I said nothing. I couldn’t think of anything to say. This was strange territory he was taking me into.
He went on, ‘Wilberforce, I’ll sell you my wine for one pound.’
‘A pound! You mean a million of them, don’t you?’ For a moment I wondered whether Francis’s illness was affecting his reason. Or perhaps he was on some very strong medication - that might be it.
‘There is a catch. Two of them, in fact,’ Francis said. ‘They depend on your being as well off as I think you are. The first catch is that to get the wine you have to buy Caerlyon itself. That means paying off a mortgage of nearly one million pounds. At the moment the rent from the Council doesn’t even cover the interest. The second is, I want you to open negotiations with the Council after my death, and buy them out of their lease. I know they’d take your hand off if you made them an offer. This place is a white elephant as far as they are concerned. There was a fashion amongst local authorities for taking on buildings like this a few years ago, but now they want to get free of them whenever they can. They hardly ever use it nowadays. Anyway, I want you to find a way to get them out and then live in the house when I am gone.’
I decided Francis wasn’t speaking under the influence of drugs. His voice was as clear, as sharp as ever. It was only that nothing he said made any sense. ‘Me? Live here?’ I asked.
‘You were adopted, weren’t you?’
‘I was brought up by foster-parents. I never knew my real mother or father.’
‘Then it’s not as if you are going to inherit a family home, is it?’
I shook my head.
‘Make this your home, then. Live here as if you had been my heir. Except that all you are inheriting is debt. But if you can pay off the debt, and prevent the house and its contents being sold, then this can become your home. Everyone needs to belong to somewhere, Wilberforce.’
I couldn’t think what to say to this proposition.
‘Then, even if no Blacks will ever live here again, I can die knowing that someone’s family will live here. Future generations of Wilberforces,’ said Francis, with his dry laugh, ‘might live and prosper here. I’d rather it was you than anyone else.’
I shook my head. This was too much to take in. I wondered how to let Francis know that all of this was impossible. I was well off, I suppose, with a good income, but there was no way in which I could raise more than a million pounds in the next six months. Even if I could, what would I do, rattling around in an enormous house like Caerlyon? My two-bedroom flat in Newcastle was too big for me. I’d never been inside the Council-occupied parts of Caerlyon, but Francis had told me it had twenty bedrooms, a drawing room, two dining rooms, a smoking room, and numerous other domestic rooms, offices and studies. The thought of living there on my own was preposterous. I would go mad.
What was I to say? How could I let Francis down without hastening his death? I had no doubt that my refusal would bring the end nearer. I had no doubt that I represented the last throw of the dice for Francis, a man confronted with the prospect of his own untimely death and forced to reckon up the wasted years of his life. I chose my words as carefully, with as much kindness as I could.
‘Francis, I’m afraid that’s just . . .’
He held up his hand. ‘Don’t say any more, Wilberforce. It was unreasonable of me to suggest it. I know it was the most presumptuous suggestion. I know I should never have made it, except that I also know how much you have come to care about my wine collection. I hope you will not think the worse of me for speaking as I have done.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said, ‘I’ll sell my company, raise the money, buy the house and keep the wine.’
Francis did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, his head bowed, ‘You don’t mean it.’
‘I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. It has just occurred to me that it is, after all, the best possible thing I could do. I can’t explain it all now, but I have never meant anything more certainly in my whole life. Of course I’ll do it.’
As I spoke, a huge weight was lifted from me that I had not realised I had been carrying. My business, which had once been my whole life, now stood in the way of my life. I didn’t enjoy it any more. It had become too big, too grown-up, too much about money, too demanding of every part of my life. I couldn’t even drive up the hill to see Francis without Andy making me feel guilty, as if I was spending time that belonged to him. And then there was the wine. As soon as Francis had talked about selling it, I knew I could never let that happen. It had taken a few minutes for the consequence of that truth to work its way into my conscious mind, but now I knew: I needed that wine; I couldn’t bear the idea that it would be dispersed, disappearing into other men’s collections, other men’s cellars, being sold in hotels and restaurants. I needed it, and I had to have it.
