Francis half-sat up in bed and gripped my arm. His grip was weak, but his hand felt hot through my shirt sleeve. ‘You must do it soon. If the money isn’t there, the executors will have to sell the wine to pay off the Caerlyon mortgage. I won’t last much longer, Wilberforce.’ He had raised his voice. He sounded desperate, quite unlike the old, languid Francis I remembered. I didn’t like this new version of him: corpse-like, feverish, waiting for a transfusion of my money.
The nurse put her head around the door. ‘Now, we’re not getting all excited, are we, Mr Black?’ she said.
Francis gave her a ghastly smile and sank back on the pillow.
The nurse looked at me, and said, ‘Two more minutes. You mustn’t tire him out.’
When she had gone down the stairs, Francis asked, ‘Have you seen Catherine?’
‘No.’
‘It won’t be long now. Simon Hartlepool is in the same condition as me. I don’t believe he’ll live much longer, and Ed wanted to get married while his father was still alive. I don’t think he can now. I think he will have to wait until it’s all over, after all.’
There was a silence, and Francis’s gaze wandered away from me. I thought he had forgotten I was there, or was slipping back into a morphine dream.
Then he turned to look at me again, and said, ‘We won’t speak many more times, Wilberforce. I am losing the battle. I can’t manage without the morphine and it’s making me very confused. But there’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know about you.’
I said, ‘You can ask anything you want, Francis. There’s nothing much to know.’
‘What’s your first name?’
I hesitated. He had asked me the one thing I really did not want to answer.
‘I can’t die not knowing your given name, Wilberforce,’ Francis told me.
‘It’s Frankie,’ I told him.
Francis’s face slowly spread into a rictus, the lips drawn back from his teeth in a death’s-head smile. ‘But what were you christened?’ he asked.
‘Francis,’ I said. Then the corpse on the bed began to shake with laughter, until tears ran down its cheeks. I couldn’t bear to watch. I heard him heaving with laughter and between gasps saying, ‘Frankie - Francis - Francis Wilberforce. Oh God, that’s priceless.’
I gave a surreptitious glance at my watch. I wanted to be out of here. I hadn’t wanted to tell Francis that we shared the same name. It was another invisible bond between us, and maybe one too many. I had a meeting at the solicitor’s in half an hour to discuss the sale and purchase agreement. It was an excuse to get going. I stood up.
Francis stopped laughing, and put his hand on my arm for the second and last time. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Stay with me a while longer.’
I muttered something about having to go to a meeting and said I’d look in again very soon. I went next door into the kitchen. The nurse was reading the Daily Mail. She looked up as I came in. From the dining room where Francis lay on his bed I could hear that he had started laughing again. I could catch the words between the whoops: ‘Frankie! Francis! Oh, my God.’
‘You seem to have cheered him up, anyway, dear,’ said the nurse. I nodded and made for the door but she called me back. ‘Have you a mobile phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give me the number, and keep it on. It won’t be long now.’
I nodded and went out to my car. How thoughtless of Francis to want to detain me. He should have known that nothing now was more important than concluding the sale of my company.
Five
When you’re in trouble, go and see your mother.
I was too busy for the next few weeks to go and see Francis. I suppose that’s a lie: there must have been half an hour here or there. Somehow I never got round to it. I was too absorbed in the sale of the company. There were meetings, and then more meetings. There were histrionics from the solicitors on both sides. The purchaser walked out of the room once and said he would be on the next plane back to Houston, and half an hour later was back in the room joking and laughing as if nothing had happened. Nothing had happened: someone changed some words in a clause, and the party moved on. When I did surface for a few hours, it was to feel utterly wretched. If this deal fell through, I wouldn’t get the wine; worse than that, if anything could be worse, I thought about Catherine marrying Ed. I started taking The Times and the Daily Telegraph in case the wedding was announced in either newspaper. I saw nothing about it. I didn’t talk to any of my Caerlyon friends. I rang none of them; none of them rang me.
Except that one day, Teddy Shildon did ring, as I was leaving the flat to go to the office. ‘Wilberforce,’ he said. ‘Sorry to call you so early.’
