Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  Now that I have made my decision I am impatient to make it happen. Though I have let three decades pass without action, I feel suddenly as if I cannot wait another day.

  I can see from Bernard’s face that he longs to ask me what these certain matters are, who this Eve Forrester is to me. But he would never pry and I am not ready to tell him. After I’ve found Eve, and spoken to her: that will be the time for discussion.

  ‘Guy?’

  Even after all these years, Bernard struggles with the pronunciation of my name, so it comes out sometimes as ‘gooey’, at other times ‘goy’.

  ‘Guy, I am concerned about you. You look tired, and I can hear from your voice that your throat is not so good. All of this emotion will put pressure on your heart. Just when your doctor has told you to take it easy. Can you really take the risk of opening this particular box?’

  Bernard mimes the action of removing the lid from something, dislodging the big ginger cat who has been lying on his lap all the while. The cat stalks off in disgust, its tail high.

  All of a sudden, I feel exhausted, drained of energy. The thought of walking downstairs is daunting enough, let alone travelling back to England. A wave of hopelessness engulfs me.

  I have left it too late.

  Still, I summon all my strength to reply: ‘If the lid remains closed, I’m afraid the whole box will explode, taking my family with it.’

  9

  3 June 1948

  ‘NO HARD FEELINGS.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You can’t blame a guy for trying.’

  ‘It’s forgotten.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘I said it’s forgotten.’

  Eve, who is lying on her back on a steamer feeling the cells of her skin expanding in the sun, wishes Sully would stop talking. She knows perfectly well that his drunken, half-hearted attempt at a pass while they were walking home from the reception the previous evening came more out of a sense of misplaced duty than an outpouring of passion.

  She closes her eyes, allows the jasmine-scented air to settle around her, listens to an insect buzzing somewhere in the vegetation and tries not to remember that this is her last full day in France. The face of Victor Meunier appears in her mind, the blue irises ringed by a darker navy, the angles that dissolve and re-form as his expression changes.

  ‘What do you know about Victor Meunier?’ she asks.

  ‘Our local hero? Wounded in the war. Spent some time as a POW in Germany, then returned to Paris, but couldn’t stomach life under occupation so managed to talk his way down here.’

  ‘So why the hero part?’

  ‘Rumour has it he helped several Jewish families escape before they could be rounded up and sent to the camps. Mind you, the war made heroes out of so many ordinary people. Bernard and Marie Gaillard, for example, were leading lights in the Resistance around here.’

  Eve pictures the sad-eyed notary and his excitable wife, and things start to fall into place.

  ‘Then there’s our own Noel and all those endless missions he flew in the R AF.’

  ‘Oh?’ Eve keeps her eyes closed.

  ‘Set some sort of record, I believe. Do you know they had to more or less bar him from the airfield in the end because he wouldn’t stop turning up to fly? They had his photograph on the wall at the security point, like the casinos with their blacklists.’

  ‘Are you exaggerating, Mr Sullivan?’ She peers over at him, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.

  ‘Well, maybe just a little. But he did fly an awful lot. I guess he was trying to make up for—’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Tell me, what did you think of our Gloria?’ Sully changes the subject and sits up on his recliner, leaning forward so his powerful shoulders are all Eve can see over his bent knees. ‘Didn’t you think she looked as if she’d been kidnapped and brought there under duress? I kept watching her lips, waiting for her to mouth, “Help me”.’

  Eve abandons any hope of peaceful meditation and sits up too.

  ‘I think she’s terribly beautiful. But I agree she didn’t exactly look like a radiant bride. She hasn’t long been divorced from Greg Dalladay, has she? And those two always looked to be so much in love.’

  ‘I’m sure they were – until he met Carla Jasmine on the set of What the Heart Wants. Poor Gloria. It’s hard enough being abandoned by the man you love, let alone being abandoned so publicly, for a girl not even twenty years old.’

  ‘So you think she is trying to fix her broken heart by marrying someone else?’

