2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  Francis dropped his arms to his sides and reminded me, “I inherited quite a lot of it, you know.” He had told me this before. “I’m afraid I have not been very good at hanging on to the things that were left me. But I’ve managed to hang on to this.”

  “Well, it’s more interesting to look at, and a lot more fun, than a load of computer programs,” I said.

  Francis laughed briefly, and then we went back up the stairs again to the shop. He sat down in his chair again and looked at me. He said, “You ought to work less hard, settle down and marry someone, and start to lead a proper life.”

  “Francis! Who on earth would marry me?”

  He ignored my question and said, “I should have married. I almost did, at one point, but…it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I haven’t even got that far.”

  Francis looked at me. The strong arch of his eyebrows gave his face a quizzical look at times, and now I thought he was quizzing me. “I think you’ll be married before the year is out.”

  “I’d like to know who to, if that’s the case.”

  There was a silence and then Francis said, “You do know. Of course you know. But you asked me about my selling up the wine a moment ago, if you remember. I am selling it.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I put my head in my hands and said, “Oh God.”

  “I’m selling it to you.”

  I looked up. He was smiling, but not as if he was teasing me.

  “You’re what?”

  “Wilberforce, I’ve got cancer. If I live for six months it will be longer than the doctors expect at the moment.”

  I stared at him, appalled. I had noticed that Francis wasn’t well, for the last few weeks, but I’d never dreamed for a moment that it was something serious. I think I said something, about how sorry I was—was there anything I could do? but he brushed aside my words with a wave of the hand.

  “Let’s concentrate on the matter in hand. As you know, I’ve no living relations that I know of. That has never troubled me much, but lately I have been giving it some thought. I find, after all, that it is a trouble to me that, when I die, my life’s work, my life’s passion, will be sold at auction by ignorant men to other ignorant men, that this collection of wine which my grandfather started and which my father built upon and which I inherited and added to, should be dispersed on my death. This collection of wine has become my life. I can’t bear the thought it should go under the hammer. I’ve been to auctions like that myself, as a buyer—dealers looking to make a quick turn, or rich businessmen wanting trophy wines.”

  I shuddered at the thought. I supposed Francis thought of me as a rich businessman. At least I had begun to appreciate what he gave me to drink. “I couldn’t bear that, Francis,” I said. “I’d sooner buy it all myself. But I haven’t got that kind of money.”

  “Haven’t you? You don’t know what the price is yet, do you?”

  Francis poured us both another glass of wine, then sat back in his chair again. “There’s another thing: Blacks have lived in this house for over four hundred years. That’s quite a long time, even in this part of the world. I used to tell myself all that meant nothing to me. But when I inherited the house, it was in bad shape and needed a lot of money spending on it. Half the estate had been sold. I think we were down to two thousand acres when I inherited, and ten or a dozen farmhouses. We used to own all of that valley where you work, you know. We managed to sell most of it to the Church Commissioners in the 19305. They took it off my father’s hands as a favour.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. The building in which I worked on its own had a freehold value of several million pounds. Unfortunately I was only a tenant. Francis’s family had given away land that had a present value of tens of millions.

  “The Black family has not managed its affairs well. We became rather too keen on collecting wine and, in my father’s case, drinking it. My father and my grandfather were both very fond of drinking wine. They spent a fortune on building up this cellar; and drinking the stuff. When I inherited Caerlyon it already had an enormous mortgage, which I haven’t exactly been able to reduce. I’ve never drunk that much. Unfortunately I had what they call a misspent youth. I used to gamble quite heavily when I lived in London.” Francis sighed. “When they hand out sainthoods, I won’t be anywhere near the front of the queue. It’s a little late to put things right.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand. His voice sounded flat.

  “There has been a Black living in this house, or in the houses that were here before, since 1540. In a few months’ time, that will all come to an end.”

  He looked up at me again, and I saw now the infinite sadness that had always lived behind his eyes, but which I had never recognised before. I had taken Francis at face value: I had read the urbane, reserved, ironic expression and never looked behind it. Now, his face thinner than before and with dark circles under his eyes, there was no mistaking how he really felt.

  “I think I would die easier if I had done something to preserve what’s left to me. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t think of anything to say. This was strange territory he was taking me into.

  He went on, “Wilberforce, I’ll sell you my wine for one pound.”

  “A pound! You mean a million of them, don’t you?” For a moment I wondered whether Francis’s illness was affecting his reason. Or perhaps he was on some very strong medication—that might be it.

  “There is a catch. Two of them, in fact,” Francis said. “They depend on your being as well off as I think you are. The first catch is that to get the wine you have to buy Caerlyon itself. That means paying off a mortgage of nearly one million pounds. At the moment the rent from the Council doesn’t even cover the interest. The second is, I want you to open negotiations with the Council after my death, and buy them out of their lease. I know they’d take your hand off if you made them an offer. This place is a white elephant as far as they are concerned. There was a fashion amongst local authorities for taking on buildings like this a few years ago, but now they want to get free of them whenever they can. They hardly ever use it nowadays. Anyway, I want you to find a way to get them out and then live in the house when I am gone.”

