2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  Francis had an eidetic memory. If he had once seen that he had a case of Château Latour 1979 resting on top of a case of Sauternes, he would remember for ever the position of each and, if you asked him about either of those wines, he could lead you straight to it.

  In the side chambers were the special wines, behind locked iron grilles. There were pre-phylloxera Imperial Tokays; Châteaux Yquem from the i88os; bottles of ancient port; odds and ends, collector’s dreams that might have been sold for the most enormous sums at auction. They will never go to auction now. Francis could never part with a bottle of wine he really loved, and neither will I. I thought about it once, but I would never do it. I could not bring myself to do it. Francis was my friend. To sell his wine would be a betrayal. There has been enough betrayal…

  I remember the first time I went to Caerlyon—such an odd name: a remnant of the Dark Ages, before the Saxon and Dutch settlements. Caerlyon had survived and kept its identity intact, an island in the flood tide of Saxon and then Danish place names that arrived after the Romans left. The present version of the house was early Victorian, I believe, but there had been settlements in that place since the Bronze Age: Roman, medieval, an Elizabethan house. The Victorian house had been built in the days of the Black family’s greatest prosperity, when they had mined the rich coal seams that lay under the poor farmland that had sustained them in earlier centuries. That evening I had left my office as usual at about half past seven in the evening. My office, a miracle of black glass and marble, was in almost the last building at the edge of a modern industrial estate, south-west of Newcastle. It was an evening in late May. It was the time when I normally left work in order to get to the local shopping centre to buy a pizza or some other form of instant nourishment before all the shops shut. I would buy whatever pre-cooked meal came to hand, go home, microwave it and eat it, sit in front of a computer for an hour or two and then try to get five or six hours’ sleep before heading back to the office around five in the morning.

  I still remember what a beautiful evening it was, with the magical light that occurs as spring changes into early summer. The sky was a pale pink, shading to a light green, which hinted of the Aurora. The industrial estate where I worked, a wilderness of aluminium sheds and modern glass-and-brick palaces like my own offices, was eating slowly into the side of a green hill. At the top of the hill, green pasture shaded into brown and rushy fell. For no reason, I turned off the road to the shopping mall and went up a little lane, driving up the side of the hill instead of along its base, towards the pale edge of the evening sky, as if there was a message waiting for me at the top of the escarpment. The offices and the factories below were already shrouded in the gloom of approaching night. I thought that it might be pleasant to see the last of the evening sunlight, as if I had, for a moment, sickened of all those years of neon-lit offices.

  At the top of the hill, which I had driven up with some spirit in the Range Rover that I had bought for myself that year—the first (and last) expensive car I ever owned—I pulled in to the side of the road. Beyond me was a different landscape of small farms and allotments rising up to the great brown slopes of the Pennine moors. Just beyond where I had stopped the car was a little lane, with a brown sign pointing down it, and in white lettering the words ‘Caerlyon Hall’. I felt light of heart. I was breaking my routine, and I found that it was refreshing. I made a promise to myself that I would give it another ten minutes, then would turn around to go and buy my pizza and put in my couple of hours working on a new computer program. I turned the car down the lane through a planting of dark trees, and there in front of me was an enormous grey house. The drive gates were locked and barred and a sign said, ‘Gateshead County Council: Community Outreach Centre’.

  I drove along the lane beside a high stone wall. The lane seemed to head towards the back parts of the house. After a hundred yards I found an opening in the wall that led into a cobbled courtyard, with stables and outbuildings. A large ‘A’ board was positioned by the side of the road: in gold Palace script on a burgundy-coloured background it announced: “Francis Black: Fine Bordeaux Wines. Visitors welcome.”

  I remember feeling a little like Alice must have felt when she found the table at the bottom of the rabbit hole, with the little bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’. She knew very well that it would be wiser not to drink it, but strange things had already started to happen to her since she’d fallen asleep in the garden that afternoon, and seen the white rabbit and decided to follow him into Wonderland. So she thought, Well, why not? Looking back, now, I feel that the unexpected image that then came into my mind of a dimly remembered book from my childhood, that subconscious association of the burgundy-coloured sign with the bottle that Alice found labelled ‘DRINK ME’, was one of those irreversible moments in my life. I had other such moments later, but that was the first stage of my journey out of the world I knew. I turned my back on the safe world of pizzas and expensive cars and accountancy and computer-programming, with one innocent, unpremeditated step: the beginning of a journey that left that world behind for ever. So I thought, Well, why not? I pulled the car in to the side of the road, turned off the ignition and got out, feeling the evening sunlight warm upon my cheeks, smelling the sweet and woody smell of heather blowing in from the distant hills; and I sauntered in the general direction of Francis Black and his fine Bordeaux wines.

