BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE
At 5 pm on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, Isobel Weber died much as she lived: dressed in high fashion, sipping champagne and surrounded by no one.
Turn the clock back two years, and I’m sitting with her in the Kronenhalle restaurant, Zurich, struggling to make sense of what she’s saying. Her lips are moving, but they’ve just had about 5 vials of filler pumped into them.
What use, I am moved to ask myself, does a wheelchair-bound sexagenarian have for lips like those? I suppose younger women do it to swell out their CVs for the job that men’s wives no longer perform. But Isobel?
The only flutes her lips wrap around are ones filled with champagne.
It is only when I notice that all eyes in the room are turned towards these lips that I realise their true purpose. Everything Isobel does, I am reminded, is an exercise in attention.
‘They must remember me from when Henrik and I used to come here,’ she croaks with a sort of wistful pride, pouting her lips like a Napoleon fish.
For them to remember her, they’d have to recognise her, and there is little left of Isobel’s face that remains recognisably natural. It is a monstrous mismatch of lines and incongruously taut skin, upon which age spots gather, betraying any pretence to youth the surgeries might otherwise give. The looks on the diners’ faces – ones of mingled pity and terror – don’t suggest that they recognise her, but rather that they’ve never seen anything like her.
Stars who refuse to fade often burst into supernovas of ill-conceived interventions: lips plumped like tumours and eyes pulled tightly into perma-startled stares.
Isobel is no different.
She was once one of Zurich’s most celebrated socialites, but her husband left a decade ago and took with him all her confidence, self-esteem and sanity. There’s no holding back time although their connubial villa on Lake Lucerne now stands as a mausoleum for their departed marriage. Bouquets of roses lie fossilised in the hallway. A tinsel tree lurches limply over the lounge, beneath it the unopened presents from their last Christmas.
Such is the depth of Isobel’s loneliness that the only man who knows the intimacy of her body is her surgeon, who no doubt sees in her the same quality to which her ex-husband was so attracted: her mother’s fortune.
I know all this because Isobel likes to interest the public in her private misery. She repeats her story to me every time we meet, each time telling it as if it were the first. There is a line in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier which reads: ‘It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost forever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole.’ This aptly describes every encounter I have had with Isobel. The only times I see any flashes of life in her are when she’s talking about cutting her own one short.
Isobel tours suicide clinics and critiques them as if she were penning some write-up for the FT’s How to Spend It supplement. The first clinic didn’t have a view of the lake; the second one did, but poor-quality curtains spoiled it; the third one was no good because she had a dreadful suspicion that its staff were Turkish – you’d think she was searching for somewhere to check into rather than check out from.
That dinner in the Kronenhalle was the last one I shared with Isobel. I don’t remember much of it, only her parting words:
‘If you have to go, then go Swiss’.
I still see her in some of my friends and acquaintances who are travelling towards ruin without a map; partying for partying’s sake, consuming drink and drugs to enhance or endure the occasion.
Still, Isobel charted out her journey with vivid precision. She knew and was conscious of the direction in which she was heading. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I received the call telling me she had finally arrived at her destination.
‘If you have to go, then go Swiss’ – I had always hoped, in knowing vain, she was referring to the airline.
James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine.