Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  ‘And if she won’t tell me?’

  ‘Then you will just have to accept that there are some things you will never understand. This is all past business, Eve. And to be frank, I’m of the opinion some secrets are best left buried. You come from a respectable family and I’m sure you wouldn’t want anything to emerge to jeopardize that respectability. Isn’t that right?’

  When Eve doesn’t reply, he takes her silence as acquiescence and his tone softens.

  ‘My dear, I know this has been very unsettling for you. I can’t think what this Guy Lester was about, stirring up all this drama in your life. All these questions. Mind you, I have been doing a little bit of digging around and from what I hear he was quite an unpredictable, maverick sort.’

  ‘Digging around? You mean you’ve been checking up on him?’

  ‘Of course. It would be highly irresponsible not to do so. I made a few calls. Spoke to some chaps I know. He came from a very wealthy family. Grandfather made a fortune out East. Eton, Cambridge. Trust fund on his twenty-first birthday. Good marriage. Acquitted himself well during the Great War. Promoted to Captain. Awarded the Military Cross and three bars for gallantry on the battlefield. Took up his position at the family firm once he was back home. So much, so straightforward. Perfectly good sort, one might think. But then listen to this. A year or so after the end of the war, something happens, though nobody seems to know what, and he suddenly ups sticks and moves his whole family to France. Never comes back. Never plays any further part in the family business. Sits out the last war in America. Florida, by all accounts.’ Clifford says ‘Florida’ as if it is this detail that is the most unfathomable.

  ‘So the picture emerging here is that Guy Lester appears to be quite a shady character. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was something murky in his past. You don’t hide yourself away all your life for no reason. Now, I understand your curiosity has been piqued, Eve. But the best thing is for you to come home and put this little interlude out of your head. Then as soon as the sale documents are prepared, I’ll go down to the South of France myself and make all the necessary arrangements. Whatever little game Mr Lester has been playing is not going to work on us, I’m afraid.’

  Eve is silent, listening to her breath echoing down the long-distance line. As the telephone at Villa La Perle was disconnected when the Lesters moved to Nice, Bernard has brought her here to this strange-looking hotel, the Belles Rives, teetering above the seafront on the approach to Juan-les-Pins, to place an international call to Clifford. Now she worries that the call will be costing a fortune, even though Bernard assured her, following a protracted conversation with the hotel concierge, that expenses would be covered by Guy’s estate. He’d had to rush off for a meeting shortly afterwards but told her he would call round in the evening to find out what she’d decided to do about returning home.

  Eve’s unease at the notion of being subsidized by the Lesters is counterbalanced by her delight in the hotel, which has large pine-shaded terraces on different levels overlooking a narrow strip of private beach below and a wooden jetty that protrudes into the sea, on which several people are sitting in low-slung chairs, making the most of the early June sunshine. Across the bay a verdant island squats like a toad above the water.

  In a corner of the reception area, Eve wedges the receiver of the phone between her chin and shoulder and holds out her right hand. The emerald changes in the light from bottle green to amber where the sun hits it. Each time Eve sees it, she is taken back to that photograph. Her mother laughing. Her strong hand gripping her baby daughter, keeping her safe.

  ‘Eve? Are you still there?’ Clifford’s impatient voice interrupts her train of thought. ‘Damn these infernal phone lines. Now, I won’t be able to get to Victoria to meet you when you arrive, so you will have to take a taxi from Victoria to Paddington. Make sure the driver takes you directly, mind. You don’t want him driving around the houses, clocking up the meter. You’ll feel a lot better once you’re home and away from all this fuss.’

  Eve glances again at her finger. At home, when Clifford adopts this lecturing tone, she quickly gives in, agreeing to whatever version of truth he is putting forward, just to get the whole thing over with. But now, separated by hundreds of miles, she finds herself curiously resistant.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ she tells him quite affably, ‘I am not coming.’

  The door to the terrace opens and a couple walk into the reception, he with a light-coloured hat, she with her hair pulled back tightly from her narrow, angular face.

