2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “Sometimes I wonder whether it hasn’t been a waste of my life, collecting wine. After all, it is only fermented grape juice.” Francis shook his head and smiled at his own absurdity. “I think there came a point, about fifteen years ago, when I had to choose between selling a farm or selling the wine, in order to make ends meet. I simply couldn’t think of any other choice available to me. I was never brought up to any trade. No one ever told me I might have to learn a living. My father and my grandfather certainly never had to. I hadn’t the least idea about money when I inherited. It never occurred to me to think about the stuff. My accountant came to see me twice a year, and we drank a bottle of sherry between us. Afterwards I never could remember a single word he had said to me. Then, one day, the bank wouldn’t let me have any more money.” He raised his glass of wine and drank a little from it.

  “A little young, still, wouldn’t you say?”

  I nodded, and asked, “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I knew I had to do something. Before I came back to live here, I lived in London for a few years. I got in with what my mother called ‘the wrong crowd’. It seemed like fun at the time, but I was in over my head and ran up some pretty serious gambling debts. My parents had to sell a couple of farmhouses. My mother had to sell some family paintings. It was hard luck on her, but then she had been very unkind to me, so perhaps justice was done, after all.” Francis stopped speaking for a moment, thinking of some memory at an infinite distance. He shook his head as if to clear it and said, “Anyway, that gave me the idea. I sold another one of our farms, cleared my overdraft with room to spare, and started collecting more wine. After that, it was obvious: whenever my cash at the bank ran down, which it did surprisingly often, I sold another farm.”

  I enjoyed these conversations with Francis. They were unlike any conversations I had ever had with anyone else. Now I was spending as much time with him as I could manage. He would die soon; I wanted to know what he knew. It was more than that: Francis was not talking to Eck, or Ed, or even Catherine, whom I knew he adored. He was talking to me.

  Francis was emptying the vessel of his mind into mine, day by day. “I learned an important lesson from that,” continued Francis.

  “Which was…?”

  “Never run out of farms. Unfortunately, I did. Then one spring night, as I remember, you walked through the door and asked me whether I sold red wine.” Francis laughed at the recollection and I felt myself blushing. I heard a scratching noise somewhere not far away and said, “I think we’ve locked Campbell out. I’ll go and let him in.”

  “Do,” said Francis. “Poor little dog.”

  I went upstairs and opened the shop door; Campbell insinuated himself inside and then pattered down the stairs behind me, to go and sit at his master’s feet.

  “I didn’t realise it straight away,” said Francis, “but chance brought me the one person I have ever met who feels about this place, and what is in it, the way I do.”

  I felt the undercroft humming with power as he spoke, as if unknown frequencies of radio waves were emanating from its tens of thousands of bottles. But it was only the wine singing in my veins.

  “What will you do,” asked Francis, “when you sell the business?”

  I had shared with Francis all my plans. I had yet to tell Andy, but I could not put off doing that any later than the next morning. The American buyers wanted to see numbers; they wanted information. The person who was going to have to give it to them was Andy. I was not looking forward to the conversation. I sighed.

  “Having second thoughts?” asked Francis. He reached out and briefly put his hand on my arm. It was the first tender gesture I had ever seen him make. His hand looked very thin.

  “No, just thinking about all the things I have to get done before I actually do manage to sell the company.”

  “I’m sure you’ll deal with it all,” said Francis. “After all, how much more difficult could it be than selling a farm? But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see that far ahead.”

  “You should settle down and get married,” said Francis. “Don’t make the mistake I made. I once thought I had found the girl I loved. Unfortunately my mother did not approve. That might sound ridiculous in these days, but it wasn’t so odd thirty or so years ago. My mother was a very strong character. Formidable was the word most people used to describe her.”

  I tried to imagine. Eck had once told me something about Francis’s mother. He had made her sound cruel, almost monstrous.

  “I’ve never stopped regretting the fact that I was so weak I allowed her to take away the one thing in my life that might have been really good,” Francis went on. “Don’t you let any of your chances slip through your fingers the way I did.” His voice was very sad.

  “There’s no one I know who would marry me,” I said.

  “You are a clever man, Wilberforce,” said Francis, with more energy, “and you have become, as I told you, very knowledgeable about wine. But in other ways you are remarkably slow on the uptake.”

  I looked at him but did not say anything.

  “I told you before you would be married before the end of this year, and I said that you already knew whom you would marry.”

  “I didn’t understand you then, and I don’t really understand now.”

  Francis put down his wine glass so firmly on the box beside him that the wine splashed out of the glass. Campbell raised a paw and looked up, in case action was required from him.

  “Don’t be so obtuse! Look what you’ve made me do! Catherine, of course. Who else could I possibly have meant?”

  “Catherine’s going to marry Ed Simmonds.”

  “She will, of course, if you sit there like a lemon and let it happen. I must say I thought that if I dropped enough hints you might get up off your arse and do something about it.” Francis was now quite animated, even angry.

  “But…”

  “But nothing. Pour me some more wine.”

