2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  I said, “I’m tired of this conversation. I don’t like being lectured. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re living in my flat, bought with my money, earned by my hard work, in one of the best streets in London. I’m entitled to do what I like, I should think.” Then I left the flat, slamming the front door, and walked about twice around Hyde Park before I felt able to return home.

  When I came back, I went up to Catherine, who was sitting in a chair in the sitting room, reading a novel, and I kissed her on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t mean to be cross.”

  “I tidied up your papers,” she said. “I hope I’ve put them back in the right order.”

  “I saw,” I said. “Thank you, darling.”

  She was very quiet all that evening, but the next day it was as if there had been no row, and everything was as it always had been between us. Except that it wasn’t as it always had been. It was as if a fine crack had appeared in a once perfect porcelain bowl. The damage had been mended and could not be seen. But the bowl, which had been unblemished before, was cracked now.

  For a few weeks I made a conscious effort to taste less wine at lunch time, at least when Catherine was there. I set up one or two meetings and went to them, and talked to a couple of people whom I thought might back my new business venture. But my heart wasn’t in it: I couldn’t persuade myself I really wanted to do this, and I don’t think I convinced them.

  “Keep in touch,” they said, but they didn’t mean it.

  Then I hit upon a different idea: instead of having to go through the effort of setting up meetings which I didn’t want to go to, and where I could never think of what to say, I thought I would tell Catherine I was having lunch with one or other of my old customers, and then just go and have lunch somewhere by myself.

  The drawback in this plan was that it was not always possible to find somewhere with a reasonable wine list. I resented paying over the odds for wines that I would hardly bother to open at home. But I decided I had to be realistic; it was better to spend a bit of money to have a glass of decent wine, even if I knew I was being robbed. This worked well. I found, to my surprise, a few wine lists which were really quite interesting even if expensive, with wines that sometimes were new even to me.

  At first Catherine was very pleased with me. “You see,” she would say as I rolled back into the flat cheerfully after another of my solitary, but satisfactory lunches. “It makes all the difference getting out and meeting people. You’re in a much better mood now you’re getting out and about.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you were absolutely right about that, darling.”

  “And what do they think of your new idea?”

  “Oh, I think they’ll go for it.”

  “That’s brilliant!” said Catherine, jumping up from the sofa and giving me a hug. She sniffed. “What have you been eating?”

  “Peppermints,” I said, bringing a bag of them out of my pocket. “Want one?”

  I suppose this new plan became too much of a good thing, after a while. Catherine didn’t say anything, but her initial enthusiasm about my getting out and meeting people began to wear off. It might have lasted a bit longer except that one day I decided to have lunch in a restaurant in Walton Street that had become rather a favourite of mine. I ordered a starter and drank a bottle of a good white Rhone wine with that. I was just in the act of tasting the glass of Bordeaux that the sommelier had poured for me, before the next course arrived, when Catherine came into the restaurant with Sarah, one of her girl friends. I might have known it was a mistake to eat somewhere so close to Sloane Street. I knew Catherine was shopping and having lunch with someone that day.

  She saw me and I saw her at the same instant. I began to prepare the words I would say to her when she came over. But she didn’t come over. She turned away. Sarah hadn’t seen me. She had only met me once or twice and quite possibly wouldn’t have recognised me anyway. I wouldn’t have known her, had she not been with Catherine.

  I finished my lunch as quickly as I reasonably could, and paid my bill. Catherine had been given a table at the back of the restaurant. I could not see her, and made no effort to look for her. I walked slowly home, went to my desk, pulled out my wretched business plan and made a few more notes in its margins. When Catherine came back to the flat half an hour later, I was still at it.

  I heard her come in and shut the door. Then she went into the kitchen and I heard the kettle boiling. After a moment, I went to the door of the kitchen and looked in. She was sitting at the table with a mug of tea, smoking a cigarette, something she hardly ever did. She did not smile, or say anything, when she saw me.

  “That was a funny coincidence,” I said. “My date stood me up. He had to go to a meeting and rang me on the mobile after I’d sat down. So I thought I’d just have lunch anyway. Ha ha.”

  Catherine said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “You looked so damned…furtive.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Catherine stared at me. She had avoided looking at me before, but now she stared at me in the same way Andy once had, when I had told him I was selling the business without consulting him; the way Ed Simmonds had when I had admitted I’d been seeing Catherine without his knowledge. It was a weary, contemptuous expression. She said, “You haven’t been having business lunches with anyone, have you? I was pretty sure it was all a lie, but now I know what you’ve become.”

  I didn’t ask her what she thought I had become. I didn’t want to hear her tell me I was a drunkard, because I knew it would make me angry. My face felt rigid and frozen.

  “My God!” said Catherine. “If Sarah had seen you, or recognised you. Sitting there red-faced with a bottle of wine, on your own. I would have died.”

  “I think I’ll get on with my work,” I told her, “if you’ve nothing else to say.”

  Catherine didn’t reply. She sat smoking her cigarette, with the same distant expression on her face. I went back to my desk. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut, as she went out again.

