The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (21 page)

For a moment I said nothing. The truth was, Andy was right in one thing: we had to do something - either put the business up for sale or float it. It was exactly the wrong size: too big to be a niche business, too small to compete with the big players.

‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ I said.

Andy shook his head. ‘Do,’ he said, and left my office. We barely spoke again for the rest of the day. I hadn’t yet told Andy about the letter I had in my desk at home from an investment bank based in the City, asking me if I’d consider selling the business to an unnamed trade buyer.

 
That evening I drove up the hill again to Caerlyon. The lane was quiet and empty; no lights were on in the big house; the Gateshead Community Outreach Centre showed no more signs of activity than it ever did. The light was on in the yard above the entrance to Francis’s shop, and I parked my car in the yard and went inside. The lights were on in the shop, but Francis was not in sight.

‘Anybody at home?’ I called.

From some distance, I heard Francis’s reply: ‘Wilberforce, if that’s you, come on downstairs to the undercroft. If it isn’t you, bugger off.’

I went downstairs. Francis had a clipboard with a sheaf of dog-eared bits of paper attached to it. His spectacles were on the end of his nose and he was checking the contents of a rack of wine and marking it off from a list on the clipboard. Campbell was sitting near him on top of a case of wine, licking a paw.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked. I had never known Francis do anything like a stock-take before. He relied on his extraordinary memory, which could lead him unerringly to a far corner of the undercroft, where a case of Château Pessac-Léognan would be buried under half a dozen cases of other wines. He looked up, his face lighting with a smile as he saw me. As I looked at his thin figure standing beneath the vaulted arches of the undercroft, the recesses of the stone ceiling hidden in darkness, the whole vast, gloomy, mysterious space illuminated only by weak yellow bulbs of light in metal sconces at intervals along the walls, I thought there was something spectral about him. It was as if he were condemned for ever to wander between the pillars of wooden cases, along the racks, into the strange side chapels protected by locked grilles, where the rarest wines were.

‘I’m doing a valuation,’ he said. ‘I’ve been at it for days, on and off. But I’m getting there.’

‘Why are you doing a valuation?’ I asked. A cold sense of dread filled me as I spoke. Surely Francis was not going to sell his wine. Yet such a thing was very likely: Francis was hard up, he had no other visible means of support except for his wine merchant’s business, and I could not imagine he made much money from that. Almost no one ever visited the shop. Very few people even knew it existed. He never advertised; he never sent around catalogues or even lists of the wines he had for sale. A few loyal friends of means, such as Ed Simmonds or Teddy Shildon, would buy a couple of dozen cases of good wine from him a year. Lately I had begun to do the same. But I knew from personal experience that Francis hated selling the wine. He liked to drink it in moderation, he enjoyed talking about it if he could find anyone to listen to him, but above all he liked to look at it. He liked to walk among the columns of wine cases, recalling past vintages, forgotten fragrances of some noble claret whose name and year he saw stencilled on the side of a case, or picking up a bottle from one of the racks, reading from the label a story few other men would have read, for Francis had told me that in his time he had visited most of the vineyards from which he bought wine: he might recall the firm handshake of this grower, the cellars of another.

All this brought in Francis less money than I imagined even he spent. He lived frugally in a two-bedroom flat at the back of his former family home, Caerlyon House. He never entertained except with a bottle or two of wine in his shop, or the occasional kitchen supper in the flat for a handful of friends; he never appeared to buy new clothes, although he was always well turned out in his dress. I think he received a peppercorn rent for the rest of Caerlyon House, but he once told me he had virtually given it away to the Council on a ninety-nine-year lease, in return for them taking on its upkeep. If he had any other income, I did not know where it came from.

‘Come upstairs. I want to talk to you.’ We left the undercroft and went upstairs to the shop. Francis went to the door and flipped over the ‘Open’ sign, to read ‘Closed’, then locked the door. ‘There,’ he said, as if he had just prevented, in the nick of time, a stream of customers from entering the shop. ‘That should give us peace and quiet.’