Then Francis poured us both the last of the wine from the decanter and raised his glass to me in a toast. He said, ‘Drink this, in remembrance of me.’
A few days later I met Ed and Catherine at another of the many supper or dinner parties that I went to that year. There were the usual people there, including Eck. We were having dinner with someone called Bilbo Mountwilliam, who lived in London but had a house in the county. Before we went into dinner, when she didn’t think anyone was watching her, Catherine turned to me and made a ridiculous little mime of someone eating a poppadum, and then put her finger to her lips. I almost burst out laughing. I knew that she meant I wasn’t to say anything about the two of us having had supper together in Al Diwan. That meant she had not told Ed about it. I smiled and nodded and then we were going through to the dining room and I found myself sitting next to Annabel Gazebee, who immediately engaged me in conversation. No one around the table seemed to have heard of Francis’s illness, so I said nothing about that either.
But while Annabel was talking to me, I wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying; I was thinking about the feeling that had been almost like an electric shock, when Catherine had turned to me and put her finger to her lips. It was the sense of a conspiracy: it was the sense of a connection. I shook my head to clear it of its treacherous thoughts and tried to concentrate on Annabel’s very long description of an opera she was organising for a Red Cross fund-raising event.
Later in the evening I saw Ed casually drape one arm over Catherine’s bare shoulder, without turning his head to look at her. The act of possession made me flinch. Then my neighbour on the other side asked me a question, and I realised she had spoken for a second time. I made an effort and turned to talk to her.
The following morning Catherine rang me in the office. I hadn’t even known she had the number. ‘We need to talk,’ she said, without any preamble.
‘Oh. Well, yes, of course. When?’
‘Are you free now?’
I smiled to myself at Catherine’s assumption that, like her other friends, I couldn’t possibly have anything more important to do than go and talk to her. Then it occurred to me that it would be very nice to leave the office for a couple of hours and spend them with Catherine, if that is what she wanted. I clicked open the diary in my computer and looked at what was in it for the afternoon.
‘Hold the line,’ I said to Catherine, ‘I’ll see what I can sort out.’ Then I buzzed Andy on an internal line.
‘What’s up, doc?’ he asked, as he picked up.
‘I need to free myself up this afternoon. Something’s come up. I’ve got a presentation to the people from Miller Ltd, who are coming in about three p.m. to look at the new project-management software package. Can you do that for me?’
‘Sure thing. Are you back in later? I want some time with you.’
I knew what that would be about. ‘Thanks. I’ll let you know if I’m not going to make it.’
I picked up the parked call again and said, ‘That’s fine, Catherine. Where do you want to meet?’
‘Come here, if you don’t mind.’
‘Here’ was Coalheugh, Catherine’s family home, about fifteen miles south-west of Caerlyon, deep in the Pennine dales. Her parents were not often there at this time of the year, spending most of the winter in Bermuda and the spring in their house in Antibes.
‘I’ll be with you in half an hour or so.’
I drove south, into the bleached winter landscape. A low sun shone on quiet fields mostly bare of stock, the cattle in their sheds for the winter, most of the sheep penned up for the start of lambing. All the colours were pale: the fields almost yellow, the woods on the sides of the valley brown except for the dark green of spruce here and there. A few patches of snow could be seen higher up on the hills. As I drove, I wondered what Catherine could possibly want to talk to me about. Then I wondered if Ed would be there. I turned off the road between the drive gates, along a drive that turned this way and that through parkland planted with great oaks and ash, with patches of snowdrops here and there, nodding in the breeze. After a while Catherine’s house came into a view: not as large as Caerlyon, but big enough - a large Victorian house built from dark-grey stone, of no great beauty, ornamented only by a crenellation that ran along its front.
Catherine must have been watching for my arrival because as I parked the car at the front of the house she came down the steps to greet me.
