Obscure & British Comment Fest 2: Withnail & I

[swordznsorcery]

http://lost-spook.livejournal.com/389689.html

Withnail & I, Withnail/Marwood, 10 years later

Fandom: Withnail & I
Gen, c. 10000 words



A Whiter Shade Of Yesterday


When I look back, I sometimes think that the years I spent as a very young man, in that dismal little flat in the company of Withnail, were amongst the best of my life. I'm very conscious that my memories are rose-tinted; that I am remembering youth itself as much as the actuality of events. In many ways, of course, they were terrible times. A period even now half-obscured by a fug of alcohol, cigarettes and the heavy, choking smoke of Danny's ubiquitous joints. There was never enough to eat; sometimes there was nothing at all. We seemed to be permanently cold; we were forever assuaged by creeping damp, creeping mould, and creeping rats; and the constant fear of eviction hung over us even more tangibly than the smoke. If I take the time to analyse it in those terms, the romance of the period soon drains away, like the oily, black water in our terrifying sink. There are other memories, though. Long walks in the park, Withnail regaling the pigeons with scenes from his hollowly privileged youth; bizarre adventures when half drunk, stumbling together down wrong turnings into Camden's weirder backstreets; or tumbling in gales of laughter over garden fences, chased by irate publicans, ferocious constables, or the occasional broom-wielding housewife, expertly insulted by a grandiloquent Withnail. The quiet, peculiar joy of sprawling together in the flat of an evening, listening to ancient, hefty discs on the gigantic gramophone that we had unearthed in some monstrous cupboard. Withnail would direct me to wind the thing, whilst he lay on the hideous old sofa, wrapped in an ancient silk bed-coat, and all the blankets he could wrangle, waxing lyrical on his many philosophies, as long-dead singers wailed through seas of pops and crackles. Lean times then, but not without allure. Ultimately I had had to get away, but for all that I had yearned for cleaner air and a clearer head, I can hardly deny that a certain regret forever hangs over my choice to leave. Had I stayed, I fear that my life would soon have ended in a sordid scene in some vile little bedsit, with Danny's latest offering by my side. And yet, for all that, I still wonder. How could I not?

It was in December of 1979 when that distant past remembered itself to me, not in the usual, lazy contemplations of some drowsy Sunday, but in the form of something far more concrete. A letter, delivered one morning amid a handful of prospective scripts, in a heavy and watermarked envelope. Even in those days, when communication by post was still quite commonplace, such a thing was rare, at least in my world, and I broke my usual rule of setting personal mail before business. The envelope, a creamy blue-white, was stubborn about revealing its secrets, and only consented to do so when assaulted with a breakfast knife – which should perhaps have suggested itself to me as some kind of omen. I found a short letter within, on paper as heavy as the envelope, pristine white, and inscribed in a beautiful hand:

Mr Vyvian Withnail, Esq. requests the pleasure of your company to celebrate the occasion of his fortieth birthday, at a party for his closest friends. RSVP by earliest post. Full wine list available upon inquiry.

I could hardly have been more surprised. Withnail! And after all these years. I had not laid eyes upon him since those closing weeks of 1969, when I had wrenched myself away from our life together, and moved on to pastures anew. Thought of him, yes, but never dared allow myself to go back and see what had become of him. I remembered all too well how he had railed against the approaching milestone of his thirtieth birthday; I should have realised that the close of another decade would be bringing his thirties to an end as well. Good old Withnail – and still partying, it seemed. I could hardly turn down the invitation. With a smile in my heart, I hurried off a reply there and then. Strange how these things consume us. After years without a word; years when I admit there were times he had barely entered my thoughts; suddenly I could not wait for the day to arrive.

**********
I don't know quite where I had envisaged Withnail living. I knew of course that he had stood to inherit a sizeable fortune, should his greatly maligned father ever get around to passing it on. The letterhead on the invitation suggested that this event had come to pass, for it had carried hints of some old family home in a forgotten corner of London. A rambling Gothic pile, perhaps, such as that monstrous old building where we had used to live? Some sprawling country estate would hardly be his style, but some old, picturesque manor house, perhaps; an ancient, rose-bedecked cottage with pretensions? I tried to find out what I could as the day neared, as much to discover what might be the expected dress as through general curiosity. I had some serviceable evening wear, the better to appear faintly civilised at awards functions and the like, but Withnail came from a world so entirely unlike my own. When we had known each other he had been trying to escape all of that, but perhaps, upon receipt of his inheritance, he had laid aside the revolutionary aspirations of his youth? Who might his friends be now? What ancient traditions might he have turned to, that I might inadvertently offend?

But for all that he might have become, I could not shake the simple truth of it; that he was Withnail, and could never really be anything else. He was my old friend, with all his ridiculousness, his affectations, and endearing foppery. Who else could he be but that? When the day came, I put on my black tie, made the usual aborted attempt to make my hair look as though it had not recently been dragged through several hedgerows backward and, playing safe, called a taxi to take me out to the address on the card. My homburg-hatted driver informed me that we were aiming towards a quiet suburban corner; the sort of place that had once been its own, independent village, beyond the outskirts of London, but had since been swallowed whole by the city's advance. It took some time to reach it, from my own, less rarefied quarter, but soon enough we discovered the right road. It was a long one, lined with trees, the houses set back at a distance. A world of unexpected greenery; of rural bliss almost, ensnared within the claws of the capital. A place where one might confidently expect to find cheerful evacuees, busy about their adventures in forgotten nooks and crannies; or ghosts, sprawling decadently upon window seats, and gazing out through ivy-crowned windows.

