The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 Pétrus, 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 pâté 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 pâté. Of course my first thought was to take a bottle of Gewürztraminer. 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