2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

by Paul Torday

  After I had finished eating I used to tidy up. A cleaning lady who did the other flats in the building came in three times a week, and did the laundry as well, so there was never very much to do. I liked rearranging things: I used to rearrange the books in the bookcase, a mixture of a few novels bought at the supermarket checkout and manuals for software developers. I would sometimes arrange them by size and at other times by colour. I used to wash and dry the foil cartons in which my takeaways came and keep them in neat piles, in case they could be of use some day. I rearranged the piles of cartons now and then. I found it soothing. At other times I would empty everything from the fridge and clean the fridge out, a job the cleaning lady often neglected to do. There was never much in it: a block of processed Cheddar, a tub of instantly spreadable butter, a carton of orange juice or two, and a few eggs.

  If there was nothing to tidy up, I would sit and do large sums in my head. It was an ability I had been born with: numbers were to me like words to other people. Thinking up algorithms was a form of passing the time that I found particularly satisfactory. When I had completed these recreations, it would be time to turn on the computer, call up the office file server, and do a couple of hours work on whatever project was engaging me at the time. Some time before midnight I would go to bed and sleep for a few hours before driving to the office at five or six in the morning.

  For more than ten years this routine had satisfied me, and I had needed no other distraction in my life. I loved doing what I did. I was good at it—better than most people. My work was everything to me: Andy used to say I was obsessive about it, but then he earned a salary of seventy thousand a year on the back of my obsessions, so he really couldn’t complain.

  Now, like dawn creeping through the drawn curtains of a darkened room, a pale light was beginning to grow, and as it grew it illuminated the austere and lonely nature of my world. It hadn’t just been the visit to Hartlepool Hall that had unsettled me. One morning I woke up with a haunting sense of loss. I awoke from a dream, and as I awoke, its shreds and tatters of memory drifted away and evaporated into nothingness even as my conscious mind reached out to grasp them. I awoke from a dream in which someone very close to me had died, and yet in the dream he or she was still able to reproach me, to call out to me for help. It had been a she, I felt sure. As my mind struggled with the remains of sleep, for a moment the image in my dream came back to me. I saw a dim figure on the far shore of a pale lake, with her arms reaching out to me. It seemed to me that if I could have reached out and touched her outstretched fingers, and grasped her hands, I might have brought her back; but the pale lake stood between us and I knew I could never cross it. Then the figure receded into darkness, and as it disappeared, its silent cry of anguish and despair reached inside me and twisted itself around my heart. Then I was truly awake, and tears stood in the corners of my eyes.

  A dream is a dream, and most of the few dreams I had ever had involved the development of a new bit of software. Once I dreamed I had found a new prime number. I had never had a dream like this before. Its memory stayed with me for days, like a wound deep within my brain that would not heal.

  The existence that I had led, sitting in front of a computer for fourteen hours out of every twenty-four, once seemed to have sufficient rigour and clarity to be the complete answer to any question that I might ask myself about the point of my existence. Now, I began to appreciate that life and software development could not be balanced in the same scales. I began to imagine that my life was itself like an insoluble equation, and there was an ‘x’ in the middle of the equation that I had to understand and could not quantify.

  Ed Simmonds didn’t ring me back. Once I would have been grateful not to have the problem of knowing how to refuse further invitations. Now I regretted that he had ever allowed me to think that he would be in touch again. I had written my telephone number down for him because he had asked me to, and I had left it by the telephone in his sitting room. It would not have required a moment of his time to pick up the phone and call me, and he appeared to have no shortage of time available to him. He did not ring, and I knew exactly what he must think about it all, as if I could hear him in the next room speaking to Eck about me: “Such an odd chap, that Wilber-force; he’s awfully clever with computers. He must live and breathe them. He doesn’t tell many jokes, though, does he?” and Eck would reply, “True. Still, it’s probably better to keep his number in case your machine breaks down or something?”

  Ed Simmonds didn’t ring. I did go back to see Francis Black now and then. He did not seem to mind me dropping in and he did not expect me to buy anything. We sat and talked and I was surprised how easy it was to talk to Francis; or to listen, for Francis was quite apt to suddenly recall some piece of family history, or some incident from his own past, which he would decide it would suit me to hear about. I began to form a disconnected picture of Francis’s past. He had been wild in his youth—almost to the point of self-destruction. The death of his parents and the inheritance of what remained of his family estate had steadied him up. Now wine was his one reason for living. It was almost an obsession with him.

  I did not visit Francis very often. I was afraid of imposing myself on him. From time to time I bought a bottle of his wine, because I thought it might be expected of me, in order to give him the pleasure of telling me all about the grower, the vintage or the appellation. Francis’s shop had been where I had met Ed and Eck, and whenever I went up to Caerlyon I half-expected and half-hoped I would see another car parked in the courtyard. I never did.