With me still wondering, quite wide-eyed, we drove on. Past the other houses, on to where the gaps between the wide, gated driveways grew longer and longer, and the sounds of city life died away. On until the road came, at last, to its end, in the winding, gravelled approach to what was clearly the Withnail family home. A manor house of sorts, three storeys high, yet its grey slate roof near the only bit of it that had managed to escape from a towering tangle of creeper and rambling roses, clambering and crawling together up the walls. In the summer perhaps it looked magnificent, although I doubted it. In winter, with December in its grey and soggy infancy, it looked as though some resident Sleeping Beauty might be slumbering inside, in want of a fearless prince.

We proceeded up the drive, past vast, overgrown bushes, over weeds threatening to utterly displace the gravel, past at least one huge marble lion all but vanished into a jungle of nettles and ivy. A bird-bath fed by a small fountain struggled valiantly forth from a mammoth elderberry bush, but the fountain spat its water in thin and muddy gasps, all but beaten by the rampant undergrowth. Moving on, we left it to its fate, coming at last to the end of the drive, and crunching to a halt before a wide, ivy-carpeted step. There were no other cars parked there, which suggested that I was the first to arrive. I was more than a little relieved. Alone there could be a private reunion, a quiet opportunity to revisit our old friendship before Withnail's other guests arrived. It unsettled me a little as well, I admit. What barriers might time have erected; what ghastly sheets of ice would have to be broken? In general I dislike being the first guest to arrive at a party. It lands one with a terrible burden of responsibility. Still, there was no escaping it; I could hardly stay in the car awaiting reinforcements. Paying the driver, I watched him depart with a certain degree of trepidation; then, mounting the embattled step, I knocked hard upon the door.

It opened to reveal quite the most terrifying human being that I have ever encountered. Six feet tall at least, ramrod straight and iron grey from head to toe, she wore what appeared to be a uniform of sorts; a housekeeper perhaps. Peering down at me from a step above – and several inches extra height in addition to that – she utterly failed to blink, as she gazed upon me through the wire-rimmed half moons of her spectacles. Expecting Withnail, I all but quailed in the face of this unexpected apparition, but after a moment a small smile lit her dour countenance.

"Mr Marwood." It wasn't a question. It may have been a welcome; certainly it appeared to be an invitation. Forcing rebellious lips to return her smile, I advanced into a large, dark hall. It was panelled in wood in the traditional style, a hard wooden floor helping to enwrap the whole in a nut-brown shroud that swallowed what little light remained. It was like stepping inside a sack – and as soon as I had entered, the housekeeper drew the string closed about the neck, and sealed us both inside. "Mr Withnail is in the parlour, sir," she told me. I half expected her to lead the way with a guttering candle, but instead she simply moved on ahead, and threw wide a door that promptly glowed, with that half-light characteristic of antique lamps. It was far from bright, in keeping with that dark and shadow-drenched corridor, but it chased away at least some of the gloom. At once the hall took on new character, and I saw now the paintings that decorated the panelled walls. Sharp eyes of some two score Withnails, gazing out from centuries past at this wanton trespass. The housekeeper loomed briefly in the doorway, robbing the hall of most of the limited light.

"Mr Marwood, sir," she announced, with a touch of theatre. There was a pause. "Will you be requiring anything else? A pot of tea, perhaps?"

"Tea? Tea?!" The voice that I remembered so well blared out of my memories, echoing the full length of the hallway in its indignance. Age had plainly not dimmed his old habit of bellowing like an actor aiming toward the cheap seats. "Tea, Mrs Cambridge, is the very stuff of the devil. It has the temerity to have the colour of a good bitter, but none of the body. No, we shall have a bottle of red, if you will. The '59, I think. Or perhaps two. Better yet, bring a case. Marwood! Marwood, get in here, man. I need a barrier against this blasted fifth columnist, and her insistence on offering tea."

"Hello, Withnail." It was like stepping into my own past, as I moved past the redoubtable Mrs Cambridge, and into the room beyond. A curiously patchwork place, all oaken shelving, bearing eccentric knickknacks that might have been collected the world over, during the course of several centuries of travel. A vast pair of leather sofas dominated the centre of the room, with a thick, brightly coloured rug between them like a punch in the eyes after all the sombreness of the panelling. Upon one of these sofas, sprawled in the manner of some Roman emperor awaiting the attention of his slaves, was my old friend. He was dressed in what had set out in life as evening wear, but his bow tie was undone, flapping loosely around his neck, just as his cuffs flapped wildly around his wrists. If he had cufflinks, he had clearly misplaced them, and the buttons of his waistcoat were similarly absent. Nonetheless, there was an air of poetry about the man; just as in days of old, he was able to appear truly magnificent, like a lord with the whole of the world ready to revolve about him. He smiled at me, from a face white as milk, framed by unruly, grey-streaked hair.

"Marwood." That old air of authority; that old establishment of familiar order. Withnail had always been the king in our court. I was no longer the hapless innocent caught in his shadow, but he was my host, and I was hardly going to object if he still wished to play the king now. Striding over to his sofa, I offered my hand.

"It's good to see you again." I meant it. If the pallor of his skin worried me; if the lines that showed on his cheeks and forehead were cause for concern when I drew near; they were concerns that I soon pushed aside. We all age differently, and it had been ten long years. We were here on the verge of his fortieth birthday, and my memory saw him still as a man toppling on the brink of thirty. Certainly I had matured a great deal in those ten years. It would hardly be fair to expect less of Withnail.

"Hmm." He rose up, his long, thin body the same as always. A little thinner perhaps, his clothes a little too loose about his frame, but so recognisably, happily Withnail. He took my hand briefly, but he seemed more interested in examining me than in following custom. "You look different."

"I'm thirty-five," I protested. He frowned, staring at me from on high, and leaving me feeling like some small boy brought before his headmaster.

"No, it's not that. It's..." His expression clouded. "It's health, Marwood. You positively glow with it. You reek of fresh air and good living, and it simply won't do. I insist upon Bacchanalian reprobacy. Absolutely nothing else is acceptable."

