2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  “No.”

  “Want one?”

  I thought Eck seemed remarkably at home in Ed’s house. “No, I don’t.”

  Eck saw me looking at him as he trimmed the cigar. “This house is the next best thing to Liberty Hall. Ed expects his friends to make free with all the good things he has. I try never to let him down.”

  “What does Ed do all day?” I asked, thinking of the office and the computer. “Does he manage the whole estate on his own?”

  “No,” said Eck. “He’s got people to do all that for him. No, what Ed does when he’s not going racing, or hunting, or the occasional day’s shooting, is read the papers. When he can be bothered.”

  I thought this sounded rather severe. Then I realised that to Eck and Ed leisure was a natural state of being and employment was not. I said to Eck, out of curiosity to see if my theory was right, “What do you do, Eck?”

  “I can tell you what I did do. I was a soldier for ten years or so; a Grenadier. I come from a family of soldiers. My father was a colonel; my uncle is General Chetwode-Talbot. You’ve probably never heard of him, but there it is—if you were ever in the army you would know the name. Soldiering is all that our lot know how to do. After about ten years I decided I wanted to make a bit of money, so I switched to the private sector. I worked for quite a while for Risk Management. Have you heard of them?”

  I admitted that I had not.

  “What we did was manage kidnaps, for Lloyd’s of London. The idea is that if you are working in a dodgy part of the world, your company can insure you against ransom demands with an underwriter at Lloyd’s. There are a few of them that make a market in that kind of cover. Our job was, if the worst happened, to get involved in negotiating the ransom and to make sure the hostage came out alive if we could get him out at a sensible price.”

  “Goodness,” I said. “I had no idea all that went on.”

  “That, and more,” said Eck, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke as he sat in his armchair. I understood all of a sudden that, although Eck had cast himself in the role of the joker, behind his teasing and his charm, he was enormously tough.

  “So why did you stop?” I asked.

  “I was working on a slow case in Medellin in Colombia. A chap from BP had been lifted by PARC. They are a bunch of very professional narco-terrorists, who finance themselves and their revolution through kidnapping and drug deals. But something didn’t ring true on this deal. I was getting nowhere. I had no idea if the chap from BP was still alive. Then I came to the unpleasant conclusion that he was not and, worse, that whoever I was talking to—and I’m still not sure whether it was PARC or some other group—had in mind to use me as a bargaining chip instead. I started to feel I was being followed. Then I was sure I was, by some very unpleasant people. So I took off.”

  “You left?”

  “I took a flight to Bogota and rang my office on the satellite phone. They advised me to get out of the country and I did. When I got back I found my aunt had died while I was in country and had left my cousin Harriet and me a decent legacy. So I quit. I couldn’t see the point in going on, fun as it had been. One day or another it was going to go wrong, and I decided it would be a clever idea to leave before it did.”

  I was fascinated; I had never met anyone like Eck before. He stubbed his cigar out and we went out into the hall. Horace appeared from somewhere and opened the front door for us and we walked down the steps to where Eck’s car was parked next to mine.

  “Well, good to meet you again,” said Eck, putting out his hand. I shook it and then he said, “Are you going to get in touch with Ed?”

  “I might. I don’t know. What do you think?” I spoke as if I had known Eck for years. He had that effect on people, at any rate upon me.

  “He’s a very old friend of mine. If he said he wants you to get in touch, then he definitely meant it. Ed always means what he says. He is the most delightful man on the planet so long as he is getting his own way. When he doesn’t, it can be quite bruising for people around him. He likes to get what he wants.”

  This didn’t seem much of a problem to me. Why shouldn’t Ed Simmonds get what he wanted? It was all the same to me.

  §

  Ed Simmonds didn’t get in touch and I didn’t feel able to ring him. After all, why should he? He’d given me lunch and I had fixed his computer. The trade was done. Why on earth should he bother to want to see me again? It shouldn’t have mattered to me. I was, as always, very busy at work and I had no time to contemplate a social life of any sort. All the same, there had been something pleasant to me in the brief glimpse I had seen of Ed’s world.

  I did go back up the hill to see Francis Black again. I felt I owed it to him. After all, he had given me a bottle of very good wine. I had opened the Château Gloria the night he had given it to me. I drank a glass with the Chinese takeaway I had bought, as the shopping mall had been shut by the time I went back down into the valley. It had not been a happy mixture of tastes. Then I had had a second glass the next night, with a pizza. That had been more of a success, although the wine tasted murky. I wondered if you were meant to keep the cork in the bottle. The third night I thought there was something definitely wrong with the wine, and poured the rest of it into the sink.

  When I appeared again in Francis’s shop he was sitting behind his desk, filling in a form. He didn’t recognise me for a moment, but then his face cleared and he put his pen down and said, “Wilberforce. I hoped you would call in. How was the Château Gloria?”

  Campbell the spaniel came to greet me, and I bent down and stroked his head. Then I explained to Francis, rather apologetically, how I had got on with his present of a bottle of wine. I said that by the third day the wine had not really tasted of much at all.

