‘Yes, that must have been very hard for you,’ I said with sympathy. ‘But I’m very lucky: I really do have a lot of wine,’ I said. It seemed important that Eric should understand this point. ‘I drink a lot of wine. I’ve told you that. But that’s because it’s my hobby. I inherited some wine from a friend. He built up a fantastic collection. As far as I know, it is one of the largest collections of Bordeaux in private hands in this country.’
Eric smiled. ‘OK, Will, you have a hundred thousand bottles of wine. You probably have a million bottles of wine, in your wonderful, secret cellar. OK. But do you own the wine, or does it own you?’
The afternoon continued in this vein. Eric drank more Diet Coke. I longed for a glass of wine, but I knew I had to go without for a while. After an hour or two of conversation with Eric, which was becoming tedious, I decided it would be better, for Eric’s sake and mine, if I pretended that the undercroft did not exist.
Eric was very pleased with me when I admitted that point to him. He said, ‘I’m so proud of you, Will, for owning up to that. It’s like you’re telling me you understand the need for truth. If you can be honest with me, you can be honest with yourself. You’re close to taking the first step.’
I ate alone in my room that night. Eric said it was too soon for me to meet the other guests, but tomorrow I could join in a group discussion. When I had finished eating the tasteless food, I went and lay on my bed and thought about Catherine. Would she have approved of me being here? I thought she would have been very proud of me. For some reason a memory came into my mind of Catherine and me sitting together at a metal table on the pavement outside a bar, somewhere near our hotel in the Faubourg St Honoré, on our last visit to Paris together. It was a sunny day, warm for late October, and we were both drinking white wine.
Catherine said, ‘I hope we can always have happy times together like this, Wilberforce.’
‘What could stop us?’ I said.
‘Because sometimes I worry about you drinking too much. It’s not that I mind you drinking a bit. You’ve earned the right to enjoy yourself, God knows, and I’d be the last person to get in the way of that. But I do worry sometimes. It makes you look ill. You look so much nicer, when you aren’t drinking.’
‘You mustn’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll be all right. And you look very good to me at all times.’
‘Darling,’ she said, smiling. Then she added, ‘I only mean, if it’s between the wine and me, I hope you’ll choose me.’
I raised my glass to her, and she raised hers in reply and I said, ‘I’ve already chosen you.’
I remember how we sat smiling at each other in the autumn sunshine, while we finished our wine together.
Then, as I lay on my bed and remembered how she looked that day, and the sound of her voice, at long last the tears came. I mourned for Catherine for the first time since her death. I couldn’t remember what had happened, or why she had been taken from me; but I understood at last the full reality of my loss. She had been taken from me, and now I had to sort out my life. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long while, before finally making the effort to undress and get inside the bed. Before I went to sleep, I said, ‘I choose you, Catherine. Not the wine.’
The next morning Eric came to take me down to breakfast. All meals were served in a smart self-service canteen. A dozen other tables were occupied by people either sitting alone or in groups of two or three. There was not much conversation. Eric and I collected some coffee and toast, and went and sat together.
‘Great bunch of guys here,’ said Eric. ‘There’s Dave, who’s a methadone addict - really nice guy: he’s a florist. Pete, who’s sitting with him, is coming off a whisky habit. I can relate to Pete, ha ha.’
I could see nothing out of the ordinary about either Dave or Pete: two quiet, middle-aged men having a cup of coffee together.
Eric looked around him. ‘That girl over there - she’s Wilhelmina from Utrecht.’ I looked across and saw a tall, pale girl with spectacles, and long, straight red hair, sitting alone at a table. ‘She got drunk the other day on two glasses of white-wine spritzer, and checked herself in here. I don’t know what we can do for her. She’s rather weird. That large man at the service counter - that’s Mick. Everybody here calls him ‘‘Big Mick’’. He’s a tax accountant from the City, with a telephone-number salary, he tells me. He also has a drugs-and-violence problem: he’s a crack addict. But he’s a very, very sweet man so long as he’s not high. He has his own special plastic cutlery. We don’t like him around knives. But don’t worry about him: he’s more likely to damage himself than anyone else.’