  Eve’s heart gives a lurch of pleasure as recognition dawns.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaims. ‘Hello. How marvellous …’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’ Clifford demands. ‘Is there someone else with you? What is going on?’

  The Colletts, for it is they, are all smiles as they hurry over.

  ‘My dear. We were so hoping we might run into you here.’ Ruth’s blue eyes sparkle with pleasure.

  ‘Eve!’ The telephone receiver has slipped from her ear so that Clifford’s voice sounds tinny and small, like the far-off whine of a mosquito.

  ‘I must go,’ she tells him, signalling to the Colletts that they should wait for her. ‘My friends are here.’

  ‘Friends? You don’t have any friends. Look here, Eve, I must insist—’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she tells him, ‘when I’ve found out what I need to know. It’s just for a few more days. Please don’t worry about me, darling.’

  She hasn’t called him darling since the early days of their marriage, but she is conscious of the watching Colletts and their possible expectations of how a married couple should behave towards one another.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eve, but I cannot allow this. If it’s answers you want I will try to find them for you, but I must insist you come—’

  ‘Goodbye then, darling.’ She keeps her tone light and her smile constant.

  As she hangs up, she hears him shout out ‘Wait!’ but the scratchy little noise is cut short by the satisfying click of the receiver being returned to its cradle.

  She feels a small flash of panic followed by a far greater surge of … what? Not power, certainly that would be too strong a word. Excitement perhaps. For the first time in her life she feels she has some agency. For the first time she is dictating events rather than responding to them.

  But by the time she joins the Colletts, she is already regretting her impulsiveness. She ought to have made more of an effort to explain to Clifford how she felt. She ought to have been more conciliatory. He was only looking out for her best interests, wanting to be sure she was safe and not taken advantage of. She will write to him, she resolves. Tell him about the ring and the way it feels on her finger, the rightness of the weight of it, the immediate sense of connection she felt when she saw it. She will make him understand.

  The Colletts insist on going back out on to the terrace for a celebratory cocktail in honour of this serendipitous meeting. Over peach Bellinis, which Eve has not tried before but declares immediately she will drink nothing but from this point forth, they tell her about their night in Marseille and then their trip to Fayence to see the spot where their son Leo came down.

  ‘It was very lovely, very peaceful,’ Ruth says. ‘A field on a hillside surrounded by pines with a golden village in the distance and a lingering smell of lavender. You’ll laugh, but I could hear his voice in my ear, clear as I’m hearing yours now, saying, “If it had to be anywhere, here isn’t too bad, is it, Ma?”’

  Now they want to know all about her mystery inheritance. Eve brings them up to speed, gratified by their reactions of shock and amazement.

  ‘It’s just like a novel,’ Rupert says when she finishes. ‘In fact, if you weren’t married already this would be around the time for the handsome foreign prince to arrive and sweep you off your feet.’

  An image of Victor Meunier’s face comes into Eve’s mind and she stifles a smile.

  The Colletts are waiting for t
heir younger son Jack to join them, fresh from researching his dissertation in Paris.

  ‘Jack’s the reason we booked this particular hotel,’ Ruth explains in her nervous chatty way. ‘Because the Fitzgeralds stayed here in the twenties and Jack is such an admirer of Fitzgerald. You have read him, I assume? The Great Gatsby. The Beautiful and the Damned.’

  Eve shakes her head. She has heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, but most of her interest has been in his life, not his art. The marriage to the wife who went mad, the alcoholism. The early death.

  ‘My dear, you must read him. He’s so good about the futility of everything.’

  ‘I’m not sure that sounds terribly uplifting,’ says Rupert, smiling.

  ‘Well, maybe not everything,’ concedes Ruth. ‘Just the things that people think they most want. Money. Fame. Even love.’

  ‘Well. Love,’ says Rupert, as if that’s all that needs to be said.

