2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  At last the police stopped asking me questions. I made an arrangement to go and formally identify Catherine’s body later that day, but for now I could leave.

  I took a taxi back to Caerlyon. I had been given the contents of the Range Rover before I left the hospital, including the keys to the flat at Caerlyon, the undercroft and the London flat. Everything was surprisingly intact. The only two casualties of the crash were Catherine herself and the car, which was a write-off for insurance purposes. When I returned to the flat at Caerlyon, I opened it up and brought the bags in. I unpacked mine again and was starting to unpack Catherine’s when I realised there was no point. So I sat on the bed with my head in my hands, feeling numb. It was very cold. I don’t know how long I sat there, but after a while I became conscious that the phone was ringing, and had been for some while. I got up from the bed and went and answered it.

  “Wilberforce, are you all right?” asked Eck.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I’m so dreadfully sorry about Catherine,” he said.

  “Yes, it is very sad, isn’t it?”

  “Can you face seeing me if I come over?”

  I thought about this and said, “I’m not really feeling very sociable at the moment.”

  Eck made a sound like clearing his throat and said, “No, of course not. But the Plenders have asked me to come and talk to you about the arrangements.”

  “What arrangements?”

  “For Catherine’s funeral,” Eck told me. So I told him that of course he could come, and he offered to drive me afterwards to the hospital to identify Catherine.

  “You’d be better off having company for that visit,” Eck told me. “It won’t be easy for you.”

  About an hour later, he arrived. Whenever Eck arrived anywhere, it was as if someone had opened a door on a windy day. He brought with him laughter, activity, vitality; but when Eck came to my flat this time, he crept in like a ghost. There were dark rings under his eyes and he looked as if he might have been crying. Of course, Eck had known Catherine since they were both small children. All the same I felt jealous that he had been grieving for her, whilst I had simply been sitting on my bed with my head in my hands, empty of all thought or feeling.

  We talked for a while about the arrangements for Catherine’s funeral. Eck was going to take care of matters for the Plenders, and he just wanted me to agree to the proposals, which were that the funeral should be held as soon as possible, it should be as small as possible and as simple a service as possible. I agreed to it all, and then offered Eck a glass of wine. For the first time ever, he refused.

  “I’m not really in the mood,” he said. “But you have one. You probably need one.”

  This reminded me of what Catherine had told me the night before, about Eck telling her parents that I drank too much. “No,” I said. “I don’t feel like drinking anything.”

  Eck raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “Shall we go to the hospital now?” I asked.

  “Before we do,” said Eck, turning away from me and fiddling with something on the kitchen table, “can you just tell me something?”

  “If I can.”

  He had picked up Catherine’s handbag without thinking. He saw me looking at him and put the handbag down on the table again. “How on earth did the car come off the road like that? Catherine was a very good driver. The police said it almost did a right-angled turn. How did that happen?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t remember what happened,” I told him. “I banged my head fairly early on. Catherine was driving. Only she could tell us what happened, but she’s dead now.”

  Eck looked at me, waiting for me to say something more. When I did not, he gave a slight shake of his head and then said, “Well, we might as well get it over with.”

  Then he drove me to the hospital where Catherine waited for us. We drove there in silence. Eck seemed to have nothing more to say to me after his last brief question, and my answer. At the hospital they were efficient, and helpful. The registrar came out to meet us and took us to the room where Catherine was laid out waiting for me, wrapped in a winding sheet and stored in a mortuary cabinet. When we came into the mortuary the air was chill. A porter slid a box out from the cabinet, on to an autopsy table. Inside the box was Catherine.

  “The head injuries were quite bad,” said the registrar. “You will probably find this rather distressing. Take your time. There’s a chair here if you want to sit down.” Then the registrar removed the sheet that covered Catherine’s head.

  Eck turned his face away and walked across the room, as far away from Catherine as he could get without leaving the mortuary.

  “That’s not Catherine,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked the registrar. “Isn’t that Mrs Wilberforce?”

  I shook my head. “It is her, I know. It’s just not how I want to remember her.”

  “Those injuries were caused when she went through the windscreen,” said the registrar. “I’m very sorry.” He quickly covered up Catherine’s head again.

  The night my wife went through the windscreen, I thought.

  §

  So I went to another funeral, but this time it was for Catherine, not Francis. I was still obliged to use my crutches when the day of the funeral came. I sat in a pew near the front of the church, on my own. The Plenders were huddled together with friends and relations on the other side of the aisle. I do not remember much of the service. There were few mourners: the Plenders had restricted the funeral to immediate family and close friends. I saw Teddy Shildon, Eck, Annabel Gazebee and Ed Hartlepool. When Ed saw me hobbling in, he turned his head to stare at me. The hatred in his look was like a blow. I was feeling awful, anyway. Since the night Catherine had gone through the windscreen I had not drunk a drop of wine. I longed to drink a glass or two; I longed to go down into the undercroft to find solace amongst its store. But some feeling prevented me: I wanted Catherine to know that I was not an alcoholic; that I could drink wine, or leave it alone. Now, deprived of the sustenance that the undercroft could offer I felt a nervous excitement within me that prevented me from concentrating on anything. I could hardly take in the fact that I was attending my own wife’s funeral.

