2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “My God,” said Catherine.

  I put my arm around her shoulders and she relaxed into me. We stood like that for a long time, watching the giant steel skeleton pass through the piers and out to sea, and the strangeness of the moment made us forget, for a time, all that had just been said.

  §

  That night I went up the hill to Caerlyon, to break the news to Francis. The light in his shop was not on and the door, when I tried the handle, was locked. I walked across the cobbled courtyard to the entrance to Francis’s flat. The door was unlocked, so I opened it. Inside, everything was neat, tidy and austere. There were few ornaments or pictures. On one table I saw one of the few pictures Francis did possess. It was a photograph of him standing with his arms around Ed and Catherine. I had taken that photograph, one day when we went grouse-shooting on Ed’s moor at Blubberwick.

  I called out, “Francis?”

  There was no reply. I went to the foot of the stairs and called again, and thought I heard a faint reply. I hurried up the stairs and knocked on a closed door that I supposed was Francis’s bedroom. I had never been upstairs in his flat before.

  “Come in, dear boy,” said Francis’s voice. He sounded hoarse, and faint.

  I opened the door and put my head around it. Francis was lying, fully clothed, on his bed. The spaniel Campbell was curled up beside him on the bedspread. His bedroom was as neat and impersonal as the rooms downstairs. All of Francis’s life was next door, in the undercroft.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m just having a rest,” said Francis. His skin looked yellow, his face tired to death. “I’ll be down in twenty minutes. Go and select a bottle of wine from the cellar. It’s the only food I want nowadays, so find something that won’t disappoint me, and bring it up to the shop and open it. I’ll join you there.”

  “The keys?”

  “On the kitchen table, as far as I remember.”

  I went downstairs, found the keys and opened up the shop. There was no burglar alarm, and once you were in the shop, the door at the bottom of the stairs that went down to the undercroft was never locked. An enormous iron key stood in the lock of the undercroft door; it had rusted itself solid and was impossible to remove or turn. I thought to myself that the first thing I would do when all the wine became mine would be to put in a really first-class alarm system, CCTV, direct phone links to the police station and all the rest of it. A steel door and Chubb locks at the foot of the stairs wouldn’t be a bad idea either. What about the risk of fire? There would need to be a sprinkler system installed, and proper climate-control too.

  Then I remembered I had come to tell Francis that I couldn’t, after all, take on Caerlyon and buy his wine. I did not quite know how best to tell him. There probably was no good way to do it. Poor Francis: he looked frailer this afternoon than I had ever seen him. I went down the stairs into the undercroft and flicked on the lights. There, in the half-gloom, was one of the great collections of wine, perhaps one of the greatest that had ever been assembled. I remember Eck telling me, not long after I had first met Francis, that over the last thirty years Francis had sold off the last of the Black patrimony: two thousand acres of farmland, and ten farmhouses. Eck supposed most of the proceeds had either gone to pay gambling debts, or else had been spent on acquiring more wine. Eck said that Francis used to be part of a very fast set that played cards at Aspinalls or the Clermont. Most of them were a good deal richer than he was, and he had got seriously out of his depth. Then his parents had sent him away to Austria to live with Heini Carinthia, in order to get him away from London. It was Heini who had got Francis interested in wine.

  Now I, too, stood in the half-light, looking at the thousands of bottles, gleaming jewel-like from the racks, for Francis dusted his bottles all the time. The aisles of cases with their magic names spoke of warm hillsides in a far country: Latour-Martillac, Rauzan-Segla, Leoville Las Cases, L’Eglise-Clinet. The enchantment was all around me. I heard, in my mind, Francis whispering the names and vintages of this fabulous treasure, in which the sunlight of fifty years was captured in the grapes from a thousand vineyards: a secret world of experience few could understand and fewer would ever enjoy, and which could only ever be possessed by one person: me.

  I found a bottle I thought Francis might like and took it upstairs to open it. Francis was already in the shop, sitting in a chair.

  “You were quick,” I said.

  “You were slow,” he replied. “You’ve been down there at least half an hour, by my watch.”

  “Was I really?” I said, in surprise.

  “Yes. The undercroft can steal your time in that way. What have you brought up?” He took the bottle and looked at it and said, “Yes, I think I might have chosen that myself if I’d seen it. Decant it first, please.”

  I decanted the wine and poured two glasses out.

  “No second thoughts?” asked Francis. “Every day I expect to hear from you that you’ve changed your mind about Caerlyon. You know, I would forgive you in an instant if you did. I only hope you will forgive me for putting you in such an impossible position.”

  I was silent. I had finally come to the banks of the Rubicon. I had to cross it now, or turn aside for ever. I had come here to tell Francis I couldn’t help him; I couldn’t make the commitment he was asking from me. And now he himself had offered me, in the kindest and most tactful way possible, the way out that I needed. Francis said nothing, but sipped his wine while I sat and thought about it all over again.

  I thought about the store of wine below. How would I feel the day the sale was announced? I would creep to the back of the room and be the underbidder on one or two small parcels of wine, while the dealers and the collectors bid it all out of sight. For what: to repay a bank loan on a house nobody wanted?

