2008 - The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce Read online

  Colin shook his head and looked at his watch again. “There’s a nurse downstairs,” he told me. “She’s called Susan. I’ve arranged for her to stay here for a few days. She’ll look after you and I’ve told her to make sure you have no alcohol. At the moment a drink—any alcoholic drink—might well kill you. I’ve got a consultation to go to, and then I’m going back to my office to get the results of some tests we did on you when they brought you home. I’ll come back this evening to see how you’re getting on, and we’ll see what the tests can tell us. Meanwhile, stay in bed, and keep as warm as possible. Nurse Susan will come up shortly to make sure you are all right.”

  He gave me his kind and empty smile again, and then left the room. I heard him go down the stairs and then the front door was slammed briskly shut.

  I lay in my bed feeling awful. The sense of confusion was beginning to lift but everything seemed to be in a faint haze—not just in my mind: my vision had been affected and the room looked as if a fog had crept in through the windows, blurring and dimming the outlines of everything that I looked at. I shook my head to clear it, but it did not clear. After a while I found that I could move my gaze from the curious, locked position it had assumed, managed to look down at the bed I lay in, and noticed the sticking plaster on the back of my left hand where the drip had gone in. I could hear someone boiling a kettle downstairs. My hearing seemed to have sharpened commensurately with the blurring of my vision.

  I felt cold. I could feel the warmth coming from the radiators, yet it did not penetrate. I felt a deep chill, and shivered and pulled the bedclothes closer around me. How long had Colin said I had been asleep for? I tried to remember what I had been doing whenever it was I had fallen asleep. It was ridiculous to use a word like ‘coma’. Colin was always trying to intimidate me with medical claptrap of that sort, but it cut no ice with me. And another thing: referring to wine as ‘alcohol’ was so insensitive and crass I could only imagine he did it to annoy me.

  Thinking about wine reminded me again about the Petrus. How glorious that had been! I tried to remember where, and when, I had drunk it. All that I could recall was that Catherine had been there, and she had sung to me while I sipped the wonderful, heady wine.

  Thinking about sipping the wine made me look at the clock on the bedside table, and I saw it was eleven in the morning. By now on any normal day I would be at least halfway through my first bottle. That was another reason it was wrong to describe me as an alcoholic: an alcoholic wouldn’t care whether his wine came from a box or a bottle. He wouldn’t wait until he had breakfast before he drank; his first drink would be breakfast. He would not sip what he drank meditatively, sometimes making tasting notes in a little black leather book bought from Smythsons. That was what I did. My drinking was, I supposed, capable of being described as a form of mania, but no different from collecting butterflies, or birds’ eggs, or rare books. Perhaps it was a more expensive mania than some, but it was the same passion: to know, to possess, everything that could be known about, or obtained for, one’s collection.

  At that moment the person Colin had referred to as ‘Nurse Susan’ came into my bedroom carrying a cup of tea. I loathe tea. I could smell its hideous bouquet. I could smell, almost taste, the tannin, the unpleasing chalky notes of lactose from the milk she had splashed into it, the sickly undertones of sugar beet from the teaspoonfuls of white sugar she had shovelled into the cup. I felt nauseous.

  Nurse Susan was a brisk-looking middle-aged lady in a white uniform. She saw that I was awake and said, “Now then, how are we?” She spoke with the sharp accents of North-East England, which I remembered from a different era of my life.

  I muttered something.

  “What you need is a nice hot cup of sweet tea,” she told me firmly. Immediately, the nausea overwhelmed me and I started to retch. Before I could bring anything up, Nurse Susan had miraculously put the cup of tea down on the bedside table and produced from somewhere a plastic bowl and a damp towel. She had the bowl in position as I threw up into it, the beads of sweat starting from my forehead and running down my cheeks. Then she mopped my face with the towel and took the bowl away, returning in a second with a glass of water.

  “There now, petal, just drink this. I’ve put something in it to calm your stomach down.”

  I tried to take the glass but my hands were trembling too violently, so she held it to my lips and I managed to take a few sips. At first I thought I was going to be sick again, but I wasn’t, and after a while my feelings returned to something like normal.