  Later that evening she returned. I was sitting in the kitchen, watching television, drinking a glass of wine. “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “Out.”

  “Do you want something to eat?” I asked. “We could go to Shepherds Market and find somewhere?”

  “I’m not hungry,” said Catherine.

  “Neither am I, really.”

  She took her coat off and hung it up and went upstairs. A few minutes later she came down again, and sat opposite me. “Pour me some wine,” she commanded.

  “Of course,” I said. “What would you like? I’ve got some Bordeaux open, or there’s a bottle of—”

  “Just whatever’s open,” she said, so I poured her a glass and refilled my own.

  She sipped it, without showing much appreciation, and then said, “Wilberforce, what’s happening to us?”

  “How do you mean?”

  She sipped some more, looking at me searchingly. “This isn’t what I thought being married would be like. I should have got to know you better first, shouldn’t I?”

  “What more is there to know?” I said. “I haven’t changed.”

  “Ah,” said Catherine. “Perhaps you’re right. Maybe there isn’t anything to know about you. It’s just that I thought there was. But maybe there isn’t. Maybe you’re completely empty inside. Is that why you have to fill yourself up with wine every day?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t angry now. It suddenly seemed to me to be very important that I understood what Catherine was trying to tell me, but somehow her words made no more sense than if she had been speaking in Mandarin. “I’m not a drunkard, as you seem to think. Since I inherited the undercroft, I’ve become very interested in wine.”

  “You didn’t inherit anything,” said Catherine. “You’re not Francis’s family. You’re not anybody’s family, as far as I know. You bought the wine when you bought Caerlyon, Wilberforce. I think you told me that one way or another it c
ost you a million pounds. That’s not the same as inheriting, is it?”

  “No, I just meant that I think of it as an inheritance.”

  Catherine pushed her glass across to me. “Pour me some more. I’d better keep up with your drinking, if we’re to stay together.”

  I filled her glass without replying.

  Catherine said, “If I’d married Ed Simmonds, I might have been bored to death. He might have screwed around. I’m sure he would have done, just like his father. But at least I’d have known what I was getting into. With you, it’s like living with someone who’s dead but doesn’t know it.”

  I stared at her. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. “I’m not dead, Catherine. I’m a very fit thirty-five-year-old, everything considered.”

  She laughed. “Poor Wilberforce,” she said. “You’ve no idea how to be a human being at all, have you? That’s why I thought I fell for you. I thought you were different. That’s why I left Ed. Different? I’m not even sure what species you are.”

  The next morning, though, everything was all right between us again. In a way.

  TWO

  We had just returned from a few days’ shopping in Paris. It was a sunny afternoon in early October, a warm autumn day with that radiance of light that comes just before the dark season. Catherine was unloading endless carrier bags from our taxi whilst I brought the suitcases in. As I put the cases down in the hall I heard the phone ringing. I went into the kitchen and picked it up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Wilberforce, it’s Helen Plender here,” said Catherine’s mother. “Have you been away? I’ve been ringing and ringing.”

  “We thought we’d take a few days’ break in Paris,” I told her. Helen Plender spoke as if she had never hung up the phone on her daughter every time Catherine had rung her over the months since we had been married. I would never have known from her conversational tone that she had refused to attend her only daughter’s wedding because her daughter was marrying someone of whom she did not approve.

  “How nice,” said Helen Plender. “Is Catherine there?”

  She did not ask me how I was, or what I was doing, or whether the sun had shone for us in Paris. I put my hand over the phone and mouthed at Catherine, “It’s your mother.”

  “My mother!” Catherine came and took the phone from me.

  I went outside and paid off the taxi driver. When I came back in, Catherine was busy listening to whatever her mother had to say to her. It sounded like a one-sided conversation. I took the cases upstairs and began to unpack.

  We had been taking a break in Paris so that Catherine could buy some new clothes. As far as I could see they were exactly the same sort of clothes as she could have bought in London; but it had become important to us to go away from time to time. Although Catherine and I had patched up our relationship after she had caught me out in my harmless fiction about going out to business lunches, our lives together were not as easy as they had been. The great thing about going to Paris, as far as I was concerned, was that no one, not even Catherine, could disapprove of my drinking wine. If you can’t drink Bordeaux in Paris without exciting comment, where can you drink it? That was my view, and provided I took a generous view of Catherine’s shopping, she was prepared to allow that I might have my bottle or two at lunch and my bottle or two in the evening. There were, after all, wines on restaurant lists in Paris that I had never even heard of before, let alone tasted. Some of them were delightful.

  I finished unpacking and went down to the kitchen to see how Catherine was getting on. She had just hung up.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It was quite extraordinary. She was all sweetness and light. It was quite as if we had never quarrelled.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Catherine said, “It’s too good to be true. She asked about the flat, what colours I had done it up in. She asked what I was doing, whether there was any sign of children. She even asked what you were up to.”

  I said, “What did you tell her?”

