The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (17 page)

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Don’t let me down, Will. Don’t leave here and throw all our hard work away. There are demons lurking in the thickets, Will, who will whisper to you to turn aside from the straight and narrow path you must tread. Take this pamphlet. I know you don’t believe in God, but He believes in you, and He can help you. It’s all written down in here. I refer you to page nine specifically.’

‘Thanks, Eric,’ I said. I took the pamphlet without looking at it.

‘Hugs,’ he said, and before I could escape he put his arms around me and squeezed me in a tight embrace. He smelt faintly of perspiration and disinfectant.

‘Thanks, Eric,’ I said again.

‘God be with you,’ said Eric with a sob. He turned away, and I left the room.

The exit interview with Angela was different. She was a tall, cool, severe-looking woman with short-cut straw-coloured hair, a determined mouth and firm chin. She said, when I went to see her for my final meeting, ‘Mr Wilberforce. Come in and sit down. How do you feel about things, now you’ve spent some time with us?’

‘Much better,’ I said.

‘I’m in two minds about your case, Mr Wilberforce,’ she said. ‘Eric’s given you an excellent report. He says the two of you have bonded well together. But Eric works with his emotional intelligence. He gets very involved. It makes him a good caseworker, don’t you think?’

‘Very good,’ I agreed.

‘I’m more of an observer, however,’ said Angela, ‘and what I have observed in you is a great ability to mask your feelings. I don’t really know what you’re thinking. I’m not sure what your level of buy-in has been to what we do here. I think you are walking along the edge of a cliff, which you could still fall over. I am not sure you have understood or accepted everything that we have told you, or shown you. What do you think?’

‘I feel it has done me some good,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t want a drink right now.’

‘Hang on to that feeling,’ said Angela. ‘I think we have achieved something together. But I believe in clear outcomes to cases. I don’t think we’ve got one with you. I think you’ve made progress, but I don’t know whether you can change your behaviour altogether.’

‘I feel I’ve made progress, too,’ I said. It was true.

‘Come back and see us in six months,’ suggested Angela, ‘and then we’ll see how much progress you have made.’

‘Thanks, I will,’ I promised. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see Eric again.

‘That’s a deal, then,’ said Angela. ‘We’ll keep in touch with your doctor, in any case.’ She stood up, and we shook hands.

Half an hour later I was sitting in a taxi and on my way back to the station; then home to London. And when I got there, what then?

Five

I came back from The Hermitage determined to change my life. It wasn’t the fact that Eric had altered the way I thought about myself with his constant nasal twang, preaching to me about the Twelve Steps. It was the experience of being at the mercy of people like him, which made me so keen to avoid any return journey to The Hermitage, or anywhere else like it. I had a feeling there were places a lot worse than The Hermitage that I might end up in.

I had thought a great deal, too, about being found drunk on the floor of the flat by Colin - the circumstance which had led to my agreeing to go The Hermitage. I knew there would be a lot more nights and days like that, when I had drunk too much. The thought of ending up like some emaciated, magenta-faced, incontinent drunkard lying in a doorway terrified me. I felt clearer-sighted than I ever had about my fondness for drinking wine. Whatever the reasons I had had for drinking in the early days, when I had first begun to know Francis and he had first initiated me into the mysteries of wine, they had long since been overtaken by changes in my body chemistry.

I knew now that Colin was right, and that Eric was right. I was becoming an addict: an alcoholic. I knew enough about life to realise how it would all end, if I ever strayed from the straight and narrow path, as Eric had described it. Things were going to have to change.

I sat down at my desk on the day I returned and made a list of the actions I would take - the actions that would signal the beginning of a new life:

 
I tore the piece of paper from the pad and went and pinned it up on the cork pinboard that Catherine had put on the wall above the phone. On the board was a note in her neat, sloping hand: ‘Get chicken drumsticks. Buy bin liners. Call home.’ I removed the note and threw it away. I didn’t want to be reminded of her every time I looked at the telephone. Catherine had been right, too. Above all, Catherine had been right. She had understood clearly what was happening: she had seen the alchemy of the wine from the undercroft at work, and she had tried to tell me. And I had quarrelled with her because I did not like to hear the truth.

I pinned my Action List on the board. Then I went and retrieved Catherine’s note from the bin, smoothed out the wrinkled paper and put it away in a drawer.

Then I went back to the Action List and wrote, in big letters: ‘SELL CAERLYON. SELL THE WINE.’

As soon as I had written those words I felt a profound sense of relief. That was what I would do. In a stroke I would free myself from the weight of temptation that sat on my shoulders even now and achieve some stability in my life. I was becoming ill and becoming poor at the same time. I had spent a lot of the proceeds from the sale of my company in buying Caerlyon, and more of it on buying the flat in Half Moon Street. What I had left did not produce a sufficient income to cover my needs, and I was steadily using up my capital; not all that slowly, either. Selling Caerlyon would put me in a position where it would not matter whether I worked or not for the next ten years. I was going to get a job if I could, anyway. What else would I do with my time?

