‘Don’t pretend not to understand me, Wilberforce. You’ve been seeing Catherine behind my back and you’ve muddled her up. She’s still very young, and she hasn’t known many men apart from me, and she thinks she likes you just because you’re someone new.’
‘I’m not exactly new, Ed,’ I objected; ‘it’s been well over a year since we all first met.’
Ed gave me a hard smile that was almost contemptuous. I had seen it before once or twice, when someone or something made him forget to be the engaging, unselfconscious young man he normally appeared to be. ‘Believe me, Wilberforce, a year or two is new - very new. You’ve wandered into our lives, and we’ve befriended you. Now I find Francis is leaving you all his wine, and you want to take Catherine away from me, and presumably set up house with her at Caerlyon. It’s a joke.’
I felt myself going red. This sneer, this implication I had insinuated myself into their lives, was very distasteful to me. Ed could scarcely have found a more hurtful thing to say to me.
‘I’m sorry if Catherine thinks she likes me more than you think she ought to. I don’t know what else to say about it. If that’s true, all I can say is that these things happen.’
‘I want,’ said Ed, almost grinding the words out between his teeth, ‘I want you to stop seeing her.’
‘I’m not seeing her - not in any regular way.’
‘She says you’ve been with her three times in the last fortnight. What do you call that?’
‘I don’t call it anything. I go about my life, and Catherine goes about hers. If we meet, it’s rather up to her, wouldn’t you say?’
I don’t know if Ed was contemplating physical violence. There certainly was a look in his eye, and I might have stepped back, only there was a sofa behind me and I would have ended up sitting down rather abruptly. Just then, Horace came in and announced the arrival of Mr Chetwode-Talbot and Miss Gazebee, and then withdrew again.
Eck came in to the room, beaming all over his red face. ‘Ed!’ he said. ‘Wilberforce! The delightful Annabel will be here in a moment, only she’s wandered off somewhere with Horace.’
‘Eck,’ said Ed. ‘There’s wine, or there’s anything else.’
‘Whisky and soda, please, Ed.’
Ed went to another table where a decanter of whisky and a siphon stood, and poured a whisky and splashed some soda into it. While he was doing this Eck looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. The tension in the room had diminished as soon as Eck had come in, but it didn’t take a psychic to know that something was wrong.
Ed came back with a large tumbler and handed it to Eck. Just then Annabel came in. She saw me, and came and kissed me briefly on the cheek, then went and embraced Ed with rather more enthusiasm.
More drink was supplied. I wondered how soon I could leave without causing comment.
‘How’s your pa?’ Eck asked Ed.
‘Not making much sense.’
‘Poor old boy,’ said Annabel. ‘It must be ghastly for him. He was always such an active man.’
‘That’s what all the girls used to say,’ said Eck; ‘not such a bad epitaph, really.’
Ed looked amused. ‘You wouldn’t say that, Eck, if my mother had still been around.’
‘I wouldn’t have said anything at all,’ replied Eck. ‘She used to terrify me. Remember that party you had when you were eighteen, when she caught me passage-creeping?’
There was laughter. I felt excluded. They were sharing jokes that I could not understand, remembering days when I had been sitting at home alone and trying to teach myself how to write computer programs, trying to find a future for myself.
I put down my glass. ‘Ed, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to push along.’
‘But we’ve only just come,’ said Annabel. ‘That’s terribly rude.’
‘Aren’t you staying for supper?’ asked Eck. ‘And where’s Catherine?’ I think Eck was being mischievous. He enjoyed stirring the pot.
‘Catherine will be along a little later,’ said Ed. ‘Wilberforce has already turned down my supper invitation, haven’t you, Wilberforce?’
‘Ed, you’re always more than kind, but I really have to go.’ Eck smiled at me and raised his glass in my direction: ‘Wilberforce, you work too hard. Money, money, money.’
I said nothing. I smiled and said, ‘Ed, thank you for the drink. Good to catch up. I’ll see you soon, I expect.’
‘You’ll see yourself out,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve no idea where Horace is. He’s probably heating up supper - its cook’s night off.’
