Eddie

Eddie's ill.
It's rumoured that he has emphysema, although he says that it's just a reaction to the water in Czech, where he visits most summers. The last few times that i have seen him, he has been gaunt and grey, shrunken with beady bright eyes behind his glasses.

I guess that he's sixty, now, and looks his age. He's going out with a twenty-five year old woman - god knows how he does it.

When we first knew him, thirty years ago, he was a dashing, rich young man who was courting one of Moonface's flatmates. From then onwards, his life seems to have been a downward spiral. He was born into a family with money from brewing, and briefly attended Eton. (He says. Nothing's for sure with Eddie.) In his late twenties, he ran an advertising agency, told us that he was nearly a millionaire and drove fast cars. He sailed yachts, too.

Then he lost the agency, disappeared to Taunton and lived a strange life with money from un-named sources. He married, had three children, separated.

In the early eighties Eddie was sailing a yacht in the Channel with two of his nephews, his older brother's sons. A storm blew up so they tried to anchor off the Dorset coast. Eddie jumped ashore to moor the yacht, but the offshore rip was too strong and the boat went out to sea again. The yacht was wrecked, and Eddie's two nephews drowned. Eddie survived on-shore and - I suppose - lost his mind. He's never worked properly again, nor undertaken any activity demanding responsibility.

Since then he moved to Bristol, met and lived with a Czech woman with whom he had two more children, then left her under unpleasant circumstances and moved to Somerset again. He can be wonderful company, or totally unbearable. He's a friend and a burden, difficult when he is manic. I must see him again soon.