The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (26 page)

We sat in silence for a while. I poured myself some more wine.

‘Why do you care what Catherine does?’ I asked him.

‘Because I have known her since she was a small child. I am very fond of her.’

‘Why should you ever think she would want to marry me?’

Francis said, ‘I’m becoming chilled down here. Take my arm, and let’s see if I can manage to get up the stairs.’

We did manage to climb the stairs, and then lock up the shop. Francis, with some effort, and holding on to my arm, negotiated the cobbles in the courtyard, and at last got himself inside his flat, where he sank with a sigh of relief into an armchair. When I thought he was comfortable, I sat down opposite him. Campbell jumped up into his lap.

Then I repeated my question to Francis: ‘Why should Catherine want to marry me?’

‘For one thing, she’s curious about you. You’re so different from the other people she knows. I think she’s attracted to you.’

‘That’s a reason for someone to get married?’

‘It’s a reason. But you asked the wrong question.’

‘Oh. Sorry. What is the right question?’

Francis didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, ‘Wilberforce, there’s a copy of today’s Daily Telegraph on the kitchen table. Do bring it to me.’

I went and fetched the newspaper and handed it to Francis without looking at it. He took it and opened it up, then folded it at the page he had found.

‘The right question is: Why ever should you want to marry her?’ he told me. ‘There’s something in the paper you should see.’ He passed me the folded newspaper and I read it.

 
As I read this, I felt a sensation I had previously only seen described in books: I felt as if my body had turned to ice.

‘Now do you know why you want to marry her?’ asked Francis.

I could not speak. I hated him at that moment.

‘Because’, Francis explained, ‘if you don’t marry her, someone else will.’

 
When I arrived at the office the next morning, Andy was waiting for me with two mugs of coffee. He must have poured them out as soon as he saw me parking my car. I was not in the mood for Andy. I wanted to sit at my desk, put my head in my hands, and feel sorry for myself.

He said, ‘Morning, Wilberforce.’ He wasn’t smiling.

‘Andy.’

I took the coffee and sipped it. He stood in front of me, not speaking, not smiling. I looked up at him after a few moments and said, ‘OK, what is it this morning?’

He put his coffee down. ‘Oh, nothing much, Wilberforce, except that I gather you’re busy selling the company behind my back.’

Oh dear: largish cat out of bag.

‘I’m not doing anything behind your back.’

‘I rather got the impression from the man from Bayleaf Corporation that you’d already agreed a price.’

I stood up. ‘Don’t get at me, Andy,’ I told him. ‘Yes, I’ve had talks with Bayleaf. I didn’t approach them. They approached me through a bank. You know I’m not crazy about the idea of taking the company public. I wanted to see what our other options were. I’ll tell you something else: the reason the bank approached me was that they’d heard on the grape-vine we were thinking of coming to market; so much for Christopher Templeton’s professional discretion. He must have gossiped. So I went to see them, and, yes, we discussed possible terms. I mean, they asked me how much money I wanted, and I told them.’

‘You did what? Without talking to me first? What did you tell them?’

I told him.

‘Jesus Christ, Wilberforce - that’s about half what it’s worth!’ shouted Andy. He clapped his hands to his head. It was not a melodramatic gesture: he looked as if he really thought his head might explode.

‘Oh well, that’s what I’ve told them anyway,’ I said. My head was beginning to ache as much as it looked as if Andy’s might be aching. I really wasn’t in the mood for this.

‘I can’t believe you,’ said Andy: ‘I’ve given ten of the best years of my life to help you build the business up. Then you stitch me up like this. You don’t even bother to tell me about it - me, your finance director. I even thought we were friends - good friends. What a mistake.’ He turned and started to leave the office, his mug of coffee forgotten.

‘Don’t forget your coffee,’ I told him.

He turned back, looked at the mug and then at me in disgust, and then said suddenly, ‘Have you signed anything?’

‘Only Heads of Terms - nothing legally binding.’