  When someone in their sixties is gathered in, as Francis had been the year before, the feeling is—or the feeling had been, at his funeral—that, untimely though his death was, he had probably managed to have his fair share of the good things that were going. I remember at Francis’s service people put their heart into the hymns, wanting to give their friend the best of send-offs. After the burial service, everyone had stood about telling jokes about Francis and his wine collection, sharing affectionate memories of him. This was different. There was an irreducible bleakness about Catherine’s service. There was the fact: she was just over twenty-five, and she was dead. Catherine had been taken from me before we had really begun our lives together. I felt oppressed and angry. It was so unfair.

  The prayers and the hymns proceeded, but there were not enough people in the church to give the singing any substance. The words of the service and the music of the hymns fell listlessly on my ears. The very air in the church seemed thin and dead, attenuating every sound. Then the service was over, and the pall-bearers took the coffin out. We straggled outside after them, towards the grave. There was a space around me. Nobody talked to me, or even looked at me.

  Outside it was a cold December day. A fine drizzle fell from a grey sky. The mourners stood beside the grave as the priest read the last words of the service and this time, unlike at Francis’s funeral, none of them stopped afterwards to talki or reminisce about Catherine, or about anything else. Everyone fled the churchyard as soon as they could. No one stopped to say any last word to me. It was as if I was invisible.

  I was starting to make my way back to the other side of the church, where a taxi was waiting for me, when Ed Hartlepool walked up to me. He was wearing a black overcoat over a dark pin-striped suit, a white shirt and a bla
ck tie. His face was as white as his shirt, his eyes red-rimmed. His fair hair, always unruly, made him look as if he had been struck by lightning. His cheeks bore the tracks of dried tears. I had seen him briefly when I had entered the church, but he had only looked at me and not spoken. Now he strode up to me and stared me full in the face. His eyes glittered; his normally cheerful, open face looked gaunt and much older. He said, “You killed her, Wilberforce. I know the police aren’t going to do anything about it, but Catherine would never have driven off the road like that. I don’t know what you did, but you killed her.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. “Ed, that’s so unfair. Catherine was driving. It wasn’t my fault.”

  He was quivering with anger, and grief. “It’s lucky for you that you are on crutches,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and left.

  The vicar came up to me, looking concerned, and asked me if I was all right. I thanked him and he said, “So sorry for your loss, Mr Wilberforce. She was a very special girl.”

  I managed to make my way around the church and down the path to the road where my taxi waited. The Plenders had said they did not feel up to asking anyone back to their house. There was to be no wake, no gathering of any kind. Catherine had been killed in a car accident, she had been buried, and now everyone was driving away. When I came close to where my taxi was parked, I saw that the Plenders were still standing by their car, and when they saw me, Helen Plender came up. I wondered if, at last, she would say something, or in some way acknowledge our shared grief.

  She stood in front of me, her face more aged than I remembered it, bitter and birdlike. She said, “Mr Wilberforce?”

  “Mrs Plender,” I said, “I’m glad to have this chance of saying how deeply sorry I am—”

  She cut me off. “I haven’t come to hear how sorry you are. Nothing you could ever say will make the slightest difference to how I feel about you. I came to ask you if you would be kind enough to return my daughter’s jewellery, as soon as possible. They are all valuable family pieces, and should be returned to us immediately.” Then she turned to go back to the car.

  I lost my temper. I shouted after her, “It was your fault, Mrs Plender! If you hadn’t quarrelled with Catherine, she would never have wanted to go straight back to London. None of this needed to happen. It was your fault, not mine!”

  The upright black-covered figure paused and quivered for a moment, but Helen Plender did not turn her head or reply.

  Then the vicar was beside me, his arm around me as I started to try and swing on my crutches after Catherine’s mother. “Please, Mr Wilberforce. Remember where you are, and what we have just done. We must respect the dead, and their living relations. Let me help you to your taxi.”

  I allowed him to shepherd me back to the waiting car, and help me inside it. “Thank you, vicar,” I said. I couldn’t think what else I ought to say. “Thank you for a lovely service.”

  Then the taxi took me back to Caerlyon.

  §

  I remained a day or two longer at Caerlyon after the funeral, until I felt mobile enough to travel. Then I took the train back to London. When I returned to the flat in Half Moon Street, a sense of loss caught up with me at last. I don’t know how it was, but I was convinced that when I turned the key in the latch, and put the bags down in the hall, I would hear Catherine’s voice from upstairs, calling, “Is that you, darling? Where on earth have you been?” And I would reply, “What do you mean, where on earth have I been? Where on earth have you been?”

