Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,29

could stand being a failure much better on my own.

By total chance, because of friends of friends of my despairing mother’s, I was despatched to live as a paying guest with a family in Bordeaux, and it had meant nothing to me at first that my unknown host was a wine shipper. It was Monsieur Henri Tavel himself who had discovered that I could tell one wine from another, once I’d tasted them. He was the only adult I’d ever met who was impressed by my trick with the chocolate. He had laughed loudly and begun to set me tests with wine each evening, and I’d grown more confident the more I got them right.

It had still seemed a game, however, and at the end of the planned three months I’d returned home with still no idea of what to do next. My mother applauded my French accent but said it was hardly to be considered a lifetime’s achievement, and I spent my days sneaking out of her sight as much as possible.

She had had to come looking for me the day the letter came, about a month after my return. She held it out in front of her, frowning at it as if it were incomprehensible.

‘Monsieur Tavel suggests you go back,’ she said. ‘He is offering to train you. Train you in what, Tony darling?’

‘Wine,’ I said, feeling the first pricking of interest for many a long day.

‘You?’ She was puzzled more than amazed.

‘To learn the trade, I expect,’ I said.

‘Good heavens.’

‘Can I go?’ I asked.

‘Do you want to?’ she said, astonished. ‘I mean, have you actually found something you’d like to do?’

‘I don’t seem to be able to do anything else.’

‘No,’ she agreed prosaically: and she paid my fare again and my board and lodging with the family and a substantial fee to Monsieur Tavel for tuition.

Monsieur Tavel gave me a year’s intensive instruction, taking me everywhere himself, showing me every stage of wine-making and shipping, teaching me rapidly what he’d spent a long lifetime learning, expecting me never to need telling twice.

I grew to feel at home in the Quai des Chatrons, where many doors into the warehouses were too narrow for modern lorries as a legacy from an ancient tax and where no wine could still be stored within a hundred yards of the street because it had been thought the vibration from horses’ hooves on the quayside would upset it. In the de Luze warehouse, stretching nearly half a mile back, the staff went from end to end by bicycle.

In the city long buses had concertina central sections for turning sharp corners into narrow streets and in the country mimosa trees bloomed fluffily yellow in March, and everywhere , every day, all day, there was the talk and the smell of wine. By the time I left it, Bordeaux was my spiritual home. Henri Tavel hugged me with moist eyes and told me he could place me with de Luze or one of the other top négotiants if I would stay: and sometimes since then I’d wondered why I hadn’t.

On my return to England, armed with a too-flattering Tavel reference, I’d got a job with a wine shipper, but I was too junior for much besides paperwork and after the intensities of Bordeaux grew quickly bored. Impulsively one day I’d walked into a wine shop which said ‘Help wanted’ and offered my services, and in a short time began a brilliant non-stop career of lugging cases of booze from place to place.

‘Tony works in a shop,’ my mother would say bravely. My mother was nothing if not courageous. Large fences had to be met squarely. She also, in due course, made me an interest-free loan for basic stock for a shop of my own and had refused to accept repayments once I could afford to start them. As mothers went, in fact, mine wasn’t at all bad.

Flora, in essence a more motherly lady, grew day by day less exhausted and depressed. Jack’s leg was doing well and Jimmy was tentatively out of danger, although with pierced lungs, it seemed, one couldn’t be sure for a fortnight.

Jimmy, Flora said, couldn’t remember anything at all of the party. He couldn’t remember escorting the Sheik round the yard. The last thing he could remember was talking to me about the Laphroaig; and he had been very shocked to learn that Larry Trent was dead.

‘And Jack’s spirits?’ I asked. ‘How are those?’

‘Well, you know him, Tony dear, he hates