‘Only Heads - did you get any legal advice?’

‘I didn’t need it; I could understand it all perfectly well without some lawyer explaining it all to me. And it says it’s not legally binding.’

‘Believe me,’ said Andy, putting his mug down, ‘anything you sign where the other party is a US corporation is legally binding. They will sue the arse off you, if you don’t go through with it - sue us, the company, as well. You’re a clever man in some ways, Wilberforce, but what you have just done is the most imprudent thing that I have ever heard of in my entire business life.’

That was twice in two days someone had called me clever, when they really meant that I was stupid. I didn’t enjoy it any more the second time. Andy walked out again, slamming the door, causing heads to be raised from desks in the office outside. I noticed he had forgotten his mug of coffee again.

That was the difficult beginning to a difficult few weeks. In the end, Andy and I reached an accommodation of sorts: I had to pay him an enormous bonus to get him to agree to the deal with the Americans and to help make it happen. I couldn’t have sold the company without him, and Andy made sure that, if the company was going to be sold ‘from under his feet’, as he kept saying, then he would be richly rewarded for helping me, not to mention his proceeds from his share options when the business was finally sold. What had once been a light-hearted friendship became a very sour relationship indeed. I took Andy out to dinner at Al Diwan one night in order to try to patch things up between us. We had been working very late, putting together the disclosure bundle, part of the pre-contract documentation. Asking him out was a mistake, for two reasons. The first reason was, I should never have allowed myself to hope that he would ever see my point of view. As far as Andy was concerned, I had broken his code of behaviour between two friends. I had gone behind his back.

Over a pint of Cobra and a plate of poppadums, he said, ‘You know, I don’t understand why you didn’t talk to me before going to the Americans. At least we could have got a better price from them. We’re more or less giving the company away. I promise you, in a year to eighteen months, we could have floated the company for twice what they are buying it for.’

‘Yes, and then I wouldn’t have been able to sell any shares anyway.’

Andy looked at me. ‘Do you need cash, Wilberforce? What’s going on? You earn a huge salary, you live in your flat, you don’t have a mortgage, and you don’t even pay for a season ticket at Newcastle United. You’ve got a nice car; you don’t go on holiday; as far as I know you haven’t got a girlfriend, and you don’t do drugs. What on earth do you need cash for?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. That’s why I didn’t tell you in the first place.’

The chicken balti arrived. Andy leaned back in his chair, caught the waiter by the arm, ordered another pint of Cobra for himself, and said, ‘Well, try me.’

I said, ‘I need to buy some wine.’

He began to laugh, and a few grains of pilau rice shot across the table on to my tie, as he spluttered for a moment. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ll brush those off. How much wine?’

‘A lot of wine, actually.’

Andy stopped laughing. He was really puzzled now. ‘But, Wilberforce, I didn’t know you drank wine. I’ve never seen you drink very much of anything. You can’t even get through a pint of lager. It must be - it must be - let me see: say you can buy good drinking wine at Morrison’s for four pounds a bottle and your end of this deal is say three million after tax and fees, then you should be able to buy three-quarters of a million bottles of wine, give or take.’ He started laughing again, no doubt at the idea of my wheeling trolley loads of wine out from a Morrison’s store. Some of the lager went up his nose. He shook his head. I could see he was amused, and very angry at the same time.

‘Much less than that: about one hundred thousand bottles, altogether. But you need to take into account that there are individual bottles which might be worth a thousand or two in the collection.’

Andy stopped laughing. He looked at me curiously, as if I had just crawled from behind a stone. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve become interested in wine. I’ve always wanted to have a hobby, but I’ve been too busy up until now.’

‘A hundred thousand bottles?’

‘I think so.’

Andy said, ‘Let me be clear about this. You’ve thrown away a great company, which I personally have sweated blood and tears to build up, you’ve trashed a good friendship, or a friendship I thought was good, and you’re doing all that so you can buy some wine?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘Where are you going to keep it?’