  §

  I walked down Piccadilly and turned into St James’s Street. As I passed the steps of one of the three gentlemen’s clubs at that end of St James’s, Ed Hartlepool, who was once close to me, a member of the circle of friends who adopted me and for a while were almost my family, came out of the door of his club and stood at the top of the steps down to the street, taking in the scenery. I was surprised to see him: Catherine had told me he had been forced to go and live in France as a tax exile and only came back to England for a few weeks a year. He looked the same as when I had last seen him: tall, very thin, in an immaculate navy-blue double-breasted suit, the whole effect set off by a shock of unmanageable curly fair hair starting from the top of his head. He turned to answer a comment from a large person behind him, which obviously amused him, for as he turned his head back in the direction of the street he was smiling. Then he saw me, and his smile vanished immediately. I half-acknowledged him with raised eyebrows: we were only yards apart, and I wondered if he, in his turn, would notice my presence in some way, making it necessary for me to say something to him. He said nothing; he cut me dead, looking at me and through me as if I was made from glass. I had not seen or spoken to Ed since Catherine’s funeral. Then, as I had entered the church on my crutches, he had gazed at me with a look of such deadly hatred that it had turned my legs almost to jelly. When I saw his look I had had to steady myself in order to avoid losing my balance. That had been rather an emotional occasion, and I couldn’t think now why Ed should have looked at me like that, or spoken to me in the way he did just after the service finished. Everyone knew that Catherine’s death hadn’t been my fault.

  It was unsettling to see Ed again, to think he haunted this street so near to where I lived. I averted my gaze from him and hurried on towards my bank and, as I did, I heard a short, hard laugh behind me. I did not turn my head.

  Once in the bank I presented my cheque and, not entirely to my surprise, there was a delay. Then my Personal Relationship Manager, Mr Rawle, came to the counter and said, “Good afternoon, Mr Wilberforce, good afternoon.”

  “Hello, Mr Rawle,” I said. “Is everything in order?”

  “Oh, yes, everything is more or less in order. Perhaps if we could just have a quiet word over at my desk?” He rubbed his hands and looked sideways at me with soft and pleading eyes, like a spaniel in a pinstripe suit.

  I followed him over to a screened-off area of the banking parlour and sat opposite him at his desk. I found that my eyes strayed up towards the ceiling, and locked on it, so that Mr Rawle had to talk to my chin.

  “Mr Wilberforce, I wonder if you received
a letter I sent you, about your account?”

  I said yes, I had, and I had taken steps to put funds into my account.

  “Oh, excellent news, excellent,” said Mr Rawle, rubbing his hands until I wondered if they might catch fire. “Might I ask what amount of funds?”

  I said, as carelessly as I could, that I had moved fifty thousand across for the time being.

  “Are there any other pressing liabilities just at present?” asked Mr Rawle.

  A small tax bill. How much? I couldn’t exactly remember. I managed to detach my eyes from the ceiling and speak directly to Mr Rawle, rather than to one of his ceiling lights.

  Would it be all right if the bank cashed my cheque now, as I had an appointment?

  Mr Rawle stood up, and almost bowed, and said, “A cheque for how much, Mr Wilberforce?”

  “Just the usual five thousand pounds,” I said, trying to recapture the old insouciance with which I had asked for such sums of money in the past.

  But Mr Rawle shook his head sadly. “I’m terribly sorry, but until the cheque you spoke of has been cleared and the funds are in your account, I don’t have the authority. I can let you have a thousand, I suppose.”

  “It’s very inconvenient,” I told him.

  He bowed again but would not give in. “I’m so sorry, Mr Wilberforce. I’m so sorry, but there it is.”

  It ended with me writing another cheque for one thousand pounds, and then Mr Rawle took it personally to the cashier and stood there while they counted out the fifties—in case they gave me one too many, I suppose. Then he ushered me to the door, and I went back out into the street feeling rather unsettled. There was a humming, like bees in my head again.

  §

  I had just arrived in Bogota on the Avianca flight from Medellin. I had been there for several weeks in unsatisfactory discussions with representatives of PARC, the narco-terrorist group that had recently been taking European hostages in Colombia. The current list included three French tourists, two Brit backpackers, and two employees of BP Colombia. The latter were insured at Lloyd’s of London, which is why I was there. The idea was to do a deal on ransom, but for the last few days I had been feeling increasingly uneasy about the negotiations. I had no proof of life. The PARC representative wanted me to trust him. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence that any of these people were still alive. That meant either that they had been killed, which I thought was unlikely because that would be a very uncommercial thing for PARC to do; or it might mean the little weasel-faced man who called himself an PARC representative had nothing to do with them at all. He might be from the cartels, or some other group wanting to make money from the situation.

  I know that when he proposed a change of venue for our daily conversations, somewhere just outside of the city, I decided that it was likely he and his friends had decided I mightn’t be a bad bargaining counter myself. I thought they would probably set up a kidnap attempt of some sort the next day, so I rang London on the satellite phone to explain the position, and we agreed I should head back to Bogota for a few days and get away from the front line.

  There was something else that happened in Medellin, though—something very unsettling; but I couldn’t remember what it was. There was a smell, and there was a sense of something or someone always on the edge of my vision.

