‘And what do you want, Catherine? Do you want a title and an estate?’ I asked her.
‘I think all that is a distant second to the question of whether one loves the person one is meant to marry. Don’t ask me any more questions, please, Wilberforce. Just listen for a moment.’
But she did not speak for a while. She was trying to tell me something, but I could see the words would not come. Then at last she did speak again.
‘Ed asked me to marry him after you left me the other day. That was why he had come round. It was nothing to do with worrying about me being snowbound. Almost as soon as you left he told me that his father is dying. Poor Simon Hartlepool. He’s got the most awful cocktail of illnesses. It’s the result of burning the candle at both ends for a lot of years. Ed didn’t exactly get down on his knees. He just stood there and said, ‘‘My pa is dying. I want us to get married before he goes. It would mean so much to him.’’
‘And what about you?’ I repeated. ‘Do you want to get married to Ed?’
Although I said these words very calmly, inside I was terrified of what she would say next. If she told me that to marry Ed was her dearest wish, of course that would be the end of it. The end of it? There hadn’t really been a beginning. All the same, my heart started to pound, as if a ghost stood in front of me. Catherine might have been a ghost, for that matter. She was so pale I wondered if she was about to faint. I took her arm and steered her to a nearby bench. We both sat down, and stared at the glassy river.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I thought my knees were going to give way.’
‘What did you tell Ed?’ I asked. I didn’t apologise for not minding my own business. I think she could hear the desperation in my voice.
‘I told him I would have to think about it for a little while. He got quite stroppy. Ed doesn’t like the thought that anyone - even me; especially me - could think twice about falling into his arms. And why should he? He’s got all the things a girl ought to want. Ed is very sweet, even if he can be a little self-centred at times. You like him, don’t you?’
When was Catherine ever going to answer my question? I muttered something between my teeth about how nice Ed was, and then she said, again, ‘The thing is, Wilberforce, I know there could have been something between you and me. But it’s impossible. My life has been mapped out for me. I would break the hearts of my parents, of old Simon Hartlepool, and especially I would hurt Ed, if I suddenly changed my mind. That’s not how one behaves. One’s not allowed to do the unexpected. Life isn’t allowed to be unexpected.’
I stared rigidly in front of me. I couldn’t speak.
‘Next time Ed asks me,’ she told me, ‘I’ll say yes. I would have said yes the first time, only . . . I had to speak to you first.’
She had finished telling me what she had needed to say, and we both sat together on the bench. A chill rose from the river and numbed me. Then, in the mist, I glimpsed something coming downriver, and at the same time heard the blast of a ship’s siren. We both rose to our feet. Slowly, like some great Jurassic beast, an enormous shape was coming towards us, through the wreaths and tatters of fog. Four tugs, two aft and two astern, towed the structure. The constant blasts from the foghorns suggested the mournful hooting of some vast predator, stalking through a primeval forest of cranes, dimly outlined against a pearly sky for one second and then again obscured as the mist rolled back in. As it approached, Catherine gripped my right arm as if the beast might attack us, but it was only an oil-production platform - a giant structure of decks, and helicopter pads, taller than ten houses, larger than any building, on four enormous columns, with drilling rigs reaching up through the decks and into the mist, moving slowly towards the mouth of the river.
‘My God,’ said Catherine.
I put my arm around her shoulders and she relaxed into me. We stood like that for a long time, watching the giant steel skeleton pass through the piers and out to sea, and the strangeness of the moment made us forget, for a time, all that had just been said.
That night I went up the hill to Caerlyon, to break the news to Francis. The light in his shop was not on and the door, when I tried the handle, was locked. I walked across the cobbled courtyard to the entrance to Francis’s flat. The door was unlocked, so I opened it. Inside, everything was neat, tidy and austere. There were few ornaments or pictures. On one table I saw one of the few pictures Francis did possess. It was a photograph of him standing with his arms around Ed and Catherine. I had taken that photograph, one day when we went grouse-shooting on Ed’s moor at Blubberwick.
I called out, ‘Francis?’