"You haven't changed." I was amused, although I had long ago grown out of my own desire to indulge in our old habits. Withnail, it appeared, had not. It was clear that this was the cause of some displeasure for Mrs Cambridge, for she emitted a loud snort such that one might generally hear in a farmyard, before disappearing into whatever inner recesses of the house were her domain. At her departure Withnail let out a heavy sigh, and visibly relaxed.

"Thank goodness for that," he huffed, in a quite ridiculous stage whisper. "Her very presence sucks the joy from a room. I can feel her disapproval, turning the air to soup." He huffed out another sigh, and then, as though refreshed by our new seclusion, looked upon me anew. "Hmm. This really won't do. I implore you, Marwood. Imbibe something immediately; you really must."

"I can't drink like I used to, Withnail."

"Oh, nonsense. You only think that you can't, but really it's like riding a bicycle. Look at me! About to take the plunge into my forties, but still able to drink the way that I could when I was eighteen. One must approach these things with an air of positivity." I didn't feel it politic to suggest that he had had considerably more practice than I. Instead I clapped him warmly on the shoulder, and gave him a smile filled with very real warmth.

"You look good for forty, anyway," I told him. He harrumphed loudly, and fixed me with a steely glare.

"Good? I have no desire to look good. I desire to look debauched. Fabulously, catastrophically debauched. Why people must insist on telling me that I look good, I have no idea. I find it quite insulting." He turned sharply on his heel, and headed to the nearest bookshelf, where he produced a bottle of whisky from between two large and leather-bound tomes. "Fetch us a couple of glasses, old man. There should be a half dozen or so around hereabouts."

"More than half a dozen, I should say." Once I began to look for them, I could see that the room was quite festooned with the things, lined up in serried ranks and awaiting fulfilment. By the look of it Withnail was expecting half of London to come to his party, and was also expecting everybody to be thirsty. I collected a pair from nearby, and presented them as offerings to the lord of the manor. He received them with a nod, before promptly filling both to the brim.

"Here." He shoved one back into my hands, even as I was attempting to object. I hadn't drunk that much whisky in one night since a barely remembered party following the closing night of my first play. "We shall celebrate this night in the only way that befits it. The occasion of one's fortieth should be a show like no other. A halfway point, Marwood! Or perhaps even more than that. I may already have crept past the tipping point of the see-saw, and sent myself crashing down into the depths." For a moment he stared into his glass; then abruptly he smiled. "And what could be more fitting than that? I have lived my life in pursuit of the decadent and debauched. I revel in it. Where better for me than on some fast track to the darkness that awaits?"

"And hello you too," I said, half as a grumble. He smirked faintly, eyes abright with mockery.

"One must start as one means to go on, old man."

"Most people try to be a little happy about their birthdays," I pointed out. He barked a shout of laughter, before throwing back the entire glassful of whisky in one gigantic swallow.

"Happy? But I am happy! It's a party, and my great old friend has come to share it with me. What could possibly make me happier?" He leaned closer, as though afraid that we might be overheard. "Excepting that I might chase that dreadful ogre Mrs Cambridge away, that is. All the others have gone. When I inherited this place, it was absolutely teeming with retainers. Goodness knows how my father kept them all employed. I began chasing the wretches away from the very first week that I took possession. For months we positively haemorrhaged gardeners. It was magnificent." His eyes strayed to the doorway, through which Mrs Cambridge had made herself scarce just a few minutes before. "But her. She haunts the place, Marwood. She lurks in corners, and emerges from shadows just when one feels sure that one is alone. She hides my whisky, and fails to replenish the wine cellar. She calls it 'protecting me from myself', but I have unmasked her, dear boy. She is a gargoyle, come to plague me with her evil stare." He refilled his glass, and then eyed mine disapprovingly. "Marwood..."

"Oh. Sorry." I took a sip, anxious to be a dutiful guest. It was fine stuff; a single malt, well aged and robust, the sort of thing that Withnail had once struggled to save his welfare cheque to afford, whilst foregoing all but the most necessary food along the way. I could not help but think of those days now, when we had declared heating and electricity to be unnecessary luxuries, and had wandered from week to week in a morass of whisky and illicit smoke. It struck me then that, but for the grey hair, Withnail might almost still be standing in that flat – vastly more luxurious now, most certainly, but with that air of a life abandoned still so easy to discern. I began to feel a little uneasy, and perhaps also a little sad for my old friend.

"How many guests have you invited?" I asked, in an attempt to chase away some of these new misgivings. He frowned, sitting down on the arm of the nearest sofa, and stretching out his legs for better balance.

"Guests?"

"For the party." His expression cleared then, and he sipped from his whisky, all smiles and self-satisfaction.

"There are no guests. Why would I want to fill my house to the brim with sordid interlopers? Rowdy gaggles of humanity, poring all over the antiques, and drinking my booze? No, it's just the two of us. It was always just the two of us. Anybody else would get in the way."

"I see." It was a surprise, although not an unwelcome one. In truth I had been somewhat wary of the arrival of other guests; of the element of formality that such events require; and also, though it does me no credit, the necessity of sharing Withnail. In the past we had kept to each other's company through default. We had known almost nobody, we had had no money, and gradually we had become sequestered in that ghastly, draughty old building, with the rest of the world as sealed off from us as we were from them. We had become strangely co-dependent in our isolation, frequently at loggerheads, driven into bitter fights by misery or by close quarters – or, sometimes, by the chemicals that we all but lived on. And yet it had been an intense relationship, like no other. It would have been hard to have welcomed others into it now. Eager to do our reunion justice, I managed a more hearty swallow of whisky, before sitting down on the nearest sofa.

