2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  At last I had someone to talk to; someone to kick ideas around with; someone who would mind the shop if I had to travel to see clients. I could even contemplate having a day or two off, though I don’t remember that I took much advantage of that. But the best part of it was knowing there was someone who would watch my back; someone who would say, “Don’t worry about that, Wilberforce, I’ll take care of it,” and mean it. Better than all of that, in those moments of elation when we won a major contract, Andy and I would stand in the middle of the office grinning at each other, and we would shout at each other, “Yes!! They’ve gone for it!” That was better than anything I had ever felt when I was on my own; and within a year the business had accelerated and lifted off, and we could have afforded to pay ourselves almost anything we cared to. Andy stayed; a year later he was my finance director and we were running a multi-million-pound business.

  Now we had sales of more than ten million pounds a year and annual growth of twenty per cent. We employed a hundred people, and Andy was talking about floating the business on the stock market and raising money to acquire some of those competitors who had frightened me to death a few years ago. Andy’s appetite for making money, and more money, was limitless. His tolerance for long hours of work grew, whereas mine did not. What I loved was writing the programs for our software, and solving problems for our major customers. The cascade of money that all this effort generated had at first seemed a wonder; now it seemed like a distraction, wondering what to do with it all. I had other interests in my life now. I had new friends, new interests. I wanted time to explore these new worlds, to get to know these new people.

  So when I left work before Andy, and knew that he was still in the office, talking on the phone, or closing off the month-end accounts, or writing a huge spreadsheet to model the next deal, I felt uneasy that I was somehow letting him down.

  I would look up and see that his office light was still on, as were half a dozen others: Andy’s team didn’t like to leave work before its boss. I would hesitate, almost turn and head back to put in another hour of work. Then some sweet scent from the hills to the west would reach me, or reach me in my imagination, and I would get into the Range Rover, head away from the office and find the little road that wound up the side of the valley away from the great conurbation, up towards the upland fells upon the edge of which was Caerlyon.

  That evening I had promised to go to a wine-tasting that Francis had invited me to. I didn’t really need any special invitation: I often called in on him, expected or not, and he always seemed pleased when I did. Last time I had been in his shop he had said, “Make an effort to look in on Thursday night, Wilberforce. I’m giving a wine-tasting. There won’t be anything particularly worth drinking, but I need to make an effort to sell a few cases to be able to pay my bills. There will be a lot of people guzzling cheap wine and talking at the tops of their voices for a couple of hours. It would be a comfort to me if you could be there, and when we get rid of them we’ll share a bottle of something decent. For God’s sake don’t risk drinking any of the wine I’ve opened for tasting.”

  I had wondered, when I accepted, if Ed and Catherine would be there.

  I felt the now familiar sense of release as I drove up the little winding road to the head of the valley, leaving the lights of the modern world behind. It was February, and there was still a glimmer of wintry light on the horizon. As I approached the large, rambling, grey-stone house on the edge of the moors, the sense of liberation that I always felt, as I drove up that winding road, turned to something closer to elation. Caerlyon had become a secret world that I had been given the key to enter. I told no one about it—not my foster-parents; not even Andy. It was a world I did not want to share: Francis; Francis’s friends, some of whom were now my friends; Francis’s wine.

  When I turned into the narrow lane that led to the back courtyard of the house where Francis had his shop, and where the main entrance to the undercroft was, I realised I wasn’t going to be able to park anywhere near the house. The courtyard was already full of parked cars, and there were two or three pulled up on the grass verge of the lane. I parked the Range Rover behind an old Bentley and walked down the lane past an Aston Martin, a Ferrari, then past the cars of those of Francis’s friends who had plenty of land and not much cash: a very old Subaru with a roll of wire netting in the back; what looked like the very first ever model of the Land Rover Discovery, so covered in mud as to be almost unrecognisable; a Morris Traveller with wooden coachwork, which was the pride and joy of one of Francis’s grander friends, the Earl of Shildon.

  Inside the shop there was a buzz of talk, and a crowd of men in dark suits or tweeds, and one or two women. I saw Catherine instantly, but could not spot Ed in the crowd. At the centre of the gathering was a long wooden trestle table with open bottles of wine, with numbers on the bottles and tasting notes on the table in front of them; rows of glasses; basins for spitting the wine out into; and plates of bits of cheese.

  “Well done, dear boy,” murmured Francis in my ear. I turned and greeted him. He was thinner than ever and it made him look taller. He was wearing a cardigan over an open-necked check shirt, and corduroy trousers. His clothes seemed to hang from him more than usual. Although he was the only man in the room apart from me not wearing a tie, he still looked more elegant and self-assured than anyone else there. His normally tanned face looked pale. The last few times I had seen Francis he had not looked especially well.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him, bending down to fondle the ears of Campbell, his golden cocker spaniel.

  “I’m as well as can be expected, with this crowd milling around. You’d better have a drink of something, otherwise it will look odd. People will begin to suspect the truth about the wine. Try number 27; it’s a harmless Sauvignon. And remember, you are expected to stay on when they all go.”