There was no reply. I went to the foot of the stairs and called again, and thought I heard a faint reply. I hurried up the stairs and knocked on a closed door that I supposed was Francis’s bedroom. I had never been upstairs in his flat before.
‘Come in, dear boy,’ said Francis’s voice. He sounded hoarse, and faint.
I opened the door and put my head around it. Francis was lying, fully clothed, on his bed. The spaniel Campbell was curled up beside him on the bedspread. His bedroom was as neat and impersonal as the rooms downstairs. All of Francis’s life was next door, in the undercroft.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘I’m just having a rest,’ said Francis. His skin looked yellow, his face tired to death. ‘I’ll be down in twenty minutes. Go and select a bottle of wine from the cellar. It’s the only food I want nowadays, so find something that won’t disappoint me, and bring it up to the shop and open it. I’ll join you there.’
‘The keys?’
‘On the kitchen table, as far as I remember.’
I went downstairs, found the keys and opened up the shop. There was no burglar alarm, and once you were in the shop, the door at the bottom of the stairs that went down to the undercroft was never locked. An enormous iron key stood in the lock of the undercroft door; it had rusted itself solid and was impossible to remove or turn. I thought to myself that the first thing I would do when all the wine became mine would be to put in a really first-class alarm system, CCTV, direct phone links to the police station and all the rest of it. A steel door and Chubb locks at the foot of the stairs wouldn’t be a bad idea either. What about the risk of fire? There would need to be a sprinkler system installed, and proper climate-control too.
Then I remembered I had come to tell Francis that I couldn’t, after all, take on Caerlyon and buy his wine. I did not quite know how best to tell him. There probably was no good way to do it. Poor Francis: he looked frailer this afternoon than I had ever seen him. I went down the stairs into the undercroft and flicked on the lights. There, in the half-gloom, was one of the great collections of wine, perhaps one of the greatest that had ever been assembled. I remember Eck telling me, not long after I had first met Francis, that over the last thirty years Francis had sold off the last of the Black patrimony: two thousand acres of farmland, and ten farmhouses. Eck supposed most of the proceeds had either gone to pay gambling debts, or else had been spent on acquiring more wine. Eck said that Francis used to be part of a very fast set that played cards at Aspinalls or the Clermont. Most of them were a good deal richer than he was, and he had got seriously out of his depth. Then his parents had sent him away to Austria to live with Heini Carinthia, in order to get him away from London. It was Heini who had got Francis interested in wine.
Now I, too, stood in the half-light, looking at the thousands of bottles, gleaming jewel-like from the racks, for Francis dusted his bottles all the time. The aisles of cases with their magic names spoke of warm hillsides in a far country: Latour-Martillac, Rauzan-Ségla, Léoville Las Cases, L’Eglise-Clinet. The enchantment was all around me. I heard, in my mind, Francis whispering the names and vintages of this fabulous treasure, in which the sunlight of fifty years was captured in the grapes from a thousand vineyards: a secret world of experience few could understand and fewer would ever enjoy, and which could only ever be possessed by one person: me.
I found a bottle I thought Francis might like and took it upstairs to open it. Francis was already in the shop, sitting in a chair.
‘You were quick,’ I said.
‘You were slow,’ he replied. ‘You’ve been down there at least half an hour, by my watch.’
‘Was I really?’ I said, in surprise.
‘Yes. The undercroft can steal your time in that way. What have you brought up?’ He took the bottle and looked at it and said, ‘Yes, I think I might have chosen that myself if I’d seen it. Decant it first, please.’
I decanted the wine and poured two glasses out.
‘No second thoughts?’ asked Francis. ‘Every day I expect to hear from you that you’ve changed your mind about Caerlyon. You know, I would forgive you in an instant if you did. I only hope you will forgive me for putting you in such an impossible position.’
I was silent. I had finally come to the banks of the Rubicon. I had to cross it now, or turn aside for ever. I had come here to tell Francis I couldn’t help him; I couldn’t make the commitment he was asking from me. And now he himself had offered me, in the kindest and most tactful way possible, the way out that I needed. Francis said nothing, but sipped his wine while I sat and thought about it all over again.