He turned and said something to Eck and Annabel as I left, and there was an explosion of laughter as I went out of the library. Horace was in the hall, after all. He opened the door for me and said, ‘Good night, Mr Wilberforce. We will see you again here soon, I expect.’
I was always a favourite with Horace, for some reason.
Four
I opened a second bottle, this time of Château Smith-Lafite. We were both sitting on top of boxes of wine in the undercroft. Francis was not drinking much wine. Since the evening when we had celebrated my affirmation that I would look after Caerlyon and its contents after his death, he had become even more frugal than ever. He sipped half a glass of this, half a glass of that. But he encouraged me to sample as many different wines as I could manage, and as I drank them he told me what he knew about them: which wine critic had said what, what score the wines had been given, how the wines were made, which years were good and which less good; sometimes he would describe the grower’s own knowledge of wine, his house and his family, the colour of the earth in the vineyard, the way it looked on a sunny day.
If I ever showed signs of not wanting to finish a bottle I had started to drink - and at first I very often felt that two-thirds of a bottle was far more than I could manage - Francis would simply say, ‘Don’t waste it. Think of the love that went into making it.’
After a while it was less of a problem for me; I developed a tolerance for drinking the wine, even a certain fondness.
‘You know,’ said Francis, ‘I don’t know how much time I’ve got left now. Perhaps I have another month or two. I fear that this will be one of the last times we come down to the undercroft together. The stairs are becoming too much for me.’
I poured us both a glass of wine. Francis now walked everywhere with a stick, and he had persuaded someone to carry his bed down from the upstairs level of the flat to the dining room, where a makeshift bedroom had been made up. Fortunately there was a small bathroom on the ground floor.
‘Don’t say that,’ I told him.
‘My dear boy, one has to face facts. The comfort is, that you are learning so much about wine in these hours you very kindly give up to me that we are coming to a point where there is not much more that I can tell you.’
‘I am sure I will never know half of what you know,’ I said.
Francis did not reply. He looked around the great vaulted space, with its rows and columns of bottled treasure, and said, ‘You will find that, no matter how much wine you take from here, it never seems to make any difference. I have collected so much, and sold so little.’
‘It sounds the ideal cellar,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I wonder whether it hasn’t been a waste of my life, collecting wine. After all, it is only fermented grape juice.’ Francis shook his head and smiled at his own absurdity. ‘I think there came a point, about fifteen years ago, when I had to choose between selling a farm or selling the wine, in order to make ends meet. I simply couldn’t think of any other choice available to me. I was never brought up to any trade. No one ever told me I might have to learn a living. My father and my grandfather certainly never had to. I hadn’t the least idea about money when I inherited. It never occurred to me to think about the stuff. My accountant came to see me twice a year, and we drank a bottle of sherry between us. Afterwards I never could remember a single word he had said to me. Then, one day, the bank wouldn’t let me have any more money.’ He raised his glass of wine and drank a little from it.
‘A little young, still, wouldn’t you say?’
I nodded, and asked, ‘So what did you do?’
‘Well, I knew I had to do something. Before I came back to live here, I lived in London for a few years. I got in with what my mother called ‘‘the wrong crowd’’. It seemed like fun at the time, but I was in over my head and ran up some pretty serious gambling debts. My parents had to sell a couple of farmhouses. My mother had to sell some family paintings. It was hard luck on her, but then she had been very unkind to me, so perhaps justice was done, after all.’ Francis stopped speaking for a moment, thinking of some memory at an infinite distance. He shook his head as if to clear it and said, ‘Anyway, that gave me the idea. I sold another one of our farms, cleared my overdraft with room to spare, and started collecting more wine. After that, it was obvious: whenever my cash at the bank ran down, which it did surprisingly often, I sold another farm.’
I enjoyed these conversations with Francis. They were unlike any conversations I had ever had with anyone else. Now I was spending as much time with him as I could manage. He would die soon; I wanted to know what he knew. It was more than that: Francis was not talking to Eck, or Ed, or even Catherine, whom I knew he adored. He was talking to me.
Francis was emptying the vessel of his mind into mine, day by day. ‘I learned an important lesson from that,’ continued Francis.
‘Which was . . . ?’
