2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  Then I went into the kitchen and unwrapped Catherine’s jewellery, which I had rolled up in tissue paper before posting it back to her parents. I laid the pieces out on the table. There was a pair of sapphire-and-diamond earrings, and a matching three-stranded sapphire-and-diamond necklace. The stones were a deep blue. There was a heavy gold bracelet and a signet ring, a three-stranded pearl necklace, several diamond rings, an emerald-and-diamond necklace, and various less important pieces.

  I could remember her wearing most of them. I thought I could picture each occasion when she had worn the sapphire necklace, which was not very often, for it was a very grand piece of jewellery. I decided that I would not post them for a day or two yet, to give myself another chance to look at them before they went. They were a part of my memory of Catherine, and once they went, her ghost, always present in my mind, would become thinner and less substantial. I wasn’t ready to lose any more of her just yet. I scooped up the jewellery and wrapped each piece in the tissue paper it had been wrapped in, then took it to my desk and locked all of it in a drawer.

  The next day I received a letter from one of the software companies I had written to. It was full of enthusiastic praise for the programs I had developed at my old company, and said that the writer would get back in touch with me at the earliest possible moment, if anything came up that he thought would be of interest. There was no suggestion that we should meet.

  Over the next few days I received several more letters in a similar vein. None of them had any immediate requirement for my services. One of them went as far as suggesting lunch some time, but did not give a date. Another said they were fully staffed up at present, but might be looking for more people next year. They were the most positive replies I received. The rest were polite, but unhelpful. Only one person rang me up: the managing director of a former competitor.

  “Yes, it’s a young man’s game now,” he said. “Some of our programmers aren’t much more than teenagers. It’s like tennis players: you’re over the hill by the time you’re thirty. But keep in touch, Wilberforce; you never know, something might turn up.”

  I also received a phone call from Christie’s. Ben Someone rang to say he had been to value the wine at Caerlyon.

  “Oh yes?” I said. “What do you think? It’s quite a collection, isn’t it?” Ben said, “Yes, well, it’s quite a mixture. Rather difficult to value, in a way.” He sounded hesitant.

  I said, “I would have thought it was quite easy. I always thought he bought most of his wine at auction from you.”

  “No,” said Ben. “Your agent said you thought that, but he wasn’t a recent customer. It’s an odd mixture. There are a few cases of quite good stuff, all from the sixties and seventies. After that the recent additions to the collection seem more like odds and ends. Did the cellar change hands in the 19805? There isn’t really much of any value later than that date.”

  Francis had inherited the cellar from his parents when he was in his early forties, some time in the mid-eighties.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s when Francis Black began adding to his father’s collection of wine.”

  Ben Ingledew said, “Well, the later stuff is quite a strange mixture. It almost looks like what we’d expect to get offered to us from bankruptcies or house clearances. You know: a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some odd choices in there too: Australian and Bulgarian reds that frankly should have been drunk within a year, if at all.”

  I became irritated. I had no idea what the man was talking about. I said, “I believe that Francis in his day was one of the great experts and one of the greatest collectors specialising in the wines of Bordeaux.”

  Ben Ingledew said, “Well, I am sure he knew a great deal about it. There certainly are a few remnants of some very good wines in the cellar, but nearly all the cases have been opened, and a lot of it seems to have been drunk. I mean, we found a couple of bottles of 1974 Petrus, for example. There’s a couple of cases of 1978 Trotanoy. There are six bottles of 1953 Cheval Blanc. But we would have been looking for some of the newer vintages and some of the classic first growths that you’d expect to find in a modern collection of wine. There are hardly any premiers grands crus classes. There’s no Le Pin, or Le Dome, or Latour. There’s no Angelus or Palmer or Ausone. There aren’t even very many decent third- or fourth-growth wines. On the other hand there are quite a few things that probably wouldn’t be stocked in the better supermarkets. I’m not saying it’s all bad news. There are several cases of quite good stuff, and a few exceptional bottles, which must have been laid down a very long time ago…” His voice trailed away in embarrassment.

  They had obviously sent some young trainee to value the wine—someone who didn’t really know what he was talking about. I felt annoyed.

  “So, what do you think it is worth, then?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s about five hundred cases of wine in wooden boxes, and about a thousand bottles of wine in the racks. Say seven thousand bottles altogether.”

  I interrupted him: “There’s at least a hundred thousand bottles in that cellar.”

  “Oh,” said Ben. “Well, I must have missed something. I’ll send you the inventory in the post. There must be another cellar somewhere, is there? Because we certainly inventoried everything in—what do you call it?—the undercellar?”

  “The undercroft,” I told him.

  “Anyway, not counting anything else you keep elsewhere, we would recommend that you put a reserve on what we have listed of about thirty, if you send it to auction.”

  “Thirty?”

  “Thirty thousand,” said Ben, “and if we are lucky it could get up to fifty on the day.”

  “Thirty thousand?” I repeated. “That collection of wine must be worth more than a million pounds!”