  Eve wonders how it would have been to be brought up by the Colletts instead of her own parents. Who would she now be? What might she have made of her life? She imagines lively conversation around the dinner table. Art. Literature. Politics. There were no books in her own parents’ house apart from a dinner-party cook book that her mother had been given but never used, owing to never giving dinner parties, and a set of encyclopaedias that her father had rashly bought from a door-to-door salesman. There were also some leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets with her mother’s name inscribed on the inside cover in a schoolgirl’s careful writing. But there was no sense of reading for pleasure. And if anyone ever tried to touch on politics at the table, her mother soon shut down the conversation. This is a home, not a bar room, thank you very much. As if debate were interchangeable with dissent. So mealtimes were largely silent. Some questions about how she was getting on at school that were answered with a simple yes or no. Some observations about the weather, or the difficulty of getting hold of various ingredients now that rationing had been tightened up. No unpleasantness, as her mother called anything that might involve a differing opinion from her own.

  The Colletts want to know how Eve plans to proceed in her search for answers. Eve, whose earlier bravado on the phone has given way to a kind of low-level unease, feels a flare of panic as she admits she has no idea what happens next. Suddenly she sees how rash she has been, how little she has thought things through.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to go home, after all,’ she says. But they will not hear of it.

  ‘Since the war I sometimes feel,’ says Ruth, ‘as if we who survived are morally bound to live fully because so many did not. Leo will never get to have the adventures he planned, so I must have them for him.’

  They are interrupted by a waiter who tells them they have a guest, and before they have a chance to react, someone sweeps in from the hotel lobby in a great whirl of flapping raincoat and cigarette fug, and then Ruth is up on her feet with her arms around a slight, bespectacled young man whose pale skin is already pinkening in the Mediterranean sun.

  ‘You should have told us!’ she says. ‘We would have—’

  ‘No need,’ he says, laughing. ‘I hitched from Paris. It was all very straightforward. I said ‘S’il vous plaît’ and ‘Merci’ and nodded an awful lot, and that seemed to do the trick. Mind you, I nearly boiled alive in this coat. It’s hotter than hell down here.’

  Introductions aren’t necessary, yet they are made anyway. Jack Collett eyes Eve with frank curiosity through his round, wire-framed glasses and then insists on a second tour around the hotel, so that he can recount the legends attached to the various different areas. ‘Here’s where Josephine Baker walked her pet cheetah.’ And, ‘Did you know, Zelda kept packed luggage in every room just in case she needed to make a quick getaway?’ And, ‘I say, do you think this could be the room where Scott locked that group of musicians, and wouldn’t let them out until they’d spent the evening playing for him and Zelda?’

  Back on the terrace, Jack declares himself delighted with everything – the elderly man in the old-fashioned striped bathing suit who stands in the sea below them up to his knees performing a sequence of slow squats, the fat bee buzzing in and out of the orange blossom, the sleek schooner that glides across the horizon. Eve, used to her mother’s philosophy that good favour must be earned, and Clifford’s that if you view everything with suspicion you’re less likely to be taken advantage of, finds herself charmed by the unabashed joy with which Jack seems to view the world.

  Jack is given a potted history of Eve’s strange bequest.

  ‘Oh, but this is wonderful,’ he says. ‘I must say, my parents are forever collecting waifs and strays, but they’ve outdone themselves with you.’

  Eve assumes this to be a compliment, but is not entirely sure.

  11

  JACK INSISTS ON going to see Villa La Perle right away.

  ‘If there are any clues to be found, that’s the obvious place to start,’ he says, dismissing Eve’s concerns about how Mrs Finch and the Lesters will react to the idea of her bringing guests to the house as if she owns it. (‘You do, don’t you, in a way?’)

  The matter is decided when it is discovered that Eve would otherwise be walking home. What could be more natural than for them to give her a lift back to the villa in the borrowed car, arranged for them by an American officer friend of Leo’s?

  At the villa, Eve brings her guests around the side of the house so as not to disturb Mrs Finch. In her concern for the housekeeper, she has completely forgotten about Sully, and is at first perplexed when Ruth exclaims, ‘Oh my!’ until she follows her gaze to see the back of Sully’s broad naked shoulders hunched over a typewriter at the bistro table on the bottom terrace.

  More introductions are undertaken and Eve is relieved to see that Sully has a pair of short trousers on.