  When I could speak I said, “Please take the tea away.”

  “It would do you a lot of good, petal, if you drank it.”

  “I can’t stand the smell of it.”

  Nurse Susan shook her head doubtfully, but she took the tea away.

  As she was about to leave the room I called, “Nurse?”

  She stopped and turned to see what I wanted.

  “In the kitchen, in the wine rack, you’ll find a bottle of Château Yon Figeac 1996. I hope it is the 1996. Could you open it and bring me a large glass of that, please?”

  She shook her head. “No alcohol. Doctor’s orders, Mr Wilberforce. It’s very naughty of you to even think of such a thing.” Then she left before I could confront her with the very many compelling arguments as to why Colin had no right to stop me drinking wine in my own flat, why it was my body and I could do as I wanted with it, why I had survived perfectly well on a regime of four or five (or maybe five or six) bottles of wine every day of my life for the last few years, and why she could take herself off and go and be more use elsewhere, if she was not prepared to let me take my preferred medicine in my preferred way.

  I heard her go downstairs and, a moment later, the sound of the television in the kitchen.

  §

  I love wine. I have not always loved it, but I have made up for the woeful ignorance of the first thirty years of my life by the passion and intensity of my relationship with wine ever since. I need to be more precise: I very much like white burgundy, I am fond of some red burgundies, I have flirted with some excellent and intriguing wines from Tuscany; but I adore Bordeaux. When I say wine, I am speaking of red Bordeaux—or claret, as some of us who drink it still call it. I am speaking of the wine that is made from the grape varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. I am speaking of vines planted on the light land of Medoc, on the clay levels of St Emilion and Pomerol, on the iron-rich soils of the terroir of Petrus. I am speaking of wines made from a triage- a selection of the best berries—of grapes, which are destemmed by a fouloir egrappoir and then pumped into the cuvee, where fermentation takes place over many anxious days and nights. Then the grape skins are added back in, and maceration takes place for a further ten or fourteen days, adding colour and body to the wine. Once this process is complete, the wine is removed from the vat to the barrel, where it may reside for a further period of two years or more, before it is finally bottled.

  All this is chemistry, technology and then, finally, wizardry. You and I might do it by the book and produce something undrinkable despite using the same equipment and the same methods as the great winemakers; but a Jacques Thienpoint or a Christian Moueix can add magic to the process and suddenly the base grape juice is transmuted into something wonderful, even celestial.

  Then, as I lay in bed thinking about wine, the familiar restlessness crept upon me once again. I felt a need to keep twitching my arms and legs, as if I had just taken too much exercise, or else not enough. My hands and feet felt chilled. After a while the whole of my body was covered in a light film of perspiration, as if I was weeping through the pores of my skin.

  When I experience those sensations, there is only one thing to do and that is have a glass of wine. My regime is to start with a bottle of youngish Bordeaux, between breakfast and lunch time. I find the slight tartness in a young claret leaves the palate clean and sharpened, as if one has been eating gooseberry fool. Thus I prepare myself for lunch
, when the more serious wine-tasting begins. I might very probably follow with a second-growth claret over lunch, followed by another fuller-bodied wine at tea time, and finishing off with some great classic premier cru vintage with dinner—though recently I have sometimes risked diluting the final explosion of taste with a few glasses of a white burgundy, as a nightcap.

  The question was: how was I to manage to drink a glass of wine with this hired nurse wandering around downstairs? I had no doubt she was probably equally well qualified in the martial arts as she was as a nurse, and she would simply stop me, by force if necessary.

  I lay considering the problem for a while, but after a few minutes the twitching, restless feeling in all my limbs became so overwhelming that I felt I had to get out of bed and move about. I swung my legs on to the bedside that and sat on the edge of the bed, collecting my wits. I felt unsteady at first, but managed to take a few steps in the direction of an armchair, where I stopped for a while, like a swimmer grasping a rock for a moment’s rest, before continuing my journey. Then I came to my dressing table, with my wallet and my keys upon it, and my money clip, which was empty. I appeared to have spent over six thousand pounds whenever it was I last went out. It must have been the Petrus. I picked up the wallet and went on to the window, which I opened. I threw my wallet out. Then I went, at a better speed, to the bedroom door and from there to the head of the stairs.

