The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce (8 page)

I went into the kitchen and looked in the fridge for something for breakfast. There was the same in the fridge that there had been yesterday and the day before: nothing. Of course, one had to shop if one wanted to find things in the fridge. Somehow I had not got around to shopping for food, even though the shop on the corner was open at all sorts of hours. I thought I would go there later, when I got up. I did not really want to go out in the street, though, in case I met someone I didn’t want to meet.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was half past ten. I must have slept for more than twelve hours. I yawned. The kitchen was rather depressing to be in. The plates never seemed to get washed and the whole place smelled rather stale. I cleared some dirty wine glasses from the table and took them as far as the sink. I took two empty bottles and pushed them into the bottle bin, which was full. Someone ought to empty that, I thought. There seemed little point in having breakfast this late. I decided I would open a bottle of wine and take a glass up to bed, and get up later. I opened a bottle of red wine from the Murrumbridge Irrigation Area of New South Wales that I had found in the basement, and took it upstairs with a glass. I climbed back into bed, poured the wine and put the bottle on my bedside table. I stared at the label for a moment and wondered why Francis, a lover of Bordeaux, had allowed this stranger into his cellar. I decided it must have been part of a parcel of wines he had picked up at auction somewhere.

As I sipped the wine, which was young, I considered my affairs. It was clear I was going to have to find some money. I supposed I could sell the flat, which must be worth quite a lot; but then where would I live? I had taken out some fairly large loans against the security of the flat some time last year, in order to pay off an overdraft at the bank. Still, it was worth looking into, when I got the time. Then there was Catherine’s jewellery, which her family kept asking me to return. I supposed I could sell that. It was my property really, and she didn’t need it. That might at least pay off a few bills while I sorted myself out.

Sorting myself out was a silent conversation I had with myself every now and then. Sometimes it progressed as far as writing a number of proposed actions down on a sheet of paper, for example:

 
There were several such sheets of paper in and on my desk at present, for the simple reason that the waste-paper basket was so full there was no point trying to throw them away.

I supposed the wine at Caerlyon was worth quite a lot - at least a million pounds. It was a comfort to me that it was still there, that it would always be there. I wondered whom I should leave it to. It sounded from what Colin was saying as if I ought to make another will. I had made one when Catherine and I married, and in it I had left everything for life to her, and then afterwards to the children that we never had. It was probably a good idea to have another look at that. To whom would I leave the wine?

The thought was discomforting. There was no one. No one except Francis understood wine and cared for it as I did. He was dead, and Colin was trying to convince me that I was dying. Trying? He was making a good job of it.

What was it that he had said I had? Werner’s philosophy? That wasn’t it, but it was like it. Whatever the condition was called, it didn’t sound very appealing: falling into an endless sleep, haunted by dreams of a life I had never had, my own memories pushed into far corners of my mind from where they could never escape, eternal prisoners in nightmare oubliettes.

I found I was perspiring heavily, and my pyjamas and the sheets were damp. I climbed out of bed and went and looked at myself in the mirror. I was tall and once had black hair and a pale face and blue eyes. My hair was now streaked with grey and plastered to the top of my head, shining with sweat. My face was no longer pale but dead white, decorated with a few patches of rough red skin, and covered in a sheen of perspiration. Catherine had once told me, in the first effusions of our love, that she found me physically attractive. I do not remember that I looked different from anyone else. No one except my foster-mother had ever commented on my physical appearance until Catherine did. My foster-mother had told me I had been a beautiful baby, but she had spoken as if all those charms were in the past.

If I had been attractive either as a baby or as the man whom Catherine married, I was very far from being so now. My skin was the colour of old newspaper. There were dark circles under my eyes and their whites were no longer the brilliant white they had once been, but a yellowish-grey colour, the colour of milk gone bad. I looked nearer to seventy than thirty-seven.

Not too bad, considering everything. I decided to get up and have a shower.

 
In my sitting room, on the mantelpiece, are two photographs. One is in colour and is of Francis Black, standing with one arm around Catherine and the other around Ed Simmonds. Ed, a few years younger than he is now, is wearing tweed plus fours and an old khaki jersey. His face is almost split in two in an urchin grin that makes him look much younger than thirty, which is about the age he was when I took that photograph. His unruly, tightly curled blond hair is sticking out all over the place, mostly upwards. He looks more like the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist than the future Marquess of Hartlepool, heir to twenty thousand acres and Hartlepool Hall. He is enjoying himself enormously, and it shows. In the middle stands Francis, exactly like Francis always looks: silvery grey hair still streaked with black brushed straight back from his high forehead; an aquiline nose jutting from his face, deep laughter lines on either side. Francis is not smiling, though. I don’t remember him ever smiling much, but his thin mouth has that familiar, ironic expression that he adopted for the company of younger friends such as Ed and me. Francis is wearing a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper over an open-necked, check shirt, and baggy tweed trousers. His complexion is tanned - surprising for someone who spent a lot of his life in a wine cellar. The adoring Campbell, his spaniel, is at his master’s feet, looking upwards with a rolling eye.

Then there is Catherine: at least a head shorter than the other two, she stands slightly at an angle to the others, with Francis’s arm draped loosely over her shoulder. She is laughing, I think at some joke of Francis’s, as I was taking the picture. Her thick blonde hair is wind-blown. Her usually pale face has colour in it, from the open air and the exercise of walking over heather. Her grey eyes are looking at me, the person taking the photograph. She is looking at me and, I believe, thinking about me perhaps for the first time as someone distinct and separate from most of Ed’s circle of friends. I always think she has the elegant, slightly drawn and fragile look of a film actress from the 1940s or 50s: a younger Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

Behind the three figures are rolling hills purple with heather, and above the heather the sky in the photograph is so white from a thin, bright overcast that the three people in the foreground have an etched, almost three-dimensional clarity, as if they might step out of the picture frame at any moment.