  ‘Yeah, but not just any old someone else. A someone else with a private plane and multi-millions in the bank and a big yacht with a full-time staff of twelve.’

  ‘You’re very cynical, Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘Sully. And I’m not cynical at all. I’m a hopeless romantic, which is why I’ve been married so many times. Still trying to find that elusive happy-ever-after. And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Have you found your happy-ever-after?’

  ‘Of course. I’m perfectly content with my husband.’

  Eve closes her eyes so she can’t see Sully’s expression, but even so she can sense him staring at her. Content. Such a half-hearted, mealy-mouthed sort of word.

  And what is she doing here anyway? Tomorrow she must return to England. She has just one more day in this idyllic place, so why is she wasting the morning exchanging idle gossip with this forward American writer?

  She gets to her feet.

  ‘I’m just going to have a look around.’

  She has a sudden flashback to the previous evening and Clemmie Atwood’s comment about her totting up the house’s contents. Will he think that’s what she is doing? Oh dear.

  She enters the house through the open glass doors of the sitting room, her shoes making a scudding noise on the polished parquet. She hopes she doesn’t bump into Mrs Finch. Though she hasn’t seen the friendly housekeeper since the previous day, she was taken aback to find breakfast laid out ready for her when she got up, as if Mrs Finch were tracking her movements through the house.

  She considers sitting down on the chaise. Perhaps flicking through one of the magazines piled neatly on the low glass-topped table. But something stops her. A sense of trespassing where she has no right.

  In the hallway she hesitates. Above her the polished bannister curves upwards. Should she go up to her room? Lie on the bed looking out at the sky? But what a waste of her precious last day. How absurd to think it is only two days since she arrived, and no time at all until she must leave again. Bernard is coming this afternoon with more paperwork. She knows she must not sign anything. Clifford has told her. But still she is looking forward to seeing the French lawyer with his sympathetic eyes.

  She walks around to the back of the staircase. Straight ahead is the corridor that leads to the kitchen and to Mrs Finch’s domain. And to her left the doorway she’d noticed the day before. She glances around to make sure she is alone before turning the handle.

  The door opens into darkness and Eve blinks as her eyes adjust. Eventually she realizes that she is standing at the top of a flight of stone steps, which descend into the gloom. She finds a switch to her left but the sickly yellow light that comes out of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling hardly extends beyond a few feet.

  She picks her way down the stairs. The skin on her arms rises up into bumps as the damp air creeps into her bones. At the bottom of the staircase she finds herself in a small, cramped vestibule, with two closed wooden doors leading off it and a floor made up of grey stone slabs that appear almost black in the corners.

  She should not be down here. The conviction strikes her as she shivers in her thin cotton blouse. Despite what is written in Guy Lester’s will, this is not her house.

  And yet, now that she is here, should she not take a look? Too nosy for your own good, says her mother’s voice in her ear. Curiosity was frowned upon in their house. Resignation. That was the key. Not acceptance,
even. Resignation.

  She remembers Clemmie Atwood’s suggestion that she and Noel Lester were brother and sister, that her mother and Guy Lester had …

  She feels a warm rush of repugnance. Impossible.

  Outrage strengthens her resolve and she pushes open the first door. A light switch on the near wall illuminates, as Mrs Finch had said, a small wine cellar lined with row upon row of wooden racks, most of which are empty, although there are a few bottles still dotted around.

  I’ll just pop down and fetch a bottle of wine from my cellar, Eve imagines herself saying to a table of dinner guests. The thought makes her smile.

  The handle of the second door is so stiff that Eve imagines at first that it must be locked. She yanks it down and is dismayed when it comes off in her hand. She manages to slot it back in and has one last go, pulling the door towards her and thrusting the handle at the same time, as she has to do with the back door at home, and is rewarded as it grudgingly gives way. The cold hits her instantly and she pauses on the threshold. She fumbles around for a switch, stepping further into the gloom, but all she encounters is the cold damp stone of the wall.

