Something in him had this survival instinct."All of which is vividly described in her book: "As she lowered her head, her hair fell across her face and hid the involuntary grimace she made as she caught the smell of him: stale, sickly, milky like the old His skin was loose, stretched and robbed of its elasticity. "It sounds a cruel thing to say, but Brett took such a long time to die We'd think he was slipping away and then he'd get better. 'This is the wrong way round,' his mother would say, 'he should be burying me.' The next five years were spent with him being sick and in and out of hospital with pneumonia We would split up, come back together, split up again. She returned to England.Brett, meanwhile, had been forced to give up his job as an architect in LA and return to his mother's home in Michigan "I went back and forth," says Bosley. "A man who baths every day - ooh, I liked that! To me, he was just extraordinary, gifted and beautiful I think he was profoundly ashamed of his homosexuality. But I was only 21 and, at that age, you believe that people can change."On his 30th birthday, in 1987, he told her he had the Aids virus "He was standing in front of the mirror, shaving.

We were going to the races for the day, in Golden Gate Fields, and there I was chirping away, putting my make-up on, talking about betting And I just thought how unfair it was. There he was, a talented, lovely man, having to confront his death so young."Bosley reckons he probably contracted the disease in the early Eighties, when no one knew much about Aids At that time there were rumours, but no hard medical facts. In New York they were calling it the gay man's plague, while in Britain, the scare stories didn't begin until around 1986.She married him anyway, in California, in February 1988 She was 22. By October, he was beginning to succumb to the virus and she was in trouble with the Rough Guides The editor was writing things like "This is bollocks You are illiterate" across her copy. One day he rang her and said either she came home and worked under supervision or they would cancel the contract. "They were advertising for someone to write about California A friend told me about the ad.