  Catherine was not anywhere on earth; her remains were in the earth, but she herself was gone. I stood in the hallway and, my senses sharpened by grief, it seemed to me I could smell her perfume in the air and hear the rustle of her last movements a fortnight ago, as she had gone about the flat packing up her things for the journey north. In truth, the flat was silent. No one was there now but me. No one would ever be there now but me. I went into the kitchen and sat there for a long time, listening to the dripping of a tap. It must have been dripping like that since we went away. I could not find the energy to stand up and go and turn it off.

  It would have been better if I could have wept, but for some reason I remained dry-eyed. The tears would not come.

  I went to the wine rack next to the sink, picked up a bottle of Bordeaux and looked at it without much interest. It was a Château Sociando-Mallet 1986. It should be just about ready to drink. I opened it, took a glass from the cupboard and polished it. Then I put the glass down on the table and sat and waited while I gave the wine time to breathe. I said to myself, in a voice very like Catherine’s, “Did I die for this? Does my death mean nothing has changed? Are you just going to climb straight back inside a bottle?”

  I sat there, staring at the glass and the bottle, and did not move. The day wore on, but I did not reach for the bottle or leave my chair. I sat looking at the wine and wondering about its taste, and wondering if I should at least pour out an inch into the glass and swirl it enough to release its fragrance. But I did not move.

  At five o’clock I went to the phone and rang my doctor friend, Colin Holman. It took a while to get through to him, but I waited whilst he finished speaking to a patient. When he came on the line his voice was friendly, jolly and professional.

  “Hello, Wilberforce. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “And how’s your lovely wife?”

  “She’s dead, unfortunately.”

  There was a silence and then Colin said in a different tone, “Oh my God, Wilberforce. How terrible! What happened?”

  “A car crash,” I told him, without going into further details.

  “What a ghastly thing to happen,” said Colin. “I can’t believe it. And what about you? Were you hurt?”

  “I was very lucky,” I told him. “Just a few cuts, a bruised knee, and a cracked rib.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” asked Colin.

  “As a matter of fact, Colin,” I told him, “there is. I’m about to start drinking again. I’ve been trying not to all day. It’s not that I’m a serious drinker. I just love wine. But I’m worried that if I start again now, I will forget to stop.”

  “Are you drinking at the moment?” asked Colin.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Then don’t start,” he told me. “I’ve two more appointments but I can be free in an hour. I imagine you’re at the flat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay there. Don’t have a drink. Don’t go out. I’ll be with you as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you, Colin,” I said, with a sense of relief. “You’re a real friend. I’ll wait for you; take as much time as you like—I’m not going to go anywhere.”

  “And don’t have a drink,” he repeated.

  “No, I won’t,” I promised. We hung up.

  Colin had not been a close friend at university, but now I was in trouble, he was there for me. Why weren’t there more people like that in the world? Where was Eck? Where was Ed Hartlepool? Where were any of them—when I really needed someone? It was funny how people turned out.

  The other thing was, Colin was an extremely good doctor. If there was anything wrong with me, he would sort it out. I had nothing to worry about. If I had been drinking a little more than I should have been—and now I admitted to myself that there were times when my enthusiasm for good Bordeaux had perhaps been excessive—Colin would find a cure for it all. There must be some pills you could give people. I would be able to drink just the right amount of wine, and never too much. Colin would fix that for me. I had no need to worry about it any longer.

  I thought that Catherine would understand now if, finally, I poured myself a glass of wine. Colin would be here soon, and he would sort me out. The Sociando-Mallet had been open for several hours now: it would be beginning to slowly oxidise and die. I wondered if it would be noticeable. I poured myself a glass and tasted it, but the wine was good.

  The wine was very good.

  FOU
R

  By the time Colin arrived at the flat I had drunk the bottle of Sociando-Mallet, another bottle of a Margaux, and I had just started on a third bottle, of a St Emilion. There was nothing much he could do for me that night except help me to bed. He left a note for me asking me to call on him at his consulting rooms near Belgrave Square when I awoke. I found the note when I came downstairs the next morning. There was no food in the flat, so I drank a glass of white wine and went to call on Colin.

  The waiting room where Colin worked was done up like a drawing room, with stiff, uncomfortable chairs, and rows of this month’s glossy magazines laid out on a low glass table. I picked up a copy of Country Life and turned its pages without reading anything, while I waited for Colin to find a gap between his other patients’ appointments.

  When I went in to see him, he was sitting behind a large partner’s desk with a thin brown folder open in front of him. He waved at me to sit down in the chair opposite.

  “Morning, old boy,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  Colin himself looked healthy, and much younger than the reflection of myself I had seen in the mirror that morning. “I’m fine,” I assured him.

  “You were into your third bottle by the time I arrived. Do you often drink that much wine, that quickly?”

  “No,” I said. Then, because I thought it was important to be accurate if Colin were to help me, I added, “I mean, yes, I do sometimes drink a few bottles, but I usually take more time to appreciate it.”

  “I see,” said Colin, and made a note.

  “I was a bit stressed out yesterday,” I explained.

  “Quite. I quite understand. All the same, three bottles is a lot of wine for a single person in a single day, let alone in a couple of hours.”