  “Well,” said Ben, “we can’t get it to add up to that sort of figure. Or anything like it. As I say, we’ll send you the inventory with our values against each lot of wine. The trouble is, we don’t really know its provenance, or how it was stored before it got to your cellar. Quite a few of the cased wines in wooden cases, and most of the wine in those little side chambers, we expect may have started to go over by now. A lot of it should have been drunk or sold and the money reinvested in something younger. And those bottles which are of that sort of age aren’t always special enough to command a rarity value. Mind you, there are some very interesting bottles of wine there. I don’t want to be too depressing about it.”

  “I really can’t understand,” I said, “how you can put such a low figure on such a marvellous collection of wine. I’ve been told it is one of the greatest collections in private hands in this country.”

  Ben said, so politely that I could imagine him smiling to himself as he spoke on the phone, “Well, I couldn’t really say, Mr Wilberforce. But I would say that if you were to pay more than fifty thousand for what we’ve seen, you’d be paying over the odds.”

  “I see,” I said. This boy was an idiot. I had wasted my time involving him. Why had they sent someone who so obviously had been in the job less than a week?

  “Let us know if you want us to put it into auction,” said Ben, “and let me know, when you see the inventory, if I have missed something.”

  We hung up. Now I was going to have to trail all the way up to Caerlyon to check the wine off against his inventory. Fifty thousand pounds! I had paid a million for that wine, and I knew then that it was cheap at the price. I rang up the agent and complained.

  “Well,” said my agent, “I don’t know about that. Ben Ingledew is a Master of Wine, you know. I’d be very surprised if he’s got it wrong. But when you get his valuation, you’d better come up and check. He’s obviously missed something.”

  A couple of days later I took the train up to Newcastle and then a taxi to Caerlyon. The daffodils were out, covering the neglected lawns of the old house. The courtyard was covered in moss. Someone had thrown a brick at the shop window, but it had bounced off the wire grille I had arranged to
be put up, and the pane was only cracked. The visitor had had more success with the house. Both kitchen windows were starred, where someone had thrown something at them. I unlocked the door and went in, expecting to find that the place had been trashed. But it was untouched, unvisited, unloved. All that had changed was that there was a pile of letters to ‘The Occupier’ on the door mat.

  I put my bags down in the kitchen and turned on the heating. Then I took the keys to the undercroft from the tin where I kept them hidden and went next door. The shop was dusty and abandoned, but there were footprints in the dust and the desk had been cleared, evidence of the valuer’s visit. I went down the stairs to the undercroft, and flicked the light switch on.

  For a moment, Ben Ingledew’s words seemed to have affected my vision. What, after all, was in this cellar but a few piles of wooden cases, a few thousand dusty bottles of ageing wine? I stood halfway down the stairs, looking into the great stone chamber, and it seemed forlorn, a collection of odds and ends, a dumping ground for the unsold stock of a dozen pubs and restaurants.

  Then it came into focus again, and I saw the cellar as it really was: a magician’s cavern, full of potency and brilliance. The lights sparkled on the endless bottles lining the sides of the great vaulted space. The small piles of awkwardly stacked wooden cases of wine became columns and towers of wooden boxes, an underground reconstruction of Manhattan, along which one could walk down avenues of Pomerol, Margaux, St Emilion, St Julien.

  I looked at the inventory in my hand. There was far more wine down here than they had listed—I knew that. I wasn’t going to bother to count it all. I could see it in front of me. The man had got it badly wrong, that was all.

  I wandered along the racks on the south wall of the cellar and checked the inventory. According to the list, which I had looked through on the train on the way up, there should be some bottles of Château Talbot 1979 somewhere here. I found the last two and thought, Well, at least Mr Ben so-called-master-of-wine Ingledew has got something right. I decided to take them upstairs to the shop.

  I put the bottles on the desk. I wasn’t sure why I had moved them from the rack. Then I sat down in my chair, opposite the chair where Francis had sat, and thought. I could feel no sense of Francis now. That sense had become fainter every time I had returned here. The first time I had been back to the undercroft I had felt as if he was telling me what to do, guiding me in everything. I could almost see him. Out of good manners, I never sat in his chair in case he still wanted to use it. He had gone, though—gone for good—and all the decisions were up to me now.

  The first decision I had to make was whether I should sell the wine at auction. I was certainly not going to put it into auction at the reserve price that Christie’s had suggested. A cheque for thirty thousand pounds in return for an investment of a million pounds made a year or two ago—it simply did not bear thinking about.

  I decided I would leave it for a few months and then get someone else to look at it. It was probably going up in value just sitting there.

  That solved another problem. While the wine remained unsold, there was no point in selling Caerlyon. I would only have to move the wine somewhere else and, if anything was likely to affect its value, moving it would. Although I knew I really needed to sell Caerlyon sooner rather than later, six months either way wasn’t going to make any difference. I decided I would tell the agent to revalue the wine and the house six months from now, using different valuers, and see what the result was compared with the estimates now.

  I sat and looked at the two bottles of Château Talbot. Without really thinking about it—thinking more about whether I could find any of Francis’s old invoices for the wine he had bought, which might indicate how much he had paid for it and where it had been bought from—I went over to the desk and opened one of the bottles. It was automatic; I just felt the wine should be allowed to breathe.