‘I’m going to keep it where it is now: in a cellar. I get the cellar as part of the deal.’

‘And where’s that?’

I hesitated. I had a vision of him jumping into his car, driving to Caerlyon, going down to the undercroft and laying about it with a hammer, just to teach me a lesson. I shuddered.

Andy saw the hesitation, and saw the shudder. He said, ‘You don’t understand about friendship, do you, Wilberforce? I trust you, but you don’t have to trust me. Is that it? Is that how your mind works? I work twelve hours a day for you, I have practically no social life, whilst you wander off every night at six o’clock to go drinking with some wine merchant friend of yours. Great. You know, when they put you together, Wilberforce, they left something out. I don’t know what it is, but something’s missing in you. You’re not normal. I should have seen it before.’

I said nothing. It was best to let him have his say.

‘You won’t even tell me whose wine you are buying, or where you are going to keep it. Are you frightened I’ll go and steal some?’ He stood up and dropped his napkin on the floor. ‘I’ve lost my appetite. I’m not going to waste my time sitting here with you. You pick up the bill. You can afford it.’

‘But you haven’t even started your chicken balti,’ I said.

Andy didn’t even look at me, and walked out.

I sat for a while pushing the food around on my plate, but there no longer seemed much point in eating any.

He and I never really spoke again, after that evening.

The second mistake I made in going to the Al Diwan was: it reminded me of Catherine. The last time I had been there was with her. That had been several weeks ago. Time, the great healer, was not doing much healing as far as I was concerned. I used to wake up in the night, burning with the thought that Catherine was going to be someone else’s. The idea overwhelmed me. I could not stand it. I knew I ought to call her, or write to her, or do something that would let her know how I felt, that might somehow induce her to change her mind.

I did nothing. Every night, I awoke thinking about her. I sat in the dark on my bed, full of neediness, and I did nothing.

 
A day or two later I went to see Francis again. I had been less diligent in going to see him lately, partly because of the pressure of work and partly because we could no longer go down to the undercroft together. Now Francis spent most of the time in bed, and he was taking a lot of morphine under the watchful eye of a nurse from the hospice. Francis was not often lucid these days. He made simple mistakes when talking about wine, confusing châteaux and years in a way I found unsatisfactory, when I remembered how diamond-hard his memory had once been.

Perhaps there was not much more he had to tell me anyway. He was beginning to repeat the same stories for the second or third time. He talked about his grandfather. He talked about his mother. He told stories about them with a mixture of unhappiness and pride. They weren’t as interesting the second time, and became tedious on the next repetition. There wasn’t a lot left for him to say. Like some of his older wine, he was going over. Soon he would be undrinkable.

There wasn’t a lot left for me to say either. What can you say anyway, to someone who is dying and who, at the end of the day, you don’t really know that well?

From time to time I still made the effort to go and see him. I didn’t want Francis to think I had tired of him. I didn’t want to take the risk that he might suddenly revise the terms of his will and somehow leave the wine away from me. I don’t think he would have done that, but you can never be sure.

When I arrived, the first thing I noticed, or rather didn’t notice, was Campbell. ‘Where’s Campbell?’ I asked Francis. He was lying in bed, very pale, very gaunt. Under the sheets he seemed as thin as a wafer of chewing gum, as if everything below the neck had wasted away. Perhaps it had.

‘Had to give him away, dear boy. I can’t look after him, and the nurse won’t. Teddy Shildon has taken him in, thank God.’

‘That’s sad,’ I said. ‘I liked Campbell. I would have taken him if you’d asked.’

‘Wilberforce,’ said Francis, ‘you don’t know the first thing about dogs.’

I said nothing, then, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t called for a bit. I’ve been very busy. But all in a good cause.’

‘All in a good cause,’ echoed Francis, faintly. He hadn’t any idea what I was talking about. ‘And how is the sale of your company going?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I meant. That’s what is keeping me so busy. It’s going very well.’