2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “I suppose it must have been,” I said. “How was I to know any different?”

  The food arrived, so I didn’t have to make any further comment about my childhood, a subject that always made me uncomfortable on the very few occasions someone asked me about it. The past was walled off. My childhood had been bricked up somewhere deep inside me.

  Catherine had a first forkful of chicken balti. “Mmm,” she said. “This is absolutely delicious. Oh God, give me some water.”

  Catherine became preoccupied with her food. She ate with enthusiasm. I watched her enjoying it.

  “If I lived nearer,” she said between forkfuls, “I’d come here every night.”

  “You’ve eaten Indian food before.”

  “Not often. Ed likes Italian food. But he doesn’t really like going out at all. He likes very long evenings with lots of his friends in chilly dining rooms, where the men all wear nice warm smoking jackets and the girls freeze to death in their frocks. That’s the sort of evening Ed likes.” She raised her face from her plate and stared at me again, with a questioning look I had seen once before on her face, as if she was seeing me for the first time.

  I began to wonder about Eck’s remark earlier in the evening. Ed and Catherine were, so far as I knew, engaged. Now she spoke of him like some familiar thing, such as a black labrador, which had failed to come up to expectations.

  “And what made you become a computer expert?” asked Catherine. “Ed says you’re a genius with computers.”

  “I liked doing sums at school,” I said. “Sums are like a landscape to me. I see patterns in numbers that other people can’t see, or take a long time to see. That’s how I became involved in software in the end. It’s a language of numbers. I happen to be good at it.” It was a landscape I had gone to live in a long time ago.

  I could see Catherine did not really understand what I was trying to tell her, but the reply intrigued her. “It must be so brilliant to be really good at something,” she said. “No one else I know is any good at anything or, if they are, they would never admit it.”

  After a while Catherine started forking in the food at a slower rate than before, and finally put her fork down on the side of the plate, and with a comical little explosion of breath said, “I can’t finish it. I’ve tried, and it was wonderful, but I think I might explode if I ate another thing.”

  “That was the starter,” I said.

  She stared at me again and then laughed out loud. “Wilber-force! You mustn’t joke! I was really alarmed, for a moment.”

  “Nobody ever finishes Indian food,” I reassured her. “That’s the whole point. There’s always just a bit more than you can manage.”

  After a moment I asked, “Is everything all right between you and Ed?”

  “Of course it’s all right. Why do you ask?”

  I shook my head, regretting that I had spoken. “I don’t know. Just something to say, I suppose. It’s none of my business, anyway.”

  “The words ‘all right’ define my relationship with Ed,” said Catherine with sudden seriousness. “We’ve been going out for so long I can’t remember when we weren’t. If I’ve ever gone out with anyone else, it was so long ago I can’t think who it was.”

  “Why don’t you get married?”

  “I suppose we will, some day. We need to become engaged, first.”

  I was surprised by this. “I thought you were engaged. I’d always assumed you were. Everybody seems to think so.”

  “Well then, we must be, mustn’t we? Only it’s never got as far as the columns of the Daily Telegraph.”

  The waiter brought the bill; I paid, and we stood up to go. As I put my hand out to pick up my credit card from the plate on the table, Catherine suddenly reached down and put her hand over mine and said, “Thank you, Wilberforce. That was a very special treat. I’ve had such fun. Thank you so much for asking me.” Then her hand was gone and the waiter was helping her on with her coat.

  Outside, I walked her to her car. It was a clear night. I glanced up at the sky and saw that the stars were out: thousands upon thousands of points of light glittering in the dark. We reached her car and Catherine turned to face me. We stood looking at each other, without speaking. The questioning look was back on her face, as if she was searching my own expression for some clue as to what would happen next.

  Then I said, “Can we do this again some time, if you’re ever at a loose end?”

  “I don’t think we ought. Ed might take it the wrong way.”

  “I’d like to, though.”

  Catherine smiled then, and said, “If you promised to tell me your first name, I might think about it.”

  “I couldn’t do that. It’s a trade secret.”

  “Oh well, there you are then.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and before I could return the kiss, she had slipped away and was sitting in her car. The lights came on, the engine revved briefly, and then she was gone, with a wave of her hand.

  I walked down the hill to where the Range Rover was parked. What an unexpected evening: full of surprises. I wondered what Ed would think of it all, when he heard about it. Probably nothing: Ed knew he could trust me. We had been friends for over a year now. We saw a lot of each other—Ed, Catherine and me. If Ed couldn’t trust me, I thought, I’d like to know who he could trust. But could I trust myself?

  TWO

  The next day in the office Andy said to me, as I came in, “Good party last night?”

  “Party? Oh, the wine-tasting: yes, it was fun.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  “The awful thing is, I forgot to.”

  It was true. I of all people ought to have bought some of Francis’s wine. Never mind: I would buy a- few cases from him this evening, when I went up the hill.

  “Then it must have been a good party,” said Andy, smiling. He turned back to his computer and I went on to my office and switched everything on.

