The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce by Paul Torday Read Free Book Online

business I had built up. We had been going to take the company public, on the AIM market, but a trade buyer had nipped in at the last minute, offering a reasonable price. I ended up with a small fortune when the sale went through. The company that bought us gave my job as managing director to Andy, my finance director, and I resigned. I wasn’t enjoying it any more, in any case. I didn’t think I needed the salary, and I felt sure Andy did not want me to stay on. He had not wanted me to sell the company in the first place. So I left.
    Some of the money went on buying Caerlyon, Francis’s family home, from his executors, including the vast store of wine in the undercroft beneath it. I spent a lot more buying the flat in Half Moon Street in London, for Catherine and me to live in.
    In the last few years I seemed to have run through a huge amount of money, passing interesting wine-tasting evenings like the one I had just spent somewhere or other with a bottle or two of Château Pétrus. If you go out twice a week, and spend several thousand pounds on dinner and wine, it adds up after a while. Apart from the spending of my walking-around money of five or ten thousand pounds a week, other expenses were mounting up: Colin’s medical bills, for example. In the last two years, when Colin and one or two other members of my rapidly shrinking circle of acquaintances had pestered me, I had found myself splashing out on visits to health farms and drying-out clinics such as the Hermitage. I’d given that up now as a waste of time and money - time and money that could be better spent on Bordeaux.
    All of this came to mind the following morning, when I was sitting at my desk in my sitting room, sipping a glass of Château Carbonnieux and reading a letter from my bank manager. It had been on the kitchen table for some days now, but I had learned, after having had the telephone and the electricity cut off a couple of times, that eventually one does have to get around to reading one’s post, especially anything in a brown envelope or from a bank.
    The letter enquired after my health, and then went on to remark: ‘Your current overdraft of £50,327.09 is above the limit of £30,000 that was previously agreed. Unfortunately this means the Bank has had to charge an unauthorised-overdraft interest rate of 7 per cent. Please can you advise us at the earliest possible opportunity of when you will be able to remit funds into the account to reduce borrowings to below the agreed limit?’ The letter closed with the friendliest possible good wishes from the odious Mr Rawle, my Personal Banking Relationship Manager. Nevertheless, the tone of menace was unmistakable.
    I found a felt-tipped pen and wrote on the letter: ‘Please increase overdraft limit to one hundred thousand pounds. Thanks, Wilberforce.’ Then I found both an envelope and a stamp in my desk and addressed the letter back to Mr Rawle.
    I had forgotten I had started to go into overdraft. I was so used to having my account in credit, and just dipping into it for my weekly walking-around money, that it had seemed impossible I might ever be in debt. Now that griping anxiety came back to me that I remembered from the early days of my business, when we’d had to drive around to collect cheques from our customers and then go straight to the bank to cash them, just to keep on the right side of insolvency.
    I opened the next letter, but it was only from some restaurant advising me that, following the recent unfortunate incident when I was dining with them, they regretted that they would be unable to accept any further reservations from me. I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that someone - not me - had been wearing very highly polished black shoes. In any case, there was no problem. If I wanted to go back, I would just make the reservation in the name of Francis Black. Then they could go and stand beside his grave and complain all they wanted to.
    I returned to the more pressing