  I decided Francis wasn’t speaking under the influence of drugs. His voice was as clear, as sharp as ever. It was only that nothing he said made any sense. “Me? Live here?” I asked.

  “You were adopted, weren’t you?”

  “I was brought up by foster-parents. I never knew my real mother or father.”

  “Then it’s not as if you are going to inherit a family home, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Make this your home, then. Live here as if you had been my heir. Except that all you are inheriting is debt. But if you can pay off the debt, and prevent the house and its contents being sold, then this can become your home. Everyone needs to belong to somewhere, Wilberforce.”

  I couldn’t think what to say to this proposition.

  “Then, even if no Blacks will ever live here again, I can die knowing that someone’s family will live here. Future generations of Wilberforces,” said Francis, with his dry laugh, “might live and prosper here. I’d rather it was you than anyone else.”

  I shook my head. This was too much to take in. I wondered how to let Francis know that all of this was impossible. I was well off, I suppose, with a good income, but there was no way in which I could raise more than a million pounds in the next six months. Even if I could, what would I do, rattling around in an enormous house like Caerlyon? My two-bedroom flat in Newcastle was too big for me. I’d never been inside the Council-occupied parts of Caerlyon, but Francis had told me it had twenty bedrooms, a drawing room, two dining rooms, a smoking room, and numerous other domestic rooms, offices and studies. The thought of living there on my own was preposterous. I would go mad.

  What was I to say? How could I let Francis down without hastening his death? I had no doubt
that my refusal would bring the end nearer. I had no doubt that I represented the last throw of the dice for Francis, a man confronted with the prospect of his own untimely death and forced to reckon up the wasted years of his life. I chose my words as carefully, with as much kindness as I could.

  “Francis, I’m afraid that’s just…”

  He held up his hand. “Don’t say any more, Wilberforce. It was unreasonable of me to suggest it. I know it was the most presumptuous suggestion. I know I should never have made it, except that I also know how much you have come to care about my wine collection. I hope you will not think the worse of me for speaking as I have done.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, “I’ll sell my company, raise the money, buy the house and keep the wine.”

  Francis did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, his head bowed, “You don’t mean it.”

  “I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. It has just occurred to me that it is, after all, the best possible thing I could do. I can’t explain it all now, but I have never meant anything more certainly in my whole life. Of course I’ll do it.”

  As I spoke, a huge weight was lifted from me that I had not realised I had been carrying. My business, which had once been my whole life, now stood in the way of my life. I didn’t enjoy it any more. It had become too big, too grown-up, too much about money, too demanding of every part of my life. I couldn’t even drive up the hill to see Francis without Andy making me feel guilty, as if I was spending time that belonged to him. And then there was the wine. As soon as Francis had talked about selling it, I knew I could never let that happen. It had taken a few minutes for the consequence of that truth to work its way into my conscious mind, but now I knew: I needed that wine; I couldn’t bear the idea that it would be dispersed, disappearing into other men’s collections, other men’s cellars, being sold in hotels and restaurants. I needed it, and I had to have it.

  Then Francis poured us both the last of the wine from the decanter and raised his glass to me in a toast. He said, “Drink this, in remembrance of me.”

  §

  A few days later I met Ed and Catherine at another of the many supper or dinner parties that I went to that year. There were the usual people there, including Eck. We were having dinner with someone called Bilbo Mountwilliam, who lived in London but had a house in the county. Before we went into dinner, when she didn’t think anyone was watching her, Catherine turned to me and made a ridiculous little mime of someone eating a poppadum, and then put her finger to her lips. I almost burst out laughing. I knew that she meant I wasn’t to say anything about the two of us having had supper together in Al Diwan. That meant she had not told Ed about it. I smiled and nodded and then we were going through to the dining room and I found myself sitting next to Annabel Gazebee, who immediately engaged me in conversation. No one around the table seemed to have heard of Francis’s illness, so I said nothing about that either.

  But while Annabel was talking to me, I wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying; I was thinking about the feeling that had been almost like an electric shock, when Catherine had turned to me and put her finger to her lips. It was the sense of a conspiracy: it was the sense of a connection. I shook my head to clear it of its treacherous thoughts and tried to concentrate on Annabel’s very long description of an opera she was organising for a Red Cross fund-raising event.

  Later in the evening I saw Ed casually drape one arm over Catherine’s bare shoulder, without turning his head to look at her. The act of possession made me flinch. Then my neighbour on the other side asked me a question, and I realised she had spoken for a second time. I made an effort and turned to talk to her.

  The following morning Catherine rang me in the office. I hadn’t even known she had the number. “We need to talk,” she said, without any preamble.

  “Oh. Well, yes, of course. When?”

  “Are you free now?”