‘Not at all, Teddy,’ I said. ‘How’s Francis? I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.’ It was more like six.
‘He’s sinking fast, poor old boy. That’s what I was ringing about.’
I waited for an explanation.
‘You know, of course, that I’m one of Francis’s executors?’
‘Yes, he told me.’
‘And of course I know about your amazingly generous offer to pay off the mortgage at Caerlyon, and take over Francis’s wine. I suppose I’ve got that right, haven’t I? It’s not something Francis has dreamed up on his own?’
‘No, that’s exactly right.’
There was a pause, and then Teddy Shildon said, ‘Slightly indelicate question, this, but I have to ask it. As soon as Francis dies - and it won’t be long - the bank will want to call in their mortgage. That will mean the house and its contents will have to be sold at auction. So you see, it’s really rather important . . .’ He did not finish the sentence, but allowed me to complete it by saying. ‘. . . that the money’s there.’
‘That’s about it.’
I said, ‘Teddy, one can never be sure about these things, but as far as I can tell at the moment, the money will be there. We’re expecting to complete the sale this week.’
‘Jolly good. That’s what I was hoping to hear. Well done. Keep me posted.’
‘I will.’
I was about to hang up when Teddy added, ‘Poor old Simon Hartlepool is in a bad way too. I think there will be two big funerals in the same week. One last thing I wanted to mention to you, Wilberforce: as I’m an executor of Francis’s estate, I’m responsible for organising some sort of knees-up after the funeral. I thought I would open a few bottles of wine in the undercroft, clear a space and have drinks down there. The sort of send-off Francis would have appreciated, don’t you think?’
I did not think that Francis would have liked people poking around in his wine cellar and drinking his wine indiscriminately. Unfortunately, it was not yet mine, so there was nothing I could do except agree with the suggestion. I said I thought that would be fine, and hung up, angry with myself for not having the courage to tell him it would be a waste of Francis’s wine.
We did complete the sale of Wilberforce Software Solutions that week. After all the tedium and tension of the preceding weeks and months, it was a remarkable anticlimax. We all sat in a huge boardroom at the solicitor’s offices, while piles of documents were moved from one place to another, as if in an enormous game of patience. Occasionally Andy and I were asked to sign some of them. We sat in silence, sipping cups of coffee and then glasses of water, as the day moved on. Now and again he would cross the room and join the Americans in confidential conversation. They had asked him to stay on after the sale, but as managing director. I was to be a ‘consultant’ for a year, but I had a feeling Andy would not be able to find any office space for me. People spoke in hushed tones, occasionally making phone calls to banks to check on the departure of large sums of money from one account, and on their arrival in others. At four o’clock it was done. There was brief applause from the lawyers and the man from Bayleaf came and shook my hand and said how pleased he was. Someone else took a photograph while he did so.
Then Andy came across and said briefly, ‘Well, Wilberforce, you can go and buy your wine now. I’m taking Chuck to the airport. I’ll see you in the morning for a handover session. Be in my office at nine o’clock, please.’
Then they left and, after a few valedictory words with my solicitor, I wandered out into the street.
For the first time in fifteen years I had nothing to do. At last I was free to do whatever I wanted. I felt as if I stood on the edge of a giant void. I was suddenly terrified by the emptiness in front of me. I might live another fifty years, and I had nothing whatsoever to do in all of them. I had no other life, apart from what might await me at Caerlyon. I did not like football or cricket; I did not make model airplanes or collect stamps. I had no friends outside work apart from my Caerlyon friends. Since I had quarrelled with Andy, I thought I might have no friends inside work either. In any case, I felt sure I would not spend many more days at the office. What on earth was I going to do with myself?
I went to see my foster-mother.