  He led me to the trestle table, poured me a glass of white wine, and then was collared by the Earl of Shildon who said, “Now then, Francis, what’s this bloody awful muck you’re serving us? Did you get it at a house-clearance sale?”

  I turned away and looked for someone I knew. Eck was standing nearby. ‘Eck’ was short for Hector Chetwode-Talbot, an ex-Guards officer who, as far as I could tell, did absolutely nothing all day long except attend any event where there was an excuse for a drink. This ranged from following the hounds in the hunting season, attending every drinks party that anyone ever gave and, when absolutely desperate, coming to wine-tastings such as this one. He was of medium height, very upright, wearing an ancient pinstripe suit. Tufts of ginger hair stood on each side of an otherwise bald head. His face was reddened by drink and fresh air, the two main components of his existence as far as I knew, setting off very blue eyes.

  “Evening, Eck,” I said.

  “Wilberforce! Good God! They’ve let you out of your office early. Or have you been sacked?”

  “Not so far. How are you?”

  “Can’t get near the drink, there’s such a scrum around the table. I’ve been here twenty minutes and all I’ve had is one glass of very moderate claret. There’s never anything decent at Francis’s wine tastings. Either he keeps all the good stuff for himself, or he hasn’t got any in the first place.”

  “If he offered you good wine, would you buy it?”

  “Never had the opportunity to form a view on that, old boy. Let’s make a sortie.” He charged into the crowd and, not knowing what else to do, I followed him. He took my half-full glass, without being asked to, chucked its contents into one of the spittoons, and came back with two glasses of red wine.

  “There,” he said, “as far as I can tell that’s the most expensive wine Francis has condescended to open for us tonight.” He tasted it. “Mmm. Might do for a lunch party for not particularly close friends.”

  “What are you up to, Eck?”

  “In February? Not much, now the shooting season has ended. I follow the hunt when I can. Might go skiing, if anyone asks.” Eck was always asked to a
nything that was going.

  “Eck, is Ed Simmonds here?”

  “I haven’t seen Ed. His bird is here, though.” Eck always used words like ‘bird’ that had been only just still current ten years previously, when he was a young officer going to deb dances.

  “Catherine?”

  “Yes, Catherine. I heard things weren’t going too well there.”

  “Really, Eck? You know everything.”

  He looked at me consideringly and I felt uncomfortable. “But then, if they weren’t, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Come off it, Wilberforce. Ah, there’s Teddy Shildon. He owes me money.” Eck turned away from me without much ceremony, took a sidestep and brought his arm around the Earl of Shildon’s broad, tweed-clad shoulders, shouting in his ear as he did so, “Cough up, Teddy. Twenty-five quid you owe me for that horse of yours that lost at Thirsk.”

  I turned away and stood by myself, clutching my glass of red wine. I couldn’r see anyone else I parricularly wanred to talk to, unless it was Catherine. She was surrounded by a circle of men, taking advantage of Ed Simmonds’s absence to try to flirt with her. I did not care to join in. I considered Eck’s remark for a moment. Was that what people were saying—that I was something more to Catherine than a friend, and something less to Ed than a friend should be?

  Then someone else came and talked to me, breaking into that disquieting train of thought, and not much later I saw Francis start to make shooing noises with outstretched arms, like a farmer trying to manoeuvre a flock of sheep through a gate. The party started to break up. Within fifteen minutes, without much fuss, Francis had got rid of everyone, even Eck—everyone, that is, except Catherine, who now came up to greet me and kiss me on the cheek.

  “Wilberforce,” she said. “I saw you in the crowd, but you didn’t bother to come and rescue me from those dull people, did you?”

  “You didn’t look as if you needed rescuing,” I told her.

  “Ah, but I did.”

  Francis came towards us. He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling. Campbell pattered behind him. “Thank God that’s over,” he said.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “I suppose I sold fifty or sixty cases of wine.”

  “They were all terribly rude about it,” said Catherine.

  “They always are, aren’t they? But they know they have to keep me going, otherwise where would they get the decent wine from, when they want it? Most of them don’t know the difference anyway; they just like to have the right labels on the bottles that appear on their dining tables.”

  Francis turned aside, went to his desk and picked up a bottle of red Bordeaux. It had already been opened. “Now, try a glass of proper wine,” he said.

  It was a Cissac, I think. I was still learning about wine. Francis poured a glass for Catherine and me, and handed them to us, then poured one for himself. He raised his glass towards us, as if he were proposing a toast to the two of us. Perhaps he was—I don’t know. We sipped the wine: it was delicious, tasting of blackberries and other notes too subtle for me to identify.

  “Where’s Ed tonight?” Francis asked Catherine.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere,” she replied, and bent her face towards her glass again. I couldn’t make out her expression, or read anything into the indifference in her voice, but it was the first time I had ever seen Catherine anywhere without Ed.

  Francis made no comment, his face set in its usual immobile, ironic cast. Then he said, “Wilberforce, can you come and see me tomorrow? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Of course,” I said, wondering what that could be. I often came and sat and talked to Francis these days, about his wine or his misspent youth. This sounded particular.