  She hears the door creak behind her and swings around.

  ‘Mrs Forrester? Is that you?’

  The rounded figure of Mrs Finch is silhouetted against the sickly light coming from the vestibule.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I opened the wrong door and thought I would see where it led.’

  How ridiculous she sounds. Standing here, where she has no business.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness for that. I thought we had company. Sometimes animals get in down here. Rats and squirrels. Even the occasional stray cat. We like to keep the doors closed to keep the damp smell out.’

  ‘So you don’t store anything down here?’ Eve asks, peering into the gloom.

  ‘Not really. Just odds and ends Mr Lester didn’t want to throw out.’

  Mrs Finch moves out of the doorway, allowing the thin light to penetrate further into the room. Eve makes out a shelf on the far wall with a few items on it. Tins of paint. An assortment of tools. Candles. Some crockery. And leaning against it, a collection of objects in various states of disrepair – a rusty bike, some ancient pipes, a stained ceramic sink.

  ‘You must remember, Mrs Forrester, that during the war this house was taken over by enemy soldiers. Officers. First the fascists, then the Germans. It was left in a right old mess, I’m afraid. As most of the houses were. Things broken or stolen. These people had no respect for property, no manners as we would know them. We only had the cracks in the swimming pool repaired earlier this year. This room is full of junk mostly. Things that were ruined. Every home along this coast will have a similar room, I imagine. Do you know, our neighbour even found an unexploded shell in the nursery?’

  Eve finds herself nodding in the darkness. The reminder that everyone had their own war. Everyone suffered in their own way.

  Back upstairs, Mrs Finch makes her excuses and bustles away into the kitchen.

  Meanwhile, Eve, relieved to be warm once again, sits down in one of the armchairs in the sitting room and picks up a magazine with Gloria Hayes’s face on the cover, her lips pouting into the camera lens. But she cannot settle. Her excursion to the cellar has disturbed her. She can still smell the sour dampness on her clothes. Her skin prickles at the memory of cold stone under her fingertips, the pallid waxiness of candles in the gloom.

  She is glad when the front doorbell sounds. Seconds later Bernard appears in the doorway and she is so happy to see him, she has to hold herself back from throwing her arms around his neck.

  Bernard asks her how she spent the previous evening and seems amused by her account of the reception for Gloria Hayes. ‘I have lived here all my life but no invitation. But you have been here just one day and …’

  He makes a gesture with his expressive hands that somehow conveys unfairness, amusement, irony and acceptance all in one.

  ‘It is a pity you have to leave tomorrow,’ he continues. ‘A few more days and you would have conquered the Riviera.’

  The reminder comes like a physical blow and she realizes she has been pushing the unwelcome thought of returning to England to the back of her mind.

  ‘Noel Lester mentioned inheritance tax to me, Mr Gaillard. It’s been on my mind ever since. I have not got … that is, my husband and I are not wealthy people.’

  Bernard looks stricken.

  ‘Please do not worry yourself, Mrs Forrester. I ought to have discussed this with you yesterday. I’m afraid I have let you down.’

  ‘Oh no. Not at all.’

  ‘The truth is, there will be a large inheritance payment due. And I’m very sorry to say that unless it transpires that you are related to Mr Lester, your own payment will be higher than the other three beneficiaries – perhaps even as much as sixty per cent of your share. However, you have a long time to pay it. Several years. During which time the house will be sold, giving you enough money to pay the tax and have a sizeable amount left over.’

  Eve nods.

  ‘I have here something for you. Mr Lester left it with me to look after – I think perhaps he worried about Mrs Lester’s reaction if she came across it by chance. But I am quite sure he intended it for you. I would have given it to you yesterday but I thought the news of your inheritance was probably enough for you to digest in one day.’

  ‘A gift? Oh, but I really don’t think …’ Eve tails off, transfixed by the small brown paper package in Bernard’s hand.

  ‘Not a gift, no,’ says Bernard. ‘A restoring of property. That is how Mr Lester spoke of it.’

