2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  I left soon after, walking back to my own flat a mile or so away. It was early April, and a north-easterly wind blew cruel hail showers across the city. Mary was right: the daffodils had been out for a couple of weeks now, and it was spring. I put up the collar of my coat, and turned my face away from the stinging hail as I walked on.

  My mobile rang. I recognised the number: it was Francis—or, as it turned out, Francis’s nurse, ringing from Caerlyon.

  “Mr Black passed away this afternoon, Mr Wilberforce. I thought you’d like to know. He lasted longer than any of us expected.”

  I thanked her for ringing and put the phone away. As I walked on through the streets slick with a sheen of melting hail, the sky brightened as the squalls passed overhead, and a pale light lit the eastern sky. Caerlyon was mine, now. The wine was mine, now. Nothing could change that.

  I had lost a friend, but gained a wine cellar.

  §

  “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever believeth in me shall never die.” As the vicar intoned these words I glanced about the church. It was nearly full. I could see no sign of either Catherine or Ed.

  The funeral was at St Oswald’s, a small church of Saxon provenance about two miles further up the hill from Caerlyon. Inside, set into rough walls of stone that seemed hewn rather than cut, were brass or marble tablets proclaiming the lives and deaths of generation after generation of Blacks. Some were so faded as to be illegible, dates and inscriptions all in Roman numerals and Latin; others, more recent, testified to soldiers who had died on the North-West Frontier of India, or on the Somme; a judge or two, and the occasional Reverend Black. How would Francis be remembered? As a lover of wine? How would that look on his funeral plaque? On each tablet, without fail, was the family motto: “Resurgam”—appropriate enough, in the circumstances.

  There was the creak of a door, and I turned my head, along with others, to see Catherine slipping into the church. There was no sign of Ed. She looked very pale, and very beautiful, wrapped in a fur coat and with a black hat upon her head with a veil. I turned back to listen to the vicar.

  “For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.”

  A few minutes later Teddy Shildon stood up to read the lesson from Corinthians. I was thinking about Catherine now, no longer following the words. Could we speak together after the service? Would she let me approach her? Was she married now? The wind had got up outside and it howled around the church in fitful gusts, and a door banged somewhere. Teddy raised his voice to make himself heard and, as he did so, the wind dropped again so that his voice boomed out in the now silent church: “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise or not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

  Soon after, the service was over. It was very simple: no poems, no readings, no memorial speeches. Francis had insisted in his wishes that everything should be short and to the point.

  Then the coffin-bearers came. Eck was one of them. I think the others were mostly professional pall-bearers. We followed them out into the churchyard and walked down a mossy avenue between great yew trees until we came to the freshly dug grave. The coffin was lowered into it. Then Teddy Shildon stepped forward, now clad in a long navy-blue overcoat, and flung a handful of earth down on to the coffin.

  The vicar read the last few words of the service: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection…”

  About us, the storm had passed over, and its dark bulk now hung over the Pennines. The air was warmer again, and the wind had dropped. Blue gaps appeared in the cloud above and then a shaft of sunlight beamed down on the churchyard, illuminating us in its light, and, as it did so, the solemn, stationary group of dark-clad figures suddenly broke ranks, formed little groups, and conversation, even laughter, filled the churchyard. The service was over.

  I saw Catherine talking to Teddy Shildon, and saw him shake his head, then put his hand out and pat her shoulder. I saw Eck, in a double-breasted tweed overcoat, roaring with laughter at something. Then we were all walking back to the cars, and in a few minutes a long convoy of vehicles was winding its way down the hillside to Caerlyon. Inside the undercroft a very noisy drinks party was soon under way. With callous disregard for Francis’s eclectic filing system, Teddy Shildon had caused the columns and aisles of cases to be re-formed into a hollow square, in the middle of which stood a trestle table laden with bottles and glasses. Teddy had lit candles everywhere, and the bottles threw back a thousand points of light from their flames. Two black-clad maids, presumably also supplied by Teddy, circulated with trays of bits and pieces to eat. Francis would have been horrified if he could have seen it all. I wondered if his ghost was watching us, from somewhere in the shadows.