‘Never run out of farms. Unfortunately, I did. Then one spring night, as I remember, you walked through the door and asked me whether I sold red wine.’ Francis laughed at the recollection and I felt myself blushing. I heard a scratching noise somewhere not far away and said, ‘I think we’ve locked Campbell out. I’ll go and let him in.’
‘Do,’ said Francis. ‘Poor little dog.’
I went upstairs and opened the shop door; Campbell insinuated himself inside and then pattered down the stairs behind me, to go and sit at his master’s feet.
‘I didn’t realise it straight away,’ said Francis, ‘but chance brought me the one person I have ever met who feels about this place, and what is in it, the way I do.’
I felt the undercroft humming with power as he spoke, as if unknown frequencies of radio waves were emanating from its tens of thousands of bottles. But it was only the wine singing in my veins.
‘What will you do,’ asked Francis, ‘when you sell the business?’
I had shared with Francis all my plans. I had yet to tell Andy, but I could not put off doing that any later than the next morning. The American buyers wanted to see numbers; they wanted information. The person who was going to have to give it to them was Andy. I was not looking forward to the conversation. I sighed.
‘Having second thoughts?’ asked Francis. He reached out and briefly put his hand on my arm. It was the first tender gesture I had ever seen him make. His hand looked very thin.
‘No, just thinking about all the things I have to get done before I actually do manage to sell the company.’
‘I’m sure you’ll deal with it all,’ said Francis. ‘After all, how much more difficult could it be than selling a farm? But you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t see that far ahead.’
‘You should settle down and get married,’ said Francis. ‘Don’t make the mistake I made. I once thought I had found the girl I loved. Unfortunately my mother did not approve. That might sound ridiculous in these days, but it wasn’t so odd thirty or so years ago. My mother was a very strong character. Formidable was the word most people used to describe her.’
I tried to imagine. Eck had once told me something about Francis’s mother. He had made her sound cruel, almost monstrous.
‘I’ve never stopped regretting the fact that I was so weak I allowed her to take away the one thing in my life that might have been really good,’ Francis went on. ‘Don’t you let any of your chances slip through your fingers the way I did.’ His voice was very sad.
‘There’s no one I know who would marry me,’ I said.
‘You are a clever man, Wilberforce,’ said Francis, with more energy, ‘and you have become, as I told you, very knowledgeable about wine. But in other ways you are remarkably slow on the uptake.’
I looked at him but did not say anything.
‘I told you before you would be married before the end of this year, and I said that you already knew whom you would marry.’
‘I didn’t understand you then, and I don’t really understand now.’
Francis put down his wine glass so firmly on the box beside him that the wine splashed out of the glass. Campbell raised a paw and looked up, in case action was required from him.
‘Don’t be so obtuse! Look what you’ve made me do! Catherine, of course. Who else could I possibly have meant?’
‘Catherine’s going to marry Ed Simmonds.’
‘She will, of course, if you sit there like a lemon and let it happen. I must say I thought that if I dropped enough hints you might get up off your arse and do something about it.’ Francis was now quite animated, even angry.
‘But . . .’
‘But nothing. Pour me some more wine.’
I poured him another glass to replace what he had spilled, and he said, ‘Catherine and Ed is an arranged marriage. Robin Plender and old Simon Hartlepool fixed it up years ago between them, over a glass of port, and Helen Plender supported it. Ed always does what he’s told, and for Ed, one girl is very much as good as another provided she is pretty, which Catherine is, and amusing, which Catherine is. Ed will marry anyone who fits that bill, and who will more or less do as she’s told.’
‘And why should Catherine not fall in with all of this?’
‘Because being married to Ed Simmonds is not what she wants to do. Ed will treat her just as his father treated his mother: he kept her tied to Hartlepool Hall to bring up children, whilst he had one mistress in London and another in Paris, and divided the rest of his time between going racing and shooting grouse. That’s the way that family has always conducted itself, and Catherine knows that as well as I do. It will be all sweetness and light for six months, and then Ed will say, ‘‘I’ve just got to run up to London to see the Trustees,’’ or some such nonsense, and that will be the beginning of the end. Except, Catherine being Catherine, she would never seek a divorce.’