The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (12 page)

‘You didn’t inherit anything,’ said Catherine. ‘You’re not Francis’s family. You’re not anybody’s family, as far as I know. You bought the wine when you bought Caerlyon, Wilberforce. I think you told me that one way or another it cost you a million pounds. That’s not the same as inheriting, is it?’

‘No, I just meant that I think of it as an inheritance.’

Catherine pushed her glass across to me. ‘Pour me some more. I’d better keep up with your drinking, if we’re to stay together.’

I filled her glass without replying.

Catherine said, ‘If I’d married Ed Simmonds, I might have been bored to death. He might have screwed around. I’m sure he would have done, just like his father. But at least I’d have known what I was getting into. With you, it’s like living with someone who’s dead but doesn’t know it.’

I stared at her. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. ‘I’m not dead, Catherine. I’m a very fit thirty-five-year-old, everything considered.’

She laughed. ‘Poor Wilberforce,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea how to be a human being at all, have you? That’s why I thought I fell for you. I thought you were different. That’s why I left Ed. Different? I’m not even sure what species you are.’

The next morning, though, everything was all right between us again. In a way.

Two

We had just returned from a few days’ shopping in Paris. It was a sunny afternoon in early October, a warm autumn day with that radiance of light that comes just before the dark season. Catherine was unloading endless carrier bags from our taxi whilst I brought the suitcases in. As I put the cases down in the hall I heard the phone ringing. I went into the kitchen and picked it up.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Wilberforce, it’s Helen Plender here,’ said Catherine’s mother. ‘Have you been away? I’ve been ringing and ringing.’

‘We thought we’d take a few days’ break in Paris,’ I told her. Helen Plender spoke as if she had never hung up the phone on her daughter every time Catherine had rung her over the months since we had been married. I would never have known from her conversational tone that she had refused to attend her only daughter’s wedding because her daughter was marrying someone of whom she did not approve.

‘How nice,’ said Helen Plender. ‘Is Catherine there?’

She did not ask me how I was, or what I was doing, or whether the sun had shone for us in Paris. I put my hand over the phone and mouthed at Catherine, ‘It’s your mother.’

‘My mother!’ Catherine came and took the phone from me.

I went outside and paid off the taxi driver. When I came back in, Catherine was busy listening to whatever her mother had to say to her. It sounded like a one-sided conversation. I took the cases upstairs and began to unpack.

We had been taking a break in Paris so that Catherine could buy some new clothes. As far as I could see they were exactly the same sort of clothes as she could have bought in London; but it had become important to us to go away from time to time. Although Catherine and I had patched up our relationship after she had caught me out in my harmless fiction about going out to business lunches, our lives together were not as easy as they had been. The great thing about going to Paris, as far as I was concerned, was that no one, not even Catherine, could disapprove of my drinking wine. If you can’t drink Bordeaux in Paris without exciting comment, where can you drink it? That was my view, and provided I took a generous view of Catherine’s shopping, she was prepared to allow that I might have my bottle or two at lunch and my bottle or two in the evening. There were, after all, wines on restaurant lists in Paris that I had never even heard of before, let alone tasted. Some of them were delightful.

I finished unpacking and went down to the kitchen to see how Catherine was getting on. She had just hung up.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘It was quite extraordinary. She was all sweetness and light. It was quite as if we had never quarrelled.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

Catherine said, ‘It’s too good to be true. She asked about the flat, what colours I had done it up in. She asked what I was doing, whether there was any sign of children. She even asked what you were up to.’

I said, ‘What did you tell her?’

‘I said you were putting together a new business and she said, she hoped I wasn’t going to be left too much on my own.’ Catherine smiled to herself when she said that, somewhat grimly.

I went to the fridge, found a bottle of St Veran, opened it and poured a glass for myself.

‘Want a glass?’ I asked Catherine.

‘A bit later, perhaps,’ she said. She was still thinking about her mother’s call. ‘You know,’ said Catherine, ‘Mummy asked me all the questions that mothers are supposed to ask. It’s extraordinary. She won’t speak to me for six months and then she expects to pick up exactly where we stopped the day I told her I wasn’t going to marry Ed - as if she hadn’t said the awful things she said to me that day, the awful names she called me; the words she used about you.’

