The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce Read Free

therefore felt it was appropriate to saturate myself in the wines of Pomerol that day, while I read about them and thought about the evening that lay ahead.
    After breakfast I drank, very slowly, a bottle of Château La Fleur de Gay; and with lunch I drank a bottle of Château Trotanoy 1990, the last bottle of that wine and that year that I had been able to find in the undercroft. I ate, as usual, very little: just enough to bring out the flavour of what I was drinking. I usually get something sent up from the restaurant around the corner. I lingered over the Trotanoy well into the afternoon. I thought about opening another bottle, but decided against it. I came to the restaurant with the tastes of Pomerol still lingering on my palate: two great wines from the district which yet, in the wine drinkers’ map, were as foothills to the great peak of Pétrus on whose summit I soon would tread.
    It was inevitable that the wine affected me. My balance, which has been deteriorating these last few months, was not good. I have also developed a distasteful tendency to perspire heavily when I am not drinking wine, and I find my hands tremble. As I am no longer inclined to drive, since the accident, it matters less than it might otherwise have done. I have a Screwpull corkscrew and that opens all but the very oldest bottles without trouble, no matter whether my hands are shaking or not. And when I drink wine I find I become very peaceful, very reflective, sometimes even devotional in my moods. When I am not drinking it, I become restless, prone to unhappy memories of events earlier in my life. I walk around my flat in Half Moon Street, which is on the edge of Mayfair, in the West End of London. I pick up books and put them down unread. I go out into Hyde Park and try to blow the memories away in the fresh air. I walk down Piccadilly and look into the shop windows, or prowl among the bookshelves of Hatchards, or stare at the mountains of crystallised fruit in the windows of Fortnum’s. The memories won’t go away, and so I go back to my flat and bring up a bottle of wine from the small cellar of perhaps a thousand bottles that I keep there, and drink it. My main collection of wine is still in the undercroft at Francis Black’s old house in the North of England, which I acquired when I bought his house from his executors when he died. From time to time I go up there to gaze at my wine and make sure everything is all right, and I check that the temperature controls are working, and the security alarms are correctly set. I ship another few cases back to Half Moon Street to keep me going. The quantity of stock never seems to lessen, though - as if, when I am not there, the wooden cases and the racked bottles are secretly multiplying themselves. But I never linger for more than a few hours there: too many ghosts.
    When I have opened the wine, rotated it this way and that in the glass, and savoured its aroma, and when I have sipped the first sip, then peacefulness gradually returns.
     
I finished the foie gras and sipped at the Rieussec. It was a good wine, with a delicious honey flavour, almost too powerful. I knew I would forget its taste instantly with the first glass of Pétrus. They took the plates away and I was left in peace for a moment, to glance about me. This was a restaurant for the rich and famous. It had taken quite an effort on my part to reserve a table, some weeks ago. Now there was scarcely an empty place in the room. The restaurant had filled up. But it was not noisy. There were perhaps only a dozen tables in quite a large room, well apart from each other so that one could neither overhear nor be overheard. I supposed that if I ever read the newspapers, I would recognise some of the people in here. There were three men ordering their dinner at the next table, and one of them was, I am fairly sure, a government minister. But I felt no real curiosity and I am sure I was invisible to them - not smart enough, sitting on my