Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  There are two people on the equipment: a couple, both gleaming and, even this early in June, quite golden. The man is in the process of transferring from the rope, which he has clearly just scaled from the sea, to the rings, while the woman is sitting on the trapeze, moving her legs to and fro to make it swing. Then, as Eve watches, she drops backwards so that she is hanging by her knees upside down as the trapeze makes great swooping arcs through the air, suspended far above the surface of the water.

  ‘Oh!’

  Eve has exclaimed so loudly that one or two of the bathers around the pool raise their heads off their towels to take a closer look.

  Libby giggles. ‘It’s so much fun, Eve. It’s like flying. Mummy used to be the queen of the trapeze, apparently. It’s where Daddy first saw her and he fell in love with her at once, like that.’ She snaps her fingers in front of Eve’s face. ‘She was standing up on the bar, bending her legs so it went faster and faster and higher and higher, and she had long hair then, down to her waist, and it was flying out behind her and he said she was like a goddess riding a flying chariot.’

  Diana is waiting for them on the upper terrace of the restaurant pavilion at a round table under the shade of the canopy.

  ‘Can’t we sit over there?’ asks Libby, pointing to the far corner, which is the only spot bathed in sunshine, and is currently occupied by a group of noisy young people who have been there quite some time, judging by the three near-empty bottles of champagne on the table. One of the women is perched on the railing, her back to the sea and her bare legs entwined in the bars, and Eve doesn’t know which she finds more shocking: the fact that one lapse in concentration could send her flying backwards into the water below, or that she is wearing nothing more than a bikini.

  ‘The sun coarsens your skin, Libby,’ says Diana. ‘How many times do I need to remind you?’

  Then she relents.

  ‘However, since your brother is now here, I suppose you could go on the trapeze if he’s willing to supervise.’

  Libby flings her arms around her mother’s neck by way of reply.

  When the younger Lesters are gone, Diana lights a cigarette and leans back in her chair.

  ‘Thank you for coming. I’m aware you might have had other invitations.’

  Eve feels the blood rush to her face. Does the whole of the Riviera know about the compromising photograph?

  ‘Don’t worry. I haven’t asked you here to discuss Victor Meunier. You’re a big girl. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I want only to know how long you intend to stay in Antibes, Mrs Forrester. I think it’s always best to be upfront with people, don’t you? So we all know where we stand. This has been a very difficult time for the family. My husband dying so suddenly, before we all had a proper chance to say goodbye, and then your arrival stirring up so much bad feeling. I would like to know when we might be allowed to start grieving in peace.’

  She is so cool, so completely in control, in a pink sleeveless dress with white stitching around the neck to match the white sunglasses that hold back her glossy hair. No hint of the heartbroken widow, or the insecure new young bride of Noel’s description.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Eve mumbles. ‘I didn’t mean … That is, my intention was never …’

  Diana snaps open a cigarette box. Sits back. Disinterested. Imperious.

  Eve, having been inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, now feels her old animosity returning.

  ‘As we’re speaking frankly, may I ask a question of my own?’

  ‘Of course.’

  If Diana is taken aback by Eve’s newfound assertiveness, she does not show it.

  ‘Why is it so important to you? You’re well provided for. I’ve seen your house. Why the rush?’

  Diana flicks ash into the ashtray and takes a sip of her drink. She has ordered them both whisky sours, despite Eve’s protestations that she rarely drinks at lunchtime.

  ‘I don’t know what it is you’re imagining, Mrs Forrester, but the truth is Guy did not leave nearly as large an estate as you appear to think. He was disinherited by his family in England, and though he did come into a trust when he was very young, it has largely been spent. Buying the Nice villa practically wiped him out financially. Now there will be inheritance dues to be paid, bills to meet. The coffers are all but bare.’

  It has the ring of truth about it, although Eve is quite sure Diana’s idea of bare coffers bears little resemblance to her own.

  ‘You think me greedy, Mrs Forrester. You think I have everything I need; why should I push for more?’

  Before Eve can protest, Diana gets to her feet.

  ‘Please, come with me a moment.’

  She strides to the railing at the edge of the terrace, leaving Eve no option but to follow.

  ‘Look at her.’

  Diana is pointing along the cliff to the left, where in the distance they can see Libby trying to get up on to the trapeze, helped by Noel. The girl is not a natural athlete and takes several attempts before she manages to haul herself up out of the water, where she grasps the bar under her armpits and kicks out wildly with her chunky legs.

  Below her, Noel pretends to make a grab for her foot and Libby flails even more wildly. Something solid in Eve’s chest starts to dissolve.

  ‘You have no children, Mrs Forrester.’

  It is a statement of fact rather than a question, but still Eve feels the need to reply. To justify herself.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Two brief words and yet such a world they contain. Those intermittent furtive fumblings in the dark with Clifford. The monthly creep of excitement and dread. How is it possible to be both dismayed and relieved at the same time? A child would be a validation, and furthermore would provide some shape to the featureless landscape of her future. And yet. What about her? What about that voice she has had inside her the whole of her life asking, Is this it? Is this all? Will a baby silence that voice, or amplify it?