She still lived in the house I had given her and my foster-father five years ago. It was a smart new bungalow in an acre of garden, with a patio and a pond. My foster-father had died a year ago. I don’t think he ever felt comfortable living in a house that I had paid for, but he had no choice: my mother would probably have left him if he had refused the gift. I took the Metro subway out from the centre of town and then walked a few hundred yards to the house. I had no concern that Mary would be out. She never went out. She had never, so far as I knew, progressed beyond a nodding acquaintance with her neighbours. She was painfully shy. She sat in the lounge, watching television or reading historical novels. Once a week she went out to a book-club lunch, where, I imagine, she sat silent, too intimidated by the other women ever to open her mouth. Years of marriage to my foster-father, who had never allowed anyone to underestimate his intelligence and criticised every other word she spoke, had left her with little self-confidence. His sharp tongue had its effect on me, too.
When I rang the doorbell it chimed, and in a moment Mary opened the door, looking out with timid suspicion. Then her face brightened.
‘Oh, it’s you! Frankie!’
‘Mary.’
We hugged, and then she said with reproach, ‘It’s been six months since you’ve been. You ungrateful boy.’ She led me into the lounge and made me sit down on the dreadful tangerine-coloured sofa I’d bought them, and then went into the kitchen to make us some tea. I didn’t want any tea. I’d been drinking tea, coffee and water all day until I had nearly drowned in liquid. But I knew I had to have a cup of tea with her, so I let her get on with it.
‘I’m so sorry, Mary,’ I told her. ‘I know. But I’ve been incredibly busy.’
‘You’re always incredibly busy, Frankie. You only live a mile away. Is it so hard to come over?’
‘No, I really have been busy. I’ve been selling the company. In fact, I sold it today.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She seemed bemused by the information. ‘You’ve sold it? Why did you do that, dear?’
I found, when it came to it, that I couldn’t explain. It had been hard explaining about Francis’s wine to Andy; it would be impossible to explain it to my mother.
‘Oh, I’ve been doing it for fifteen years now. It seemed like time for a change.’
‘Well, I expect you know best what’s good for you, Frankie. You always were a boy who knew what was best for himself, even though your poor father might not always have agreed.’
I drank some tea and watched her. She was trying to think what to say to me next. Mary was a mother who knew all the right responses a mother should have. She knew about them from reading about other mothers, in books. How much of it she felt I never knew. When she kissed me hello or goodbye, or patted my arm, there was something curiously two-dimensional about the gesture - a learned, rather than an instinctive, quality. Perhaps some foster-mothers were like that; perhaps they never really connected with their fostered children. I think, though, that it was just how Mary was.
Now she was running out of things to say to me, after only ten minutes together. For the last fifteen years I had come two or three times a year and told her how hard I was working and she had said, ‘Well, it’s good to keep busy,’ and now we needed a new set of conversational furniture and neither of us could think what it might be.
Then she asked, ‘Time for a change to what, dear?’
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. I only sold the company an hour ago. I need to get my bearings. I don’t want to rush into anything.’
‘And that man who works with you - what’s he going to do?’ she asked.
‘Andy? He’s going to stay on and run the company. I’m going to leave.’
‘Whatever will you do with yourself? I wonder.’ Mary thought about this for a while, and I sipped my tea. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t come. Instinct, not reason, had brought me here. Reason should have told me that there was nothing Mary could say that would help me; so what was the point of my visit?
Then her face brightened and she said, ‘Perhaps now you’ll have the time to look about you and find a nice girl. You’re getting on. You don’t want to be left on the shelf.’
‘I’m only thirty-five,’ I reminded her.
‘You’re still a good-looking boy, Frankie. You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a nice girl.’
I wondered what Mary’s idea of ‘a nice girl’ was: someone else who would sit quietly in front of the television; or curl up on the sofa with a Catherine Cookson novel?
‘I have found a nice girl,’ I said.
‘Oh, good,’ said Mary. ‘Do tell me about her.’
‘Well, she’s about to get married to another friend of mine.’
Mary looked blank. ‘Then you haven’t found her. Someone else has found her,’ she corrected me.
‘That’s the problem.’
Mary put her cup of tea down and said, ‘Frankie, if she’s going to get married to someone else, then it is dreadfully wrong of you even to think about her, except to wish her happiness.’