Catherine had never talked to me about what had happened that day. Whenever I had asked her about it, she had just shaken her head and wouldn’t answer. Now she stood in the middle of the kitchen, in a patch of afternoon sunlight, biting her lip, deep in thought.

Suddenly she burst into tears. ‘How can she act as if nothing ever happened? How can she?’

I poured Catherine a glass of wine and refilled my own glass. She took it and came and sat opposite me at the table, and we drank our wine.

Catherine said, ‘You don’t know how horrible it feels to be cut off by your own family, because you’ve never really had a family of your own.’

‘I suppose that’s true,’ I said.

‘And now she expects I’ll drop everything and go up and see her, because she’s decided that I’ve been punished enough.’

‘Are you going to go and see her?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Catherine. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’ Later that evening we went out to dinner, as there was nothing to eat at home. Night had fallen, and people seemed to be hurrying everywhere: late office workers scurrying home, couples on their way to the theatre or the cinema. As we walked arm in arm down Piccadilly past the Ritz Hotel, a man in a covert coat who was walking briskly in the direction of Hyde Park Corner stopped us. It turned out to be Eck.

‘Ah, the young married couple,’ he exclaimed; ‘how nice to bump into you like this!’ He and Catherine kissed each other on the cheek, and Eck patted me on the arm. ‘How are you, old boy,’ he said. ‘Is she looking after you?’

It was ages since we had seen him. Just after we had moved into our flat in Half Moon Street he had looked us up on one of his rare visits to London. We had sat on packing cases in the kitchen, because there were no chairs, and Eck and I had drunk a lot of Bordeaux from Caerlyon, and we had laughed a lot; or at least, Eck had laughed a lot.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Eck, where are you off to? Why don’t you come and have dinner with us? We were just on our way to find somewhere to eat.’

‘I can’t,’ said Eck, ‘I’m on my way to the Cavalry Club, to have a drink with a man who is proposing to sell me the hind leg of a racehorse which has come last in its past three outings. The good news is that I expect my share of the animal to be cheap. Then I’m getting a late train down to Hampshire. My cousin Harriet has become engaged to a rather nice soldier called Bob Matthews, and there’s going to be a party to celebrate.’

‘Oh, Eck,’ said Catherine. ‘What a pity. We could have had a gossip.’

‘Well, come up north,’ said Eck. ‘We’re all still there. You won’t need a passport.’

‘Well, if we do, will you come and have dinner with us in the flat at Caerlyon?’ asked Catherine.

Eck promised and hurried away. Catherine and I walked on.

‘Oh, it was nice to see someone from home,’ said Catherine. ‘Dear old Eck. You can never get hold of him. He’s so social. He’s always busy doing something.’

We found our way to a restaurant, sat down and ordered dinner. Catherine was in a better mood: seeing Eck had lightened her heart. She didn’t speak much, though. I could see she was still thinking about her mother.

‘You want to go and see your mother, don’t you?’ I asked, after she had crumbled her bread roll into small pieces on her plate.

‘I think I ought to. She is my mother, after all. I know she behaved terribly badly - to both of us; but that doesn’t mean I should behave badly to her in return. She’s not getting any younger and my father is ten years older than she is. Who knows how long they’ll be around?’

The potted shrimps arrived.

‘Well, I need to visit Caerlyon soon anyway,’ I said. ‘I need to check the cellar is in good order and probably bring back a few more cases of wine to London. I’d like to have a few more different wines and vintages down in London to choose from.’

Catherine looked up and I saw she realised that some sort of a deal was being offered.

‘I might not come and see your parents on this first visit,’ I said. ‘I think it would be best if you went over to Coalheugh for the day whilst I check Caerlyon and perhaps go and see my own mother.’

So a plan was made, and the next morning Catherine rang her mother, and fixed a date.

