David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘How very good of you to see me, Mr Colville,’ said Powerscourt. ‘This must be a very difficult time for you all.’

‘It’s good of you to come all this way,’ said Nathaniel Colville. ‘I don’t suppose I shall be much use to you. I haven’t had very much to do with the family business for years. I still get the dividends, of course, and I’m still meant to be writing the history of the firm. I’m supposed to have been doing that for the last eight years. I’ve got all the early records in a room at the top of the house but I don’t even read them any more. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish it now.’

‘There’s still time, plenty of time,’ said Powerscourt, thinking ruefully of his own unfinished second volume on the Cathedrals of England, the notes and descriptions still mouldering in a cupboard in Markham Square. ‘Tell me, Mr Colville, is there anything you can tell me about your nephews, Randolph and Cosmo? Anything you can remember about their early years, about their characters?’

Nathaniel Colville shook his head. ‘I was thinking about that before you came, Lord Powerscourt. They were both perfectly normal little boys. They spent a lot of time, obviously, with my own children and another cousin when they were growing up. There was nothing that suggested one was going to be shot at his son’s wedding and the other one arrested with a gun in his hand, nothing at all.’ The old man shook his head slowly.

‘Is there anything in the firm’s history that might have left somebody bearing a grudge against them?’

‘A vendetta come to Norfolk to take revenge for some sins committed long ago? I don’t know anything of that sort but, as I said, I haven’t had much to do with the business for a long time.’

‘Were things very different in your days, Mr Colville, when the firm started up?’ Powerscourt suspected that Nathaniel Colville might be happier with the past than the present.

‘I know I’m old, Lord Powerscourt, God knows when you get to my age, you are reminded of it every day. But I think of those early years when we were establishing the business as a time of great happiness. We were doing something none of us had done before. We didn’t really know what the rules were, if there were any rules. We took risks, we spent an awful lot of money advertising our wares in the newspapers once we were up and running. Nobody had ever done that before. We tried to do the best we could for our customers. We worked very hard. We were very intensely alive, if you know what I mean. There wasn’t a great deal of time for children. Anyway we were away in France quite a lot of the time.’

‘Do you think that times are less happy now? In the wine trade, I mean.’

‘Do you remember the Jubilee, Lord Powerscourt? The second one, not the first? I remember watching the procession to St Paul’s, the soldiers marching through London from all over the world, all come from parts of the British Empire, the royal carriages in procession with the little Queen at the end? I saw them all pass by from the windows of my club on Pall Mall and I remember thinking that this was the end of an era. Two days before, you see, we learned that one of our competitors had been offering champagne at two shillings a case less than we were. In the old days that would have been unthinkable. The rivals might put their stuff on the market at the same price. We all had to make a living after all. But now it was no longer live and let live, it was live and let die. I remember thinking very strongly that this was the end of an age. What have we had since? That fat adulterer on the throne. Women, suffragettes they call themselves, marching about the place throwing stones through shop windows and demanding votes for women. These dreadful motor cars belching smoke over us all – only the other day the gardener and the footman and I had to help pull some fool in his car out of the river down there. Brakes failed, the man said. God help us all. Right through my life, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve been interested in politics. I can’t imagine saying today that things are better than they were at the time of the Jubilee. Entente Cordiale with our oldest enemy, the French, hoping to lure us into some terrible war of revenge with Germany over Alsace Lorraine. The Germans building up a vast navy and spoiling for a fight. Russia honeycombed with revolutionaries seeking a final reckoning with the Tsar – they had a damned good go at it only a couple of years back.’

‘Has the wine trade become more and more competitive, Mr Colville?’ Powerscourt was wondering if anything concrete was going to come out of his visit.

‘Well, I’m not there now, but I would say it has, yes.’ Nathaniel Colville laughed suddenly. ‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, I realize I must have been sounding dreadfully reactionary just now. I’m not that bad. I try to do what the doctor tells me, regular exercise, moderation in all things. Did you learn Greek at school, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt nodded.

‘Do you remember that they had a favourite saying back then, the Greeks I mean? Maiden agan. Nothing to excess. Think of it, man. Nothing to excess? Greeks? These were people who served up their guests children cooked in a stew at banquets, who went to war for twenty years because a king’s wife ran off with another man, who ended up with their most restrained philosopher Aristotle educating a prince, Alexander, who wanted to conquer the whole bloody world. Nothing to excess? Some day I’m going to tell my doctor what I’ve just told you but the right moment hasn’t come yet.’

‘Let me just go back to where I started, Mr Colville. Anything at all you can tell me about Randolph and Cosmo?’

The old man looked at Powerscourt carefully as if sizing him up, as if he were a colt he might buy at the sales. ‘You seem a perfectly respectable sort of fellow to me,’ he said finally. ‘There is perhaps one thing you ought to know, though please don’t tell any of my relations I told you.’ He stopped and stared into his fire. ‘It’s about Randolph,’ he said and paused again. It was as if he wasn’t sure he could get the words out. ‘They say he was a terrible man for the women, chased anything that took his fancy.’

‘Before his marriage,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘or after?’

‘Damn it, man, I only know what I hear. But I should say the answer to your question is both before and after. All the way through.’

Alfred Davis, general manager of Colville and Sons, was staring in disbelief at four sheets of paper on the table in front of him. The latest disaster to strike the Colville company was the non-arrival of a great consignment of wine from Burgundy, wine in every price range. The receipts in front of Alfred were the records of these deliveries in the previous years. Always they had left Burgundy in the second week of October and arrived in London a week or so later. Now there were no records at all. Every attempt to contact the firm of Chanson, Pere et Fils, had failed. Alfred had first been made aware of the lack of incoming burgundy the evening before. He had spent most of his time since staring at the records of previous years. Alfred Davis did not wonder if anything had gone wrong at the wine merchants in France, a serious illness, a death perhaps which might have impeded business. He worried only about the firm of Colvilles. This consignment was meant to last them into the New Year. Another shipment usually came along in February. But Christmas, granted the long lead times involved in the trade, was almost upon them. Alfred did not know what he could do if the shipment simply failed to turn up at the docks. Mr Randolph had looked after the Burgundy business for years. No doubt he could have conjured some more wine out of those wily negociants and filled the gap. But Mr Randolph was rotting in his grave near the Thames and would trouble the wine trade no more. Alfred could not imagine what damage the loss of the Burgundy wines would do the business at one of the busiest times in the wine merchant’s year, Christmas and New Year.