  Eve hesitates, imagining what the Lesters would say if they knew Guy had given her something else. But in the end curiosity wins out.

  She unwraps the package slowly, trying to suppress her growing feeling of excitement.

  Inside there is a smart green leather box, its corners sharp and new, with a French name printed in the centre, embossed in curling gold writing.

  ‘The box is from a famous jeweller’s shop in Nice,’ says Bernard. ‘But I believe it is entirely unconnected to the contents.’

  Eve presses her lips together and pushes up the lid with unsteady fingers, revealing a red velvet cushion. Nestling on the cushion is a gold ring with a distinctive star-shaped green stone that Eve recognizes immediately.

  That photograph. The only one she has ever seen of herself as a baby. The one that she found in the bottom of her mother’s drawer where she shouldn’t have been looking. How dare you go rifling through my private things? Only afterwards did it occur to her that this was her history too, but when she’d dared ask her mother again about the photograph, she was told it was lost. And though she’d searched and searched over the years, she’d never found it. But she remembered. A photographic studio clearly set up for a formal family portrait. Her mother’s face as Eve had never seen it, soft with youth and laughter, a little blurred, as if she were in the act of turning her head towards her child’s. Her own baby face unsmiling, her chubby body twisted towards her mother, who clasps her wriggling child with a strong arm around her middle, her fingers splayed out over the white lace-covered tummy. The ring clearly visible. The irregular shape that had drawn her attention.

  ‘Does it mean something to you?’ Bernard’s voice is soft, hesitant. As if he worries about intruding.

  ‘I recognize this ring,’ Eve says. ‘My mother was wearing it in a photograph I saw of myself as a baby.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Eve knows what that ‘ah’ means. So there is a connection between her mother and Guy Lester after all. And there is only one obvious connection that could be. Still Eve cannot believe it. Her mother, with her best clothes that she never wears locked away in a dark cupboard stinking of mothballs. With her frown line clogged with talcum powder. With her ‘Don’t expect and you won’t be disappointed.’ She can no sooner imagine a connection between her mother and this sun-soaked house with its charismatic owner than she can imagine being able to fly t
o the moon.

  ‘I imagine you will have some questions for your mother when you arrive home,’ says Bernard.

  Eve nods. And yet she cannot envisage it. Walking into that house in Banbury. Sitting down on that hard mustard-coloured sofa with the loose covers her mother made from old sheets to keep the upholstery pristine for the visitors who never came. Asking her mother, Tell me how you knew Guy Lester. As if they had that kind of relationship, the kind where one could ask personal questions, and expect to be answered.

  No. The more Eve thinks about it, the more certain she is she will find the answers here, in this house where the sun is painting golden stripes across the floor, and the only sound comes from the waves slapping against the wooden jetty far below and a lone bee trapped behind one of the glass panes in the sitting room.

  She holds the ring in the palm of her hand, admiring how heavy it feels, how solid. When she angles it under the light in a certain way, she notices there is an inscription on the inside of the band. From F with love eternal.

  F? Her father’s name was Harry.

  Perhaps there might have been a middle name, or a pet name, but she simply cannot imagine the quietly spoken, reserved man who shrugged in quiet sympathy behind her mother’s back, but rarely spoke up for his daughter, feeling moved to have such an inscription made.

  The ring slips on easily and as soon as she feels its reassuring weight on her middle finger, Eve is struck by a most surprising conviction.

  She is not going home.

  10

  ‘WHAT DO YOU mean, you want to stay longer?’

  Clifford sounds impatient rather than angry. Certain this will turn out to be a misunderstanding.

  ‘I need to find out who Guy Lester was to me. Why he left me a share in this house. If I come home now I may never learn the truth.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Eve. It’s all arranged. Three days in France – which is three days too long in my opinion – and then back on the train tomorrow. We’ll get to the bottom of things once you’re safely home. It seems clear the connection lies with your mother so the obvious thing is to go to Banbury together and ask her.’