  After each visit, if I had bought some wine, I would put the bottle away somewhere. There were quite a few of them after a while, lining my shelves. Very occasionally I opened a bottle and drank a glass. I had to admit that I could see why people sometimes drank wine. The taste was strangely interesting, certainly more interesting than Diet Coke. If I ever drank a second glass I felt, for a moment, disinclined to do any tidying up or count up to very large numbers in my head. Oddly enough, the most readily identifiable feeling I had after drinking the second glass was that it might be nice to drink a third. I never did; I poured the rest of the bottle down the sink, as Francis had told me I should, so that the wine should not die.

  It was odd to think that wine could die so quickly. What had Francis’s words been? A lifetime of experience to create, ten years in the bottle to become ready to drink, and a few hours of drinkable life before the wine was drunk or extinguished.

  One’s own life, too, was finite. I had once read in a science magazine that we start to die as soon as our cells stop dividing and growing, in our late teens or early twenties. The same article said that we lost most of our ability to learn at around the age of five, when our ability to absorb new information reduced by at least three-quarters. On that basis I was on the way out. I was well over thirty, my brain was vanishing in an exponential decay of brain cells, my body had stopped growing and started ageing, and all I had ever done was write some clever software.

  I expressed this view to Andy one night in Al Diwan, the Indian restaurant we used to eat in.

  He piled a spoonful or two of chopped onion on to a flake of poppadum, added a good-sized amount of hot lime pickle and said, “Yes, well, in your case, Wilberforce, it is very likely that you are either already dead, or else in a state of suspended animation.”

  “That’s not particularly funny,” I said. Andy enjoyed winding me up, I knew, and he indulged himself quite often enough for me.

  “No, but seriously, you don’t allow yourself much of a life. Why don’t you ever go on holiday?”

  “Where to?”

  “Majorca? Florida? The Maldives? You could afford to go anywhere in the world, but you never bother.”

  Andy went on holiday a lot. He worked hard, but he went to France or Spain with his girlfriend at least three times a year, and dreamed of owning his own villa next door to a golf course.

  “What would I do on holiday?” I asked him.

  “Nothing�
��that’s the whole point,” explained Andy. He drank from his glass of lager. “And then there’s the question of your social life.”

  “What social life?”

  “Exactly,” said Andy. “What social life? Other people have friends. They even have girlfriends. They go to bed with their girlfriends sometimes and have sex with them. Did you do sex at school, or did you leave before they got to that bit?”

  I didn’t like Andy teasing me, but then again I did like him talking about me. No one else had ever spent any time on the subject, apart from the teachers who wrote my school reports. He had an attractive girlfriend called Clare whom he had once told me he might marry when he had the time.

  “I got a GSCE in Biology,” I said, “I got a C. I got an A-star in Mathematics and—”

  “We’re not writing your CV,” said Andy. “I’m just saying that most people, when they get to your age, probably have a few friends. They might belong to the rugby club, or the tennis club, or the golf club. They might not even belong to a club at all, but just might get out and meet people. They might be going out with someone, or they might even be married. Wilberforce, did you know quite a lot of people got married before they were thirty? You and I are still single and at our ages we are the exception rather than the rule. But at least I can say I have a girl in my life.”

  “A very nice one too,” I said, thinking of Clare.

  “She is, isn’t she?” agreed Andy, with a complacent smile. “I don’t mean to lecture you—ah, mine is the lamb vindaloo; my friend is having the chicken madras,” he said to the waiter as the food began to arrive. “But it was you that brought up the subject of a social life.”

  There was a pause while we helped ourselves to curry.

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about having a social life myself,” I said. “But I’m not sure how to go about it, or what I would do with it if I got one.”

  “A social life,” explained Andy, “isn’t like a takeaway. You can’t buy it. Well, some people can, but I don’t think that you are one of them. You have to work at it. You have to meet people, you have to like them, and they have to like you. That’s how it works.”

  “I met some people the other day,” I said, as casually as I could.

  “People? What people?” he asked. He seemed slightly put out by my initiative.

  “Oh, some people at the top of the hill.” Then I had to explain that my remark was not about their social status, but more to do with geography.

  He said, “Well, there you are. It just shows how these things can happen. Will you be seeing them again?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “It depends.”

  Then he became bored with teasing me and we spent the rest of the evening, as usual, talking about the business. Andy wanted me to float it on the stock market one day and I said, “That’s more or less the same as selling it, isn’t it? I don’t think I could ever sell it. What would I do with the money? What would be the point?”

  It depends, I had said, when Andy had asked me if I would see my new friends again. It depends on what? I wondered, as I drove home that evening. On what would it depend that Ed Simmonds, whom I hardly knew, or Eck, or Francis, or anyone whom I would ever meet, would want, having once met me, to repeat the experience? I couldn’t think of a single reason. What could he gain from seeing me a second time, if his computer still worked?

  Once again the image of a secret garden came into my mind. Everybody else in the world was in on the secret and had a key to its iron door. Only I, a child of no known mother, a person of no accomplishments except being able to add up large numbers in his head, prowled around on the outside and was never to be admitted.

