2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “You just had a good time,” said Dave. “I wouldn’t let it get you down.”

  The morning passed away with further reminiscences of this kind and then we broke for lunch. I sat with Big Mick, who seemed to have taken a shine to me.

  “He’s not a bad bloke, your Eric,” said Big Mick confidentially to me. We were sitting together at a table eating pasta and salad. Eric was talking earnestly to Angela at another table.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure his heart’s in the right place.”

  “Yes, and he was a bit of a piss artist in his own right, once upon a time,” said Big Mick. “It wouldn’t take much for Eric to be sucking on a bottle of whisky again—know what I mean? Anyway, tell me what you do in the real world?”

  “I used to be a software developer. In fact, I used to own a software company until recently.”

  “Really,” said Big Mick. “I know all about that. I’m a tax accountant. I specialise in corporate stuff, sheltering high earners and private equity types from paying more tax than they need to. What was your company called?”

  “Wilberforce Software Solutions,” I told him. “But I sold it to Bayleaf, and it’s Bayleaf UK now.”

  “Great business,” said Big Mick. “Those are excellent software packages. I use them myself. I’m really pleased to meet you.” He reached across the table and took my hand and shook it.

  For a while we sat and talked happily about tax computations, and the deficiencies of Inland Revenue software.

  Later, when we were on our own together, Eric said to me, “I was so pleased to see you getting on so well with Big Mick. Not everyone can adapt to him. I expect you were talking about religion, were you?”

  “In a way,” I agreed.

  §

  Eric and I continued our daily sessions together, and every day there would be a group session as well where we traded experiences. Some of the members of the group went; others arrived. When it was Big Mick’s time to depart he gave me his business card and said, “Get in touch some time, if they ever let you out of here. We could maybe work on some ideas for new software packages together, now that I’m cured.”

  “Are you cured?” I asked.

  Big Mick winked and said, “One step at a time, Wilberforce. One step at a time.”

  I did try to get in touch with him a few months later, but when I rang the number on his card I was told that he’d left the office. I kept asking questions and in the end I found out that he had been shot dead by his crack dealer in a disagreement about money.

  Eric continued to work on my case. We spent an unproductive morning talking about God.

  “Are you OK about God, Will?”

  “In what way, exactly?”

  “I mean we believe that it helps in this process if you can put your trust in a Higher Power. For me, that’s God. But, Will, if you don’t want to talk about God, that’s cool too.”

  “I don’t think it would be especially helpful,” I said.

  Eric looked at me with pity mingled with regret. “I think that’s the wrong judgement, Will, but, hey, it’s your judgement. Maybe we’ll talk about this again.”

  The next day was more difficult. Eric went to the whiteboard and wrote: “A list of all the persons I have harmed.” Then he turned to me and said, “This one isn’t an option, Will. If you want to get better, you need to understand that your illness may have caused harm to other people. You might have made them sad; you might have hurt them, like Big Mick did; you might have stolen from them, lied to them, or deceived them in other ways.”

  Eric looked at me expectantly. I looked back at him. As I so often found with Eric, I had no real idea what he was talking about. I said nothing, so Eric wrote on the whiteboard: ‘Mrs Wilberforce’. Then he smudged it out and wrote, ‘Mrs Will’.

  “Catherine,” I corrected him. “But I didn’t harm her. It was an accident.”

  “Don’t tell me she sat and watched you drink and wasn’t hurt by it in some way,” said Eric.

  “I know what Catherine suffered because of me,” I said. “Yes, Eric. I may have caused her unnecessary worry.”

  “Was there anybody else?” asked Eric. “There usually is.”

  Ed Hartlepool. Eck. Catherine’s parents. My foster-mother. My foster-father.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Yes, you can,” said Eric. “There is someone.”

  “Catherine left Ed of her own accord,” I said. “It was nothing to do with me, or drink, or anything.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Eric. “We’ll come back to that later. But I wasn’t thinking about your friend. I was thinking about you. It’s you who has been the most harmed by drink.”

  I supposed that was true, when I thought about it. I had harmed myself. My life was not better than it had been before I discovered wine; it was worse, immeasurably worse. The day I had first entered the shop at Caerlyon had led me into a new world. I had discovered friendship; I had discovered a kind of happiness that I had never known before. I had discovered I could love somebody, when I met Catherine. I had discovered wine, when I met Francis. Wine had brought pleasures of a different sort. In the secret garden I had entered that evening long ago, it was the fruit in the garden that turned, in the end, to ashes in my mouth. Wine had brought its own labyrinth of experience with it, in which one might twist and turn for ever, forgetting where the entrance to the labyrinth was, forgetting how to leave. If I had not gained the things I had gained—the friendship and the love—I would never have had to experience the loss that I now felt.

  I put my forearms on the table, rested my head on them and closed my eyes. I wished I couldn’t hear Eric’s nasal voice, full of triumph, as he said, “Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re making real progress.”

  §

  I finished my course at The Hermitage three weeks later. Eric had arranged an ‘exit interview’ for me with Angela.