  “Francis,” I said at last, “I will admit I’ve been having second thoughts. It’s a big change to my life, and a huge responsibility. But I’m going to go through with it. Don’t ask me about it again. There’s no need. I’ve tried to walk away from what you have offered me. I can’t.”

  Francis smiled, with a touch of sadness. “Wilberforce, I’d no right to ask you to do any of this, not even if you had been a member of my own family. But I’m so relieved to hear you say you will do it. It is such a responsibility to ask you to accept. Once it is all yours, you will find that it is a question of whether you own the wine, or the wine owns you. Now we shall open a second bottle, to celebrate. What were we drinking just now? A Pomerol? Go and bring up a bottle of Château La Fleur de Gay. There are some 19805 in the rack on the left-hand side, about halfway down, top row.”

  This was the first time I had seen Francis drink more than a glass or two. We drank the Pomerol and, later, half a bottle of Château Gazin. I drove home very late, and very slowly.

  §

  A day or two later I received a postcard from Ed Simmonds. It said, “I’m having one or two people in for drinks at seven p.m. this Thursday night. I’d be very disappointed if you did not come.” Of course I rang up and left a message saying that I would be there.

  On Thursday evening after work I drove across country to Hartlepool Hall. It was about five miles from where Catherine lived, but altogether grander and larger, with an ornate lodge at the drive entrance and stone griffins holding emblazoned shields up on the top of each gate pillar. I had been there often before, but now I realised it was several weeks since Ed had invited me there, when once I used to be in and out of the place. The bulk of the hall was picked out against the night sky by a few lights here and there. I wondered which of them the old marquess’s bedroom was, and whether he still clung to a thread of life. I hadn’t heard to the contrary.

  Although it was after seven, I saw to my surprise that, apart from Ed’s Land Cruiser, there were no other cars there yet. I parked and went up the steps. Horace, the butler, opened the hall door for me and showed me into the library where a tray with a couple of bottles and a few
glasses showed it was going to be a very small party indeed. Ed was sitting on a fender beside the fire, reading the papers. The library was an enormous, gloomy room full of leather-bound volumes. Some of the shelves housed glass cages with stuffed owls and other creatures in them, to break up the monotony of the rows of books.

  “Oh, good evening, Wilberforce,” said Ed. “So glad you could make it.” He was wearing jeans and rather an old jumper with its elbows out: even for Ed, he was dressed somewhat informally for a drinks party.

  “Am I the first?” I asked, as Ed poured me a glass of white wine.

  “Well, Eck and Annabel are looking in a bit later, so it’s just me for the moment, I’m afraid.” Ed looked a bit awkward as he said this.

  I wondered if he had asked them for supper, and was finding it hard to explain why I hadn’t been included. I lifted my glass and sipped it, and, not quite looking at Ed, I said, “Is Catherine coming?”

  “Well, no, she’s not, just yet. To tell the truth, Wilberforce, I’ve got you here under false pretences; not that it isn’t always a joy to see your cheerful face. I wanted a word with you.” Ed stood up as he said this and looked me in the eye, and now there was no longer anything diffident about his manner.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Really,” said Ed. He put his glass carefully down on a table. “In point of fact, it’s about Catherine I wanted to have that word.”

  “What about Catherine?” I asked.

  “You know the two of us have been going out together for a very long time.”

  “Of course I do,” I replied.

  Ed’s voice became sharper, and a little louder: “You know we’re going to get married, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t. Congratulations. When’s the happy day?”

  Ed shook his head in irritation. “No date has been fixed. But the general idea is, that Catherine and I are going to marry and I should think it will be sooner rather than later.”

  I wondered if Ed had proposed to Catherine again since I had last seen her a day or two ago.

  Then he said, “However, there’s a snag.”

  “A snag?”

  “Don’t pretend not to understand me, Wilberforce. You’ve been seeing Catherine behind my back and you’ve muddled her up. She’s still very young, and she hasn’t known many men apart from me, and she thinks she likes you just because you’re someone new.”

  “I’m not exactly new, Ed,” I objected; “it’s been well over a year since we all first met.”

  Ed gave me a hard smile that was almost contemptuous. I had seen it before once or twice, when someone or something made him forget to be the engaging, unselfconscious young man he normally appeared to be. “Believe me, Wilberforce, a year or two is new—very new. You’ve wandered into our lives, and we’ve befriended you. Now I find Francis is leaving you all his wine, and you want to take Catherine away from me, and presumably set up house with her at Caerlyon. It’s a joke.”

  I felt myself going red. This sneer, this implication I had insinuated myself into their lives, was very distasteful to me. Ed could scarcely have found a more hurtful thing to say to me.

  “I’m sorry if Catherine thinks she likes me more than you think she ought to. I don’t know what else to say about it. If that’s true, all I can say is that these things happen.”

  “I want,” said Ed, almost grinding the words out between his teeth, “I want you to stop seeing her.”