"Very well then, Withnail. Let's hear your story. I want to know where the last ten years have gone."

"Into a bottle, old man. Into a great, unending sea of bottles." He slid off the arm of the sofa, and sprawled opposite me, eyes bright with untold jokes. "Every night I wash away my sins in a Biblical deluge of whisky and red wine. I breakfast upon the finest sherry, and I lunch upon gin. Sloe gin, naturally. One must take a little fruit occasionally." His smile brightened, his eyes crinkling at the corners with a warmth that I recognised. There had always been a warmth to Withnail. Beneath the hail of expletives that had chased away many a caller; beneath the sharp acid with which he had often greeted the world – myself included – that twinkle of the eyes had never been too deeply buried. I could not help but smile back at him; although, with hindsight to guide me, perhaps I should have wondered even then just how wise it was to indulge him. Was I really so blinded by the memory of fellowship that I could not see that something was amiss? And yet I smiled, and I raised my glass, when it must surely have been apparent that alcohol was the last thing either of us should need.

Looking back, I suppose I was drinking to please him; to see that familiar, joyous smile work its magic upon his face, the way that I remembered from long ago. He was an imperfect man, yes, capable of cutting to the bone with words sharper and more deadly than any sword; but to see him smile was to see the world itself light up. As a naive innocent still in the virgin half of his twenties, drinking to please Withnail had seemed fun. It had become, with time, a bitter chore. To do it all again at thirty-five, with grey hair curling its way through the brown, and a weathering of little lines to prove to all that I was a boy no longer, it was more than merely stupid. But it was his smile, perhaps, or the gleam in his magnetic eyes. Perhaps even the lighting, dim enough to narrow the world down to just a few square feet of old-fashioned, Gothic-tinted room. There was nothing but darkness beyond the velvet-trimmed window; nothing but silence beyond our shrunken present. The life-lessons and consequences of the real world were a million miles away; or perhaps I just chose to ignore them. Fool that I am – fool that I had been, through those long, bittersweet days ten years before – I threw the whisky down in one, and waited for the second that would inevitably follow. There was never just one drink with Withnail. It had been one of the first things to draw me to him, all those aeons ago, and one of the first to drive me away.

We drank. We toasted acting, the profession that had brought us together, which I had followed and Withnail finally abandoned. He no longer had any need for even the pretence of a career, and the theatre would never know its loss. We toasted landlords, dragonesque furies of our old lives, from which we were now so blissfully free. We toasted cottages and rainclouds and mud – and dear Uncle Monty, eloped to Spain, it seemed, with a painter's apprentice. All toothy smiles and the smell of oil and turpentine, according to Withnail. We toasted agents – "Damnation upon that worthless, blood-sucking breed!" declared Withnail – and the purveyors of every brand of whisky we could name. We toasted wines, and we toasted with wines, snuck from the cellar like a pair of guilty children, for all that the cellar was Withnail's own, whispering together all the while of the dangers of being discovered by Mrs Cambridge. We toasted our first meeting, although neither of us could quite agree on when or where it had happened; and we toasted playwrights, in muddled, alphabetical succession, with twice the toasting when we reached M, for the marbled and questionable career of one lowly Marwood, Esq. The only time, I fear, that I shall ever find my name listed in such august company.

Night deepened. Mrs Cambridge came and went, drawing curtains, clearing away fallen or broken bottles, emptying Withnail's ashtray, and occasionally hovering, overseeing our doubtless ghastly display from the shadows at the door. When once I turned to look at her, at some pause in the revelry, I thought that I noticed some air of sadness about her, as though she were in mourning for something – but whatever it was, I was in no mood to give consideration to her just then. I was in no mood for anything save laughing at some ridiculous joke or memory; some tale dredged up by Withnail, holding court in the middle of the room. The years had vanished, swallowed whole by wine and whisky, and another yet more insidious poison besides: nostalgia. What desperate foolishness man is capable of, when he seeks to revisit that which is lost.

The clock, unseen in some other part of the house, was striking eleven when Withnail emptied another bottle of wine, and tossed its useless shell into some dark recess. He had drunk probably three times as much as myself, to some half the effect, but now even he was showing signs of maudlin brooding. He held his newly refilled glass aloft, and stared at it for so long that I wondered if he was falling asleep.

"To Danny," he slurred at last, and I raised my own glass, half-empty and uncooperative, in wobbly salute.

"Danny," I replied obediently. Another name from the past; another person unseen for ten years. It dragged my foggy thoughts to places best avoided, to memories of bad trips and worse nightmares; of a pulse rate hammering like a lop-sided express train, and tremoring fits drenched by deluges of paradoxical, ice-cold sweat. Even now I sometimes dream of those chemical highs. They haunt me like vengeful wraiths.

"You weren't at the funeral, were you?" For a second Withnail stared at me, his eyes sharp and bright as shards of glass. Then he shrugged. "Maybe I wasn't either. I don't remember. It was all too long ago."

"He's dead?" One becomes accustomed to death, after a time. Past the age of forty – and especially after fifty – one begins to lose one's friends and acquaintances at a constantly increasing rate, until get-togethers become mutual appreciation societies, where everybody congratulates one another for the mere feat of remaining alive. But back then it was still a novelty; something to be greeted with curiosity and alarm. When I had seen Danny last he had been in his usual fine health, rolling joints, and brazenly attempting to steal anything that we did not actively hide away.

"1972," said Withnail dourly, then frowned. "Or was it '73? No, it was '72, in the summer. When they found him, they said he'd been like that for weeks." A light of grim humour stole away a little of his gloom. "Turned to soup, and dripping through the floorboards. He probably did it on purpose, just to piss off his landlord."

"Good God." It was a horrible image, but the kind of thought that a brain can all too easily seize upon, especially in the dark, and especially when well-seasoned with additives. Withnail gave a short laugh, and drank down the rest of his wine with what seemed to be little enjoyment.

