The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce

Catherine gave me a photograph of herself, just before we were married. ‘This was taken when I still had my looks,’ she told me. She was smiling as she said it, her eyes dancing, inviting a compliment.

Catherine picked the photograph up from the table where I had put it down and studied it. ‘It’s funny,’ she said: ‘when that was taken all I was thinking about was parties, and you were already sitting behind a computer writing programs. You’ve never really had any fun in your life at all, have you?’

‘Yes, it will be a relief to be finally married, won’t it? Then people will stop making such a fuss about Ed, and we can just get on with our lives.’

There had been a great deal of ill feeling when Catherine had told Ed Simmonds that she wasn’t going to marry him after all. I was glad I had not been present when the conversation took place, at Hartlepool Hall. Catherine had stood up to the combined forces of her parents and Ed with a great deal of courage and determination. I admired her for it.

Her parents weren’t on speaking terms with me any longer, and neither was Ed. The general view was that I had gone behind Ed’s back and betrayed the trust of a friend. I didn’t look at it like that at all. It was just something that had happened. After all, Ed wasn’t perfect himself. I knew for a fact he’d spoken unkind words about me behind my back in the past.

In those days Catherine and I were very happy together, making plans, then changing them and, as Catherine had wanted, having fun. She had said there hadn’t been much fun in my life; I’m not sure she had known much fun either since she had become engaged to Ed Simmonds.

We went on holiday not long after Catherine told her parents she wasn’t going to marry Ed, just to give everyone time to get used to the idea, and to take ourselves out of the way for a while. We went to India for three weeks. It was all arranged by Catherine. I wouldn’t have had any idea where to go, or how to get there. I was happy just to write the cheques and leave the organisation to Catherine.

But people didn’t get used to the idea of her broken engagement with Ed. Catherine’s parents told her they would disinherit her if she married me; they certainly had no intention of coming to the wedding.

To my surprise, my foster-mother Mary showed some resistance to the idea as well: ‘She sounds very nice dear,’ she said, when I told her that Catherine and I were to be married. ‘But I don’t think I can come to the wedding. It really isn’t fair to the poor young man she was engaged to.’

‘But you didn’t know the poor young man,’ I said to her in exasperation. ‘What does it matter? Catherine’s going to marry me. She hasn’t run away from him; she never married him; she’s just changed her mind.’

‘Well, I don’t really think people should change their mind,’ said Mary. I gave up. Why should I care what my foster-mother thought? I couldn’t recall her ever showing much interest in my thoughts and feelings.

The only person who didn’t throw us over was Eck Chetwode-Talbot, Francis’s godson. Eck had left the army quite a few years ago, but he still carried himself as if he was on parade: very upright and brisk in his movements. He came to Caerlyon for a drink soon after the news broke. Catherine was upstairs in Francis’s flat and I was in what had been the shop, which I now used as an office.

‘Where’s Catherine?’ he asked, as he settled into a chair. I opened a bottle of white wine, handed him a glass and said, ‘She’s upstairs, getting changed. We’ve been moving my furniture in from my flat.’

Eck laughed. ‘I think the whole thing’s absolutely marvellous. There was a distinct shortage of gossip until Catherine ran off with you. Now everybody has something to talk about. In fact, they won’t talk about anything else. And if the Plenders won’t speak to you, it’s a win double. You get the daughter without having to take the mother-in-law on board as well. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘Not at all. Why should I? I was very fond of old Francis and I know for a fact that he longed for you and Catherine to get together. A sort of paternal thing with him, I think. He quite liked Ed for his father’s sake. He used to see a bit of Simon Hartlepool when Simon still saw people. But he adored Catherine. All the people Francis really liked were our age. He never seemed to want to mix with his own generation. Anyway, I’m sure he never wanted Catherine to get married to Ed.’

‘That’s the trouble with being a bachelor,’ Eck went on: ‘you develop an excess of unsatisfied paternal instinct. You adopt the young. Then you start to want to rearrange their lives. In Francis’s case, he adopted Catherine first, and then you, for quite different reasons, I should think.’

‘You are sweet to agree,’ said Catherine, and hugged Eck. Eck looked pleased, and as we all raised our glasses in a toast, I knew that he was also thinking what a good story it would make, and how many lunches and dinners he would be asked to, so that people could hear him make a joke of Catherine and me getting married, with Eck casting himself in the roles of father of the bride, best man, and witness.

After our wedding, we decided to go and live in London. There was too much history for us in the North: Catherine hardly dared go out for fear of meeting someone she knew, and being snubbed. Now I had sold the business and separated myself from Andy and all the others I had once worked with, there was nothing to keep me there either. A fresh beginning seemed like a good idea, to both of us.

We found a flat in Half Moon Street, in Mayfair. It cost an enormous amount of money, but I didn’t mind. It was ideal: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small sitting room and, best of all, a basement that could be adapted to store some wine. Catherine was appalled when I told her how much it would cost to buy it and do it up, but I told her that the money from the sale of my business had to be put into something: why not property? I sold my flat in Newcastle and we moved south a month or two after we were married. It was a happy time. We settled into the new flat and started to do it up. It was just off Piccadilly and near almost everywhere we wanted to be near to.