  I poured him another glass to replace what he had spilled, and he said, “Catherine and Ed is an arranged marriage. Robin Plender and old Simon Hartlepool fixed it up years ago between them, over a glass of port, and Helen Plender supported it. Ed always does what he’s told, and for Ed, one girl is very much as good as another provided she is pretty, which Catherine is, and amusing, which Catherine is. Ed will marry anyone who fits that bill, and who will more or less do as she’s told.”

  “And why should Catherine not fall in with all of this?”

  “Because being married to Ed Simmonds is not what she wants to do. Ed will treat her just as his father treated his mother: he kept her tied to Hartlepool Hall to bring up children, whilst he had one mistress in London and another in Paris, and divided the rest of his time between going racing and shooting grouse. That’s the way that family has always conducted itself, and Catherine knows that as well as I do. It will be all sweetness and light for six months, and then Ed will say, “I’ve just got to run up to London to see the Trustees,” or some such nonsense, and that will be the beginning of the end. Except, Catherine being Catherine, she would never seek a divorce.”

  We sat in silence for a while. I poured myself some more wine.

  “Why do you care what Catherine does?” I asked him.

  “Because I have known her since she was a small child. I am very fond of her.”

  “Why should you ever think she would want to marry me?”

  Francis said, “I’m becoming chilled down here. Take my arm, and let’s see if I can manage to get up the stairs.”

  We did manage to climb the stairs, and then lock up the shop. Francis, with some effort, and holding on to my arm, negotiated the cobbles in the courtyard, and at last got himself inside his flat, where he sank with a sigh of relief into an armchair. When I thought he was comfortable, I sat down opposite him. Campbell jumped up into his lap.

  Then I repeated my question to Francis: “Why should Catherine wan
t to marry me?”

  “For one thing, she’s curious about you. You’re so different from the other people she knows. I think she’s attracted to you.”

  “That’s a reason for someone to get married?”

  “It’s a reason. But you asked the wrong question.”

  “Oh. Sorry. What is the right question?”

  Francis didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Wilberforce, there’s a copy of today’s DailyTelegraph on the kitchen table. Do bring it to me.”

  I went and fetched the newspaper and handed it to Francis without looking at it. He took it and opened it up, then folded it at the page he had found.

  “The right question is: Why ever should you want to marry her?” he told me. “There’s something in the paper you should see.” He passed me the folded newspaper and I read it.

  FORTHCOMING MARRIAGES

  Lord Edward Simmonds and Miss C. Plender

  The engagement is announced between Lord Edward Simmonds, son of the Marquess of Hartlepool, Hartlepool Hall, Co. Durham, and Catherine, daughter of the Hon. Mr and Mrs Plender, of Coalheugh, Co. Durham.

  As I read this, I felt a sensation I had previously only seen described in books: I felt as if my body had turned to ice.

  “Now do you know why you want to marry her?” asked Francis.

  I could not speak. I hated him at that moment.

  “Because,” Francis explained, “if you don’t marry her, someone else will.”

  §

  When I arrived at the office the next morning, Andy was waiting for me with two mugs of coffee. He must have poured them out as soon as he saw me parking my car. I was not in the mood for Andy. I wanted to sit at my desk, put my head in my hands, and feel sorry for myself.

  He said, “Morning, Wilberforce.” He wasn’t smiling.

  “Andy.”

  I took the coffee and sipped it. He stood in front of me, not speaking, not smiling. I looked up at him after a few moments and said, “OK, what is it this morning?”

  He put his coffee down. “Oh, nothing much, Wilberforce, except that I gather you’re busy selling the company behind my back.”

  Oh dear: largish cat out of bag.

  “I’m not doing anything behind your back.”

  “I rather got the impression from the man from Bayleaf Corporation that you’d already agreed a price.”

  I stood up. “Don’t get at me, Andy,” I told him. “Yes, I’ve had talks with Bayleaf. I didn’t approach them. They approached me through a bank. You know I’m not crazy about the idea of taking the company public. I wanted to see what our other options were. I’ll tell you something else: the reason the bank approached me was that they’d heard on the grapevine we were thinking of coming to market; so much for Christopher Templeton’s professional discretion. He must have gossiped. So I went to see them, and, yes, we discussed possible terms. I mean, they asked me how much money I wanted, and I told them.”

  “You did what? Without talking to me first? What did you tell them?”

  I told him.

  “Jesus Christ, Wilberforce—that’s about half what it’s worth!” shouted Andy. He clapped his hands to his head. It was not a melodramatic gesture: he looked as if he really thought his head might explode.

  “Oh well, that’s what I’ve told them anyway,” I said. My head was beginning to ache as much as it looked as if Andy’s might be aching. I really wasn’t in the mood for this.

  “I can’t believe you,” said Andy: “I’ve given ten of the best years of my life to help you build the business up. Then you stitch me up like this. You don’t even bother to tell me about it—me, your finance director. I even thought we were friends—good friends. What a mistake.” He turned and started to leave the office, his mug of coffee forgotten.

  “Don’t forget your coffee,” I told him.

  He turned back, looked at the mug and then at me in disgust, and then said suddenly, “Have you signed anything?”

  “Only Heads of Terms—nothing legally binding.”

  “Only Heads—did you get any legal advice?”

