport control the passenger is ushered into a waiting Mercedes, the tinted windows helping to preserve his anonymity. Just over an hour later, the car drops him off at his Kensington mansion, the electronic security gates closing him off to the world outside.

And the world to him.

In the spacious hallway, bedecked with beautiful Dresden porcelain, a number of prints have recently been rehung on the walls, and the huge adjoining galleried rooms are full of Japanese furniture and art, oil paintings and exquisite Lalique vases. In the music room, a grand piano rests on the wooden floors, upon it the silver photo frames displaying images from a life unseen by so many. The fallboard of the piano is closed.

The stairway wends its way upwards, the banister a crucial aid to the ailing man in his ever-decreasing quest to reach the master bedroom. Even the days of him coming down in the morning for his cup of tea are far fewer. He spends his time in his bedroom. Upstairs, the smell of air freshener cut with disinfectant lingers. All around is a sense of empty hours.

Within the master bedroom the once pristine bright yellow walls are now sickly-looking and faded. Facing the grand window is the bed, its headboard built into the wall and guarded on either side by two individually made chests of drawers in mahogany, inlaid with delicate marquetry. Bow-fronted French display cabinets from the Second Empire stand against the walls, containing expensive collections of crystal sculptures and Venezia bowls.

A boudoir is on the right-hand side of the bedroom; in it an Edwardian chaise longue and a fauteuil from the 17th century ready to receive friends and guests. But visitors are fewer now. Those who come don’t expect grand revelry and partying, as they once did, simply reminiscences. The drip stand to the right of the bed – there to enable blood transfusions – betrays the illness that now inhabits this house.

The patient on the bed is half sleeping. He rides on limited breath. The anti-emetic prescribed is suppressing the nausea and the painkiller, infused earlier by a member of the loyal household staff who remains by his side night and day, is beginning to work. The assortment of drugs is introduced via a Hickman line implant, a cannula inserted into a vein in the neck. This simple operation was performed several months earlier, thus facilitating easier administration of the medication required to keep the patient alive, or, at least living and free from pain. It also solves the problem of having a nurse on hand to insert Venflons every time access to a vein is required, which is presently at least twice a day. This is not helped by the patient’s allergy to morphine, normally the ideal sedative used for the treatment of pain in a case such as this.

The man who lives here would be unrecognisable now to most of us, yet almost all of us know his identity. Virtually incapacitated now, his bed is a raft, like a broken piece of salvage, and he is a prisoner within the walls of his home. Beyond the sanctuary of his Japanese garden, outside the walls of the property a frenzy is being conducted by the press and paparazzi, who permanently prowl, seeking out any rumour, gossip or whisper with which to create headlines for a public growing increasingly insatiable for news of developments within the house. They lay siege and wait. Such is their presence that he can hear the noise of them, blathering and jabbering there, while he lays in his bed. He can hear them just on the other side of the wall, and sometimes he can see the blue curls of smoke from their cigarettes rise upwards.

But they are only one of the reasons the man in the bedroom is prevented from ever leaving his home. The other, principal reason, being that he has AIDS. The hope of a cure, a half-belief in treatments that could extend life, is gone to him. The medical experts have backed away – they have nothing more to offer.

In fact, within weeks he won’t ever come downstairs again, let alone even contemplate leaving the walled confines of the house.

No longer able to eat regularly, he exists on less than the minimum. Rice, always fried, never boiled. And liquids: water and tea made with milk. Sometimes, but less frequently now, he has some fresh fruit.

There is no space reserved for hope, no longer any means by which he can rescue himself from the past. His immune system is so compromised that it has rendered the body effectively helpless against the threat of infection. His doctor makes regular phone calls, and he visits every other day, but the patient requires apparatus to assist his breathing now, and has almost entirely lost the use of his muscles.

On the television a video is playing of the 1959 film Imitation of Life, a particular favourite of his starring Lana Turner. In the past he would be reduced to tears at the denouement of this movie, his emotions cajoled by the director in the same manner he himself would manipulate the emotions of those who listened to his music over the previous two decades. Except this time he doesn’t weep. The change in his condition since he was last in London is significant. It concerns those closest to him, those who surround him. But his decline has been hastened by the decision he made less than a week ago: to come off medication.

The drugs he has taken over the last three years, an experimental and ultimately lethal cocktail, have done little to postpone the inevitable. They have served not as a hope, as he had assumed they would, but as a destructive regime that has reduced the quality of what little life he has remaining.

The hope of a miracle has not transpired. Now it is no longer a question of if he was going to die, simply when. This is how his life ended.

And how his dying began.