‘Thank you for coming, Wilberforce,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘There’s no one at home so I thought I’d better come and let you in myself. It’s the housekeeper’s day off.’
Ed Simmonds evidently was not there; otherwise he would have come out to meet me too.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been put to the trouble of opening your own front door.’
We went inside, into a large hall, and then into a drawing room. There was a fire burning in the hearth, but the room was very cold.
‘Come and stand by the fire,’ said Catherine. ‘Not many people can cope with the temperature in this house. My father has all the bills sent to him, and he checks the central-heating bills to the last penny. If he thinks I’ve had the heating on in the daytime, he gives me absolute hell. Of course if he and my mother were ever here at this time of the year, it would be on all the time.’
She went to a table where a bottle of wine and two glasses stood on a tray. ‘It’s too late for coffee, and too early for tea, so would you like a glass of wine?’
‘If that’s what you’re having.’
‘I think so. Oh, perhaps you’d like something to eat? Have you had any lunch?’
‘I don’t want anything, thank you.’
Catherine poured the two glasses of white wine and brought them across. ‘Not up to the standards you are used to at Caerlyon,’ she said.
‘Delicious,’ I said politely. It was not delicious, but it was icy cold, the same temperature as most of the room, and drinkable. A year ago I wouldn’t have known the difference. Now, thanks to Francis, I knew it very well.
As if reading my mind she said, ‘It’s Francis I wanted to speak to you about.’
I waited.
‘Did you know how ill he was? Did you know that he was dying?’
‘Yes. He told me a week ago.’
‘And you didn’t let me know? Or Ed?’ Catherine looked hurt as she said this.
‘I didn’t think it was my business to tell anyone. I thought it was up to Francis to decide who he was going to tell, and when he was going to tell them.’
Catherine considered this and then said, ‘You know, you’re right. I shouldn’t have expected you to call. Anyway, he told Ed about it the other night and Ed rang and told me this morning. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. That’s why I had to speak to you.’
I waited.
‘We must do something, Wilberforce,’ she said. She walked across to the window, and I followed her and we looked out across the park. Great banks of cloud were blowing across the sky, and the light was darkening. I wondered if it might snow.
I said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Francis is seeing one of the top oncologists in the North-East. He’s being looked after as well as he could be, but he’s been told there’s no chance of any remission. He didn’t go to the doctor until it was far too late.’
‘That is so typical of Francis. But I didn’t mean about that. He told Ed that he wasn’t expecting to live six months.’
‘He told me that, too.’
She said, still staring out of the window, ‘No, I meant about his wine. It will kill Francis before his due time, soon as that is, if he thinks everything will be sold up after he dies. It would be an absolute tragedy. We must do something about it.’
‘Like what?’ I asked. I felt uncomfortable at the direction the conversation was going in.
‘Well, I haven’t talked to anyone about it - not even Ed, although it was something he said that gave me the idea. He said: Somebody Francis likes should buy his wine. Ed says some of it is absolute rubbish, but the older wine he thinks is well worth having. But whether it’s rubbish or not, it’s a lot of wine.’
‘I don’t think I would call any of it rubbish,’ I said. ‘Francis is a very great collector. But Ed is right about there being a lot of wine.’
‘So then I thought: Why don’t a few of Francis’s friends form a syndicate to buy the wine? It’s too much for any one person anyway. And you’re a businessman. I thought you would be the best person to organise it and make something happen. If Ed organised it, we’d still be messing around trying to decide how to do it a year from now, and it would be far too late. If you got involved, I’m sure Ed would join in, and Eck, and Teddy, and half a dozen others. Then it wouldn’t be too much each, and Francis would know it would all go to good homes. I’m sure he’d die so much happier, if only we could do that for him.’
‘I’m sure he would,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s starting to snow.’ A few flakes were hurrying slantwise across the park. As we watched, snow started to fall in flurries.
‘Yes, it is. I hope you can get back all right. But what do you think of my idea?’