  I looked at my watch. It was half past eight in the morning. Andy would have been here since seven, or maybe seven thirty at the latest. A minute or two later, as I was sitting at my computer checking emails, he came in with two cups of coffee and handed one to me, then sat on the corner of my desk.

  “I talked to Christopher Templeton last night, after you left.”

  The last three words hung in the air for a moment, like the hint of an accusation.

  “And…?”

  “And…and Christopher says, that if we want to float the company next year we need to start doing something about it now. There’s a queue, and we need to be in it. That means appointing advisers, making a plan, setting a budget.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Yes, right. Wilberforce, we can’t keep putting this off. We need to start thinking about acquisitions. Not big ones, but small ones, and lots of them. We need to raise capital to do that.”

  “Our cash flow is strong enough, isn’t it?”

  “It’s excellent, but it isn’t enough to fund an acquisition programme.”

  We had had these conversations many times in the last few months. I sipped my coffee and wondered why we needed to have another.

  “We need to keep talking about this, Wilberforce. I know you hate it. Your body language isn’t hard to read. But we can’t stay where we are. A business of our size either gets bigger slowly, or smaller quickly.”

  “I don’t hate talking about it,” I lied; “it’s just I have a lot to do this morning.”

  “Give more work to Steve,” said Andy. Steve was head of programming, but he wasn’t as good as I was. “Talk to me for a while. This is real life, not a program. Wilberforce, we’ve built a great business here, but we’re still only a ten-million-a-year company. To survive in our market we need to be three or four times as big. Now, we’ve got the track record to float the business. If we float we can raise new capital and start buying some of our smaller competitors. You know, we’ve both done quite well so far, and you’ve never had bad advice from me yet. Trust
me. If we float, I know who we could buy and how much it might cost. We could be seriously rich in a year or two.”

  I swivelled my chair to face Andy.

  “There,” he said. “Now I’ve got your attention.” He smiled again, his eyes crinkling at the corners. But it was a hard smile.

  “Andy, I don’t know that I want to go on working twelve hours a day for the next ten years. I wouldn’t mind taking life a little easier.”

  “Then step up to become chairman. Let me do the work. Make me managing director. It’s virtually what my job is nowadays. I know ten customers for every one you ever meet. I’m not getting at you, but it’s true. Step up to chairman, go part-time, collect the dividends, and spend more time with your smart friends at the top of the hill.” Andy laughed as he said this, to take the sting out of his words.

  “What’s wrong with my friends? You haven’t met them.”

  “I’m sure they’re absolute sweethearts. I’m sorry I mentioned them. I don’t know why I did, except that you seem to spend as much time up there as you used to down here. Let’s not get off the point. I would like you to agree that I should start laying down a proper plan for floating this business on the stock market.”

  For a moment I said nothing. The truth was, Andy was right in one thing: we had to do something—either put the business up for sale or float it. It was exactly the wrong size: too big to be a niche business, too small to compete with the big players.

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Andy shook his head. “Do,” he said, and left my office. We barely spoke again for the rest of the day. I hadn’t yet told Andy about the letter I had in my desk at home from an investment bank based in the City, asking me if I’d consider selling the business to an unnamed trade buyer.

  §

  That evening I drove up the hill again to Caerlyon. The lane was quiet and empty; no lights were on in the big house; the Gateshead Community Outreach Centre showed no more signs of activity than it ever did. The light was on in the yard above the entrance to Francis’s shop, and I parked my car in the yard and went inside. The lights were on in the shop, but Francis was not in sight.

  “Anybody at home?” I called.

  From some distance, I heard Francis’s reply: “Wilberforce, if that’s you, come on downstairs to the undercroft. If it isn’t you, bugger off.”

  I went downstairs. Francis had a clipboard with a sheaf of dog-eared bits of paper attached to it. His spectacles were on the end of his nose and he was checking the contents of a rack of wine and marking it off from a list on the clipboard. Campbell was sitting near him on top of a case of wine, licking a paw.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I asked. I had never known Francis do anything like a stock-take before. He relied on his extraordinary memory, which could lead him unerringly to a far corner of the undercroft, where a case of Château Pessac-Leognan would be buried under half a dozen cases of other wines. He looked up, his face lighting with a smile as he saw me. As I looked at his thin figure standing beneath the vaulted arches of the undercroft, the recesses of the stone ceiling hidden in darkness, the whole vast, gloomy, mysterious space illuminated only by weak yellow bulbs of light in metal sconces at intervals along the walls, I thought there was something spectral about him. It was as if he were condemned for ever to wander between the pillars of wooden cases, along the racks, into the strange side chapels protected by locked grilles, where the rarest wines were.

  “I’m doing a valuation,” he said. “I’ve been at it for days, on and off. But I’m getting there.”