Next day I rang the agent who looked after Caerlyon for me in my absence. He received my instructions with considerable surprise.

‘Sell Caerlyon? You must be joking.’

‘I’m not joking. What good is it to me? I never go there. I’m never going to go back and live there after what happened, am I?’

The agent was conciliatory. Thoughts, no doubt, of the commission he might earn from such a sale occurred to him. He said, ‘Well, if you are sure, we would be delighted to act for you. It might take a while, with the Council as a sitting tenant in the main house. On the other hand, it’s a good covenant.’

‘Well, see what you can do,’ I told him. ‘Let me know what you think it might fetch.’

‘We’ll do a valuation,’ he said, ‘and what would your plans be for relocating the wine? There’s quite a lot of it, isn’t there? Do you want us to look for some suitable storage facilities for you? I don’t suppose you can fit it all into your London flat.’

‘Sell the wine too,’ I told him.

This surprised him even more. ‘I always thought you were very keen on Mr Black’s wine collection,’ he said.

‘I was,’ I told him, ‘but I’m afraid it’s got to go when I sell the house. Francis always told me his family used to buy wine from Christie’s. Try and get someone from their wine department to come and value it for me.’

When I put the phone down I felt more at peace than I had done for a long while. I couldn’t believe I had been so decisive. I felt Catherine would have been very proud of me. I went out and walked around Green Park in the cold March sunlight. I felt like a different man.

As I walked, I wondered what Francis would think when he found out I had sold the wine. I knew he was dead, but I found it hard to locate him amongst the things that were past in my life. Francis might be disappointed if he knew I had sold the wine. He had entrusted it to me, together with his house. I was to have lived in his house and looked after the wine in the undercroft, the collection of which he considered to have been the one great achievement of his life. He might regard the sale of his wine as a betrayal of his trust. He might be right, too: it was a betrayal. It was also the only chance of my survival. I knew that while the wine was still there, I would for ever return to its call.

The next day I wrote letters to ten different software companies, asking if they would be interested in employing me as a consultant. I hoped my reputation was still strong enough to ensure I received some expressions of interest. Then I sat at my desk thinking about how pleased Catherine would be if I got a job, and gave up drinking at the same time. I never used to drink. It was a habit I had developed after first meeting Francis.

I filled the day with activity. I tidied up the flat, which had become somewhat forlorn and dusty. A cleaner came in once a week but, unsupervised, her efforts were superficial in their effect. I parcelled up Catherine’s jewellery, in response to a letter requesting its return from a solicitor acting for her parents. I moved all her clothes out of her bedroom, and her make-up, and hung everything up in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, or stored it away in boxes.

It was only in the evening that it became more difficult for me. Now, when the day’s activity was done, it would have been very nice to drink a glass of wine. I felt the desire to open a bottle growing in me, like an itch, like an ache, like a burning need. I walked from one room to another and talked to Catherine, to stop myself thinking about having a drink.

‘I think our marriage is better than it’s ever been,’ I said to her, ‘don’t you? If I can just keep going without a drink for a few weeks I know I will be all right again. I’m not really an alcoholic, but you were right to keep warning me. I understand that now.’ I was at the desk now, and the air in the little sitting room seemed to me to be fragrant with the Chanel No. 5, which Catherine used to wear. I felt she was with me. ‘Within a month, or two months at the latest,’ I told her, ‘I’ll have a job doing contract software development somewhere. I’m not going to be too ambitious at first. I just want to get back into the habit of work, and make sure I’m earning a living and not living off capital. Later, maybe, I’ll go back to the idea of starting a new business.’

Catherine nodded in agreement. I wished she’d speak, but even though she did not, she seemed content with what I was saying. I felt that our lives were in harmony again, as they had been in the first days of our marriage. It was such a shame that she was dead.

I went to bed early that night. At first I felt the peacefulness that had come upon me as I had talked to Catherine, wandering about the flat, feeling her presence everywhere on the edge of my vision, feeling a draught fluttering across the back of my neck like the touch of cool fingers. Then restlessness set in. I began to examine my own behaviour and I thought, for a while, lying there in the dark, that I might be losing my mind. Did everyone else who had lost a wife go around talking to her as if she was still alive? I didn’t know.

Sleep came in the end. I fell into edgy dreams, with a vivid strangeness to them. In my dream, I smelled something rotten, and I saw a half-familiar shape out of the corner of my eye. I was in a strange city, in a country I did not know, and there was something following me down the street that I did not want to catch up with me.

The next morning I went downstairs and saw that someone had written on the notepad on the desk: ‘TNMWWTTW’. The letters were not written in my usual handwriting. They were scored into the paper, almost through the paper and into the wood of the desk beneath, with a furious energy. I didn’t remember writing them. I did not know what they meant. I sat and looked at them for a long time. I thought I ought to try and remember them, in case I saw them again, in case they had some significance which for the time being escaped me. So I tried to think of a mnemonic to remember them by. It was difficult, but in the end I came up with ‘Ten Naughty Mice Went Walking Towards The Wensleydale’.

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.’