On his old wooden desk was a decanter of claret and glasses. He filled two and handed me one. I sipped the wine.

‘Well?’ asked Francis.

‘Is it a Margaux?’

‘Very good, Wilberforce. Very good indeed. Right first time. You wouldn’t care to say which one, would you?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not ready yet,’ I told him.

‘You’re not far off. It’s a Château Lascombes. Not everyone would have guessed that. You don’t give yourself enough credit. You really are showing signs of knowing about wine. Now, tell me what the year is.’

That was easier. I knew Francis would have opened a classic vintage, and would not have tested me on some obscure year when the wine was thin and uninteresting. I sipped the wine again. Its taste was smoky and flowery at the same time.

‘Nineteen eighty-two?’ I asked.

‘In the bull again, Wilberforce. Well done. It is a 1982, one of the last really great wines they ever made at Lascombes in the 1980s.’ Then he sipped his glass at last, and motioned to me to sit down in one of the chairs next to his desk. He pulled up another for himself and sat down opposite me.

‘Why were you doing a valuation?’ I asked again.

Francis put his glass down on the desk and steepled his fingers together and looked at me. ‘Because I want to know how much it’s worth.’

‘You’re not thinking of selling up, are you?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking of doing,’ said Francis. His gaze was steady on me, watching my reaction.

It couldn’t have been hard to read. I was horrified. ‘But . . . Francis . . . you can’t . . . you mustn’t. What would you do? Where would you live?’

Francis shook his head, as if these questions were unimportant. Then he asked, ‘How’s your business going, Wilberforce?’

‘Very well,’ I said. Francis had asked me a few times in the past months about my business. I don’t know that he understood what it was I did for a living. He was fascinated by the idea that wealth could be created from the abstractions of software programs.

‘You know, the last member of my family to make any real money was my great-grandfather,’ said Francis. ‘He did it by employing a lot of imported Welshmen to dig coal out of the ground. We had a colliery a few miles to the south of here - a deep seam. The only people who were prepared to go that deep were from the Welsh valleys. My great-grandfather had the energy and the imagination to make it all happen, and he made a good deal of money. When he had made his pile, in his later years, he bought his own steam yacht and spent a considerable amount of time chugging around the Isle of Wight and sitting on deck smoking cigars.’

I smiled. Francis was a fund of stories of the glories of a bygone age. I could tell that the image of his grandfather, sitting on the deck of his yacht with a rug over his knees and smoking a Hoyo, was more real to him than the idea of me making money from software. I don’t think Francis ever quite grasped what ‘software’ was.

‘You’re a clever man, Wilberforce,’ said Francis. ‘You create wealth too, but as far as I can tell, it all comes out of your own head, like a musician or a playwright.’

‘It isn’t just me,’ I said. ‘We have a lot of very talented people working for us, these days.’

‘I dare say. I suppose they are there because of you. You make money, Wilberforce, and I have always spent money. That’s the difference between us.’

‘You’ve built up all this collection of wine,’ I said. ‘That counts for a lot.’

Francis stood up, so I stood up too, and followed him as he went down the steps again into the undercroft. He switched on the lights and walked down an avenue of wooden cases into a space in the centre, a point from which, like Oxford Circus, other avenues of cases radiated away into the darkness. He stood in the centre and said, ‘Yes, I have my wine, but what will I do with it? I have no children.’ He spread his arms wide to show the extent of his collection, standing tall and thin at the centre of his kingdom. The gloom of the cellar was hardly dispelled by the weak light bulbs, and in the uncertain light the number of cases looked vast. One could never tell how far they really extended.

‘But you must feel pleased with what you have achieved,’ I said. I thought Francis’s collection might be the greatest in Europe - or in the world. At least, that is what I felt whenever I went down there.

Francis dropped his arms to his sides and reminded me, ‘I inherited quite a lot of it, you know.’ He had told me this before. ‘I’m afraid I have not been very good at hanging on to the things that were left me. But I’ve managed to hang on to this.’

‘Well, it’s more interesting to look at, and a lot more fun, than a load of computer programs,’ I said.