  From downstairs I felt the familiar radio waves vibrating in my blood, singing to me. I heard the whispered names of the wine recited from somewhere in my memory: Bellevue-Mon-dotte, Yon-Figeac, Chapelle de la Mission. Each name was like a poem that evoked sunny days, the laughter of friends, the love of one’s wife and family. I remembered Catherine saying to me, not so long ago, after she had died: “You must choose one of us. You must choose me, or you must choose the wine.”

  She had said something similar a month or two before, when she was still alive and we had been in Paris together. Then I had told her, “I’ve already chosen you.” But life isn’t as simple as that. Choices are never as straightforward as one would like. In the real world there is more complexity than one can imagine. Compromise is necessary, from time to time.

  I poured myself a glass of Château Talbot, and swirled the wine around the glass to release its bouquet. It was old, but it was still going to be drinkable. I raised the glass and took a sip. I said out loud, “I choose you, Catherine, and I choose the wine as well.”

  2003

  ONE

  That winter I fell into the habit at least twice a week of leaving the office much earlier than in the old days, and driving out of the industrial estate, up the side of the valley to Caerlyon. Now I left the office at six, not eight. Very often when I left there would still be a dozen cars in the parking slots in front of the building: programmers working late, working the way I used to work. I didn’t feel guilty. I had worked like that for nearly fifteen years. I had worked like that because, if I had not, the business would have been overrun by one or other of its dozens of competitors. Clients would not have stayed with us, because what we did was meet deadlines—always, no matter what the costs to our personal lives and the few hours we allowed ourselves away from the office. I worked like that because I had nothing special to go home to.

  Sometimes, if I saw Andy’s car in the slot next to mine, I did feel uneasy. Andy was the first person I ever employed, as a part-time accountant. He worked for me a couple of hours a week in the first years of the business. He was my age: we were both twenty-two when we first met. He was an audit manager in a local firm of accountants. Like me he had left school at sixteen, and at twenty-two he was already qualified and earning what most people of our age would have regarded as an excellent salary. But he was hungry for more. After the second year I asked him if he could give me a day a week. After the third year I asked him to join me in the business, because by then I realised he was a lot more than someone who could add up. He was much better with people than I was. He didn’t mind taking customers out to dinner, or to St James’s Park to watch football. I did. I resented the time I spent away from my computer; I hated having to drink pints of beer (and in those early days I did not much like wine either), and then face the prospect of returning to the office at ten in the evening. I dreaded the thought of having to finish a proposal for a client, feeling muzzy in the head and tired, and struggling to find the right words or add up the right numbers. Andy took that problem away from me. He was the person who was best with the customers; he encouraged me to start hiring more staff; he was the person who made sure we had proper employment contracts and paid our people enough to make them want to stay with us. He dealt with pay reviews, he dealt with all the regulations and compliance, and above all he watched the money. He watched the cash to the last penny and he counted up the profits. He wined and dined our bankers every three or four months and took them to watch Newcastle United. When things became tough—for example when we lost a few tens of thousands as a result of a bad debt, which happened a few times in the early years—those evenings with the bankers paid off. They stood by us. They believed in Andy and understood him. They didn’t understand me, but so long as Andy was there to explain things to them, they backed us through good times and bad. Asking Andy to join me was one of the best decisions I ever made. To tell the truth, I didn’t give it five minutes’ conscious thought at the time. I think the idea had been developing in the back of my mind for a long while, and when I said to him, “Andy, why don’t you come and work with m
e full time?” and he said, “What took you so long to ask?” it seemed like the most natural thing in all the world that I should risk everything hiring someone I probably couldn’t afford to pay. I doubted I could match what he was already earning, and I wondered that he should risk everything working for a business that was only three years old and barely profitable. But Andy was a risk-taker, even though he was an accountant. He could see even then, perhaps more clearly than I could, what the potential of Wilberforce Software Solutions was. We shook hands, and Andy grinned at me. He was short, about five foot eight, with tight curly black hair and a face that crinkled in deceptively friendly ways. Sharp brown eyes that fixed themselves unwaveringly on whomever he was talking to were the clue to his character: tenacious, aggressive and manipulative.

  When I let go of Andy’s hand, feeling pleased but uncertain what to do next, he said to me, “Let’s go to the pub and sort this out.”

  “I need to get back to the office,” I pleaded. We were standing in the reception area of Andy’s firm of accountants.

  “No, you don’t. You need to come to the pub with me; we need to sort this out, and then you need to have a few drinks. It will do you good, and you’ve got a partner now. Relax, Wilberforce.”

  We went to the pub, and Andy told me he would work for me for a year at half his present salary in exchange for twenty per cent of the equity. After that, the business could either afford to pay both of us what we were worth, or he would go back to his old job, which he felt sure his partners would keep open for him. I don’t know if that last part was true. I just agreed with everything he said. Then we had a few drinks, as promised, and that night, instead of going back to the office and working until midnight, I went home and slept eight hours for the first time in years, feeling more relaxed than I had been for a very long time.