Then Eck also stood up and said, ‘I must go too, Francis. I can’t afford to buy any wine today, but thank you for the free sample. I’ll look in again soon.’ Eck turned to me and said, ‘Glad to have met you, Wilberforce. Perhaps we’ll meet again here if you decide to make a return visit. I’m often hanging around about the place.’
He left and I stood up too and put the glass that had contained the Condrieu down on the desk. ‘Thank you,’ I said to Francis Black. ‘That was very kind of you.’
‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘I hope you enjoyed it.’
‘I’m not much of a wine drinker, as you can see,’ I said.
‘But you might become one,’ said Francis. ‘I think you appreciated the taste of that wine. I hope so, anyway. It’s one of life’s most civilised pleasures.’
On an impulse, wanting to appear civilised, I said, ‘I’d like to buy a bottle of wine to take home with me.’
‘Certainly,’ said Francis Black. ‘What a good idea. What did you have in mind?’
‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘Do you have any red wine?’
A ghost of a smile flitted across Francis Black’s sad face. He said, ‘I have red, pink, and white. But what I have most of is red wine.’
He went across to one of the racks along the wall of his shop, took a bottle down and looked at it for a moment, then brought it across to me. ‘This is a Château Gloria,’ he said. ‘It’s a good wine, not a great wine, but a good, well-made red Bordeaux. Take it and make sure you open it an hour before you drink it.’
‘Oh, thanks very much,’ I said. ‘What do I owe you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Francis Black. I began to object, but he held up his hand. ‘I won’t hear of your paying. It is a gift. Only one obligation comes with it.’
‘What?’ I asked, though I knew before he told me.
‘You must come back here soon and tell me exactly what you thought of it.’
On Saturday I drove to Hartlepool Hall. Most people have been there on open days and will have seen its vast lodge gates and the drive, nearly a mile long, that runs between a row of ancient limes, then avenues of Wellingtonia and finally a double row of great blue Atlantic cedars. The house itself is enormous, a great colonnaded front looking out across terraces of rhododendrons and, beyond, a lake. At the top of its four storeys the house is crowned with a stone balustrade, and above the centre of the house is a grey-stone dome. Behind the house are stables, tack rooms, disused brew houses, bakeries, and storehouses and, nowadays, an estate gift shop and tea room. Quarter of a mile from the house are three vast walled gardens, which have now been turned into a garden centre, where once glasshouses full of figs, peaches and nectarines grew.
As I drove past several signs saying ‘Private’ or ‘Not Open to the Public: Trade Vehicles and House Visitors Only’, I felt it very likely that someone would stop me and turn me back. Ed Simmonds would have forgotten about asking me and it would all be monumentally embarrassing. No one did stop me and I parked my car at the front door and got out. I wondered for a moment if my car would be towed away.
I went up the steps to the great double doors below the central pediment. After a moment I found a bell pull and tugged at it, hoping it would not come away in my hand. It did not. Nothing happened for a while; I turned and looked at the lake and saw a flock of geese taking off, wheeling overhead, then skimming back down to land on it. I heard a noise behind me and turned, and saw a very distinguished-looking older man with silver hair in a dark suit standing holding the door open for me. I decided it must be Ed’s father and put out my hand and said, ‘Hello, I’m Wilberforce. I’ve come to see Ed.’
The man ignored my outstretched hand - not rudely but simply as if it was not there - and inclined himself in a slight bow. ‘My name is Horace, sir. If you would like to follow me, Lord Edward is expecting you in his office.’
I realised, feeling stupid, that Horace must be the butler. I followed him into an enormous, gloomy hall. It had dark panelled wood, with obscure portraits of men, mostly in military costume of earlier centuries, half-hidden in the shadow on the walls. Horace led me through this and then onwards through a maze of corridors, up stairs and down them again until we came to a long corridor. At the last of a series of doors we stopped; Horace opened it and gestured to me go in.
Inside was a brightly lit office with two desks, on one of which sat a computer. Ed Simmonds was sitting in front of it, staring blankly at the screen. When he saw me he jumped to his feet and came across and said, ‘It’s so good of you to come. Thank you, Horace. I’ll ring through when I think we’re ready for lunch. Wilberforce, this bloody machine has got worse. I think it’s sickening for something.’