  “Why are you doing a valuation?” I asked. A cold sense of dread filled me as I spoke. Surely Francis was not going to sell his wine. Yet such a thing was very likely: Francis was hard up, he had no other visible means of support except for his wine merchant’s business, and I could not imagine he made much money from that. Almost no one ever visited the shop. Very few people even knew it existed. He never advertised; he never sent around catalogues or even lists of the wines he had for sale. A few loyal friends of means, such as Ed Simmonds or Teddy Shildon, would buy a couple of dozen cases of good wine from him a year. Lately I had begun to do the same. But I knew from personal experience that Francis hated selling the wine. He liked to drink it in moderation, he enjoyed talking about it if he could find anyone to listen to him, but above all he liked to look at it. He liked to walk among the columns of wine cases, recalling past vintages, forgotten fragrances of some noble claret whose name and year he saw stencilled on the side of a case, or picking up a bottle from one of the racks, reading from the label a story few other men would have read, for Francis had told me that in his time he had visited most of the vineyards from which he bought wine: he might recall the firm handshake of this grower, the cellars of another.

  All this brought in Francis less money than I imagined even he spent. He lived frugally in a two-bedroom flat at the back of his former family home, Caerlyon House. He never entertained except with a bottle or two of wine in his shop, or the occasional kitchen supper in the flat for a handful of friends; he never appeared to buy new clothes, although he was always well turned out in his dress. I think he received a peppercorn rent for the rest of Caerlyon House, but he once told me he had virtually given it away to the Council on a ninety-nine-year lease, in return for them taking on its upkeep. If he had any other income, I did not know where it came from.

  “Come upstairs. I want to talk to you.” We left the undercroft and went upstairs to the shop. Francis went to the door and flipped over the ‘Open’ sign, to read ‘Closed’, then locked the door. “There,” he said, as if he had just prevented, in the nick of time, a stream of customers from entering the shop. “That should give us peace and quiet.”

  On his old wooden desk was a decanter of claret and glasses. He filled two and handed me one. I sipped the wine.

  “Well?” asked Francis.

  “Is it a Margaux?”

  “Very good, Wilberforce. Very good indeed. Right first time. You wouldn’t care to say which one, would you?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not ready yet,” I told him.

  “You’re not far off. It’s a Château Lascombes. Not everyone would have guessed that. You don’t give yourself enough credit. You really are showing signs of knowing about wine. Now, tell me what the year is.”

  That was easier. I knew Francis would have opened a classic vintage, and would not have tested me on some obscure year when the wine was thin and uninteresting. I sipped the wine again. Its taste was smoky and flowery at the same time.

  “Nineteen eighty-two?” I asked.

  “In the bull again, Wilberforce. Well done. It is a 1982, one of the last really great wines they ever made at Lascombes in the 19805.” Then he sipped his glass at last, and motioned to me to sit down in one of the chairs next to his desk. He pulled up another for himself and sat down opposite me.

  “Why were you doing a valuation?” I asked again.

  Francis put his glass down on the desk and steepled his fingers together and looked at me. “Because I want to know how much it’s worth.”

  “You’re not thinking of selling up, are you?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking of doing,” said Francis. His gaze was steady on me, watching my reaction.

  It couldn’t have been hard to read. I was horrified. “But…Francis…you can’t…you mustn’t. What would you do? Where would you live?”

  Francis shook his head, as if these questions were unimportant. Then he asked, “How’s your business going, Wilberforce?”

  “Very well,” I said. Francis had asked me a few times in the past months about my business. I don’t know that he understood what it was I did for a living. He was fascinated by the idea that wealth could be created from the abstractions of software programs.

  “You know, the last member of my family to make any real money was my great-grandfather,” said Francis. “He did it by employing a lot of imported Welshmen to dig coal out of
the ground. We had a colliery a few miles to the south of here—a deep seam. The only people who were prepared to go that deep were from the Welsh valleys. My great-grandfather had the energy and the imagination to make it all happen, and he made a good deal of money. When he had made his pile, in his later years, he bought his own steam yacht and spent a considerable amount of time chugging around the Isle of Wight and sitting on deck smoking cigars.”

  I smiled. Francis was a fund of stories of the glories of a bygone age. I could tell that the image of his grandfather, sitting on the deck of his yacht with a rug over his knees and smoking a Hoyo, was more real to him than the idea of me making money from software. I don’t think Francis ever quite grasped what ‘software’ was.

  “You’re a clever man, Wilberforce,” said Francis. “You create wealth too, but as far as I can tell, it all comes out of your own head, like a musician or a playwright.”

  “It isn’t just me,” I said. “We have a lot of very talented people working for us, these days.”

  “I dare say. I suppose they are there because of you. You make money, Wilberforce, and I have always spent money. That’s the difference between us.”

  “You’ve built up all this collection of wine,” I said. “That counts for a lot.”

  Francis stood up, so I stood up too, and followed him as he went down the steps again into the undercroft. He switched on the lights and walked down an avenue of wooden cases into a space in the centre, a point from which, like Oxford Circus, other avenues of cases radiated away into the darkness. He stood in the centre and said, “Yes, I have my wine, but what will I do with it? I have no children.” He spread his arms wide to show the extent of his collection, standing tall and thin at the centre of his kingdom. The gloom of the cellar was hardly dispelled by the weak light bulbs, and in the uncertain light the number of cases looked vast. One could never tell how far they really extended.

  “But you must feel pleased with what you have achieved,” I said. I thought Francis’s collection might be the greatest in Europe—or in the world. At least, that is what I felt whenever I went down there.