  ‘Wait. You’re Stanley Sullivan? The Stanley Sullivan?’ Jack Collett has grown very still.

  ‘Ah, glad to see some English people at least have an appreciation of good literature,’ Sully says, glancing at her. He is trying to act mock severe, but Eve can see he is flattered.

  ‘I have read everything you’ve written,’ says Jack.

  ‘In that case, you and I are going to get along very well.’

  There follows an animated conversation about various of Sully’s works, during which Sully appears almost shy as he references some lesser-known short stories, breaking into a huge smile when he realizes Jack has indeed read them. When Jack makes a comparison to Fitzgerald and mentions they are staying in the house where the Fitzgeralds stayed, Sully grows suddenly morose.

  ‘I knew them, of course, Zelda and Scott,’ he says. ‘We met here originally and then back in California.’

  ‘Oh!’ Jack’s hand is over his mouth. ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Utterly impossible. They craved attention, both of them, as if they would shrivel up without it. They were too fragile, do you see? They wanted to go around smashing things up, but in the end they were the ones who got broken.’

  Jack gazes at Sully, enraptured, and Eve sees suddenly how young he is. Surely not more than twenty-two. The war has forced them all to grow up too quickly.

  At their request, Eve takes the Colletts on a tour around the villa. In the dining room, Ruth stops in front of a photograph on the mantelpiece of Guy Lester with Diana and all three of his children.

  ‘But surely those are the two men from the train?’

  Eve nods, and explains the coincidence. She doesn’t look at the photograph, has no wish to see Noel Lester’s fierce green eyes.

  ‘Well. This whole mystery suddenly got a whole lot more mysterious,’ declares Rupert.

  On the top floor, Eve points out the other bedrooms without opening the doors, still conscious of the strange position she occupies, neither guest nor proprietor.

  When they reach her own bedroom she flings open the door with a flourish.

  ‘Oh!’ Eve stands in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

/>   ‘What is it?’ Ruth asks her. ‘Well, it’s just that I keep getting this queer feeling someone has been in here while I was out. Someone other than me, I mean.’

  Eve is trying to sound amused, but unease is snaking through her. She cannot put her finger on what is wrong, just a general sense of things being disturbed. Her eyes alight on the green leather box that the ring came in. Wasn’t it in the centre of the dressing table before, not right on the far edge like that?

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Rupert tells her. ‘Ruth is constantly informing me people have been in the house moving things around when really she just forgets where she puts everything.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Eve tries to laugh.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Eve leads the way around to the kitchen. As they pass the doorway down into the basement, Jack opens the door.

  ‘We don’t need to go down there,’ Eve says quickly. ‘It’s just a wine cellar. Practically empty, I’m afraid.’

  Mrs Finch materializes from her room behind the kitchen and claps her hands together in delight.

  ‘More company. How lovely! This house has been so quiet recently, like a mausoleum, and now in one morning we’ve had visits from all sorts. It’s been like Piccadilly Circus in here!’

  ‘Visitors?’ asks Eve. ‘Who has—’

  But her question is cut short by Mrs Finch, suggesting she make a big pot of tea. And even though Eve suspects the Colletts would far rather stick to cocktails, they all nod in appreciation.

  Afterwards Sully suggests a trip to Garoupe beach. On the way there, he explains that the small strip of sand on the eastern side of Cap d’Antibes was the scene of many of the flamboyant gatherings organized by Sara and Gerald Murphy, an American couple who’d adopted the young Sully on his first trip to the Riviera as a penniless student.

  ‘I went first to Paris, expecting to spend my days debating philosophy and drinking absinthe, but instead I stayed in a squalid little apartment which was always freezing, with a landlord who beat his wife, and I made no friends and was miserable, so I decided to head to Italy. But on the way I stopped off here in Antibes, just for a couple of nights, and ended up staying for five years. Sara and Gerald were like my surrogate parents. Their life was a constant party with so many famous guests. Not just Scott and Zelda but Hemingway, Dos Passos, Picasso too. You know Scott wrote Tender is the Night about them?’