  In the taxi from the airport we stopped at traffic lights; there was a rapping at the taxi window and I almost had heart failure. It was only one of the street children selling cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, either fake or contraband. We drove up the hill away from the city centre towards the Bogota Plaza Hotel: the pavements were slick with rain and the headlights of passing traffic made gleaming reflections in them.

  Some instinct made me stop the taxi a few hundred metres before we got to the hotel. I wanted to walk; I wanted to see if any other taxi or car behind me stopped, or whether anyone would follow me. It was not far to the hotel; it was a relatively safe part of town and the streets were usually busy.

  I got out and paid off the driver, picked up my bag from the back of the taxi, and started to walk up one of the streets that runs parallel to the main avenue, which brings you out in a small park at the back of the hotel.

  In fact, the street was deserted, but as I walked along it I heard the hurrying echoes of other footsteps. Startled, I turned around. There was no one behind me. I walked on and then stopped again. In front of me, in the middle of the road, was a manhole cover. I was walking up the middle of the street, avoiding its shadowed edges, when the manhole cover started to rotate. A second later it tipped out of its seat and was pushed aside into the road. Two small and very grimy children, dressed in assorted rags, climbed out. More street children: there were thousands of them said to be living in the rain drains beneath the city. Every now and then the police went looking for them and culled a few, and they vanished into the foul drains, where no one would ever follow them. These two scrambled out into the street. They saw me, decided I was not dangerous and approached with outstretched hands, begging for money. They spoke a few words in a patois of Indian and Spanish that I could not follow, but the meaning was clear.

  I was just getting out a banknote to give them when one of them looked behind me and said, “Quien vienedetras de ese bombre?” and the other replied, “No me gusta la pinta que tiene. Vamanos.”

  They both ran off into the dark, without taking the money I was offering. I smelled the smell of mould and rottenness, and I saw the flap of some dark garment in the corner of my eye. As I did so, the meaning of what they had just said arranged itself in my mind: “Who is that walking behind the man?”

  “I don’t like the look of it. Let’s get out of here.”

  I turned about in a hurry and walked straight into the arms of the person who was following me.

  §

  The person I had bumped into caught my elbow, and steadied me. “Whoa,” he said. “Take it easy!” It was Colin. He did not let go of my elbow, but steered me to the side of the road, and back to the pavement.

  I felt dislocated in time and space. I couldn’t remember who I was, or where I had just been.

  Colin spoke again, and the sound of his voice dispelled some of the confusion. “What were you thinking of?” he asked, “—walking down the middle of the road? There were half a dozen taxis honking their horns behind you. I think they had just about decided to run you over. We had an appointment this afternoon, remember?”

  I didn’t remember, but I followed Colin gratefully to my own front door in Half Moon Street. My heart was still thumping from the shock of bumping into him. I must have been daydreaming. He helped me find my keys and we let ourselves in. Coming in from the street I realised with a shock that the house smelt bad: stale air, wine lees, a smell of mould coming from somewhere. For the last few weeks I had done without a cleaner. In part it was to save money but also I had done something to upset the agency that sent the cleaners, possibly as a result of forgetting to pay them.

  We went into the kitchen; I saw Colin wrinkle his nose and look at the stack of unwashed crockery and glasses beside the sink. “Don’t you ever tidy up?” he asked. He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table, flicked some dust from it with his handkerchief, and then sat down.

  “I’m going to have a glass of wine,” I said. “Would you like one?”

  “I’ll join you, if it helps,” said Colin. “Maybe a drink would do you good, for once. You were as white as a sheet when I bumped into you just now. Who did you think I was?”

  “Oh, just somebody I didn’t want to meet.”

  I went to the wine rack and took a bottle of Château Cheval Blanc 1953 from it, opened it and poured a glass each. The wine tasted thin, spiritless. I sniffed it but could smell nothing and said to Colin, “I’m so sorry. I think this bottle might be corked.”

  “Tastes perfectly all right to me,” remarked Colin.

  Perfectly all right! The wine I served was never ‘all right’. The wines from my cellar we
re amongst the rarest wines, the finest vintages, that had ever been assembled under one roof. The Cheval Blanc 1953 was over fifty years old now, one of the few clarets of that age that could still be drunk, which had not yet oxidised. It was another wine of which I now had only one or two more bottles left. I took Colin’s glass from him and opened a bottle of Fitou. It was the only other red wine in the kitchen that would be close to room temperature—an oddity that I had found in the undercroft that must have been one of Francis’s more recent and whimsical additions to his collection. I poured both glasses and the rest of the bottle of Château Cheval Blanc down the sink. Then I refilled our glasses with the second wine. It tasted much the same to me, but I said nothing.

  Colin sipped his wine and said, “Quite a jolly red wine. A bit more taste to it than the first one, though there was nothing much wrong with that.”

  I bit my lip, said nothing and waited for Colin to tell me why he was here, because I could not remember.

  “I took your test results to a neurologist friend of mine. He’s had a look, and I’ve discussed some of your symptoms with him,” said Colin.