  Teddy clapped me on the back as I appeared. “Well, Wilberforce, all yours now, lucky man. Come and see me tomorrow. Come and have lunch and we’ll discuss the arrangements. But meanwhile, have a glass of wine.” He handed me a glass of white burgundy, and added, “Oh, by the way, have you heard? Simon Hartlepool died this morning. That’s why Ed Simmonds wasn’t at the service. Catherine came for them both. Very good of her, in the circumstances.”

  I stood in a corner of the square, sipping my wine. Catherine was talking to Annabel on the other side. She had not so much as glanced in my direction; it was as if I was not there.

  Eck came up to me and said, “I’ve heard you’re the new heir to Caerlyon.”

  “I promised Francis I’d take it on.”

  Eck looked at me, with his measuring blue eyes. “And you’ve sold your company, I hear?”

  “You hear everything, Eck,” I told him.

  “Ah well, you know what this county is like for gossip. So what are you going to do? Are you going to come and live here? If it was me, I’d have drunk myself to death within a couple of months. Too much temptation all around,” said Eck, waving his hands at the wooden city of wine cases, and the light glancing off the bottles. “I’ve never been much good at resisting temptation,” he added.

  “Francis managed not to fall into that trap,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, you’re right. He was very moderate in his old age. He was a bit wilder when he was young, but that was women and cards, not wine. I don’t think he went in for song much. Well, if ever you’re stuck for someone to share a bottle with, you know where I am.” Then Eck moved on, enveloping his next victim in a gale of laughter.

  I found myself talking to Catherine’s mother, Helen Plender. She was a small, icy woman, not at all like her daughter.

  “We flew back from Bermuda especially for this,” she told me with great emphasis on the word ‘Bermuda’.

  “I am sure Francis would have appreciated it.”

  “Well, he was an old friend. Anyway, I needed to come home to help Catherine with her preparations for the wedding. She’s so disorganised. She’s made no lists, the invitations haven’t even been printed. If Ed hadn’t booked the caterers, then there probably wouldn’t have been a wedding at all, this year.” Every word she spoke was like a stab wound to me.

  I managed to say, “And when is the wedding?”

  “At the beginning of July; of course the whole thing is dictated by Ed’s shooting arrangements. He had to make sure he was back from the honeymoon by the twelfth of August. Ah, Teddy, there you are,” said Mrs Plender, turning away from me.

  I wondered how much of that conversation had been accidental. Perhaps she had heard something about Catherine and me that she did not like, or perhaps she had seen me looking at Catherine. I felt as if I had been given a warning of some sort. I had never liked Catherine’s mother much, and I am sure she never understood why Catherine and Ed had taken me up.

  The party seemed to me to last for ever, but perhaps it was only an hour altogether. Then, in the way th
ese things happen, suddenly everyone was looking at their watch and muttering about lunch or an appointment. The place emptied within five minutes of the first few people beginning to leave. Teddy Shildon saw me and gave me the keys.

  “Wilberforce, as luck would have it, I’m one of Ed Sim-monds’s trustees as well as executor here. I’m working overtime this week. I said I’d go over to Hartlepool Hall to offer my condolences and have some lunch. Do you mind locking up for me? Of course, we’ll meet tomorrow.”

  “That will be fine, Teddy,” I told him.

  “Have you seen Catherine anywhere?”

  “I saw her earlier on—not to speak to.”

  “She must have left already then. See you tomorrow. Come about noon if you can, and we can get our business out of the way before we have our lunch.” Then he was gone.

  I went around the undercroft, collecting glasses and putting them on the table. Then I started to blow the candles out.

  “Don’t leave me in the dark,” said a soft voice.