"Life and death, Marwood. In the midst of one, we are..." He waved an arm. "Ecetera. 'We are just stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' And numerous other such pearls."

"It was the drugs, I suppose?" I asked. Withnail shrugged.

"One assumes so. Chase the dragon for long enough, and you can hardly complain when it turns around and bites. But this is depressing talk. We must dismiss it immediately." He looked about, for all the world as though he had forgotten where he was. "I have a bottle of excellent port somewhere. I'm sure that I can't have drunk it all. And I did specify that there should beer, and cake. It is a birthday party after all." He exaled a lavish, heavy sigh that suggested at several lifetimes of sorrow. "One just can't get the staff, you know. They laze about below stairs, drink my wine, and then have the temerity to resign when I throw paperweights at them, or threaten them with great-grandpapa's bayonet. Ring the bell would you, Marwood? I want birthday cake, damn it."

"I'll go and look for it if you like." Ringing a bell for a servant is hardly my style, now or then, and whatever his desire to restore the party atmosphere, I was in no mood for cake myself. The news of Danny had shaken me, and I could feel a once familiar weight pressing down, threatening me with suffocation. Too much alcohol, marinating a brain that has never been ideally suited to it in the first place, mixed now with the kind of dark imaginings that my cursed subconscious so greatly adores. The walls of that cloistered room had begun to close in, and a change of scenery seemed an excellent idea. Withnail waved a hand in the air, as permission, agreement, or both, so after a little confusion in finding my feet, I made my unsteady way in search of Mrs Cambridge, and hopefully some fresh air. In the event I did not have to go far to find either. A soft gust of wind, sharply cold after the stuffy warmth of Withnail's parlour, drew me along the corridor, to where the dark shape of the housekeeper awaited, framed in the open front door. The light of a pale, cloud-troubled moon lent her outline a faint halo, but did little to illuminate anything else. The world looked as grey as my thoughts. Mrs Cambridge had apparently heard my footsteps, for she turned her head slightly, enough to acknowledge my presence without ceasing to stare into the night.

"If he's after the rest of whisky, he won't find it," she said. Her voice was polite enough, but there was a cool edge beneath it. I wasn't sure how best to respond.

"He's after birthday cake actually," I supplied at length, and after a further moment's silence she turned around. With the moon behind her, she was none too visible, but I could see what appeared to be a smile on her shadowed and indistinct face. As she came nearer, my vision improved, and I was sure; the stern expression of before had gone, and the corners of her eyes were crinkled by more than mere age. When she looked at me, however, the smile did not last long, vanishing quickly into the darkness.

"He always did like his cake," she said quietly. "Every birthday there always had to be a good cake."

"Have you known him long?" I asked. The cool air had eased my head a little, restoring some semblance of sobriety, if not exactly the real thing. She shrugged, with shoulders that seemed to bear the weight of many years.

"Since he was eleven," she said in the end – and at that her expression hardened. "And I know what you think. I know what everybody thinks. But he's so much more than you all realise. There's a fine brain behind all that alcohol. I've seen it. Sometimes, on a quiet evening..." She trailed off. "Never you mind. Cake, you say? I'll bring it along presently."

"Thank you." She expected me to leave, I could see – to go back to that endless succession of drinks; that foolish attempt to recapture what I had never really wanted in the first place. Fellowship aside, just then there was nothing I wanted less.

"Have you ever heard him quoting Shakespeare's sonnets?" I blurted out. Her sharp stare zeroed in upon me, and I felt a flush of an old nervousness, that I had thought banished by ten years on the stage. "Sometimes, in the old days, he used to recite poetry, or monologues. We didn't have a television, or a radio that worked, and some nights he'd just recite. Byron, Shelley, Keats. Jagger, if he was in the mood for it." I couldn't help but smile at the memory. Three gins for his nerves, and Withnail could command his stage all night, a billion lines of poetry all wrapped up in that remarkable head. Every great monologue ever written by the Bard, waiting in line to be presented to the world – or rather just to me, in a dark and shabby flat in some dog-eared corner of London. No grand theatre for Withnail; but then no grand theatre could ever have contained a performance by my illustrious friend.

"I hear him sometimes," she confirmed. "When he thinks there's nobody but the birds to hear him. Sometimes he'll throw open the windows, and give his Iago to the sparrows on the front lawn."

"I miss that." I was remembering suddenly all those impromptu recitals – tragedy, comedy and surrealism, often intertwined. Withnail, his Adam's apple bobbing like a boat on a stormy sea, a glass of something waving unsteadily in one hand, and a cigarette painting trails of smoke from the fingers of the other. In my hurry to escape the rapidly souring dog days of our relationship, I had purposefully forgotten all those good moments. Some of them I had not thought of at all these ten years past. So many laughs, so many evenings marvelling at a man who had seen so much more than I, and who knew so much more than I would ever know. Mrs Cambridge's smile ventured out again, though briefly.

"And yet you sit with him," she said quietly, "And you watch him rot his brain."

"I—" But she was turning already, disappearing back into the shadows that swathed the house. I caught a mutter as she left, but it was too indistinct to catch. I did not ask her to repeat it. Her words were a mystery, and yet at the same time somehow not. The tone of her voice had been unmistakable, leaving her sharp invective lingering behind long after she was gone. I had never before been scolded by unheard words. I could never have imagined how effective it can be.