  “Nurse Susan!” I called. “Come quick!”

  The television in the kitchen was flicked off and she was immediately at the kitchen door, looking up the stairs at me. “You shouldn’t be out of your bed, flower,” she told me.

  “Never mind that.” I replied. “I was trying to open the window to let some fresh air in and I had my wallet in my hand and I’ve stupidly dropped it into the street below. Please go and get it before someone picks it up. It has quite a lot of money in it.” As a matter of fact, there was no money in the wallet and the credit cards were probably either out of date or over the limit.

  Nurse Susan hesitated, then said, “You stay there and I’ll go and look,” and walked quickly to the door, snicked up the catch and went out.

  The thought of the Yon Figeac gave me strength. In a second I was at the foot of the stairs, and in the next moment I had slammed, bolted and triple-locked the door. The downstairs windows were always locked. There was no other way into the house except a door to a little basement area, which I never used.

  I went to the wine rack, took the bottle of wine out, and opened it with a swift motion of my Screwpull corkscrew. I thought I would let it breathe for a few moments before I tried it. The doorbell rang, first briefly, and then more persistently. I ignored the sound and thought about the wine. It was a 1996, after all, and could be drunk now or left for as long as ten years. I had not tried this wine before. There were half a dozen bottles of it left in the undercroft. Francis must have opened the case and drunk some, before he left me the cellar. The doorbell had stopped ringing now and there was a tapping at the kitchen window.

  I went to the cupboard and found a large wine glass. As I turned to go back to the table I caught sight of Nurse Susan at the kitchen window. She was leaning over the iron railings that protected it and could just reach the window to tap on it lightly with my wallet. When she saw that I had seen her, she smiled and held up my wallet, and mouthed something at me. I couldn’t hear it but I think she was saying something like, “The door has locked itself. Could you let me in?” She didn’t look cross. She looked damp, and I realised it must have started to rain outside. Her expression was pleasant, but a trifle crafty, like Mr Wolf at the window of the Three Pigs’ house, asking to be let in.

  The door had locked itself. Oh, really. I smiled and waved a hand at her, and poured some of the wine into the glass. I put the wine glass down on the table and watched the purple liquid fill the glass. As I swirled the wine, it clung to the sides of the glass for a moment, promising me a voluptuous taste to follow. I sniffed the bouquet. It was—not Petrus, but still heaven. After a moment’s anticipation more, I reached for the glass, raised it and my eyes to the ceiling, and took a single delicate sip.

  For a while I continued to stare at the ceiling. I don’t know what it was about ceilings, but whenever I looked at them I found it hard to look away. My eyeballs seemed to roll up in my head and then stay there, unmoving. While I was doing this, the tapping at the windows went on for a while longer. Then, after a pause, the telephone started to ring. That went on for quite a long time too. Then there was silence. I managed after a while to detach my gaze from the kitchen ceiling, and at once noticed that Nurse Susan was no longer at the kitchen windows. It was raining quite heavily outside now, and I assumed she had become discouraged and had gone to fetch Colin. But Colin would be busy. His other patients paid a great deal more than I did for his time, no doubt, and he would not break their appointments except in the gravest emergency. I calculated that I had several hours yet before Colin returned to my flat. When he did, I would let him in and explain to him courteously the terms on which our association would continue.

  The other thing I noticed was that, despite having only taken a single first sip from my glass of wine, the glass was quite empty and indeed the bottle was more than half empty. I didn’t remember drinking the rest of the first glass, let alone the second glass I must have consumed. That was a shame. I poured a little more into my glass and put the empty bottle into the bin. I took a sip again and rolled the liquid around on my palate, to savour its complex flavours to the full.