  “I’m too close to it, Will,” he told me. “We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve worked together as a team and I feel terrifically close to you as a result. I think you’re a really great human being, Will—just a bit of personal development required for you to be able to return to the outside world and lead a full and meaningful life.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t let me down, Will. Don’t leave here and throw all our hard work away. There are demons lurking in the thickets, Will, who will whisper to you to turn aside from the straight and narrow path you must tread. Take this pamphlet. I know you don’t believe in God, but He believes in you, and He can help you. It’s all written down in here. I refer you to page nine specifically.”

  “Thanks, Eric,” I said. I took the pamphlet without looking at it.

  “Hugs,” he said, and before I could escape he put his arms around me and squeezed me in a tight embrace. He smelt faintly of perspiration and disinfectant.

  “Thanks, Eric,” I said again.

  “God be with you,” said Eric with a sob. He turned away, and I left the room.

  The exit interview with Angela was different. She was a tall, cool, severe-looking woman with short-cut straw-coloured hair, a determined mouth and firm chin. She said, when I went to see her for my final meeting, “Mr Wilberforce. Come in and sit down. How do you feel about things, now you’ve spent some time with us?”

  “Much better,” I said.

  “I’m in two minds about your case, Mr Wilberforce,” she said. “Eric’s given you an excellent report. He says the two of you have bonded well together. But Eric works with his emotional intelligence. He gets very involved. It makes him a good caseworker, don’t you think?”

  “Very good,” I agreed.

  “I’m more of an observer, however,” said Angela, “and what I have observed in you is a great ability to mask your feelings. I don’t really know what you’re thinking. I’m not sure what your level of buy-in has been to what we do here. I think you are walking along the edge of a cliff, which you
could still fall over. I am not sure you have understood or accepted everything that we have told you, or shown you. What do you think?”

  “I feel it has done me some good,” I said slowly. “I don’t want a drink right now.”

  “Hang on to that feeling,” said Angela. “I think we have achieved something together. But I believe in clear outcomes to cases. I don’t think we’ve got one with you. I think you’ve made progress, but I don’t know whether you can change your behaviour altogether.”

  “I feel I’ve made progress, too,” I said. It was true.

  “Come back and see us in six months,” suggested Angela, “and then we’ll see how much progress you have made.”

  “Thanks, I will,” I promised. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see Eric again.

  “That’s a deal, then,” said Angela. “We’ll keep in touch with your doctor, in any case.” She stood up, and we shook hands.

  Half an hour later I was sitting in a taxi and on my way back to the station; then home to London. And when I got there, what then?

  FIVE

  I came back from The Hermitage determined to change my life. It wasn’t the fact that Eric had altered the way I thought about myself with his constant nasal twang, preaching to me about the Twelve Steps. It was the experience of being at the mercy of people like him, which made me so keen to avoid any return journey to The Hermitage, or anywhere else like it. I had a feeling there were places a lot worse than The Hermitage that I might end up in.

  I had thought a great deal, too, about being found drunk on the floor of the flat by Colin—the circumstance which had led to my agreeing to go The Hermitage. I knew there would be a lot more nights and days like that, when I had drunk too much. The thought of ending up like some emaciated, magenta-faced, incontinent drunkard lying in a doorway terrified me. I felt clearer-sighted than I ever had about my fondness for drinking wine. Whatever the reasons I had had for drinking in the early days, when I had first begun to know Francis and he had first initiated me into the mysteries of wine, they had long since been overtaken by changes in my body chemistry.

  I knew now that Colin was right, and that Eric was right. I was becoming an addict: an alcoholic. I knew enough about life to realise how it would all end, if I ever strayed from the straight and narrow path, as Eric had described it. Things were going to have to change.

  I sat down at my desk on the day I returned and made a list of the actions I would take—the actions that would signal the beginning of a new life:

  Drink no wine

  Look for a job

  Sell the flat and move somewhere smaller and cheaper

  4 Get out and meet people

  I tore the piece of paper from the pad and went and pinned it up on the cork pinboard that Catherine had put on the wall above the phone. On the board was a note in her neat, sloping hand: “Get chicken drumsticks. Buy bin liners. Call home.” I removed the note and threw it away. I didn’t want to be reminded of her every time I looked at the telephone. Catherine had been right, too. Above all, Catherine had been right. She had understood clearly what was happening: she had seen the alchemy of the wine from the undercroft at work, and she had tried to tell me. And I had quarrelled with her because I did not like to hear the truth.

  I pinned my Action List on the board. Then I went and retrieved Catherine’s note from the bin, smoothed out the wrinkled paper and put it away in a drawer.

  Then I went back to the Action List and wrote, in big letters: “SELL CAERLYON. SELL THE WINE.”

  As soon as I had written those words I felt a profound sense of relief. That was what I would do. In a stroke I would free myself from the weight of temptation that sat on my shoulders even now and achieve some stability in my life. I was becoming ill and becoming poor at the same time. I had spent a lot of the proceeds from the sale of my company in buying Caerlyon, and more of it on buying the flat in Half Moon Street. What I had left did not produce a sufficient income to cover my needs, and I was steadily using up my capital; not all that slowly, either. Selling Caerlyon would put me in a position where it would not matter whether I worked or not for the next ten years. I was going to get a job if I could, anyway. What else would I do with my time?

