The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (6 page)

‘Please sell them, then.’

Chris said, ‘You’ll have quite a big capital-gains tax bill on both of those trades.’

I thought that I would worry about that when the time came. I thanked Chris for his help and asked him to close my account when the sale was done. There was some unenthusiastic talk of meeting up for a drink one day, but I don’t think Chris really meant it. I know I didn’t. Why go out for a drink, and risk drinking some wine bar’s ghastly house red, when you can drink real wine in the comfort of your own home?

I went on opening the pile of brown envelopes that had accumulated over the last few days, putting them into two piles: those that had to be paid if I was to continue to enjoy the provision of basic services such as heat and light; and those that could wait until the next demand. Finally I came to one from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Capital Taxes Office. I opened it, as I always opened letters from this source, with a certain amount of apprehension. It asked for immediate payment of tax overdue of fifty thousand pounds on share sales last year, plus interest running on the late payment.

I sat at my desk, and again felt chilled and damp with sweat. I had just sold the last shares in a portfolio which had once run well into seven figures and had been intended as my pension fund. According to Colin, I was unlikely ever to live until I reached pensionable age so perhaps that was not a problem after all. But I had hoped to win a few weeks’, or even a few months’, grace from the conversation I had just had with Chris Templeton. Now it seemed as if the last of my capital would go into my account in five days’ time, and leave it again just as fast.

I finished the bottle of wine and sat for a while thinking about my life. The trouble with spending a lot of money, when one didn’t have any income, was that it only worked for a time. That time had come. It had been a long while since I had been able to think clearly about my future and I wasn’t sure I was able to start now. I decided to go for a walk to clear my head, to post my letters and the paid bills, and to buy something to eat from the shop on the corner of Curzon Street. Then I checked my wallet, the one that Nurse Susan had kindly returned after I threw it out of the window. It contained three out-of-date credit cards and no cash. I knew my money clip had nothing in it. With some apprehension, I realised I was first going to have to walk down to St James’s Street to my bank and cash a cheque.

 
When Francis’s executors offered me Caerlyon Hall, I said yes, as I had promised Francis I would. The main house and grounds had been let on a long lease to the Council, as a Community Outreach Centre. One wing at the back of the house with a couple of bedrooms, a sitting room and a large kitchen had been kept by Francis for his own use, and so had the huge vault beneath the house, which so resembled the crypt of a church that Francis called it ‘the undercroft’. I had also promised Francis I would take back the main house from the Council, and make my home there, but that part of the promise I have not, so far, fulfilled. It does not look likely that I will ever live there now. Things have changed. Francis had no right to expect me to take on the burden of his house as well as his cellar. He had no right to extract a promise from me, although he did.

The undercroft itself was a huge Elizabethan vaulted cellar, which went right under the house. It was reached by going into a small stone building next to the stable block and down wide stone stairs to a large antechamber. That was where Francis had spent most of his life - in his ‘shop’. The shop area was where Francis displayed the wine he wanted to sell. The undercroft beyond was where he kept the wine he wanted to drink. The undercroft consisted of a central room, about fifty yards long, with chambers opening off it every few yards, like side chapels in a cathedral. In the main vaulted chamber Francis stacked the cased wine he had inherited or accumulated over the last forty years. There were several thousand wooden cases of wine, piled one on top of another, so that the effect was like a nineteenth-century city, a grid of great avenues and lateral side streets between the cases. There was no order, no system. Margaux was piled on top of Pomerol, St Emilion on top of Médoc; 1982s were stacked on top of 1998s and no one except Francis could ever have found anything. I have tried drawing a map of this cellar and, to an extent, I have succeeded. I have an approximate idea of the location, vintage and château of about half the wine I now own. The rest is a mystery to me - an exploration in progress. It might take me the rest of my life to find all the wine I own; it might take me longer than the rest of my life. My map is not complete; it could never be complete, for there is simply too much there to remember.

Francis had an eidetic memory. If he had once seen that he had a case of Château Latour 1979 resting on top of a case of Sauternes, he would remember for ever the position of each and, if you asked him about either of those wines, he could lead you straight to it.