Big Mick was about six foot three and eighteen stone, balding and heavily muscled. He wore a blue tracksuit and was helping himself to a generous cooked breakfast. I decided I would avoid Big Mick.
After breakfast there was a group meeting in a large conference room. Eric and another caseworker called Angela managed the session. The rest of us sat in a semicircle of chairs around the table where Eric and Angela sat. Angela spoke first. She said, ‘It’s important at these sessions that we listen as well as talk. You must tell the truth about yourself if you can, and be prepared to listen to others tell you the truth about yourself. Eric will facilitate our session this morning.’
Eric stood up, a tin of Diet Coke in one hand, and said, ‘People, I’d like to introduce you to Will here. Will’s going to tell us why he’s here in just a moment, and then I’m hoping some of you will share your own experiences with him. I want Will to know that he’s not alone. I want him to hear how all of you have struggled, and stumbled, but have taken one step and then the next on the road to recovery. Are you happy to talk to us about yourself, Will?’
I nodded, and everyone looked at me expectantly. There was a silence.
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘You want me to say something now?’ Angela said, ‘Yes please, Will. We truly want to share your problems with you, and work with you to achieve the right outcomes.’
‘Amen!’ said Big Mick.
I said, ‘Oh, well, there’s not a lot to say really. I drink wine. I love wine, in fact I collect wine. I’m very interested in it.’
I stopped and Eric looked at me, and then prompted me by saying, ‘But one day . . . ?’
‘Oh, yes, and then for various reasons I decided I ought to come here because I was probably drinking a bit more than I should be.’
‘Will was on four bottles of wine a day before he came here,’ said Eric, with dramatic emphasis on the word ‘four’.
‘The Lord protect you!’ said Big Mick.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Anyway, one day my wife was killed in a car crash so I thought I’d better get a grip on my life and I went to see a friend; he’s a doctor, a very nice chap called Colin whom I was at university with, and anyway Colin said he thought I might be drinking too much, and so I said well, what can I do about it? and he said—’
‘Slow down, slow down, Will,’ said Angela.
‘How awful,’ said Wilhelmina. ‘Your poor wife was killed.’ She started to weep silently and took out a large handkerchief and blew her nose.
‘Was you driving?’ asked Dave.
‘No, my wife was driving; it was an accident.’ I felt exhausted, talking about myself in front of all these complete strangers.
Big Mick said, ‘I smoked crack and I was possessed by demons and beat my partner, so that she left me. But then the Lord spoke to me and told me to check myself in here and now I am cured. Praise the Lord!’
‘Well, very nearly cured, Mick,’ said Angela.
Wilhelmina had finished weeping and now she, too, had something to say. ‘I was overcome by drinking some wine and I was at a party and I kissed a man and we went away and he did, oh, such things to me, and because of the wine I let him. Now I am a poor sinner without hope, and all because I drank too much wine.’
‘You just had a good time,’ said Dave. ‘I wouldn’t let it get you down.’
The morning passed away with further reminiscences of this kind and then we broke for lunch. I sat with Big Mick, who seemed to have taken a shine to me.
‘He’s not a bad bloke, your Eric,’ said Big Mick confidentially to me. We were sitting together at a table eating pasta and salad. Eric was talking earnestly to Angela at another table.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sure his heart’s in the right place.’
‘Yes, and he was a bit of a piss artist in his own right, once upon a time,’ said Big Mick. ‘It wouldn’t take much for Eric to be sucking on a bottle of whisky again - know what I mean? Anyway, tell me what you do in the real world?’
‘I used to be a software developer. In fact, I used to own a software company until recently.’
‘Really,’ said Big Mick. ‘I know all about that. I’m a tax accountant. I specialise in corporate stuff, sheltering high earners and private equity types from paying more tax than they need to. What was your company called?’
‘Wilberforce Software Solutions,’ I told him. ‘But I sold it to Bayleaf, and it’s Bayleaf UK now.’
‘Great business,’ said Big Mick. ‘Those are excellent software packages. I use them myself. I’m really pleased to meet you.’ He reached across the table and took my hand and shook it.