The corridor was so quiet. Darkly quiet. Accusingly quiet. I turned about in indecision. Should I go after Mrs Cambridge? Return to Withnail? But the game of our reunion had lost its attraction, and the thought of him, alone in that room and still drinking, made the silence pile up around me all the more. Other things pointed their fingers at me in the darkness. The patches of peeling paint, not quite hidden by the darkness. Rugs that needed replacing. Scuffed doors, scratched floors, the thousand and one marks of a house falling to rack and ruin. And I thought of Withnail, alone in his parlour, with pale face and creased eyes, and my heart stabbed a hole through my chest. Nothing had changed. I had moved on, found a new life in a different world, but Withnail was still where I had left him. A ghost haunting his old life, lost in suffocating rooms and miserable bottles, and endlessly, helplessly drinking. And here was I, his oldest friend, tumbling out of the past to offer what? No help, certainly. All that I represented was encouragement to yet more of the same.

And yet, even addled by unfamiliar drink, and predisposed to melancholy though I have always been, I could not believe myself so very much to blame. I had been gone these ten years – I had been absent a full twenty-five years of Withnail's early life. I did not make him drink. I did not make him continue to drink. When I had walked out, seeking an escape from our squalid unity of desperate, downward spiral, I had not forced him to continue along that same, damning path. But I had not helped, said that wretched, morose little voice inside of me. I had left him to his shadows and his self-destructive tendencies. Without me, who had there been to hide the anti-freeze? To call a halt when the deluge of pills and booze became too frenzied? To check, often far, far into the small hours – and, I admit, as much through a natural inclination to panic as through genuine concern – that the chest beneath the cocoon of blankets still rose and fell? That the airway remained unobstructed? I felt a hollow sham of a friend.

It was slowly and blindly that I found my way back to Withnail. Mrs Cambridge had been and gone, and a magnificent, three-tiered chocolate cake stood upon the coffee table; a mass of icing spirals, and dark and white chocolate curls. Withnail snoozed beside it, draped over a sofa arm, his undone cravat slipping slowly down one shoulder, and a bottle of sherry dangling awkwardly from one hand. I rescued it, before it could drop altogether, and paint its acid signature across the clearly antique rug.

"That's it, drink up," mumbled Withnail, from somewhere between consciousness and oblivion. I set the bottle down beside the cake, and regarded him critically – truly critically – for the first time. He was still a man of striking appearance. The gallant, distinguished air remained, emphasised by vintage dress and natural, almost regal authority; that flair that had all but swept me off my feet as a young man, so adroitly carrying me along in its wake through so many ridiculous escapades and misadventures. But there were other things there too. Ten extra years of heavy drinking. Ten extra years of idling in closeted rooms, in resentment of a sun that offended those red-daubed eyes. It was as though I were seeing two sides of the same coin at the same time. There was the man that I knew – the man that I wanted to see – with lips quirked in an arrogant half-smile, greying hair upswept into a crest atop his proud head – and there was the other man who lurked beneath. The man whose pale and puffy face expressed vastly more articulate descriptions of indolence and excess than my pen could ever conjure. The man whose crumpled, expensive clothing matched so well the grand, but ruinous building in which he held court. I saw him as a perfect match for that tall, imposing house that I had seen in the twilight on the approach up the drive, with its three storey roof beset with sprawling, attacking vegetation, intent on pulling it down. As I looked at him his smile grew, and his head lolled quizzically to one side.

"Marwood, old man, you look as though you've seen a ghost. Do cheer up, this is supposed to be a party." His hand groped for the sherry bottle, before the gears in his molasses-trapped mind turned far enough to recall that I had moved it. "Speaking of which, neither one of us is drinking. I didn't throw this party to see it fizzle out before dawn. We must have some booze. Something with bubbles."

"Withnail..."

"Ferocious bubbles. The kind that wage war against one's gastric system. And confound it, there's supposed to be cake!" He sat upright abruptly, eyes shining with a wild light that I recognised all too well. "Mrs Cambridge! Call yourself a housekeeper?"

"The cake is here, Withnail." I was peacemaker again, soothing the unrest that forever roiled so close to the surface of his mercurial mind. "Here, have a slice. Have several." With luck it would soak up some of the alcohol. I was not at all sure that my stomach would thank me for a mound of sugar and chocolate atop the torrent of unquiet booze, but I was desperate. I needed something to distract Withnail; something that might stop him, even just for a while, from pickling himself further. I wanted to talk to him – how I had no idea – and some half-civilised chat over cake might just be the best opportunity. It was a plan, if nothing else. Withnail frowned, then nodded his restless head.

"A large piece," he said after a moment, and settled himself back more comfortably in his seat. "With lots of sprinkles."

"Is this a fortieth birthday or a fourth?" I couldn't help the tease, and for a moment faced the familiar, ferocious Withnail glare. A second later it abated, to be replaced with that old, charming smile.

"I'm the lord of the manor, old man. There's something to be said for it. When one can have one's every wish, it would be churlish to skimp on making them." I handed him a plate, bearing a slice of cake roughly the size of his head, and he settled down like a contented child, silver cake fork poised.

"Do you make wishes often?" I asked him, and sat down opposite with a rather smaller slice. My stomach was already objecting, but I ignored it. It was unlikely to recover its usual balance for several days, so we might just as well put a brave face on things, it and I, and weather on regardless.

"As often as possible." The fork dived into the cake, and a second later a vast chocolate mouthful vanished into the abyss. He spoke around it, the words chewed up alongside the cake, slurred as much by his beaming smile as by food and teeth. "And why not? I have obscene amounts of dosh, you know. Not like in the old days. I could probably buy out our old landlord thirty times over."

"And yet you live alone," I pointed out. "It's a beautiful house, but isn't it a bit big? Why is there no Mrs Withnail? No children to continue the line?"

"You're not eating your cake," he told me, somewhat balefully, and I obediently swallowed a little. It was exquisite, a marriage of chocolate, cream and pure fantasy that could only have been born in this grand and alien world. It would not have tasted anything near so remarkable elsewhere.