  ‘Then you will have no idea what it is like to love someone fiercely and yet be disappointed in them. No, that’s not fair. Not disappointed in them, because of course they are as they are. But disappointed you will never get to meet the person you thought they’d be. That dream child who is you, only better.’

  Eve, struggling to understand what Diana is telling her, is surprised by the intensity of the urge that comes over her to protect Libby and keep her from hurt.

  ‘You think me unfeeling,’ says Diana. ‘Unmotherly, perhaps. And you may be right. But I know how the world is. I know what it does to young women who fail to conform to the ideal. Libby is not like other girls her age, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. She has a simplicity that means she will be easily taken advantage of. And, let’s be frank, she is no beauty. And I’m afraid if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that if a woman can’t be beautiful, she’d damned well better be rich.’

  ‘What hope is there, then, for those of us who are neither?’

  Eve means to sound droll, but there is no mistaking the plaintive tang. Diana raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow and turns to lead the way back to the table.

  ‘I meant no reflection on you, Mrs Forrester. I was merely trying to explain why money matters to me. Libby is nearly sixteen years old. I should like for her to have a decent trust settled by the time she reaches eighteen.’

  ‘To make her a more attractive marriage proposition?’

  Eve doesn’t bother to disguise her disdain, and Diana’s face hardens.

  ‘Don’t judge me, Mrs Forrester. I have always tried to make the best choice possible given the restrictions of the options open to me. I have never, like so many women, left my life to chance or to the whim of whatever man might happen to come my way and like the look of me.’

  ‘No? Just Guy Lester, who saw you swinging on the trapeze and decided there and then he was going to have you.’

  Diana laughs, but there is little mirth in it.

  ‘I see you’ve been talking to Libby. But ask yourself this, Eve
– may I call you Eve, now we’re talking so frankly? Thank you. Ask yourself how long I’d been on that trapeze, waiting for him to come past. It had only just turned May. The sea was not warm. Guy always thought he had plucked me like a wildflower he happened upon. He never wondered if I could have deliberately planted myself in his way.’

  ‘But surely you loved him?’

  ‘He was thirty-seven, and I was barely eighteen. He was hardly the romantic hero I’d imagined. I married him because he was rich.’

  ‘But kind also. And decent.’

  Now Diana’s eyes blaze, as if a light has been switched on inside them.

  ‘Guy had affairs throughout our marriage. He cheated on me, just like he cheated on his first wife. He was kind and decent as long as you didn’t ask anything of him. Let me tell you something, Eve. I’ve earned every penny of the money I’m entitled to. I don’t know what it is that you’ve done to inveigle yourself into Guy’s will, into this place, this family – but you are not taking that from me. Or from my daughter.’

  Diana has made this whole speech without once raising her voice. No one in the restaurant has looked up; the two elderly women on the next table with their hair set hard like caramelized sugar haven’t paused in their gossiping to turn their way. The champagne-drinking young people in the corner haven’t glanced over.

  What must it cost her, Eve wonders, this iron self-control?

  Eve herself is feeling far from controlled. Her thoughts churn from anger at the slur implied in Diana’s reference to her, to pity for the woman and for the daughter who will bear the brunt of her mother’s sacrifice, to a tugging sense of disappointment in the man who posthumously summoned her here.

  ‘I see I’ve dented your shiny view of Guy,’ says Diana. ‘Perhaps you’re thinking this is just sour grapes from a widow with an axe to grind. But let me ask you one more thing, Eve. Do you know why Caroline Finch has stuck around?’

  Now Eve is genuinely surprised. Why would Diana be suddenly mentioning the housekeeper at this point, when they’d been in the middle of discussing … Oh.

  ‘I see the penny has dropped. I already told you that Caroline was in love with Guy. But perhaps it would surprise you to know those feelings were not entirely without foundation. She was one of his early conquests when he was still married to Madeleine, Duncan and Noel’s mother. I don’t know how long it lasted, but Caroline never got over it. You know, I really think she believed all the way through that if she just hung around long enough, made herself useful enough, he would come back to her. Or perhaps by the time she realized he never would, it was all too late and she’d used it all up. Her youth and her currency, if you know what I mean.’

  Eve is saved from having to reply by the reappearance of Noel and Libby. Both with dripping hair and that flushed exuberance of the recently exercised.

  ‘Do you know, there are people picnicking down there by the pool,’ says Libby. ‘Duncs and Clemmie are there, although they said they won’t come and join us because it would make them die of boredom. Oops.’ She claps a hand over her mouth, as if remembering she ought not to have said that, before continuing. ‘Can we have a picnic one day, instead of always coming here where it’s so stuffy?’