  Francis listened, and then said, “Well, in an ideal world you would drink it all the same night. But perhaps that isn’t practical for one man who is not accustomed to drinking wine.”

  “I don’t really drink, to tell you the truth.”

  Francis said, “Would you mind witnessing my signature on this document?”

  I took a pen out and Francis showed me where to sign. I noticed that where he had to fill in his occupation, Francis had written the single word: ‘Gentleman’. When I had scrawled my name he asked, “Would you like to see the undercroft?”

  “The undercroft?”

  He stood up and said, “Yes, the undercroft. It is a very large space underneath the house. When I let off the main building, which is far too big for me, to the Council, I did not include the undercroft in the lease. It was part of the old Elizabethan house and we have always used it as a storage space, mostly for the purpose of cellaring wine. Would you like to see it? It might interest you.”

  I said, “Yes, of course. I’d love to.” What else could I have said?

  I followed Francis down the wide, worn stone steps that led from a few yards behind his desk down into the gloom. Halfway down the staircase was an old black light switch, which Francis flicked on. Below me I could see an ancient door of black oak. From underneath came a gleam of light.

  Francis pushed opened the door, and we were in the undercroft.

  It was a large space, as he had said. The electric lights were fitted into old sconces along the wall, rusting metal holders that would once have held candles. The light from the bulbs was weak and yellow and they did not fully illuminate the room. I saw the vaulted ceiling above disappearing into gloom; I saw dark side chambers protected by grilles, behind which a few bottles could be seen. In the centre of the room were piles of wooden cases of wine. We had to manoeuvre between these in order to complete our tour. It was interesting, but for some reason I had been expecting something more.

  Francis picked up a bottle here, and a bottle there, and told me the names of the wines, and the places they came from, and the people who had grown them. He certainly knew his subject, but it was all a foreign language to me. I was relieved when we went back into the shop, where the air was fresher. Ther
e was something overpowering and stuffy about the room below.

  When we reached the shop Francis gestured for me to take a seat and said, “So, what is it you do down in the valley?”

  I told him again I worked for a software company.

  “Is it an American company? Aren’t those sorts of businesses usually American?”

  “No, it’s my own company. I started it about ten years ago and now we employ fifty people.”

  Francis was absolutely fascinated by this information. He cross-questioned me for a while about how someone of twenty or so could possibly have started a business. “I could never possibly have done a thing like that,” said Francis. “I simply wasn’t brought up to the idea one ought to work for a living. Now I have had to learn the hard way, if you can call sitting here all day waiting for the odd customer earning one’s living.”

  “I wasn’t particularly brought up to it either,” I said. “My foster-father was a university lecturer. He thought very little of computers and computer programmers, and probably understood less.”

  “Oh, you were adopted, were you?” said Francis. For a moment, for some reason I did not understand, we looked at each other in discomfort. Then Francis went and took another bottle from a rack and gave it to me, saying, “Take this, and drink it, and if you can’t drink it all, throw the rest away the same night. The wine starts to die as soon as you open it. It oxidises after a while and all its qualities disappear. That is the most wonderful and the most frustrating thing about wine: it is a work of art, sometimes a work of genius, that has taken a lifetime of experience to create and has matured for ten or fifteen years in the bottle in order to be ready for you to drink. Then, as soon as the wine is opened, it begins to die. In twenty-four hours it is dead.”

  I tried to pay again, but Francis wouldn’t let me. “Take it, drink it; it is a gift from me. When I see that you really enjoy the wine I give you, then I will make you pay for it.” He handed me the bottle and added, “Once you learn to love my wine, you will pay the full market price.”

  TWO

  I wasn’t good with people. How could I have been?

  My foster-parents had adopted me because Mary could not have children of her own. That was what she told me, although I have since wondered whether my foster-father had been too busy reading about the politics of Germany and the Hapsburg Empire in the mid-nineteenth century to find time to take her to bed. Mary often told me what a beautiful baby I had been. She used to speak wistfully about how enchanting I had been, looking past me as she recalled the first time she saw me, the one moment in the entire process of my adoption she seemed able to recall with pleasure.

  She treated me well, though. I cannot remember ever having been beaten, or even any really hard words. It was simply that she found, quite soon after taking me in, that she did not really love me: indeed she did not seem even to like me.

  My foster-father was quite straightforward in his attitude towards me. I had been brought into the house as an indulgence for Mary. After that, it was best if I kept out of his way. That was easy enough. He spent most of his time when he was not at the university locked up in a small room he called sometimes his ‘library’ and at other times his ‘office’.

  We led a quiet life together. My foster-father’s social life was limited to the Senior Common Room at the university, or wherever else political-history lecturers gather together to graze in the fields of learning. People rarely came to our house for any form of entertainment and, when they did, it did not tempt them to stay long.

  I grew up a solitary child. I did not have much opportunity to meet other children outside school, but perhaps that was just as well: I found it difficult enough to talk to them in school. I kept my thoughts to myself. I was a very neat and tidy child. No one could ever complain about that. Sometimes I looked up to the sky and saw stars, even in the daylight. No one else ever seemed to see the stars that I saw, so I did not mention them to anyone else. I think I was about sixteen when I discovered I had an aptitude for numbers. I was not particularly good at any subject until, suddenly, I began to excel at mathematics. My foster-father thought this was a waste of time.