I sat down at the desk and started to check the settings on the computer. It took me about ten minutes to fix the problem and another twenty minutes to set up an email account. Ed sat opposite me watching me in awe, as if I was a witch doctor. When I had finished, I showed him which buttons to press and how to use his email.
Ed Simmonds was ecstatic. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘You really are a genius. I’ve had three people look at that machine and none of them could do a thing with it.’
‘What do you need it for?’ I asked.
‘Well, no modern estate office is without a computer, so I thought I ought to have one in here, and our accountants and our estate manager all insist on sending everything by email these days.’
‘Do you spend a lot of time in here?’ I asked.
‘Not if I can help it,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve got a secretary who does most of that for me, but it’s a bit shaming if I can’t even switch on the machine, or open an email without help. Now, thanks to you, I will be able to impress them all. Come and have some lunch.’
As we walked back through the house I began to appreciate its enormous scale. I glimpsed staircases soaring towards the upper regions of the house. We crossed two halls tiled in black-and-white marble and filled with pale marble and alabaster statuary. We passed rooms labelled ‘Billiard Room’, ‘Smoking Room’, ‘Lord Simon’s Study’ and ‘Butler’s Pantry’. At last we came back to the hall where we had started out. Ed strode across the hall and opened a door.
Inside was a vast dining room, with a table about fifty feet long. The walls were hung with large pictures, this time mostly Venetian scenes, or improbably robust-looking women clutching suckling children to their breasts. At the far end of the room was an alcove, where a small round table was laid for three. Next to the table was a sideboard with a decanter filled with a golden liquid, and two glasses stood next to it. A third glass was being clutched by Eck, who was sipping from it while he stared out of the window.
When he heard us, he turned and said, ‘You took so long I thought I would help myself to some of your sherry.’
‘You did the right thing, Eck,’ said Ed. ‘Wilberforce, can I offer you a glass?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t really drink.’
Lunch was served from a trolley, which was wheeled in by Horace: soup and then lamb chops. Ed and Eck drank wine and I drank water. Afterwards we went through to a small sitting room, where Horace brought us coffee. The conversation was mostly carried on between Ed and Eck, but I never felt left out. They treated me like an old friend, not as if I had appeared in their lives barely five minutes ago. I felt an odd sensation as I sat there, which I tried but failed at first to define. Then I realised what it was: I was enjoying myself.
The door of the sitting room opened, and an elderly man shuffled in wearing a threadbare crimson-velvet smoking jacket and a velvet tasselled cap. On his feet he wore scuffed slippers covered in a tweed check.
Ed sprang to his feet. ‘Hello, Pa,’ he said. ‘You know Eck, but you haven’t met Wilberforce.’
‘Who?’ asked the old gentleman, chewing at the corner of a ragged moustache while he gazed at me.
‘Wilberforce,’ Ed repeated. ‘He’s lunching with us.’
‘Never lunch myself,’ said Ed’s father. He turned to me and said, ‘Well done. Well done. Splendid effort. A marvellous innings. Showed those Aussies how to play cricket.’ Having delivered that encomium he left the room again without further words.
‘He must think that you’re someone else,’ explained Ed to me. ‘Don’t mind him. He gets ideas into his head.’
A little later Ed announced that he had promised to go and call on a girl called Catherine. ‘Don’t hurry away,’ he said. ‘Horace will see you out when you want to go. Wilberforce, thank you so much for coming. Will you come again soon? Will you write a telephone number on the pad by this phone? You really mustn’t disappear out of our lives now we’ve all met. It would be so nice if you could come over again. I’ll be in touch.’ He was gone.
‘Who’s Catherine?’ I asked Eck.
‘His squeeze. She’s very nice. You’ll like her,’ said Eck. He went over to a table where a humidor sat, and helped himself to a large cigar. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Want one?’
I thought Eck seemed remarkably at home in Ed’s house. ‘No, I don’t.’
Eck saw me looking at him as he trimmed the cigar. ‘This house is the next best thing to Liberty Hall. Ed expects his friends to make free with all the good things he has. I try never to let him down.’
‘What does Ed do all day?’ I asked, thinking of the office and the computer. ‘Does he manage the whole estate on his own?’