 
It was the beginning of December when we went up there. We drove up in my Range Rover because I wanted to stack a few cases of wine in the boot to bring back. We had telephoned the agent who looked after the property for us to get someone in and switch on the heating, and make up beds and air the flat before we arrived. Catherine brought some expensive scented candles from Jo Malone to give her mother as a peace offering. I bought a new toaster from Tesco to give as a present to my foster-mother.

We drove up the A1, and as we approached Newcastle Catherine sat straighter in her seat: she seemed divided between a sense of apprehension and a longing to see her home again. I, too, was filled with longing, to see Caerlyon and the undercroft again. It was months since I had been there.

We made an early start and arrived at Caerlyon before lunch: it was intended that Catherine should go and lunch at Coalheugh and come back to Caerlyon later in the afternoon. We had managed to persuade Eck and Annabel Gazebee to come for supper that night. My job was to go and buy some more or less instant food from the shopping centre down in the valley, so that Catherine didn’t have to cook.

When we arrived Catherine said, ‘It all looks a bit sad and lonely here, now.’

Grass was growing amongst the cobbles in the courtyard and dead leaves had blown here and there. The paintwork on the shop door was peeling. Everything had an abandoned and desolate look. The agent was supposed to keep an eye on the place and there was meant to be someone coming in and weeding and sweeping up leaves, but if he had ever been, there was little evidence of it. We took our cases inside and then I called a taxi to come and collect Catherine. Within half an hour of her arrival Catherine was on her way to see her mother. Just before she left, she asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I must just check the undercroft is all right,’ I said, ‘and then I’m going to drive into Newcastle to see Mary. I’ll do the food shopping on the way back.’

‘I should think I’ll be back about four,’ said Catherine. Then she was gone.

I watched her drive away, then let myself into the shop and unset the alarm on the undercroft. I had longed to see the place again. Sometimes I would wake up at night, in London, imagining that there might have been a break-in and that the cellar had been vandalised; or that an unknown pipe had burst and there had been a flood. I had sometimes tried to picture the undercroft in my mind, but as the weeks and months had gone by, the images of the stacked cases and bottles of wine had gone dim, had assumed the uncertain quality of a half-remembered dream. There was always a slight feeling of dread when I returned to the place, as if it might have changed, or diminished, in my absence.

I went downstairs, flicking the lights on as I went past the switch. The undercroft sprang into being before me, in all its glittering mystery. It was as if it had been suspended in another dimension and had now reappeared, like some enormous craft coming from beyond space and time, with its miraculous cargo. I stood in awe as I saw again the thousands of cases in their columns and islands, the gleaming racks of bottles along the sides of the cellar.

I walked along the gangways, from shadow to light and back to shadow again. Occasionally I stopped to examine the stencilled words on a case, or picked a bottle from a rack and examined the label. It was like coming home: it was being amongst my own friends; my own family. Château Trois Chardons; Château Sociando-Mallet; Château Vieux Robin; Château Ducru-Beaucaillou. I murmured the names softly to myself, and turned the labels this way and that.

‘Francis,’ I said, ‘I have never drunk a bottle of your Canon La Gaffelière. Isn’t that extraordinary? You never produced one for me ever, and yet I’m sure we’ve talked about it. I must have walked past this bottle twenty times without noticing it.’

Francis was dead and did not reply, but the lights flickered for a moment and I knew that he approved my choice. I took the bottle back upstairs to drink before dinner. Then I decided that I would have a taste of it now, in case it disappointed later. I sat in the shop sipping the wine. Francis would have sat opposite me, in the old days, in the chair behind his desk. He would have told me stories about the wine we were drinking, the family that grew it, the place where it grew.

‘This is delicious,’ I said aloud. ‘I wish you could taste it, Francis.’

He was almost real to me. I could picture him in my memory: the black hair streaked with silver brushed straight back from his forehead, the arched eyebrows over deep-set brown eyes, the beak of a nose; the look of gentle irony he always wore. He would have sat in the chair, one long leg crossed over the other, in his faded corduroy trousers and battered old suede loafers, and he would have said, as he once had said, ‘Drink this, in remembrance of me.’