There was a pause, not longer than a heartbeat, before Catherine said, ‘All right: that would be lovely. Shall I follow you down the hill?’
‘That would be best.’
Twenty minutes later we were sitting opposite each other in the cramped space of Al Diwan, eating poppadums and sipping water. Neither of us felt like drinking more wine.
‘I haven’t had Indian food for years,’ said Catherine.
I had Indian food about twice a week, because I couldn’t be bothered to cook, and because Al Diwan was five minutes from the office, friendly, and cheap. I could imagine that Ed and Catherine would not often find themselves in places like this.
‘This is such fun,’ she said, in a more animated tone of voice than she had used so far that evening. ‘What a charming little place! How on earth did you find it?’
‘It’s more or less the office canteen,’ I told her. ‘Andy and I come here sometimes.’
‘Who’s Andy?’
‘Andy is my right-hand man at the office. He’s the finance director. I’d be lost without him: as a matter of fact, it was he that brought me here first.’
‘Why haven’t we met him?’ asked Catherine. She picked up her poppadum and bit into it, showing her relative inexperience of Indian food, as it fragmented into about a dozen pieces all over the table.
I couldn’t help smiling.
‘I’m not used to these things,’ she explained. ‘But why haven’t we met Andy?’ She spoke as if we were all members of a close family, and I had sinned by failing to bring him to Caerlyon to be inspected.
‘Work friend, I suppose.’ I felt awful as I said that: someone was either a friend, or they were not a friend - weren’t they?
‘So are we all just your play friends? Am I your play friend?’
The waiter arrived just then, so I did not have to answer this difficult question. I ordered something for both of us and then said, ‘I hope you’ll like it.’
‘I’m bound to like it. This is such fun, Wilberforce. Wilberforce, why does no one ever call you by your first name? Or is Wilberforce your first name?’
‘No, it’s my family name - that is, my parents’ name,’ I explained.
‘Are your parents not the same thing as your family, Wilberforce? You are very mysterious. I’m so glad Ed isn’t here. I’ve always wanted to ask you about yourself, ever since I met you, but Ed doesn’t approve of girls asking lots of questions.’
I couldn’t decide whether she was serious or not. Catherine was one of those people for whom irony was the most habitual mode of expression, and it was often very hard to tell when she was joking, and when she was not.
‘No, they are my foster-parents. I don’t know who my natural parents were.’
Catherine stared, and then put her hand to her mouth, in a parody of someone being astonished. Perhaps she was. Then she clapped her hands together and said, ‘I bet Francis is your natural father, Wilberforce! We all say how he has more or less adopted you. I mean, I’ve known Francis since I was about three. He started out in the wine trade selling wine to my father and Ed’s. Eck is his godson. But you - you’re his favourite now. He adores you.’
I felt uncomfortable, as if she was suggesting I had gate-crashed a party.
She must have caught something in my expression because she said quickly, ‘No - you think I’m joking. I mean it. You’re really like the son he never had. You care more about his wine than anyone else he knows. You’re always up there. Every time I’ve been to Caerlyon in the last few months, you’ve been there. It does Francis so much good to have someone who’s interested in his beloved wine, someone he can really talk to; someone who’s intelligent enough for him. The rest of us are terribly thick by Francis’s standards, you know.’
‘Francis has been very kind to me,’ I said. My voice sounded stiff even to me.
‘But Wilberforce, what were your foster-parents like? Do you still see them?’
‘My father - my foster-father - is dead now. He was a university lecturer. He spent most of the last years of his life writing a book about Bismarck. It was never published.’
‘That’s what he did. What was he like?’
I struggled to find an answer to this. The truth was that my foster-father had never had any time for me. As far as I could work it out, when I grew to an age where one began to look for explanations of why life was like it was, he had never really liked me. My foster-mother couldn’t have children. She’d wanted to adopt a child, and given my foster-father no peace until he’d let her.
‘He was a bit remote.’
‘And your foster-mother?’
‘She was rather quiet. She watched television a lot.’