  “You can talk now, if you like,” said Catherine. “I was just going.” She sipped again at her glass, and then put it down.

  “No, Catherine, don’t rush at your wine like that,” said Francis. “Stay and enjoy it, and then you can both go, and I’m going to clear up and go to bed. I’m shattered from pouring out drinks for all these people.”

  We stayed for quarter of an hour, three friends talking about not much, and enjoying the wine. Francis poured us another glass each, and then, when we had drunk that, we said goodnight to him and stepped out into the cool evening. It was quite dark now. Catherine was looking for her car keys in her handbag under the light outside Francis’s shop when I said, without knowing beforehand that I was going to speak at all, “What are you doing now?”

  She looked up in surprise, and brushed her hair away from her face. “Home to scrambled eggs, I suppose.”

  “Come and have a bite to eat with me. There’s quite a good little Indian restaurant down in the valley, about ten minutes from here.”

  There was a pause, not longer than a heartbeat, before Catherine said, “All right: that would be lovely. Shall I follow you down the hill?”

  “That would be best.”

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting opposite each other in the cramped space of Al Diwan, eating poppadums and sipping water. Neither of us felt like drinking more wine.

  “I haven’t had Indian food for years,” said Catherine.

  I had Indian food about twice a week, because I couldn’t be bothered to cook, and because Al Diwan was five minutes from the office, friendly, and cheap. I could imagine that Ed and Catherine would not often find themselves in places like this.

  “This is such fun,” she said, in a more animated tone of voice than she had used so far that evening. “What a charming little place! How on earth did you find it?”

  “It’s more or less the office canteen,” I told her. “Andy and I come here sometimes.”

  “Who’s Andy?”

  “Andy is my right-hand man at the office. He’s the finance director., I’d be lost without him: as a matter of fact, it was he that brought me here first.”

  “Why haven’t we met him?” asked Catherine. She picked up her poppadum and bit into it, showing her relative inexperience of Indian food, as it fragmented into about a dozen pieces all over the table.

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “I’m not used to these things,” she explained. “But why haven’t we met Andy?” She spoke as if we were all members of a close family, and I had sinned by failing to bring him to Caerlyon to be inspected.

  “Work friend, I suppose.” I felt awful as I said that: someone was either a friend, or they were not a friend—weren’t they?

  “So are we all just your play friends? Am I your play friend?”

  The waiter arrived just then, so I did not have to answer this difficult question. I ordered something for both of us and then said, “I hope you’ll like it.”

  “I’m bound to like it. This is such fun, Wilberforce. Wilberforce, why does no one ever call you by your first name? Or is Wilberforce your first name?”

  “No, it’s my family name—that is, my parents’ name,” I explained.

  “Are your parents not the same thing as your family, Wilberforce? You are very mysterious. I’m so glad Ed isn’t here. I’ve always wanted to ask you about yourself, ever since I met you, but Ed doesn’t approve of girls asking lots of questions.”

  I couldn’t decide whether she was serious or not. Catherine was one of those people for whom irony was the most habitual mode of expression, and it was often very hard to tell when she was joking, and when she was not.

  “No, they are my foster-parents. I don’t know who my natural parents were.”

  Catherine stared, and then put her hand to her mouth, in a parody of someone being astonished. Perhaps she was. Then she clapped her hands together and said, “I bet Francis is your natural father, Wilberforce! We all say how he has more or less adopted you. I mean, I’ve known Francis since I was about three. He started out in the wine trade selling wine to my father and Ed’s. Eck is his g
odson. But you—you’re his favourite now. He adores you.”

  I felt uncomfortable, as if she was suggesting I had gatecrashed a party.

  She must have caught something in my expression because she said quickly, “No—you think I’m joking. I mean it. You’re really like the son he never had. You care more about his wine than anyone else he knows. You’re always up there. Every time I’ve been to Caerlyon in the last few months, you’ve been there. It does Francis so much good to have someone who’s interested in his beloved wine, someone he can really talk to; someone who’s intelligent enough for him. The rest of us are terribly thick by Francis’s standards, you know.”

  “Francis has been very kind to me,” I said. My voice sounded stiff even to me.

  “But Wilberforce, what were your foster-parents like? Do you still see them?”

  “My father—my foster-father—is dead now. He was a university lecturer. He spent most of the last years of his life writing a book about Bismarck. It was never published.”

  “That’s what he did. What was he like?”

  I struggled to find an answer to this. The truth was that my foster-father had never had any time for me. As far as I could work it out, when I grew to an age where one began to look for explanations of why life was like it was, he had never really liked me. My foster-mother couldn’t have children. She’d wanted to adopt a child, and given my foster-father no peace until he’d let her.

  “He was a bit remote.”

  “And your foster-mother?”

  “She was rather quiet. She watched television a lot.”

  It was true. My foster-mother had become disenchanted with the idea of babies at quite an early stage—certainly for as long as I could remember. She had always seemed to live in a world spent in front of the televison, or reading Catherine Cookson novels. I don’t know what she did before she had a television set to watch; she probably gazed at the spin-dryer.

  “It sounds a terribly lonely childhood, Wilberforce. Was it?”