Una had offered to get some of those talking books. Derek Jacobi reading Great Expectations, that sort of thing. But listening wasn’t the same as reading. Not as intimate. And there was nothing wrong with her eyes. Her eyes were among the few things left to her that worked perfectly. Like her hair, which went on growing as if it hadn’t the slightest suspicion of what was happening in the rest of her body. She needed to speak to Una about the medication. The painkillers were not killing any more, and the stuff she was on now just constipated her, something she detested. She wanted the next level. Nepenthe? Or there was Oromorph, which she had been told tasted like whisky. That might do. But perhaps it would be wiser to speak directly to Brando. He was the power and the glory, the last word in it all. And he had promised to look in before the end of the week. Sit on the bed and chat. Then an odd minute or two of staring at the ceiling while he touched her chest and neck, saying how he hoped his hands weren’t cold, which they never were. Secret confab with Una downstairs. Milligrams of this, millilitres of that. Update the prognosis. Leave.

How had they managed it in the old days? In Dumas’ time? A maid tiptoeing out of the door with a chamber pot. Pomanders to cover the stinks. The doctors and apothecaries bringing their rubbish. Numbing people was an art form now. There were pain specialists in pain laboratories, and the World Health people had created an analgesic ‘ladder’ so that you were never just in pain, plain and simple. She had to keep a record for Una in a little red ‘Silverstone’ notebook. Sharp. A dull ache. Jabs. Waves. She had awarded herself seven once. Ten meant the worst you could imagine. You had to keep ten in reserve. Then, if you were lucky, they did for you, like Cousin Rose at Bransgore, a tumour the size of a football in her stomach, taking a syrup called Brompton’s cocktail and dying like a seventeen-year-old dope fiend, Lord knows what gurning at her from the shadows. But that was years ago. It would be much neater now. Some harmless-looking tablet you could swallow with a sip of tea. Something they kept in a special container, like a monstrance, in a cupboard to which Brando had the key.