  I turned and saw Catherine standing behind me. She had emerged from some corner away from the light.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t see you.”

  “You didn’t see me, because I was hiding.”

  “Hiding from whom?”

  “My mother. Teddy. The whole lot of them. I wanted to see you.”

  I stood and stared at her. Then I said, “And I wanted to see you.”

  She stepped towards me so that she was standing only a foot or so away.

  “I haven’t been allowed to talk to you, or ring you up. Ed doesn’t want me to,” she told me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s wrong for me to be here now, with you—I know that.”

  That was when, finally, I found the courage to take her into my arms and say, “No. It’s not wrong, if it’s what we both want.”

  She said nothing for a while, as we stood together, surrounded by wine and darkness and the few guttering candles I had not yet extinguished. We held each other and I could feel her breathing, at first quick and fluttering like a bird’s, then finally, the slow and steady breathing of a swimmer who has reached the shore.

  After a while she said, “Poor Ed.”

  A few minutes later Catherine was gone. She had to go to lunch at Hartlepool Hall.

  “Will you come back here later?”

  “I don’t know—will you be here?”

  “Probably. I’ve nowhere else particular to go, so I might as well put all the cases of wine back in their proper places and tidy this lot up.”

  “If I can, I will,” she promised, but I wondered if she would.

  As soon as she left the spell of the undercroft and Caerlyon and got herself outside into the sunshine, common sense would reassert itself. She would go back to Hartlepool Hall as if nothing had happened. She would go back to the groove of her life and run along it, through to marriage, and childbirth, and beyond.

  “When will you tell Ed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not today. His father’s just died.” Then she was gone, and I was alone in the undercroft.

  For an hour or so I struggled with wooden cases. My memory was not Francis’s, but somehow the place rearranged itself. By some instinct I put this case back on top of that one, a Pomerol next to a Sauternes, in no especial order except I think that, in its very randomness, the place was almost as it had been before Teddy Shildon had disturbed it. It was as if Francis was whispering in my ear, telling me which case to put on top of which other, until it was as he remembered it. Then I sat down and found a half-empty bottle of white wine and poured myself a glass.

  The candles were all out, and put away, and I had turned the lights on. I felt like the verger of a cathedral after the congregation has gone, when the echoing space has fallen quiet, and the saints stare blindly from the stained-glass windows, and the knights lie quiet on their tombs. The peace of the undercroft washed through me, and I felt calm—calmer than I had felt for days and weeks.

  I wondered if Catherine would come back. But it was no longer the burning anxiety I had felt before, that she had forgotten me and settled down with Ed, and closed the door on the secret garden that I had wandered into one spring evening many months ago. Now I knew that she had, at least, not forgotten me. Very probably, if she tried to break her engagement with Ed, she would be overwhelmed by the emotional forces of the two families combined against her:

  Simmondses and Plenders. Whatever was going to happen next would happen; I did not feel there was anything more I could do except await events.

  I sat and sipped my wine and thought about Francis. He was still so real to me—not the emaciated old man who had been lying upstairs on his bed until a few days ago. I remembered Francis as he had been when I had first met him: tall, elegant, saturnine. I felt that that version of Francis was still somewhere in the cellar, watching me, approving of me as I embraced Catherine, guiding me, as I reorganised the cases of wine.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to last long if I allowed myself such fancies as that. I decided to take a few bottles of Bordeaux upstairs, select one and have a glass of wine while I waited to see whether Catherine would return.

  I went upstairs into the shop and sat down at Francis’s desk, found a bottle of Lynch-Bages on the rack at the side of the shop, opened it and poured myself a large glass. As I sipped it, I realised for the first time the immensity of my inheritance. There were a hundred thousand bottles downstairs, a lifetime’s consumption, even if I never added to the collection. But what bottles I had inherited: there was nothing common, nothing ordinary about any of them. Every single one of them had been chosen with a care, a love of wine, a profound knowledge. Not one of them would be anything less than an exceptional experience. This, that I was drinking, was delicious. Its fragrance filled my brain. I poured myself a second glass.

