Read Online The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce by Paul Torday - Free Book Online Page B

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.