It was true. My foster-mother had become disenchanted with the idea of babies at quite an early stage - certainly for as long as I could remember. She had always seemed to live in a world spent in front of the televison, or reading Catherine Cookson novels. I don’t know what she did before she had a television set to watch; she probably gazed at the spin-dryer.
‘It sounds a terribly lonely childhood, Wilberforce. Was it?’
‘I suppose it must have been,’ I said. ‘How was I to know any different?’
The food arrived, so I didn’t have to make any further comment about my childhood, a subject that always made me uncomfortable on the very few occasions someone asked me about it. The past was walled off. My childhood had been bricked up somewhere deep inside me.
Catherine had a first forkful of chicken balti. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘This is absolutely delicious. Oh God, give me some water.’
Catherine became preoccupied with her food. She ate with enthusiasm. I watched her enjoying it.
‘If I lived nearer,’ she said between forkfuls, ‘I’d come here every night.’
‘You’ve eaten Indian food before.’
‘Not often. Ed likes Italian food. But he doesn’t really like going out at all. He likes very long evenings with lots of his friends in chilly dining rooms, where the men all wear nice warm smoking jackets and the girls freeze to death in their frocks. That’s the sort of evening Ed likes.’ She raised her face from her plate and stared at me again, with a questioning look I had seen once before on her face, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
I began to wonder about Eck’s remark earlier in the evening. Ed and Catherine were, so far as I knew, engaged. Now she spoke of him like some familiar thing, such as a black labrador, which had failed to come up to expectations.
‘And what made you become a computer expert?’ asked Catherine. ‘Ed says you’re a genius with computers.’
‘I liked doing sums at school,’ I said. ‘Sums are like a landscape to me. I see patterns in numbers that other people can’t see, or take a long time to see. That’s how I became involved in software in the end. It’s a language of numbers. I happen to be good at it.’ It was a landscape I had gone to live in a long time ago.
I could see Catherine did not really understand what I was trying to tell her, but the reply intrigued her. ‘It must be so brilliant to be really good at something,’ she said. ‘No one else I know is any good at anything or, if they are, they would never admit it.’
After a while Catherine started forking in the food at a slower rate than before, and finally put her fork down on the side of the plate, and with a comical little explosion of breath said, ‘I can’t finish it. I’ve tried, and it was wonderful, but I think I might explode if I ate another thing.’
‘That was the starter,’ I said.
She stared at me again and then laughed out loud. ‘Wilber-force! You mustn’t joke! I was really alarmed, for a moment.’
‘Nobody ever finishes Indian food,’ I reassured her. ‘That’s the whole point. There’s always just a bit more than you can manage.’
After a moment I asked, ‘Is everything all right between you and Ed?’
‘Of course it’s all right. Why do you ask?’
I shook my head, regretting that I had spoken. ‘I don’t know. Just something to say, I suppose. It’s none of my business, anyway.’
‘The words ‘‘all right’’ define my relationship with Ed,’ said Catherine with sudden seriousness. ‘We’ve been going out for so long I can’t remember when we weren’t. If I’ve ever gone out with anyone else, it was so long ago I can’t think who it was.’
‘Why don’t you get married?’
‘I suppose we will, some day. We need to become engaged, first.’
I was surprised by this. ‘I thought you were engaged. I’d always assumed you were. Everybody seems to think so.’
‘Well then, we must be, mustn’t we? Only it’s never got as far as the columns of the Daily Telegraph.’
The waiter brought the bill; I paid, and we stood up to go. As I put my hand out to pick up my credit card from the plate on the table, Catherine suddenly reached down and put her hand over mine and said, ‘Thank you, Wilberforce. That was a very special treat. I’ve had such fun. Thank you so much for asking me.’ Then her hand was gone and the waiter was helping her on with her coat.
Outside, I walked her to her car. It was a clear night. I glanced up at the sky and saw that the stars were out: thousands upon thousands of points of light glittering in the dark. We reached her car and Catherine turned to face me. We stood looking at each other, without speaking. The questioning look was back on her face, as if she was searching my own expression for some clue as to what would happen next.