  “I didn’t need it; I could understand it all perfectly well without some lawyer explaining it all to me. And it says it’s not legally binding.”

  “Believe me,” said Andy, putting his mug down, “anything you sign where the other party is a US corporation is legally binding. They will sue the arse off you, if you don’t go through with it—sue us, the company, as well. You’re a clever man in some ways, Wilberforce, but what you have just done is the most imprudent thing that I have ever heard of in my entire business life.”

  That was twice in two days someone had called me clever, when they really meant that I was stupid. I didn’t enjoy it any more the second time. Andy walked out again, slamming the door, causing heads to be raised from desks in the office outside. I noticed he had forgotten his mug of coffee again.

  That was the difficult beginning to a difficult few weeks. In the end, Andy and I reached an accommodation of sorts: I had to pay him an enormous bonus to get him to agree to the deal with the Americans and to help make it happen. I couldn’t have sold the company without him, and Andy made sure that, if the company was going to be sold ‘from under his feet’, as he kept saying, then he would be richly rewarded for helping me, not to mention his proceeds from his share options when the business was finally sold. What had once been a light-hearted friendship became a very sour relationship indeed. I took Andy out to dinner at Al Diwan one night in order to try to patch things up between us. We had been working very late, putting together the disclosure bundle, part of the pre-contract documentation. Asking him out was a mistake, for two reasons. The first reason was, I should never have allowed myself to hope that he would ever see my point of view. As far as Andy was concerned, I had broken his code of behaviour between two friends. I had gone behind his back.

  Over a pint of Cobra and a plate of poppadums, he said, “You know, I don’t understand why you didn’t talk to me before going to the Americans. At least we could have got a better price from them. We’re more or less giving the company away. I promise you, in a year to eighteen months, we could have floated the company for twice what they are buying it for.”

  “Yes, and then I wouldn’t have been able to sell any shares anyway.”

  Andy looked at me. “Do you need cash, Wilberforce? What’s going on? You earn a huge salary, you live in your flat, you don’t have a mortgage, and you don’t even pay for a season ticket at Newcastle United. You’ve got a nice car; you don’t go on holiday; as far as I know you haven’t got a girlfriend, and you don’t do drugs. What on earth do you need cash for?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. That’s why I didn’t tell you in the first place.”

  The chicken balti arrived. Andy leaned back in his chair, caught the waiter by the arm, ordered another pint of Cobra for himself, and said, “Well, try me.”

  I said, “I need to buy some wine.”

  He began to laugh, and a few grains of pilau rice shot across the table on to my tie, as he spluttered for a moment. “Sorry,” he said, “I’ll brush those off. How much wine?”

  “A lot of wine, actually.”

  Andy stopped laughing. He was really puzzled now. “But, Wilberforce, I didn’t know you drank wine. I’ve never seen you drink very much of anything. You can’t even get through a pint of lager. It must be—it must be—let me see: say you can buy good drinking wine at Morrison’s for four pounds a bottle and your end of this deal is say three million after tax and fees, then you should be able to buy three-quarters of a million bottles of wine, give or take.” He started laughing again, no doubt at the idea of my wheeling trolley loads of wine out from a Morrison’s store. Some of the lager went up his nose. He shook his head. I could see he was amused, and very angry at the same time.

  “Much less than that: about one hundred thousand bottles, altogether. But you need to take into account that there are individual bottles which might be worth a thousand
or two in the collection.”

  Andy stopped laughing. He looked at me curiously, as if I had just crawled from behind a stone. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve become interested in wine. I’ve always wanted to have a hobby, but I’ve been too busy up until now.”

  “A hundred thousand bottles?”

  “I think so.”

  Andy said, “Let me be clear about this. You’ve thrown away a great company, which I personally have sweated blood and tears to build up, you’ve trashed a good friendship, or a friendship I thought was good, and you’re doing all that so you can buy some wine?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Where are you going to keep it?”

  “I’m going to keep it where it is now: in a cellar. I get the cellar as part of the deal.”

  “And where’s that?”

  I hesitated. I had a vision of him jumping into his car, driving to Caerlyon, going down to the undercroft and laying about it with a hammer, just to teach me a lesson. I shuddered.

  Andy saw the hesitation, and saw the shudder. He said, “You don’t understand about friendship, do you, Wilber-force? I trust you, but you don’t have to trust me. Is that it? Is that how your mind works? I work twelve hours a day for you, I have practically no social life, whilst you wander off every night at six o’clock to go drinking with some wine merchant friend of yours. Great. You know, when they put you together, Wilberforce, they left something out. I don’t know what it is, but something’s missing in you. You’re not normal. I should have seen it before.”

  I said nothing. It was best to let him have his say.

  “You won’t even tell me whose wine you are buying, or where you are going to keep it. Are you frightened I’ll go and steal some?” He stood up and dropped his napkin on the floor. “I’ve lost my appetite. I’m not going to waste my time sitting here with you. You pick up the bill. You can afford it.”

  “But you haven’t even started your chicken balti,” I said.

  Andy didn’t even look at me, and walked out.

  I sat for a while pushing the food around on my plate, but there no longer seemed much point in eating any.