Free The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce by Paul Torday Page A

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