Then I said, ‘Can we do this again some time, if you’re ever at a loose end?’
‘I don’t think we ought. Ed might take it the wrong way.’
‘I’d like to, though.’
Catherine smiled then, and said, ‘If you promised to tell me your first name, I might think about it.’
‘I couldn’t do that. It’s a trade secret.’
‘Oh well, there you are then.’ She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and before I could return the kiss, she had slipped away and was sitting in her car. The lights came on, the engine revved briefly, and then she was gone, with a wave of her hand.
I walked down the hill to where the Range Rover was parked. What an unexpected evening: full of surprises. I wondered what Ed would think of it all, when he heard about it. Probably nothing: Ed knew he could trust me. We had been friends for over a year now. We saw a lot of each other - Ed, Catherine and me. If Ed couldn’t trust me, I thought, I’d like to know who he could trust.
But could I trust myself?
Two
The next day in the office Andy said to me, as I came in, ‘Good party last night?’
‘Party? Oh, the wine-tasting: yes, it was fun.’
‘Did you buy anything?’
‘The awful thing is, I forgot to.’
It was true. I of all people ought to have bought some of Francis’s wine. Never mind: I would buy a few cases from him this evening, when I went up the hill.
‘Then it must have been a good party,’ said Andy, smiling. He turned back to his computer and I went on to my office and switched everything on.
I looked at my watch. It was half past eight in the morning. Andy would have been here since seven, or maybe seven thirty at the latest. A minute or two later, as I was sitting at my computer checking emails, he came in with two cups of coffee and handed one to me, then sat on the corner of my desk.
‘I talked to Christopher Templeton last night, after you left.’
The last three words hung in the air for a moment, like the hint of an accusation.
‘And . . . ?’
‘And . . . and Christopher says, that if we want to float the company next year we need to start doing something about it now. There’s a queue, and we need to be in it. That means appointing advisers, making a plan, setting a budget.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Yes, right. Wilberforce, we can’t keep putting this off. We need to start thinking about acquisitions. Not big ones, but small ones, and lots of them. We need to raise capital to do that.’
‘Our cash flow is strong enough, isn’t it?’
‘It’s excellent, but it isn’t enough to fund an acquisition programme.’
We had had these conversations many times in the last few months. I sipped my coffee and wondered why we needed to have another.
‘We need to keep talking about this, Wilberforce. I know you hate it. Your body language isn’t hard to read. But we can’t stay where we are. A business of our size either gets bigger slowly, or smaller quickly.’
‘I don’t hate talking about it,’ I lied; ‘it’s just I have a lot to do this morning.’
‘Give more work to Steve,’ said Andy. Steve was head of programming, but he wasn’t as good as I was. ‘Talk to me for a while. This is real life, not a program. Wilberforce, we’ve built a great business here, but we’re still only a ten-million-a-year company. To survive in our market we need to be three or four times as big. Now, we’ve got the track record to float the business. If we float we can raise new capital and start buying some of our smaller competitors. You know, we’ve both done quite well so far, and you’ve never had bad advice from me yet. Trust me. If we float, I know who we could buy and how much it might cost. We could be seriously rich in a year or two.’
I swivelled my chair to face Andy.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve got your attention.’ He smiled again, his eyes crinkling at the corners. But it was a hard smile.
‘Andy, I don’t know that I want to go on working twelve hours a day for the next ten years. I wouldn’t mind taking life a little easier.’
‘Then step up to become chairman. Let me do the work. Make me managing director. It’s virtually what my job is nowadays. I know ten customers for every one you ever meet. I’m not getting at you, but it’s true. Step up to chairman, go part-time, collect the dividends, and spend more time with your smart friends at the top of the hill.’ Andy laughed as he said this, to take the sting out of his words.
‘What’s wrong with my friends? You haven’t met them.’
‘I’m sure they’re absolute sweethearts. I’m sorry I mentioned them. I don’t know why I did, except that you seem to spend as much time up there as you used to down here. Let’s not get off the point. I would like you to agree that I should start laying down a proper plan for floating this business on the stock market.’