  As the wine infused my blood, as I tasted the first glass of the second bottle, I wondered what transubstantiation was taking place here. I was drinking the same wines on which Francis had lived; as I consumed them, and they became part of me, would I become more like Francis? Would I become Francis?

  I laughed out loud at myself, and poured more wine into my glass. I realised I was on my way to becoming properly drunk, for perhaps the first time in my life. I had occasionally drunk more wine than I should have done, in my evenings with Francis in the latter days of his life. I had explored the edges of inebriation with him; now I was penetrating further into that territory.

  I didn’t care. My whole life had changed beyond recognition in twenty-four hours. If I couldn’t have a few drinks to mark the rite of passage, when would I ever learn how life should be lived?

  It was getting dark. Unsteadily I rose to my feet and switched the shop lights on. I looked at my watch and thought that it said half past seven. Where had the time gone? I remembered Francis telling me, “This place steals your time.” He was right. I splashed a little more wine into a glass and then reproached myself for not pouring it properly. Catherine obviously wasn’t coming back. They had got the better of her between them.

  I stood up and went and opened the door, feeling the need of some fresh air. Suddenly the whole place had begun to feel unbearably stuffy. I didn’t want to drink any more for the moment. I went outside into the courtyard. It was dusk, cool and quiet. That sweet smell from the hills was all around me: a scent of distant heather; the wine—who knows? I looked up at the sky and saw it was a moonless night. A million stars glittered in the firmament. I craned my neck, looking at all the constellations, as if I had never seen them before. I could not ever remember the night sky looking so bright, so full of hope.

  Then I saw the lights of a car coming down the lane; Catherine’s car turned into the courtyard and stopped. She got out, still wearing the fur coat she had had on earlier in the day, but now she was hatless and, as she walked towards me, her fair hair shone in the light from the shop. She lo
oked at me standing in the doorway of the shop and said, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m drunk,” I told her. “I’ve drunk at least two and a half bottles of wine. I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  “Well, I have,” said Catherine. “It wasn’t easy to get away, believe you me, with Ed and my mother watching me like hawks. I’m sure they suspect something.”

  “Suspect what?” I asked. I felt as if I wasn’t making much sense.

  “About you and me.”

  “About you and me?” I swayed as I spoke, and caught the doorway to steady myself.

  “Come along,” said Catherine. “I’ll get you inside the flat. I’ve never seen you drunk before, Wilberforce; it’s rather sweet. You don’t do this sort of thing very often, do you?”

  I watched her whilst, with quick efficiency, she switched off the lights and locked up the shop. Then she took my arm and guided me across the courtyard into the flat.

  “You’re in no condition to drive tonight,” said Catherine. “You might as well stay here. I’ll make up the bed in Francis’s spare bedroom.”

  She steered me into an armchair and then ran quickly and lightly upstairs. I lay in the chair and started to fall asleep. Everything was being paid for at once: fifteen years of unremitting work; Francis’s death; the wine. I felt tired beyond knowing. I was just aware of Catherine taking me upstairs into Francis’s second bedroom and undressing me, and somehow managing to help me into my bed. I lay tucked up, like a child waiting to be read a story.

  “I must go,” said Catherine. “My mother will be wondering where I am. I can’t tell her too many lies in one day; she’s too sharp.”

  “Don’t go,” I said, but my eyelids were closing, even as I spoke.

  “I must,” said Catherine, “but I will be with you in the morning, as soon as I can.”

  Then she was gone and I fell into a deep sleep.

  I awoke to the sound of birdsong and to sunlight coming in through the undrawn curtains. For a while I had not the least idea where I was. Then fragments of memory came back to me: the funeral, the drinks party, Catherine leading me upstairs. She must have had to put me to bed, I realised. She must have undressed me.