I thought about the store of wine below. How would I feel the day the sale was announced? I would creep to the back of the room and be the underbidder on one or two small parcels of wine, while the dealers and the collectors bid it all out of sight. For what: to repay a bank loan on a house nobody wanted?
‘Francis,’ I said at last, ‘I will admit I’ve been having second thoughts. It’s a big change to my life, and a huge responsibility. But I’m going to go through with it. Don’t ask me about it again. There’s no need. I’ve tried to walk away from what you have offered me. I can’t.’
Francis smiled, with a touch of sadness. ‘Wilberforce, I’d no right to ask you to do any of this, not even if you had been a member of my own family. But I’m so relieved to hear you say you will do it. It is such a responsibility to ask you to accept. Once it is all yours, you will find that it is a question of whether you own the wine, or the wine owns you. Now we shall open a second bottle, to celebrate. What were we drinking just now? A Pomerol? Go and bring up a bottle of Château La Fleur de Gay. There are some 1980s in the rack on the left-hand side, about halfway down, top row.’
This was the first time I had seen Francis drink more than a glass or two. We drank the Pomerol and, later, half a bottle of Château Gazin. I drove home very late, and very slowly.
A day or two later I received a postcard from Ed Simmonds. It said, ‘I’m having one or two people in for drinks at seven p.m. this Thursday night. I’d be very disappointed if you did not come.’ Of course I rang up and left a message saying that I would be there.
On Thursday evening after work I drove across country to Hartlepool Hall. It was about five miles from where Catherine lived, but altogether grander and larger, with an ornate lodge at the drive entrance and stone griffins holding emblazoned shields up on the top of each gate pillar. I had been there often before, but now I realised it was several weeks since Ed had invited me there, when once I used to be in and out of the place. The bulk of the hall was picked out against the night sky by a few lights here and there. I wondered which of them the old marquess’s bedroom was, and whether he still clung to a thread of life. I hadn’t heard to the contrary.
Although it was after seven, I saw to my surprise that, apart from Ed’s Land Cruiser, there were no other cars there yet. I parked and went up the steps. Horace, the butler, opened the hall door for me and showed me into the library where a tray with a couple of bottles and a few glasses showed it was going to be a very small party indeed. Ed was sitting on a fender beside the fire, reading the papers. The library was an enormous, gloomy room full of leather-bound volumes. Some of the shelves housed glass cages with stuffed owls and other creatures in them, to break up the monotony of the rows of books.
‘Oh, good evening, Wilberforce,’ said Ed. ‘So glad you could make it.’ He was wearing jeans and rather an old jumper with its elbows out: even for Ed, he was dressed somewhat informally for a drinks party.
‘Am I the first?’ I asked, as Ed poured me a glass of white wine.
‘Well, Eck and Annabel are looking in a bit later, so it’s just me for the moment, I’m afraid.’ Ed looked a bit awkward as he said this.
I wondered if he had asked them for supper, and was finding it hard to explain why I hadn’t been included. I lifted my glass and sipped it, and, not quite looking at Ed, I said, ‘Is Catherine coming?’
‘Well, no, she’s not, just yet. To tell the truth, Wilberforce, I’ve got you here under false pretences; not that it isn’t always a joy to see your cheerful face. I wanted a word with you.’ Ed stood up as he said this and looked me in the eye, and now there was no longer anything diffident about his manner.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Really,’ said Ed. He put his glass carefully down on a table. ‘In point of fact, it’s about Catherine I wanted to have that word.’
‘What about Catherine?’ I asked.
‘You know the two of us have been going out together for a very long time.’
‘Of course I do,’ I replied.
Ed’s voice became sharper, and a little louder: ‘You know we’re going to get married, I suppose.’
‘I didn’t. Congratulations. When’s the happy day?’
Ed shook his head in irritation. ‘No date has been fixed. But the general idea is, that Catherine and I are going to marry and I should think it will be sooner rather than later.’
I wondered if Ed had proposed to Catherine again since I had last seen her a day or two ago.
Then he said, ‘However, there’s a snag.’
‘A snag?’