‘No,’ said Eck. ‘He’s got people to do all that for him. No, what Ed does when he’s not going racing, or hunting, or the occasional day’s shooting, is read the papers. When he can be bothered.’
I thought this sounded rather severe. Then I realised that to Eck and Ed leisure was a natural state of being and employment was not. I said to Eck, out of curiosity to see if my theory was right, ‘What do you do, Eck?’
‘I can tell you what I did do. I was a soldier for ten years or so; a Grenadier. I come from a family of soldiers. My father was a colonel; my uncle is General Chetwode-Talbot. You’ve probably never heard of him, but there it is - if you were ever in the army you would know the name. Soldiering is all that our lot know how to do. After about ten years I decided I wanted to make a bit of money, so I switched to the private sector. I worked for quite a while for Risk Management. Have you heard of them?’
I admitted that I had not.
‘What we did was manage kidnaps, for Lloyd’s of London. The idea is that if you are working in a dodgy part of the world, your company can insure you against ransom demands with an underwriter at Lloyd’s. There are a few of them that make a market in that kind of cover. Our job was, if the worst happened, to get involved in negotiating the ransom and to make sure the hostage came out alive if we could get him out at a sensible price.’
‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘I had no idea all that went on.’
‘That, and more,’ said Eck, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke as he sat in his armchair. I understood all of a sudden that, although Eck had cast himself in the role of the joker, behind his teasing and his charm, he was enormously tough.
‘So why did you stop?’ I asked.
‘I was working on a slow case in Medellín in Colombia. A chap from BP had been lifted by FARC. They are a bunch of very professional narco-terrorists, who finance themselves and their revolution through kidnapping and drug deals. But something didn’t ring true on this deal. I was getting nowhere. I had no idea if the chap from BP was still alive. Then I came to the unpleasant conclusion that he was not and, worse, that whoever I was talking to - and I’m still not sure whether it was FARC or some other group - had in mind to use me as a bargaining chip instead. I started to feel I was being followed. Then I was sure I was, by some very unpleasant people. So I took off.’
‘You left?’
‘I took a flight to Bogotá and rang my office on the satellite phone. They advised me to get out of the country and I did. When I got back I found my aunt had died while I was in country and had left my cousin Harriet and me a decent legacy. So I quit. I couldn’t see the point in going on, fun as it had been. One day or another it was going to go wrong, and I decided it would be a clever idea to leave before it did.’
I was fascinated; I had never met anyone like Eck before. He stubbed his cigar out and we went out into the hall. Horace appeared from somewhere and opened the front door for us and we walked down the steps to where Eck’s car was parked next to mine.
‘Well, good to meet you again,’ said Eck, putting out his hand. I shook it and then he said, ‘Are you going to get in touch with Ed?’
‘I might. I don’t know. What do you think?’ I spoke as if I had known Eck for years. He had that effect on people, at any rate upon me.
‘He’s a very old friend of mine. If he said he wants you to get in touch, then he definitely meant it. Ed always means what he says. He is the most delightful man on the planet so long as he is getting his own way. When he doesn’t, it can be quite bruising for people around him. He likes to get what he wants.’
This didn’t seem much of a problem to me. Why shouldn’t Ed Simmonds get what he wanted? It was all the same to me.
Ed Simmonds didn’t get in touch and I didn’t feel able to ring him. After all, why should he? He’d given me lunch and I had fixed his computer. The trade was done. Why on earth should he bother to want to see me again? It shouldn’t have mattered to me. I was, as always, very busy at work and I had no time to contemplate a social life of any sort. All the same, there had been something pleasant to me in the brief glimpse I had seen of Ed’s world.
I did go back up the hill to see Francis Black again. I felt I owed it to him. After all, he had given me a bottle of very good wine. I had opened the Château Gloria the night he had given it to me. I drank a glass with the Chinese takeaway I had bought, as the shopping mall had been shut by the time I went back down into the valley. It had not been a happy mixture of tastes. Then I had had a second glass the next night, with a pizza. That had been more of a success, although the wine tasted murky. I wondered if you were meant to keep the cork in the bottle. The third night I thought there was something definitely wrong with the wine, and poured the rest of it into the sink.