"You must get lonely," I persevered. He was silent for some half dozen further mouthfuls, before glancing up again, holding my gaze with a powerful scrutiny.

"Would you like to move in?" I honestly could not tell if he were joking or serious. He might well have been either. Several thoughts appeared simultaneously in my mind in response. I could keep an eye on him then. Maybe I could accomplish more as a man than I had as a boy. Maybe, with my greater experience, my greater confidence... but the ideas withered under the impossible weight of memory. The decay. The dreadful misery that stretched out between the periods of fun. The frustrations, the darkness, the depression, the hopelessness. All of the things that I had run away from, certain that it was a choice between escape and death. I shook my head, even before the rest of my mind could catch up.

"I have my own house, Withnail. A little place. I like it. I have..." I trailed off. His eyes narrowed, and he nodded once only.

"Another life, yes. A job. A career." He pronounced the words with a marked distaste, although for all that he was belittling the concept, to me he sounded more jealous than sarcastic. I smiled, brief memories of other times, other attempts to be encouraging, flitting through my mind.

"You could have a job too. I could ask around. I'm putting on a play myself in a month or two. Not one of my own this time, but I shall be directing it. I could—"

"I will not be babied, thank you." This time his voice was pure acid. "I shall win my own successes. The world shall accept me for who I am, or it shall not accept me at all." His temper seemed to cool a little, although his eyes retained their heat. "Besides, who can be bothered with auditions? Auditions and rehearsals, and all those blasted actors." The acid fizzed up once again. "And directors. No. It's not for me."

"You've never really given it a chance," I accused, and received a glare that might once have sent me scurrying for cover.

"You won't join me in my life," he said, a certain sulky ferocity to his words. "Why should I join you in yours?"

"I didn't mean it like that." But he had taken it that way, which was all that mattered. And was that a brave face, pressed into service beneath the belligerence? Had his offer to move in really been genuine, even heartfelt? But that was foolish – wishful even. Every man hopes to be needed, wanted. It could not possibly be that Withnail had yearned for my company these ten years gone; it surely could not be that I was his only friend? And yet I remembered the sharp tongue, the fabulous egotism, the wild flights of fancy and fits of terrible temper, and I wondered... Hastily I dismissed the thought, and the memories it had brought with it. The past was what had got me into this mess, with a brain tangled up in alcohol and yesterdays, stripping away ten years worth of growth and maturity. If I was to help Withnail, then I had to be the man of 1979, not the nervous, pulse-pounding wreck of before. I drew a breath.

"Withnail... don't you ever wonder? I mean, all of this. The house, the loneliness, the alcohol. Is it really what you want?"

"What I want?" He swallowed another huge mouthful of cake, and blinked at me through indignant, sugar-charged eyes. "What I want? I have more money than God. I can buy anything. Anyone." He gesticulated about with his mercifully empty cake fork, apparently indicating the extent of his personal world. "What more could I want?"

"A job," I suggested, painfully aware that I was beginning to test my weight upon suspect ice. Once again, his eyes narrowed.

"Employment is for the underclass. I have risen above such petty distractions."

"But you have talent. You could offer the world something. Make something of yourself. Be somebody."

"I am somebody." His narrow eyes became still narrower, chips of sharpened flint. "What is this? I didn't invite you here to have you try to reorganise my life. I am what I am. I live as I live."

"And it's killing you!" The words tumbled out in a careless rush; words that I had wanted to say since long before I had run away from him. Words bottled up through fear or lack of confidence, or just plain foolishness; a desire that he should remain my friend, perhaps, and not cast me aside as he had so many others. "Can't you see it? No man can live this way for long. And it's not fun, no matter how much you may think it is. What happens as you get older? As your brain and your body give out? We're not boys anymore. It's time to consider tomorrow."

"Oh, bugger tomorrow." With a toss of the head he dismissed the notion. "Who cares about tomorrow, when there's still today to enjoy?"

"But do you enjoy it? Really? How much of it do you even notice? The world is going by you, and you're missing it all. All that you see is the bottom of a bottle, or the carpet when you wake up face down on it. I know, Withnail. I've seen it all before."

"And you left." Quite suddenly his voice was like ice, old resentments chasing away the fragile cheer. "You can't walk back into my life after ten years without a word, and dictate how I live it. My life. My money, my booze, my liver and, damn it, my tomorrow. I do what I like."

"Withnail—"

"You've been talking to Mrs Cambridge." His eyes were dark and hot with suspicion, the old paranoia rising up like a malicious spirit. A pulse began to beat frenetically at his temple, and his voice rose in volume. "Are you a cuckoo in my nest, Marwood? You of all people, betraying my trust?"

"Oh don't be a fool. This isn't about trust, it's about care. Damn it, Withnail, it's about a lot more than that." I had run away from him, I had hated him, I had hidden from so much of it for so long – but sitting there now, in that dark and stuffy little room, reeking of sweat and alcohol, I was painfully conscious of something. In all this time, with all the joys and successes that my life had brought me, I had never had another friend to compare to Withnail. I cared for him, loved him even, in ways that I could no more define now than all those years ago. And I was thinking of Danny too, rotting undiscovered, his death a quiet, unrecognised tragedy. Would that, could that, ever be Withnail? The drugs were different, but that was all. Both remarkable men, capable of so much, but hell-bent upon their own destruction. And for what? I wanted to shake Withnail, to beat it into him even. To make him see that his life was supposed to be more than this – but my mouth never did have the same fluency as my pen. And besides, it would not work. I have yet to meet the creature that is more stubborn than Withnail. If he did not want to discuss this, then he would not; I knew it as surely as I knew what he would do next. He did not disappoint me. Rising slowly to his feet, he fetched the sherry bottle and drank straight from it – a long, determined draught that made his Adam's apple dance, and the bottle bob and sway. When he was done, he set the sherry down again, and wiped his amber-stained chin with a velvet wrist.