  “What is the use of knowing how to add up,” he asked me, “unless you are planning on working as a shop assistant. Are you planning on working as a shop assistant, Frankie?”

  “Not particularly,” I mumbled.

  “I hope you are planning on doing something,” he said. “Bringing you up has been a considerable financial burden. I wish you could appreciate the sacrifices we have made. I hope you do not expect this largesse to last for ever.”

  I did not know then what ‘largesse’ meant. My foster-father enjoyed using words like that.

  I said, “I’m interested in computers, though.”

  “Oh, computers,” said my foster-father.

  When I was awarded a scholarship at a local university to read Computer Sciences, I went and knocked on the door of my foster-father’s office. It was unheard of for anyone to interrupt him while he was working on his book. The projected Life of Bismarck occupied a great deal of his time. A publisher in Augsburg in Germany was said to be keenly interested in the German rights.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “It’s me,” I said. “It’s Frankie.”

  “What do you want? I’m very busy.”

  “I just wanted to tell you something.”

  He called me in. The weariness in his voice made me feel tired. I opened the door. He looked up from his desk. His hands were covered in printing ink from the ribbon of his Remington typewriter.

  “What is it, Frankie? You can see how busy I am.”

  “Let me help,” I said, and quickly untangled the ribbon for him and clicked the spool back into place. Then I said, “I’ve been given a scholarship, to read Computer Sciences at Durham University.”

  My foster-father said, “Oh. Well, I don’t see why you couldn’t have waited until dinner to tell me that. And I suppose you expect me to pay for your maintenance, do you?”

  My father was right: my news could have waited until dinner.

  §

  I never finished the university course. I absorbed knowledge so fast that I soon knew more than most of the lecturers, at least about the things that interested me. After eighteen months I left, and with some help from one of the lecturers, who gave me some contraband ‘obsolete’ equipment from one of the computer labs, I started my own business.

  Of course, since setting up my own company I had learned the necessity of meeting people and getting on with them. Customers in particular needed careful handling. I had learned that you had to talk to them, before you could ask them for money. Until Andy joined the business I found the selling side rather painful and, if it had not been that the software I had developed was really rather good, I would never have made a sale. When Andy joined, even though he was employed as finance director, his natural social skills meant that he took over a lot of the customer work, until we grew big enough to employ full-time salesmen. Even then he kept up the relationships with our bigger customers. He was a natural. He laughed, he made jokes, and he teased them about their football teams. Everyone liked Andy.

  I don’t know how much any of them liked me, except for Andy himself. They knew, though, that the business wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for me. I was the person who had developed the original software on which the business had been built, and I still knew more about it than anyone else. When the staff or the customers needed more than jokes, they came to me for the explanations and the answers.

  I knew how to talk to people, but I had never got to the point of doing it for fun.

  §

  The day that I left Hartlepool Hall, after having had lunch there, I believed that I would never see Ed or Eck again. Why would I? All that had happened was that there had been a transaction: one hour of IT support, provided by Wilber-force, value say £100; one lamb chop, and a cup of coffee, provided by Ed Simmonds, value say £10. On the face of i
t Ed Simmonds still owed me something, but then he had given me, if only for a couple of hours, the countenance of his friendship, value probably rather more than £90.

  Andy used to tell me he was my friend, usually in the context of a discussion about salaries or share options, and in many ways he was my friend. We used to have supper together in a little Indian restaurant sometimes after work; we shared moments of triumph and crisis in the business; and we plotted and schemed together. All of those things I thought amounted to friendship. I supposed that that was what friendship was. But after my visit to Hartlepool Hall I began to speculate that there might be other modes of life, where people passed time together and did not talk about their work but about other things: about each other; about forms of activity of which I knew nothing, such as racing or hunting; even about wine. I imagined the world inhabited by these people to be like a garden surrounded by a high wall: inside the garden, the few inhabitants allowed to enter it enjoyed a life of leisure, in surroundings that were pleasant to the eye; outside, the world trudged about its weary business. I had been allowed a glimpse of the garden through the railings, had even stepped inside for a moment, and it had unsettled me. In the garden there were fewer transactions than on the outside: instead relationships flourished, which the word ‘transaction’ was not always adequate to describe. I had thought that relationships with other people, if you had to have them, were based on mutual need: I have something you want; you have something I want. The possibility that people could spend time together with no other object in mind than enjoyment of one another’s company was a new idea to me.

  My life, which before had seemed full, now seemed empty.

  My routine went on as before. I worked until seven or seven thirty, then drove to the food mall at the shopping centre, bought a takeaway and took it home. I would sit at the kitchen table in my flat, eating the food without really knowing what it was I was eating, and sipping the giant Diet Coke I usually bought to wash down the food. Sometimes I had the television on when I did this; sometimes I did not. I never took much notice of what the programmes were about, anyway. While the television was on, the picture and the sound gave an illusion of activity to the flat which I liked, for some reason.