  Next day I rang the agent who looked after Caerlyon for me in my absence. He received my instructions with considerable surprise.

  “Sell Caerlyon? You must be joking.”

  “I’m not joking. What good is it to me? I never go there. I’m never going to go back and live there after what happened, ami?”

  The agent was conciliatory. Thoughts, no doubt, of the commission he might earn from such a sale occurred to him. He said, “Well, if you are sure, we would be delighted to act for you. It might take a while, with the Council as a sitting tenant in the main house. On the other hand, it’s a good covenant.”

  “Well, see what you can do,” I told him. “Let me know what you think it might fetch.”

  “We’ll do a valuation,” he said, “and what would your plans be for relocating the wine? There’s quite a lot of it, isn’t there? Do you want us to look for some suitable storage facilities for you? I don’t suppose you can fit it all into your London flat.”

  “Sell the wine too,” I told him.

  This surprised him even more. “I always thought you were very keen on Mr Black’s wine collection,” he said.

  “I was,” I told him, “but I’m afraid it’s got to go when I sell the house. Francis always told me his family used to buy wine from Christie’s. Try and get someone from their wine department to come and value it for me.”

  When I put the phone down I felt more at peace than I had done for a long while. I couldn’t believe I had been so decisive. I felt Catherine would have been very proud of me. I went out and walked around Green Park in the cold March sunlight. I felt like a different man.

  As I walked, I wondered what Francis would think when he found out I had sold the wine. I knew he was dead, but I found it hard to locate him amongst the things that were past in my life. Francis might be disappointed if he knew I had sold the wine. He had entrusted it to me, together with his house. I was to have lived in his house and looked after the wine in the undercroft, the collection of which he considered to have been the one great achievement of his life. He might regard the sale of his wine as a betrayal of his trust. He might be right, too: it was a betrayal. It was also the only chance of my survival. I knew that while the wine was still there, I would for ever return to its call.

  The next day I wrote letters to ten different software companies, asking if they would be interested in employing me as a consultant. I hoped my reputation was still strong enough to ensure I received some expressions of interest. Then I sat at my desk thinking about how pleased Catherine would be if I got a job, and gave up drinking at the same time. I never used to drink. It was a habit I had developed after first meeting Francis.

  I filled the day with activity. I tidied up the flat, which had become somewhat forlorn and dusty. A cleaner came in once a week but, unsupervised, her efforts were superficial in their effect. I parcelled up Catherine’s jewellery, in response to a letter requesting its return from a solicitor acting for her parents. I moved all her clothes out of her bedroom, and her make-up, and hung everything up in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, or stored it away in boxes.

  It was only in the evening that it became more difficult for me. Now, when the day’s activity was done, it would have been very nice to drink a glass of wine. I felt the desire to open a bottle growing in me, like an itch, like an ache, like a burning need. I walked from one room to another and talked to Catherine, to stop myself thinking about having a drink.

  “I think our marriage is better than it’s ever been,” I said to her, “don’t you? If I can just keep going without a drink for a few weeks I know I will be all right again. I’m not really an alcoholic, but you were right to keep warning me. I understand that now.” I was at the desk now, and the air in the little sitting room seemed to me
to be fragrant with the Chanel N°5, which Catherine used to wear. I felt she was with me. “Within a month, or two months at the latest,” I told her, “I’ll have a job doing contract software development somewhere. I’m not going to be too ambitious at first. I just want to get back into the habit of work, and make sure I’m earning a living and not living off capital. Later, maybe, I’ll go back to the idea of starting a new business.”

  Catherine nodded in agreement. I wished she’d speak, but even though she did not, she seemed content with what I was saying. I felt that our lives were in harmony again, as they had been in the first days of our marriage. It was such a shame that she was dead.

  I went to bed early that night. At first I felt the peacefulness that had come upon me as I had talked to Catherine, wandering about the flat, feeling her presence everywhere on the edge of my vision, feeling a draught fluttering across the back of my neck like the touch of cool fingers. Then restlessness set in. I began to examine my own behaviour and I thought, for a while, lying there in the dark, that I might be losing my mind. Did everyone else who had lost a wife go around talking to her as if she was still alive? I didn’t know.

  Sleep came in the end. I fell into edgy dreams, with a vivid strangeness to them. In my dream, I smelled something rotten, and I saw a half-familiar shape out of the corner of my eye. I was in a strange city, in a country I did not know, and there was something following me down the street that I did not want to catch up with me.

  The next morning I went downstairs and saw that someone had written on the notepad on the desk: TNMWWTTW. The letters were not written in my usual handwriting. They were scored into the paper, almost through the paper and into the wood of the desk beneath, with a furious energy. I didn’t remember writing them. I did not know what they meant. I sat and looked at them for a long time. I thought I ought to try and remember them, in case I saw them again, in case they had some significance which for the time being escaped me. So I tried to think of a mnemonic to remember them by. It was difficult, but in the end I came up with ‘Ten Naughty Mice Went Walking Towards TheWensleydale’.