  “I said you were putting together a new business and she said, she hoped I wasn’t going to be left too much on my own.” Catherine smiled to herself when she said that, somewhat grimly.

  I went to the fridge, found a bottle of St Veran, opened it and poured a glass for myself.

  “Want a glass?” I asked Catherine.

  “A bit later, perhaps,” she said. She was still thinking about her mother’s call. “You know,” said Catherine, “Mummy asked me all the questions that mothers are supposed to ask. It’s extraordinary. She won’t speak to me for six months and then she expects to pick up exactly where we stopped the day I told her I wasn’t going to marry Ed—as if she hadn’t said the awful things she said to me that day, the awful names she called me; the words she used about you.”

  Catherine had never talked to me about what had happened that day. Whenever I had asked her about it, she had just shaken her head and wouldn’t answer. Now she stood in the middle of the kitchen, in a patch of afternoon sunlight, biting her lip, deep in thought.

  Suddenly she burst into tears. “How can she act as if nothing ever happened? How can she?”

  I poured Catherine a glass of wine and refilled my own glass. She took it and came and sat opposite me at the table, and we drank our wine.

  Catherine said, “You don’t know how horrible it feels to be cut off by your own family, because you’ve never really had a family of your own.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said.

  “And now she expects I’ll drop everything and go up and see her, because she’s decided that I’ve been punished enough.”

  “‘Are you going to go and see her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Catherine. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  Later that evening we went out to dinner, as there was nothing to eat at home. Night had fallen, and people seemed to be hurrying everywhere: late office workers scurrying home, couples on their way to the theatre or the cinema. As we walked arm in arm down Piccadilly past the Ritz Hotel, a man in a covert coat who was walking briskly in the direction of Hyde Park Corner stopped us. It turned out to be Eck.

  “Ah, the young married couple,” he exclaimed; “how nice to bump into you like this!” He and Catherine kissed each other on the cheek, and Eck patted me on the arm. “How are you, old boy,” he said. “Is she looking after you?”

  It was ages since we had seen him. Just after we had moved into our flat in Half Moon Street he had looked us up on one of his rare visits to London. We had sat on packing cases in the kitchen, because there were no chairs, and Eck and I had drunk a lot of Bordeaux from Caerlyon, and we had laughed a lot; or at least, Eck had laughed a lot.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Eck, where are you off to? Why don’t you come and have dinner with us? We were just on our way to find somewhere to eat.”

  “I can’t,” said Eck, “I’m on my way to the Cavalry Club, to have a drink with a man who is proposing to sell me the hind leg of a racehorse which has come last in its past three outings. The good news is that I expect my share of the animal to be cheap. Then I’m getting a late train down to Hampshire. My cousin Harriet has become engaged to a rather nice soldier called Bob Matthews, and there’s going to be a party to celebrate.”

  “Oh, Eck,” said Catherine. “What a pity. We could have had a gossip.”

  “Well, come up north,” said Eck. “We’re all still there. You won’t need a passport.”

  “Well, if we do, will you come and have dinner with us in the flat at Caerlyon?” asked Catherine.

  Eck promised and hurried away. Catherine and I walked on.

  “Oh, it was nice to see someone from home,” said Catherine. “Dear old Eck. You can never get hold of him. He’s so social. He’s always busy doing something.”

  We found our way to a restaurant, sat down and ordered dinner. Catherine was in a better mood: seeing Eck had lightened her heart. She didn’t spea
k much, though. I could see she was still thinking about her mother.

  “You want to go and see your mother, don’t you?” I asked, after she had crumbled her bread roll into small pieces on her plate.

  “I think I ought to. She is my mother, after all. I know she behaved terribly badly—to both of us; but that doesn’t mean I should behave badly to her in return. She’s not getting any younger and my father is ten years older than she is. Who knows how long they’ll be around?”

  The potted shrimps arrived.

  “Well, I need to visit Caerlyon soon anyway,” I said. “I need to check the cellar is in good order and probably bring back a few more cases of wine to London. I’d like to have a few more different wines and vintages down in London to choose from.”

  Catherine looked up and I saw she realised that some sort of a deal was being offered.

  “I might not come and see your parents on this first visit,” I said. “I think it would be best if you went over to Coalheugh for the day whilst I check Caerlyon and perhaps go and see my own mother.”

  So a plan was made, and the next morning Catherine rang her mother, and fixed a date.

  §

  It was the beginning of December when we went up there. We drove up in my Range Rover because I wanted to stack a few cases of wine in the boot to bring back. We had telephoned the agent who looked after the property for us to get someone in and switch on the heating, and make up beds and air the flat before we arrived. Catherine brought some expensive scented candles from Jo Malone to give her mother as a peace offering. I bought a new toaster from Tesco to give as a present to my foster-mother.

  We drove up the Ai, and as we approached Newcastle Catherine sat straighter in her seat: she seemed divided between a sense of apprehension and a longing to see her home again. I, too, was filled with longing, to see Caerlyon and the undercroft again. It was months since I had been there.