  ‘It’s not stuffy enough,’ says Diana. ‘Some people are wearing nothing more than their bathing suits. Besides, the only reason people are picnicking is to save on paying for lunch. It never happened before the war when everyone here had money to burn, but since then everything is different. Have you seen those fields full of canvas tents? Now all French workers have to have their precious two weeks of holiday, everything here has changed. Clerks and teachers and shopkeepers from Lyon and Lille all sitting out there in the fields playing cards and eating their bread and cheese and hoping some of the magic of the Riviera will rub off on them so they can take it back to their humdrum lives. Most of the old crowd didn’t come back after the war, and the ones that did are sitting on blankets eating marinated sardines from greaseproof paper and pretending it’s a great wheeze rather than a financial necessity.’

  ‘She only asked for a picnic,’ says Noel. ‘Not a bloody great lecture.’

  To their right, a shriek of laughter goes up from the young woman perched on the railings.

  ‘Libby must learn it’s not always possible, or even desirable, to get what one wants.’

  Diana is talking about her daughter, but it is Eve whom she fixes with her long, cool, discomfiting stare.

  Eve has had enough of the Lesters. Enough of second-guessing and worrying about what she says and who she is. Enough of the confusion that being around Noel induces in her. And, looking around at the restaurant tables piled with poached fish and steaks and soufflés as light as air, at the diners with their perfect skin and their bored expressions and their little wisps of swimming costume that probably cost more than her winter coat, she has had enough of this too.

  ‘Very well, I will agree,’ she says out of the blue. ‘I will sign the papers. The house can be rented or sold as you wish. It is high time I returned to my life.’

  From the corner of her eye she sees Noel’s head jerk up.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ says Diana, her shoulders visibly relaxing. ‘I should think tomorrow would be an excellent time to complete the formalities. We will anyway all be together for the wedding reception in the afternoon, and afterwards Bernard can meet us at Villa La Perle with the paperwork. And after that you can get home to your husband.’

  She is anxious to act before Eve can change her mind.

  Well, good, thinks Eve emphatically. Time to draw a line under all this.

  When lunch is over and Noel announces in his usual autocratic way that he will take her home now, she surprises them both by refusing.

  ‘Thank you, but I should prefer to walk,’ she says.

  It is not entirely a lie. She has spotted a gate leading from the hotel out on to a path that looks, from their vantage point on the terrace, to follow the coastline in the direction of Antibes, hopefully as far as Garoupe beach. Suddenly she has a great urge to be alone with her thoughts, and the idea of a stroll with only the sea for company seems irresistible.

  ‘You can’t mean you intend to walk on that rocky path? Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t think it is even passable. No one uses it now. There are places where the sea comes right up over it.’

  Noel doesn’t even try to hide his impatience – which only increases Eve’s resolve.

  ‘If the path is closed or impassable I shall turn back.’

  Out on the path, alone, her spirits rise. There is a glorious smell coming from the same type of bush she’d noticed before while climbing around Garoupe, the one with long, waxy green leaves and garlanded all over with pale flowers. She bends to inhale deeply, her nostrils filling with the strong, sweet scent. Further along there is another bush, and again another.

  The path skirts around the perimeter of the hotel grounds, keeping in line with the rocks, which in some places are wide and shallow, but in others rise up steeply, falling away abruptly into the sea on one side so that Eve finds herself reaching with her left hand to feel the comforting solidity of the hotel wall. She tries to bring her thoughts back to her predicament, to the damning photograph in its stark brown envelope, the unwelcome prospect of one last meeting with the Lesters en masse at the wedding reception the next day. But such concerns trickle away in the face of the here and now.

  She arrives at a point where the path rises steeply, curving around a bend. The surface here is very uneven as if the path has crumbled away, or perhaps been damaged by an explosion during the war. Twice she loses her footing, sending loose stones skating down the almost sheer rock face to her right and splashing into the deep water below. To her left the hotel wall has given way to more rocks and rough plants, which she tries to grasp on to.

  Rounding the bend, she stops. She has reached a place where the high rocks peak. Behind her, she knows, is the hotel, with its preening guests and its groaning tables,
and off to the right, out of sight, that beautiful prison island where, supposedly, a man was kept in isolation with a metal mask locked to his face. And around the next bend in the other direction lies Garoupe and then Villa La Perle, where Sully is angrily bashing at his typewriter and Mrs Finch is trying to mend her damaged heart. But here, there is only the sea, where directly ahead in the distance a boat with a white sail progresses languidly across the horizon.

  Eve steps to the edge of the path so she can look down to where the small rocky cliff on which she stands meets the sea, the water clear near the surface but turning inky blue as it gets deeper. Here in this still place, she becomes aware for the first time of the chorus of cicadas behind her and the gulls overhead, and now she’s heard it, the noise seems almost deafening. The lightest of breezes wafts the heady smell from those white flowers her way until the air seems swollen with it. She feels hot suddenly and closes her eyes to feel the sun on her lids, swaying in the heat and the thick scented air.

  Slam. The blow is such a shock it seems to come from everywhere at the same time, and now, before she has a chance to work out what has happened, she is falling forward into that awful, empty space in front of her and her heart is flying up through her windpipe and out into the scented sky and this is how it ends.

  This.