  I did not sleep much that night. It takes someone to tell you about what you might be missing before you realise you are missing it. That was what Andy had just done. I lay awake staring at the invisible ceiling in the darkness, and thought about prime numbers and counted in my head up to some impossibly large number. At four in the morning, I fell into a sleep like drowning. I awoke with a start at half past seven, feeling dreadful, and rushed into the office without stopping to shave.

  Andy was already there. “Morning, Wilberforce,” he said. “You look ghastly. I told you the chicken madras would be too hot for you.”

  THREE

  A few weeks later, to my surprise, Ed Simmonds did ring. When my secretary asked if she could put the call through, I had to think for a moment before I placed the name.

  Ed was on the line. “Wilberforce, is that you? How are you?”

  “Ed, how nice to hear you,” I said. I really meant it. His voice, not heard for several weeks, was as familiar to me when I heard it as if I had been listening to it every day. In a way, I had been listening to it, in my memory, wondering and doubting whether he would ever be in touch again. Now he was, and all the doubts I had of his sincerity when he’d promised to be in touch again flapped away like a flock of crows when someone claps his hands.

  “I’d have rung before,” Ed told me, “but I’ve been away, fishing in Iceland with some friends.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was bloody cold. But we took a few cases of Francis’s claret to warm us.”

  “I didn’t know anything about fishing, but I thought I ought to say something, so I asked, ‘Did you catch any fish?’”

  “Lots, but to tell the truth, after fish number ten it became quite hard work.”

  I wondered in that case why he had bothered to go. I was not then familiar with the language of understatement, irony and self-depreciation that formed the vocabulary of Ed Simmonds and his friends.

  As if guessing my thoughts he said, “An old friend asked me last year to go with his party. I’m not much of a fisherman, but I must have accepted after drinking too much at dinner, and I didn’t feel I could jack out of it when he told me it had all been fixed up. Anyway, the way I’m droning on about Iceland, I shouldn’t be surprised to find I was showing you my holiday snaps next. I didn’t call you to bore you to death with my fishing stories. I was wondering whether you could come and have supper tonight. Sorry it’s such short notice and all that, but I thought I’d see what you said.”

  I hesitated. I had half-promised to go and have supper after work with Andy, to kick around some idea he had for growing the business. Then I thought, he won’t mind, and I said, “I’d love to. Thank you very much. What time?”

  “Eight, here, if that suits you; and just scruff. It’s only me and Catherine; we’ll probably eat in the kitchen.”

  I went next door to Andy’s office and said, “Were we supposed to be having supper together after work this evening?”

  He looked up and said, “Sure. It’s in your diary.”

  “Can I cancel? I mean, can we do it another night? Something’s come up.”

  Andy looked irritated. “Well, OK, if you must. What’s come up? Is there a problem?”

  “No,” I said. I felt a little awkward. “Actually, some friends have asked me out to supper and I seem to have double-booked myself.”

  He stopped looking irritated and started to grin. “Friends, Wilberforce? What is this friends business?”

  Now it was my turn to be irritated. “I do have friends, you know.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” said Andy, cheerfully. “No, go for it, Wilberforce. Lighten up. Have a social life for an evening. We’ll do our thing some other night.”

  I arrived at Hartlepool Hall at eight, and Horace opened the great hall door almost before I had tugged the bell pull. When he saw me he inclined his head, as he had before, but this time smiled as well. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

  “Good evening, Mr Wilberforce. Lord Edward and Miss Plender are in the kitchen. If you will follow me, sir?”

  We crossed the hall and found a staircase into the lower parts of the house. Horace opened a door on to a large and surprisingly modern kitchen. It appeared to be filled with every sort of device known to modern catering: ovens, microwaves, a doubl
e Aga, an industrial-sized dishwasher, racks from which stainless-steel pans hung, and endless glass cupboards around the walls filled with wine glasses and different dinner services. In the centre of the room was a square marble worktop, with a sauce boat and some chopped-up vegetables sitting on it. A bottle of white wine stood there, with two half-full glasses beside it. There was no one in the room. Then another door opened at the other end of the kitchen and Ed came in carrying some objects on a tin tray, followed by a girl. They were both laughing, but stopped when they saw me.

  “Wilberforce,” said Ed, “you made it! Well done. Horace, bring Wilberforce a glass of champagne. Or perhaps you’d prefer wine?”

  I was going to ask for a glass of water but decided that would not do, so I just said, “Whatever’s open.”

  “No, no,” said Ed. “Horace loves opening bottles. Horace, please bring Mr Wilberforce a glass of champagne.”

  The girl behind Ed came forward and put her hand in mine. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Catherine Plender. Ed always expects everyone to know everyone. He’s useless at introductions.” She was about five foot six, with thick blonde hair and grey eyes. I thought she was absolutely beautiful and I found that I could hardly look her in the eyes. I shook her hand. I felt myself blushing.

  I was saved by Horace touching my arm and saying, “Champagne, sir?”

  I turned and took the glass, turned back and saw Catherine Plender smiling at me. I think she knew the effect she had had on me, and was gaining some slight amusement from it.

  Ed held up a small brown carcass and said, “Any objection to roast grouse, Wilberforce?”