  I smiled to myself at Catherine’s assumption that, like her other friends, I couldn’t possibly have anything more important to do than go and talk to her. Then it occurred to me that it would be very nice to leave the office for a couple of hours and spend them with Catherine, if that is what she wanted. I clicked open the diary in my computer and looked at what was in it for the afternoon.

  “Hold the line,” I said to Catherine, “I’ll see what I can sort out.” Then I buzzed Andy on an internal line.

  “What’s up, doc?” he asked, as he picked up.

  “I need to free myself up this afternoon. Something’s come up. I’ve got a presentation to the people from Miller Ltd, who are coming in about three p.m. to look at the new project-management software package. Can you do that for me?”

  “Sure thing. Are you back in later? I want some time with you.”

  I knew what that would be about. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I’m not going to make it.”

  I picked up the parked call again and said, “That’s fine, Catherine. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Come here, if you don’t mind.”

  ‘Here’ was Coalheugh, Catherine’s family home, about fifteen miles south-west of Caerlyon, deep in the Pennine dales. Her parents were not often there at this time of the year, spending most of the winter in Bermuda and the spring in their house in Antibes.

  “I’ll be with you in half an hour or so.”

  I drove south, into the bleached winter landscape. A low sun shone on quiet fields mostly bare of stock, the cattle in their sheds for the winter, most of the sheep penned up for the start of lambing. All the colours were pale: the fields almost yellow, the woods on the sides of the valley brown except for the dark green of spruce here and there. A few patches of snow could be seen higher up on the hills. As I drove, I wondered what Catherine could possibly want to talk to me about. Then I wondered if Ed would be there. I turned off the road between the drive gates, along a drive that turned this way and that through parkland planted with great oaks and ash, with patches of snowdrops here and there, nodding in the breeze. After a while Catherine’s house came into a view: not as large as Caerlyon, but big enough—a large Victorian house built from dark-grey stone, of no great beauty, ornamented only by a crenellation that ran along its front.

  Catherine must have been watching for my arrival because as I parked the car at the front of the house she came down the steps to greet me.

  “Thank you for coming, Wilberforce,” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “There’s no one at home so I thought I’d better come and let you in myself. It’s the housekeeper’s day off.”

  Ed Simmonds evidently was not there; otherwise he would have come out to meet me too.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been put to the trouble of opening your own front door.”

  We went inside, into a large hall, and then into a drawing room. There was a fire burning in the hearth, but the room was very cold.

  “Come and stand by the fire,” said Catherine. “Not many people can cope with the temperature in this house. My father has all the bills sent to him, and he checks the central-heating bills to the last penny. If he thinks I’ve had the heating on in the daytime, he gives me absolute hell. Of course if he and my mother were ever here at this time of the year, it would be on all the time.”

  She went to a table where a bottle of wine and two glasses stood on a tray. “It’s too late for coffee, and too early for tea, so would you like a glass of wine?”

  “If that’s what you’re having.”

  “I think so. Oh, perhaps you’d like something to eat? Have you had any lunch?”

  “I don’t want anything, thank you.”

  Catherine poured the two glasses of white wine and brought them across. “Not up to the standards you are used to at Caerlyon,” she said.

  “Delicious,” I said politely. It was not delicious, but it was icy cold, the same temperature as most of the room, and drinkable. A year ago I wouldn’t have known the difference. Now, thanks to Francis, I knew it very well.

  As if
reading my mind she said, “It’s Francis I wanted to speak to you about.”

  I waited.

  “Did you know how ill he was? Did you know that he was dying?”

  “Yes. He told me a week ago.”

  “And you didn’t let me know? Or Ed?” Catherine looked hurt as she said this.

  “I didn’t think it was my business to tell anyone. I thought it was up to Francis to decide who he was going to tell, and when he was going to tell them.”

  Catherine considered this and then said, “You know, you’re right. I shouldn’t have expected you to call. Anyway, he told Ed about it the other night and Ed rang and told me this morning. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. That’s why I had to speak to you.”

  I waited.

  “We must do something, Wilberforce,” she said. She walked across to the window, and I followed her and we looked out across the park. Great banks of cloud were blowing across the sky, and the light was darkening. I wondered if it might snow.

  I said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Francis is seeing one of the top oncologists in the North-East. He’s being looked after as well as he could be, but he’s been told there’s no chance of any remission. He didn’t go to the doctor until it was far too late.”

  “That is so typical of Francis. But I didn’t mean about that. He told Ed that he wasn’t expecting to live six months.”

  “He told me that, too.”

  She said, still staring out of the window, “No, I meant about his wine. It will kill Francis before his due time, soon as that is, if he thinks everything will be sold up after he dies. It would be an absolute tragedy. We must do something about it.”

  “Like what?” I asked. I felt uncomfortable at the direction the conversation was going in.

  “Well, I haven’t talked to anyone about it—not even Ed, although it was something he said that gave me the idea. He said: Somebody Francis likes should buy his wine. Ed says some of it is absolute rubbish, but the older wine he thinks is well worth having. But whether it’s rubbish or not, it’s a lot of wine.”