"The party," he declared, as proud as any king, "is over."

"Withnail—"

"Perhaps I shall see you at my fiftieth." He smiled, albeit coldly, and the heavy wrinkles around his eyes deepened. "I shall look forward to it. Probably."

"Withnail!" But he had turned away, and the conversation was done. Wretched, I rose to my feet. So that was how it was to be. I should have handled it better. I should have let the argument build slowly, instead of letting my emotions rush ahead. Perhaps there would have been no difference. He was Withnail. He never could be reasoned with like other men. "I'm sorry," I told him, but there was no response. "I'll call you in a day or two."

"If you like." He gave no indication that he cared. Perhaps he would, later. Perhaps instead I would be fated always to talk to Mrs Cambridge, or to an unanswered phone. I began to say something - looking back I have no recollection what - but whatever it was, clearly it was wrong. Withnail greeted it with a resolutely turned back, arms folded across his chest. He was not going to listen. Not to me, not now. Though I could not see his face, I knew exactly what expression it bore. Ten years had not robbed me of my memory; and just as surely they had not robbed him of his moods.

"I am sorry," I told him, just in case. Again there was no reaction. Should I persevere? Confront him directly? I have lived my life in avoidance of conflict, but there was more at stake here than my state of mind. I didn't move. Neither did he. The moment dragged on; tormented indecision confronted by an immoveable, determined wall of ice. As only to be expected, I broke first. Feeling worthless and miserable, I headed for the door.

The walk along the corridor felt like a dream; as though some alien, disconnected body were carrying my mind somewhere it had no wish to go. Floating somewhere above it all, my head pounded and spun. The last time I had walked out on Withnail I had been cold sober; desperate and afraid, but with a fierce determination behind tears I would not let fall. Now it was all guilt and madness, like tides rushing in to swallow me whole. Each step brought an end ever closer, and I could not think fast enough. What could I say that might fix this? Whatever it was, it should probably have been said twenty years ago, before we had even met. Withnail had to change himself – I could not force him. Yet ever since hearing the tale about Danny, I knew that I could not have kept quiet. For now Mrs Cambridge was there, to prevent so lonely and undiscovered a death, but for how long? She was not a young woman, and Withnail had already spoken of wanting to be rid of her; but who else was there besides her, save for me? And yet all that I could do was walk to the door, and hope that this was not the finishing of us.

Outside, an unreal silence enfolded me. I waited there, on that huge, besieged step, held, I think, by a ragged optimism, in hope of the sounds of pursuit. For Withnail to repent was unlikely, but his forgiveness might yet come; that old, regal summons, calling me back into his company. I heard nothing. Still I waited, all but oblivious to the world, until the cold December air at last forced itself into my unhappy thoughts. I had no idea how long I had been standing there, but it had been long enough, clearly. Feet crunching on weed-scattered gravel, I began to walk away.

There were no lights here. The darkness was near total, for the moon had long ago hidden its eyes. The sky was blackening with rainclouds, promising to raise the temperature, but soak all of London in the process. I barely noticed. The evening had held such promise. How could I have been such a fool? Ten years without a word passed between us, and then one night that might have rekindled everything; the promise of friendship returning and disappearing in the same disastrous night. Should I have kept quiet? Is the greater friend the one who says nothing, or the one who throws everything away?

I walked on, down the ragged drive with its wild, throttling plant life, towards a quiet, meandering road that I barely remembered. It would be a long walk home – very long, very dark and likely very wet. All of that seemed immaterial. An arctic blizzard could have held no terrors for me that night. Was this how Withnail had felt, the day that I had walked out on him? Laid low by rejection and the agony of self-doubt? It was hard to imagine anything shaking Withnail, and yet the ferocity of his words had suggested at pain; and pain that I had caused. Perhaps I should turn back? But the pattern of it all was not new to me. He would be in no mood for bridge-mending tonight. Maybe not for a long time to come.

My progress was still dreamlike; I was still more automaton than man. With no such sorrows of their own to slow them, the first drops of rain began to fall long before I reached the end of the drive. Big, heavy drops, soaking everything in an instant. Still I could not care, although the bitter parallel with another departure did not escape me. It always seems to end in rain for us. The thought made me look back, towards that shrouded, overgrown house; and I thought that I saw, in some unlit window, the dark shape of a tall, thin man staring out. But if my mind saw tears in the corners of his eyes, it was through imagination alone. I was too far away, and it was too dark for me to have seen anything but a blank, anonymous mask. But was it my mind also that brought Withnail's voice, tinted with bitterness and sorrow, pursuing me in the grim night air? Familiar words, passing cruel judgement on all that had come between us, or on our very lives themselves? Shelley's words, falling with the rain out of the night, and as sharp and as bleak as ever I hope to hear them:

That time is dead for ever, child,
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past,
And stare aghast
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.
I don't believe that my imagination would have chosen those words, that tone, that image of abject misery. It must, surely, have been Withnail himself that I had heard? Withnail, lost in shadows both real and metaphorical, hurling words like barbs out into the oblivious night? No, I could surely not have dreamt up that?

In truth of course, I shall probably never know.


The End


NB: Withnail's first name comes from Richard E Grant, although I have no idea how far that is supposed to be considered canon. Since the character was based on Bruce Robinson's friend Vivian MacKerrell, it's not too far a leap to consider that to be Withnail's real first name.

As to the other details - Withnail says in the film that he's a month away from turning thirty, and Danny says soon after that they're sixty days from the end of the year (1969), so I chose early December 1979 for Withnail's fortieth. Marwood's age isn't given in the film, but it is in the script. The stage directions say that he's twenty-five.

And I apologise to Bruce Robinson unreservedly!