We went to the theatre and the cinema, or a concert, or the opera, as Catherine loved music. We ate in a restaurant almost every other night. Catherine took up singing again, going one night a week to choir practice. I went to an evening class in wine-tasting once a week.

In the daytime I sat in my office making plans for the new software consultancy I was going to set up, and Catherine busied herself buying things for the flat, having chairs and sofas covered and arranging for curtains to be made. She had already decided the spare bedroom was going to be a nursery when the time came.

We had lunches - sometimes quite long lunches. I would open a bottle of wine or two, and we would sit and talk, and sip the wine, although Catherine never really drank her share, and then either I would go back to my desk, or we would go into Green Park if it was a sunny day, or walk down to Knightsbridge to look at the shops; or sometimes we would just go upstairs and go to bed together.

One morning I went out to the bank to arrange some money transfer or other, and came back to find Catherine sitting in the kitchen, crying. I went up to her and put my arms around her and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

It was only the occasional shadow such as that that interrupted our happiness. We made new friends to replace those that had separated themselves from us since our marriage. I bumped into an old university friend, Colin Holman, who had become a successful doctor in private practice. Catherine rediscovered a few married ex-school friends who had settled in London, and we began to go out to dinner from time to time, or have the occasional dinner party in our new flat. Our life was busy enough, our new-found friends, if they had heard about Catherine’s broken engagement with Ed Simmonds, cared nothing about that, and our past lives became, at least for me, a dim memory.

One morning, after dining at the flat of one of our new friends, Catherine said to me, as we sat drinking tea in the kitchen at breakfast, ‘Darling, I think you were quite tight at dinner last night. You talked a great deal about wine. I’m not sure everyone’s quite as interested in the subject as you are, darling.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think I’d had too much to drink, because I didn’t really like what they were serving. It was far too young, absolutely stiff with tannin.’

Catherine stirred her tea and said, ‘Yes, darling, I’m sure you’re right. But don’t you think you’re drinking just a little too often at the moment?’

I was surprised by her remark. ‘Am I? Don’t confuse tasting with drinking, darling. It is one of my great interests in life. That’s why I agreed to buy Caerlyon and the wine from Francis.’

At lunch that day we opened two bottles of wine, a good white burgundy with the small starter Catherine had prepared, and then a bottle of Bordeaux with the poached eggs and salad. Catherine matched me glass for glass, as if to apologise for her remark at breakfast and show me that she had not meant it; afterwards we stepped out into the bright sunshine, went to Hatchards and bought a pile of great, glossy recipe books for the new kitchen and Robert Parker’s definitive work on the wines of Bordeaux, for me.

Catherine had gone out to have lunch with a girlfriend, and I sat at home and decided it would be interesting to compare a 1989 and a 1990 Château Talbot. I opened both bottles and let them breathe for an hour and come up to room temperature, and then poured out a little of each into two glasses. For me, the 1990 was almost thin, whilst the 1989, if not a great wine, had far more power and finish. It was a fascinating contrast of tastes, similar and yet dissimilar.

‘Yes,’ she replied, and bent to kiss me. Then she said, ‘Darling, you do rather reek of wine.’ She looked at the two empty bottles, which I had placed on the sink, and said, ‘Have you drunk all that yourself? Now, today?’

‘Tasting, darling, not drinking,’ I reminded her. She said nothing, but looked at me, and then looked at the two empty bottles, and then back at me. She bit her lip for a second, and then left the kitchen and went upstairs.

I said nothing. I wasn’t going to be lectured about drinking wine. It was the great enthusiasm of my life: I was learning something new every time I opened a bottle. I finished writing up my tasting notes and then went next door to the sitting room, and sat down at the desk I kept my papers in. When Catherine came downstairs, I pretended to be engrossed in the business plan I was writing for my new software consultancy. As a matter of fact, I had been writing the plan for some months now.

‘But don’t you get out of touch, darling? I mean, if you don’t go and see people, how can you know what’s going on, or what sort of things they might need? Aren’t people simply going to forget all about you?’

I said, ‘I think my reputation as one of the best software developers in the country might last more than six months.’ I was starting to get angry, because there was truth in what Catherine was saying. People would forget me; most people forgot all about me five minutes after meeting me. They remembered Andy; they remembered the name of the company, except that now it wasn’t called Wilberforce Software Solutions any more, but Bayleaf UK, after the giant American software business that had bought it.

‘Well, even so, aren’t you getting bored just sitting around the house all day? I mean, most men of your age do something. It can’t be good just sitting around drinking all the time.’

I could feel real anger running through me now, like a virus multiplying itself at raging speed. Where had it come from? I felt that if Catherine said another word about my drinking too much, I would hit her. Instead I jumped up, and the pages of my business plan went flying all over the room. Catherine started, and put her hand to her mouth in alarm.