For a while we sat and talked happily about tax computations, and the deficiencies of Inland Revenue software.
Later, when we were on our own together, Eric said to me, ‘I was so pleased to see you getting on so well with Big Mick. Not everyone can adapt to him. I expect you were talking about religion, were you?’
‘In a way,’ I agreed.
Eric and I continued our daily sessions together, and every day there would be a group session as well where we traded experiences. Some of the members of the group went; others arrived. When it was Big Mick’s time to depart he gave me his business card and said, ‘Get in touch some time, if they ever let you out of here. We could maybe work on some ideas for new software packages together, now that I’m cured.’
‘Are you cured?’ I asked.
Big Mick winked and said, ‘One step at a time, Wilberforce. One step at a time.’
I did try to get in touch with him a few months later, but when I rang the number on his card I was told that he’d left the office. I kept asking questions and in the end I found out that he had been shot dead by his crack dealer in a disagreement about money.
Eric continued to work on my case. We spent an unproductive morning talking about God.
‘Are you OK about God, Will?’
‘In what way, exactly?’
‘I mean we believe that it helps in this process if you can put your trust in a Higher Power. For me, that’s God. But, Will, if you don’t want to talk about God, that’s cool too.’
‘I don’t think it would be especially helpful,’ I said.
Eric looked at me with pity mingled with regret. ‘I think that’s the wrong judgement, Will, but, hey, it’s your judgement. Maybe we’ll talk about this again.’
The next day was more difficult. Eric went to the whiteboard and wrote: ‘A list of all the persons I have harmed.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘This one isn’t an option, Will. If you want to get better, you need to understand that your illness may have caused harm to other people. You might have made them sad; you might have hurt them, like Big Mick did; you might have stolen from them, lied to them, or deceived them in other ways.’
Eric looked at me expectantly. I looked back at him. As I so often found with Eric, I had no real idea what he was talking about. I said nothing, so Eric wrote on the whiteboard: ‘Mrs Wilberforce’. Then he smudged it out and wrote, ‘Mrs Will’.
‘Catherine,’ I corrected him. ‘But I didn’t harm her. It was an accident.’
‘Don’t tell me she sat and watched you drink and wasn’t hurt by it in some way,’ said Eric.
‘I know what Catherine suffered because of me,’ I said. ‘Yes, Eric. I may have caused her unnecessary worry.’
‘Was there anybody else?’ asked Eric. ‘There usually is.’
Ed Hartlepool. Eck. Catherine’s parents. My foster-mother. My foster-father.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anyone.’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Eric. ‘There is someone.’
‘Catherine left Ed of her own accord,’ I said. ‘It was nothing to do with me, or drink, or anything.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Eric. ‘We’ll come back to that later. But I wasn’t thinking about your friend. I was thinking about you. It’s you who has been the most harmed by drink.’
I supposed that was true, when I thought about it. I had harmed myself. My life was not better than it had been before I discovered wine; it was worse, immeasurably worse. The day I had first entered the shop at Caerlyon had led me into a new world. I had discovered friendship; I had discovered a kind of happiness that I had never known before. I had discovered I could love somebody, when I met Catherine. I had discovered wine, when I met Francis. Wine had brought pleasures of a different sort. In the secret garden I had entered that evening long ago, it was the fruit in the garden that turned, in the end, to ashes in my mouth. Wine had brought its own labyrinth of experience with it, in which one might twist and turn for ever, forgetting where the entrance to the labyrinth was, forgetting how to leave. If I had not gained the things I had gained - the friendship and the love - I would never have had to experience the loss that I now felt.
I put my forearms on the table, rested my head on them and closed my eyes. I wished I couldn’t hear Eric’s nasal voice, full of triumph, as he said, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re making real progress.’
I finished my course at The Hermitage three weeks later. Eric had arranged an ‘exit interview’ for me with Angela.
‘I’m too close to it, Will,’ he told me. ‘We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve worked together as a team and I feel terrifically close to you as a result. I think you’re a really great human being, Will - just a bit of personal development required for you to be able to return to the outside world and lead a full and meaningful life.’