  Then the glass was empty. I looked at my watch, then looked down at myself and realised that I was still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown at one in the afternoon. I swayed slightly and steadied myself by holding on to the back of the kitchen chair. After a while I made my way upstairs, showered, shaved and dressed in one of my two good suits, put on a cream shirt and a dark tie, then went downstairs to see about lunch.

  There wasn’t anything except wine in the fridge, but I found a jar of pate in the store cupboard, and an old box of Ritz crackers. There wasn’t much else, but that would do very well. I wondered if I could give Nurse Susan a shopping list when she came back. Then I went downstairs to the little basement room I used as a cellar. It was not, of course, my main cellar. My principal collection of wine was kept in the huge vaulted undercroft of Francis’s old house, Caerlyon, and protected by many bolts and alarms. Here in London I only kept a few bottles, perhaps a thousand, for instant drinking, cellared here for a year at most, and constantly restocked when I went on my frequent devotional visits to the main cellar.

  I went downstairs and sat and looked at the racks of wine, wondering what to have with the pate. Of course my first thought was to take a bottle of Gewiirztraminer. But then I thought, as I usually drank claret at lunch, it might be wiser not to change my regime too violently, from a medical point of view. In the end, after much debate with myself, and looking at labels, I selected a Château Palmer 1982.

  I looked at my watch: it was nearly three o’clock. I must have been down there for more than an hour. I was wasting time. Colin might be here in a couple of hours: barely time for me to finish my lunch-time wine and start to think about what I would drink before dinner.

  I went upstairs and opened the Palmer, decanted it, then poured myself a glass. It was still slightly chilled, but by the second sip was almost at room temperature and quite delicious.

  §

  Francis used to say to me, “The first sip is always the best,” and sometimes he would take no more than half a glass from a bottle before pouring the rest away, having extracted a knowledge of the wine from that brief encounter that was sufficient for his needs. My needs were different. I wanted to inhale the wine, to sip it, to drink it. I would have swum in it if I could have. I know that for Francis one of his greatest pleasures was simply to sit and look at it. His cellars and his shop are different now. The shop, of course, is closed. The till no longer rings its antique ring; customers no longer gather there in
the hope of a free tasting, or catching up on the gossip about the shooting and the fishing, or the racing; the candles that were always lit within it have long since guttered and gone out. That was where I first met Ed Simmonds, as he then was, who became my friend for a while. Now he is the Marquess of Hartlepool, and we no longer speak, but not because of his accession to the family title.

  That was where, in the days of my apprenticeship in wine, I sat beside Francis as his gaze wandered over the thousands upon thousands of bottles in the racks that lined the walls, the piles of wooden cases of wine that formed islands and towers around the enormous room. He would softly murmur a comment here about some château with a name out of Arthurian legend, and he would speak about the great vintages of his parents’ and his grandparents’ day. The reflected candlelight would glint on the bottles and occasionally he would get up and pull a bottle from a rack and say, “Look at that. Cocteau painted the original design for that label,” or “That château no longer exists. The Germans blew it up in the Second World War. This is probably one of the last bottles of this wine in existence and when you, or I, or some ignorant customer drinks it, its whole history will be snuffed out for ever, as if it had never existed.”

  His knowledge was more than encyclopaedic. It was like the knowledge that is acquired by a saint or hermit who has spent all of his life studying the gospels. He knew everything: every grower, every shipper, every vintage, every terroir, every clos. Even now, after those evenings of listening to him, after devotedly reading all the classic works on wine, even going at one point to evening classes, my knowledge is not to be compared to Francis’s. His knowledge of wine was like a great panorama of enormous, snow-capped mountains. My knowledge in comparison was like a molehill at the feet of the foothills of those mountains. When Francis died, the world little knew or cared what knowledge died with him. His wine lives on: the bottles sit in their racks, and the timeless vintages age more slowly than men do. Even so I know that now some of them are dying, leaving the long plateau of their mature years and descending slowly towards a vinegary graveyard. Some bottles are already dead, turned from rich dark red to a thin brown, acetic liquid. When Francis himself lay dying, he warned me that one day the wine would start to die as well.