In the side chambers were the special wines, behind locked iron grilles. There were pre-phylloxera Imperial Tokays; Châteaux Yquem from the 1880s; bottles of ancient port; odds and ends, collector’s dreams that might have been sold for the most enormous sums at auction. They will never go to auction now. Francis could never part with a bottle of wine he really loved, and neither will I. I thought about it once, but I would never do it. I could not bring myself to do it. Francis was my friend. To sell his wine would be a betrayal. There has been enough betrayal . . .

I remember the first time I went to Caerlyon - such an odd name: a remnant of the Dark Ages, before the Saxon and Dutch settlements. Caerlyon had survived and kept its identity intact, an island in the flood tide of Saxon and then Danish place names that arrived after the Romans left. The present version of the house was early Victorian, I believe, but there had been settlements in that place since the Bronze Age: Roman, medieval, an Elizabethan house. The Victorian house had been built in the days of the Black family’s greatest prosperity, when they had mined the rich coal seams that lay under the poor farmland that had sustained them in earlier centuries. That evening I had left my office as usual at about half past seven in the evening. My office, a miracle of black glass and marble, was in almost the last building at the edge of a modern industrial estate, south-west of Newcastle. It was an evening in late May. It was the time when I normally left work in order to get to the local shopping centre to buy a pizza or some other form of instant nourishment before all the shops shut. I would buy whatever pre-cooked meal came to hand, go home, microwave it and eat it, sit in front of a computer for an hour or two and then try to get five or six hours’ sleep before heading back to the office around five in the morning.

I still remember what a beautiful evening it was, with the magical light that occurs as spring changes into early summer. The sky was a pale pink, shading to a light green, which hinted of the Aurora. The industrial estate where I worked, a wilderness of aluminium sheds and modern glass-and-brick palaces like my own offices, was eating slowly into the side of a green hill. At the top of the hill, green pasture shaded into brown and rushy fell. For no reason, I turned off the road to the shopping mall and went up a little lane, driving up the side of the hill instead of along its base, towards the pale edge of the evening sky, as if there was a message waiting for me at the top of the escarpment. The offices and the factories below were already shrouded in the gloom of approaching night. I thought that it might be pleasant to see the last of the evening sunlight, as if I had, for a moment, sickened of all those years of neon-lit offices.

At the top of the hill, which I had driven up with some spirit in the Range Rover that I had bought for myself that year - the first (and last) expensive car I ever owned - I pulled in to the side of the road. Beyond me was a different landscape of small farms and allotments rising up to the great brown slopes of the Pennine moors. Just beyond where I had stopped the car was a little lane, with a brown sign pointing down it, and in white lettering the words ‘Caerlyon Hall’. I felt light of heart. I was breaking my routine, and I found that it was refreshing. I made a promise to myself that I would give it another ten minutes, then would turn around to go and buy my pizza and put in my couple of hours working on a new computer program. I turned the car down the lane through a planting of dark trees, and there in front of me was an enormous grey house. The drive gates were locked and barred and a sign said, ‘Gateshead County Council: Community Outreach Centre’.

I drove along the lane beside a high stone wall. The lane seemed to head towards the back parts of the house. After a hundred yards I found an opening in the wall that led into a cobbled courtyard, with stables and outbuildings. A large ‘A’ board was positioned by the side of the road: in gold Palace script on a burgundy-coloured background it announced: ‘Francis Black: Fine Bordeaux Wines. Visitors welcome.’