  “I’m not seeing her—not in any regular way.”

  “She says you’ve been with her three times in the last fortnight. What do you call that?”

  “I don’t call it anything. I go about my life, and Catherine goes about hers. If we meet, it’s rather up to her, wouldn’t you say?”

  I don’t know if Ed was contemplating physical violence. There certainly was a look in his eye, and I might have stepped back, only there was a sofa behind me and I would have ended up sitting down rather abruptly. Just then, Horace came in and announced the arrival of Mr Chetwode-Talbot and Miss Gazebee, and then withdrew again.

  Eck came in to the room, beaming all over his red face. “Ed!” he said. “Wilberforce! The delightful Annabel will be here in a moment, only she’s wandered off somewhere with Horace.”

  “Eck,” said Ed. “There’s wine, or there’s anything else.”

  “Whisky and soda, please, Ed.”

  Ed went to another table where a decanter of whisky and a siphon stood, and poured a whisky and splashed some soda into it. While he was doing this Eck looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. The tension in the room had diminished as soon as Eck had come in, but it didn’t take a psychic to know that something was wrong.

  Ed came back with a large tumbler and handed it to Eck. Just then Annabel came in. She saw me, and came and kissed me briefly on the cheek, then went and embraced Ed with rather more enthusiasm.

  More drink was supplied. I wondered how soon I could leave without causing comment.

  “How’s your pa?” Eck asked Ed.

  “Not making much sense.”

  “Poor old boy,” said Annabel. “It must be ghastly for him. He was always such an active man.”

  “That’s what all the girls used to say,” said Eck; “not such a bad epitaph, really.”

  Ed looked amused. “You wouldn’t say that, Eck, if my mother had still been around.”

  “I wouldn’t have said anything at all,” replied Eck. “She used to terrify me. Remember that party you had when you were eighteen, when she caught me passage-creeping?”

  There was laughter. I felt excluded. They were sharing jokes that I could not understand, remembering days when I had been sitting at home alone and trying to teach myself how to write computer programs, trying to find a future for myself.

  I put down my glass. “Ed, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to push along.”

  “But we’ve only just come,” said Annabel. “That’s terribly rude.”

  “Aren’t you staying for supper?” asked Eck. “And where’s Catherine?” I think Eck was being mischievous. He enjoyed stirring the pot.

  “Catherine will be along a little later,” said Ed. “Wilberforce has already turned down my supper invitation, haven’t you, Wilberforce?”

  “Ed, you’re always more than kind, but I really have to go.”

  Eck smiled at me and raised his glass in my direction: “Wilberforce, you work too hard. Money, money, money.”

  I said nothing. I smiled and said, “Ed, thank you for the drink. Good to catch up. I’ll see you soon, I expect.”

  “You’ll see yourself out,” said Ed. “I’ve no idea where Horace is. He’s probably heating up supper—its cook’s night off.”

  He turned and said something to Eck and Annabel as I left, and there was an explosion of laughter as I went out of the library. Horace was in the hall, after all. He opened the door for me and said, “Good night, Mr Wilberforce. We will see you again here soon, I expect.”

  I was always a favourite with Horace, for some reason.

  FOUR

  I opened a second bottle, this time of Château Smith-Lafite. We were both sitting on top of boxes of wine in the undercroft. Francis was not drinking much wine. Since the evening when we had celebrated my affirmation that I would look after Caerlyon and its contents after his death, he had become even more frugal than ever. He sipped half a glass of this, half a glass of that. But he encouraged me to sample as many different wines as I could manage, and as I drank them he told me what he knew about them: which wine critic had said what, what score the wines had been given, how the wines were made, which years were good and which less good; sometimes he would describe the grower’s own knowledge of wine, his house and his family, the colour of the earth in the vineyard, the way it looked on a sunny day.

  If I ever showed signs of not wanting to finish a bottle I had started to drink—and at first I very often felt that two-thirds of a bottle was far more than I could manage—Francis would simply say, “Don’t waste
it. Think of the love that went into making it.”

  After a while it was less of a problem for me; I developed a tolerance for drinking the wine, even a certain fondness.

  “You know,” said Francis, “I don’t know how much time I’ve got left now. Perhaps I have another month or two. I fear that this will be one of the last times we come down to the undercroft together. The stairs are becoming too much for me.”

  I poured us both a glass of wine. Francis now walked everywhere with a stick, and he had persuaded someone to carry his bed down from the upstairs level of the flat to the dining room, where a makeshift bedroom had been made up. Fortunately there was a small bathroom on the ground floor.

  “Don’t say that,” I told him.

  “My dear boy, one has to face facts. The comfort is, that you are learning so much about wine in these hours you very kindly give up to me that we are coming to a point where there is not much more that I can tell you.”

  “I am sure I will never know half of what you know,” I said.

  Francis did not reply. He looked around the great vaulted space, with its rows and columns of bottled treasure, and said, “You will find that, no matter how much wine you take from here, it never seems to make any difference. I have collected so much, and sold so little.”

  “It sounds the ideal cellar,” I said.