Francis laughed briefly, and then we went back up the stairs again to the shop. He sat down in his chair again and looked at me. He said, ‘You ought to work less hard, settle down and marry someone, and start to lead a proper life.’

‘Francis! Who on earth would marry me?’

He ignored my question and said, ‘I should have married. I almost did, at one point, but . . . it didn’t work out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t even got that far.’

Francis looked at me. The strong arch of his eyebrows gave his face a quizzical look at times, and now I thought he was quizzing me. ‘I think you’ll be married before the year is out.’

‘I’d like to know who to, if that’s the case.’

There was a silence and then Francis said, ‘You do know. Of course you know. But you asked me about my selling up the wine a moment ago, if you remember. I am selling it.’

I couldn’t help myself. I put my head in my hands and said, ‘Oh God.’

‘I’m selling it to you.’

I looked up. He was smiling, but not as if he was teasing me.

‘You’re what?’

‘Wilberforce, I’ve got cancer. If I live for six months it will be longer than the doctors expect at the moment.’

I stared at him, appalled. I had noticed that Francis wasn’t well, for the last few weeks, but I’d never dreamed for a moment that it was something serious. I think I said something, about how sorry I was - was there anything I could do? but he brushed aside my words with a wave of the hand.

‘Let’s concentrate on the matter in hand. As you know, I’ve no living relations that I know of. That has never troubled me much, but lately I have been giving it some thought. I find, after all, that it is a trouble to me that, when I die, my life’s work, my life’s passion, will be sold at auction by ignorant men to other ignorant men, that this collection of wine which my grandfather started and which my father built upon and which I inherited and added to, should be dispersed on my death. This collection of wine has become my life. I can’t bear the thought it should go under the hammer. I’ve been to auctions like that myself, as a buyer - dealers looking to make a quick turn, or rich businessmen wanting trophy wines.’

I shuddered at the thought. I supposed Francis thought of me as a rich businessman. At least I had begun to appreciate what he gave me to drink. ‘I couldn’t bear that, Francis,’ I said. ‘I’d sooner buy it all myself. But I haven’t got that kind of money.’

‘Haven’t you? You don’t know what the price is yet, do you?’

Francis poured us both another glass of wine, then sat back in his chair again. ‘There’s another thing: Blacks have lived in this house for over four hundred years. That’s quite a long time, even in this part of the world. I used to tell myself all that meant nothing to me. But when I inherited the house, it was in bad shape and needed a lot of money spending on it. Half the estate had been sold. I think we were down to two thousand acres when I inherited, and ten or a dozen farmhouses. We used to own all of that valley where you work, you know. We managed to sell most of it to the Church Commissioners in the 1930s. They took it off my father’s hands as a favour.’

I looked at him in astonishment. The building in which I worked on its own had a freehold value of several million pounds. Unfortunately I was only a tenant. Francis’s family had given away land that had a present value of tens of millions.

‘The Black family has not managed its affairs well. We became rather too keen on collecting wine and, in my father’s case, drinking it. My father and my grandfather were both very fond of drinking wine. They spent a fortune on building up this cellar; and drinking the stuff. When I inherited Caerlyon it already had an enormous mortgage, which I haven’t exactly been able to reduce. I’ve never drunk that much. Unfortunately I had what they call a misspent youth. I used to gamble quite heavily when I lived in London.’ Francis sighed. ‘When they hand out sainthoods, I won’t be anywhere near the front of the queue. It’s a little late to put things right.’ He rubbed his forehead with his hand. His voice sounded flat.

‘There has been a Black living in this house, or in the houses that were here before, since 1540. In a few months’ time, that will all come to an end.’

He looked up at me again, and I saw now the infinite sadness that had always lived behind his eyes, but which I had never recognised before. I had taken Francis at face value: I had read the urbane, reserved, ironic expression and never looked behind it. Now, his face thinner than before and with dark circles under his eyes, there was no mistaking how he really felt.

‘I think I would die easier if I had done something to preserve what’s left to me. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’