The other photograph is in black and white, taken of Catherine dolled up for her coming-out dance. I think it was on an inside page of Country Life. She looks very young: she was probably only eighteen when it was taken. In this photograph her hair is carefully swept back, falling to her shoulders. She must have worn it a lot longer in those days. Her face is poised, reflective, the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. It is a studio photograph and it has an incongruous quality for me, as if she has been caught trying on her mother’s ball gown, her mother’s jewellery, and her mother’s make-up.

I remember the day I took the photograph on the moor. Ed Simmonds had asked Francis and me to come and shoot grouse with him, on his moor at Blubberwick. Francis hadn’t shot, but had brought his spaniel, Campbell, to pick up behind the line. Catherine had been with Ed then, and she had spent most of the day standing with him. I didn’t know anything about shooting grouse, and I only shot for one drive, with a minder standing with me. When the brown birds rocketed over the horizon and whizzed through the line of butts I was too surprised to shoot, at first. At last one unlucky bird tumbled in the air and sped past me, to bounce in the heather behind the butt. Others followed. It was incredibly exciting to be out in the heather, shooting grouse. I remember that at lunch Catherine came and sat on the grass next to me, as we made a picnic by a small burn. For the first time, I became very conscious of Catherine’s nearness to me, her perfume, and the sound of her voice. That was when I first started to think about Catherine as somebody other than Ed’s friend.

She gave me the portrait photo just before we married. ‘This was taken when I still had my looks,’ she told me. She was smiling as she said it, her eyes dancing, inviting a compliment. She looked a thousand times more beautiful than in the photograph. I told her so.

‘You really do love me, don’t you?’ she said breathlessly, for I had folded her into a tight embrace.

‘Of course I do.’

‘It’s hard to tell, because you never talk much.’

I let go of her and said, ‘I’ve just been all work and no play for so many years, I’ve forgotten how.’

Catherine picked the photograph up from the table where I had put it down and studied it. ‘It’s funny,’ she said: ‘when that was taken all I was thinking about was parties, and you were already sitting behind a computer writing programs. You’ve never really had any fun in your life at all, have you?’

‘No, but that’s about to change.’

That was when we were still undecided about where to live after we married, before we made the decision to come and live in London.

 
I decided I would get dressed, go out and buy something to eat. It seemed a long time since I had eaten, and I felt a little dizzy from lack of food. The wine I had drunk lingered on my palate and in my brain, and when I stepped into the street I nearly fell over, misjudging the distance from my doorstep to the pavement. I walked down to Curzon Street, went into the shop on the corner and started to look along the shelves for something to eat that wouldn’t be too much trouble.

I was just reaching for a box of oatcakes when an advertisement caught my eye, a white poster on the wall on which was printed, in heavy black type: ‘TNMWWTTW’. It occurred to me that it was not the first time I had seen those letters. They were familiar to me, in some way, but I could not recall why. Perhaps I had seen the advertisement before. It must be one of those ridiculous teaser campaigns, designed to mystify, intended to make you think, What’s all that about, then? so that when the name of the product or service being advertised was finally explained, it would be such a relief you would immediately go and buy some out of sheer gratitude.

‘TNMWWTTW’. It grated on me that I could not make the connection. The letters stood for something, but what? It looked like a mnemonic. Then I thought it was a mnemonic, and one that I knew, if I could only call it to the front of my mind.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked somebody nearby. But I could not take my gaze from the poster. I gestured in its direction.

I was beginning to feel distinctly odd, but I managed to ask, ‘What is that advertisement for?’

‘What advertisement is that, sir?’

I waved my hand at the poster. I could not take my gaze from it. The letters grew larger, blurred and swam, turning into huge dots dancing across my vision. I felt sick and faint, as if all the blood had left my head in a rush. The room darkened and moved about. I heard a shout and then knew nothing more about it.

When I awoke, I was lying on something hard and a voice was saying, ‘Can you remember who you are?’

It was a good question: I could not. Then a name came into my head and I whispered, ‘Is it Wilberforce?’

A sponge was applied to my face, dabbing at a crust of what felt like dried blood, which appeared to have grown on it.

‘Yes, Mr Wilberforce, that’s right.’

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in the A & E department at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. You had a fall.’

I didn’t want to be in a hospital. I wanted to be at home, being looked after by my own doctor. The trouble was, I couldn’t remember who he was: his name was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t get the word out, I couldn’t remember exactly what it was - as if I wanted to say ‘Pimlico’ but could only think of Pershore.

‘Is there anyone we ought to contact to tell them you’re here?’ asked the voice, coming into view for the first time. It was a young Indian doctor.

‘Francis Black,’ I told him.

There was someone else in the room, sitting behind me, gently sponging my face. Now she spoke. ‘Can you remember his phone number, dear?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Then I remembered Francis had died of cancer three years ago. ‘I’m sorry, he’s dead, anyway.’

‘We found you at an address in Mayfair. Can you remember how you got there? Can you remember where you live?’

‘I live in Bogotá.’

Why in God’s name had I said that?

The Indian doctor said, ‘In Bogotá? In Colombia? You’re a long way from home then.’

The two voices conferred above my head, and one of them said something about ‘concussion’ and ‘retrograde amnesia’.

‘Don’t worry just now, dear,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘You’re still a bit muzzy from your fall, aren’t you? We’ll take you to a nice quiet room on your own and you can get some sleep, and then we might do some tests and try to find out what went wrong with you.’

I was wheeled out of the theatre on the gurney and along a corridor. Gentle hands lifted me into a bed, and then I fell asleep.