I remember feeling a little like Alice must have felt when she found the table at the bottom of the rabbit hole, with the little bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’. She knew very well that it would be wiser not to drink it, but strange things had already started to happen to her since she’d fallen asleep in the garden that afternoon, and seen the white rabbit and decided to follow him into Wonderland. So she thought, Well, why not? Looking back, now, I feel that the unexpected image that then came into my mind of a dimly remembered book from my childhood, that subconscious association of the burgundy-coloured sign with the bottle that Alice found labelled ‘DRINK ME’, was one of those irreversible moments in my life. I had other such moments later, but that was the first stage of my journey out of the world I knew. I turned my back on the safe world of pizzas and expensive cars and accountancy and computer-programming, with one innocent, unpremeditated step: the beginning of a journey that left that world behind for ever. So I thought, Well, why not? I pulled the car in to the side of the road, turned off the ignition and got out, feeling the evening sunlight warm upon my cheeks, smelling the sweet and woody smell of heather blowing in from the distant hills; and I sauntered in the general direction of Francis Black and his fine Bordeaux wines.

 
I walked down Piccadilly and turned into St James’s Street. As I passed the steps of one of the three gentlemen’s clubs at that end of St James’s, Ed Hartlepool, who was once close to me, a member of the circle of friends who adopted me and for a while were almost my family, came out of the door of his club and stood at the top of the steps down to the street, taking in the scenery. I was surprised to see him: Catherine had told me he had been forced to go and live in France as a tax exile and only came back to England for a few weeks a year. He looked the same as when I had last seen him: tall, very thin, in an immaculate navy-blue double-breasted suit, the whole effect set off by a shock of unmanageable curly fair hair starting from the top of his head. He turned to answer a comment from a large person behind him, which obviously amused him, for as he turned his head back in the direction of the street he was smiling. Then he saw me, and his smile vanished immediately. I half-acknowledged him with raised eyebrows: we were only yards apart, and I wondered if he, in his turn, would notice my presence in some way, making it necessary for me to say something to him. He said nothing; he cut me dead, looking at me and through me as if I was made from glass. I had not seen or spoken to Ed since Catherine’s funeral. Then, as I had entered the church on my crutches, he had gazed at me with a look of such deadly hatred that it had turned my legs almost to jelly. When I saw his look I had had to steady myself in order to avoid losing my balance. That had been rather an emotional occasion, and I couldn’t think now why Ed should have looked at me like that, or spoken to me in the way he did just after the service finished. Everyone knew that Catherine’s death hadn’t been my fault.

It was unsettling to see Ed again, to think he haunted this street so near to where I lived. I averted my gaze from him and hurried on towards my bank and, as I did, I heard a short, hard laugh behind me. I did not turn my head.

Once in the bank I presented my cheque and, not entirely to my surprise, there was a delay. Then my Personal Relationship Manager, Mr Rawle, came to the counter and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Wilberforce, good afternoon.’

‘Hello, Mr Rawle,’ I said. ‘Is everything in order?’

‘Oh, yes, everything is more or less in order. Perhaps if we could just have a quiet word over at my desk?’ He rubbed his hands and looked sideways at me with soft and pleading eyes, like a spaniel in a pinstripe suit.

I followed him over to a screened-off area of the banking parlour and sat opposite him at his desk. I found that my eyes strayed up towards the ceiling, and locked on it, so that Mr Rawle had to talk to my chin.

‘Mr Wilberforce, I wonder if you received a letter I sent you, about your account?’

I said yes, I had, and I had taken steps to put funds into my account.

‘Oh, excellent news, excellent,’ said Mr Rawle, rubbing his hands until I wondered if they might catch fire. ‘Might I ask what amount of funds?’

I said, as carelessly as I could, that I had moved fifty thousand across for the time being.

‘Are there any other pressing liabilities just at present?’ asked Mr Rawle.

A small tax bill. How much? I couldn’t exactly remember. I managed to detach my eyes from the ceiling and speak directly to Mr Rawle, rather than to one of his ceiling lights. Would it be all right if the bank cashed my cheque now, as I had an appointment?

Mr Rawle stood up, and almost bowed, and said, ‘A cheque for how much, Mr Wilberforce?’

‘Just the usual five thousand pounds,’ I said, trying to recapture the old insouciance with which I had asked for such sums of money in the past.

But Mr Rawle shook his head sadly. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but until the cheque you spoke of has been cleared and the funds are in your account, I don’t have the authority. I can let you have a thousand, I suppose.’