I said, ‘I’m tired of this conversation. I don’t like being lectured. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re living in my flat, bought with my money, earned by my hard work, in one of the best streets in London. I’m entitled to do what I like, I should think.’ Then I left the flat, slamming the front door, and walked about twice around Hyde Park before I felt able to return home.

When I came back, I went up to Catherine, who was sitting in a chair in the sitting room, reading a novel, and I kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t mean to be cross.’

She was very quiet all that evening, but the next day it was as if there had been no row, and everything was as it always had been between us. Except that it wasn’t as it always had been. It was as if a fine crack had appeared in a once perfect porcelain bowl. The damage had been mended and could not be seen. But the bowl, which had been unblemished before, was cracked now.

For a few weeks I made a conscious effort to taste less wine at lunch time, at least when Catherine was there. I set up one or two meetings and went to them, and talked to a couple of people whom I thought might back my new business venture. But my heart wasn’t in it: I couldn’t persuade myself I really wanted to do this, and I don’t think I convinced them.

Then I hit upon a different idea: instead of having to go through the effort of setting up meetings which I didn’t want to go to, and where I could never think of what to say, I thought I would tell Catherine I was having lunch with one or other of my old customers, and then just go and have lunch somewhere by myself.

The drawback in this plan was that it was not always possible to find somewhere with a reasonable wine list. I resented paying over the odds for wines that I would hardly bother to open at home. But I decided I had to be realistic; it was better to spend a bit of money to have a glass of decent wine, even if I knew I was being robbed. This worked well. I found, to my surprise, a few wine lists which were really quite interesting even if expensive, with wines that sometimes were new even to me.

At first Catherine was very pleased with me. ‘You see,’ she would say as I rolled back into the flat cheerfully after another of my solitary, but satisfactory lunches. ‘It makes all the difference getting out and meeting people. You’re in a much better mood now you’re getting out and about.’

I suppose this new plan became too much of a good thing, after a while. Catherine didn’t say anything, but her initial enthusiasm about my getting out and meeting people began to wear off. It might have lasted a bit longer except that one day I decided to have lunch in a restaurant in Walton Street that had become rather a favourite of mine. I ordered a starter and drank a bottle of a good white Rhône wine with that. I was just in the act of tasting the glass of Bordeaux that the sommelier had poured for me, before the next course arrived, when Catherine came into the restaurant with Sarah, one of her girl friends. I might have known it was a mistake to eat somewhere so close to Sloane Street. I knew Catherine was shopping and having lunch with someone that day.

She saw me and I saw her at the same instant. I began to prepare the words I would say to her when she came over. But she didn’t come over. She turned away. Sarah hadn’t seen me. She had only met me once or twice and quite possibly wouldn’t have recognised me anyway. I wouldn’t have known her, had she not been with Catherine.

I finished my lunch as quickly as I reasonably could, and paid my bill. Catherine had been given a table at the back of the restaurant. I could not see her, and made no effort to look for her. I walked slowly home, went to my desk, pulled out my wretched business plan and made a few more notes in its margins. When Catherine came back to the flat half an hour later, I was still at it.

I heard her come in and shut the door. Then she went into the kitchen and I heard the kettle boiling. After a moment, I went to the door of the kitchen and looked in. She was sitting at the table with a mug of tea, smoking a cigarette, something she hardly ever did. She did not smile, or say anything, when she saw me.

‘That was a funny coincidence,’ I said. ‘My date stood me up. He had to go to a meeting and rang me on the mobile after I’d sat down. So I thought I’d just have lunch anyway. Ha ha.’

Catherine stared at me. She had avoided looking at me before, but now she stared at me in the same way Andy once had, when I had told him I was selling the business without consulting him; the way Ed Simmonds had when I had admitted I’d been seeing Catherine without his knowledge. It was a weary, contemptuous expression. She said, ‘You haven’t been having business lunches with anyone, have you? I was pretty sure it was all a lie, but now I know what you’ve become.’

I didn’t ask her what she thought I had become. I didn’t want to hear her tell me I was a drunkard, because I knew it would make me angry. My face felt rigid and frozen.

‘My God!’ said Catherine. ‘If Sarah had seen you, or recognised you. Sitting there red-faced with a bottle of wine, on your own. I would have died.’

Catherine didn’t reply. She sat smoking her cigarette, with the same distant expression on her face. I went back to my desk. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut, as she went out again.

She took her coat off and hung it up and went upstairs. A few minutes later she came down again, and sat opposite me. ‘Pour me some wine,’ she commanded.

She sipped some more, looking at me searchingly. ‘This isn’t what I thought being married would be like. I should have got to know you better first, shouldn’t I?’

‘Ah,’ said Catherine. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Maybe there isn’t anything to know about you. It’s just that I thought there was. But maybe there isn’t. Maybe you’re completely empty inside. Is that why you have to fill yourself up with wine every day?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I wasn’t angry now. It suddenly seemed to me to be very important that I understood what Catherine was trying to tell me, but somehow her words made no more sense than if she had been speaking in Mandarin. ‘I’m not a drunkard, as you seem to think. Since I inherited the undercroft, I’ve become very interested in wine.’

‘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?’

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.’