Inheritance

by Jenny Eclair

  Benedict arrived first. The place was heaving but he managed to find an empty corner near the gents. Every time the toilet door opened, the stench of urine was overpowering. Benedict sat with a pint in front of him and a bag of pork scratchings, trying not to breathe in.

  Hugo turned up half an hour late, and bought them both fresh pints before joining Benedict in his smelly corner.

  He barely managed to sit down before Benedict muttered, ‘I will tell her if you don’t stop it.’

  Hugo wiped the foam from his mouth, ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Seeing that Holbrook girl, the actress – she’s too young and you’re married.’

  Hugo laughed, ‘Have a look around you, old chap, I don’t think I’m the only one with a bit on the side.’ And as if to illustrate his point, a middle-aged man sitting on the next banquette slid his hand beneath the skirt of a mousey young woman who started licking his ear and wriggling around like an electric eel.

  The man had dandruff on his shoulders, and in his non-exploratory hand he held a cigarette which was in danger of burning his fingers.

  ‘Natasha’s my sister,’ Benedict protested.

  ‘I know, old boy, and she’s getting into a right old paddy about the school fees.’

  ‘I’ll pay them, if you promise.’

  Hugo smiled wanly. ‘Thing is, Benedict old chap, in some respects the school fees might not be the only thing you owe. We took Annabel in believing she was yours, flesh and blood, so when you think about it, all these years of bed and board, shoes, holidays and suchlike – plus the girl eats like a horse – then I should say you’ve got off pretty damn lightly.’

  Benedict put his pork scratchings down.

  ‘Are you in trouble, Hugo?’ he asked.

  ‘Not exactly trouble,’ his brother-in-law replied. ‘Let’s just say things are a bit tight – a couple of investments have gone AWOL, usual nonsense, and it’s left me a bit short this month. So if you can clear the school fees . . . ’

  And with that Hugo went to the bar to get another round while Benedict watched transfixed as the wriggling eel girl lifted a wallet out of the middle-aged man’s pocket, only to pass it to an even younger girl sitting on the edge of an adjacent stool.

  Dandruff Shoulders wasn’t the only one to get turned over that evening. By the time the two men parted company, Benedict had written a cheque to cover the school fees and lent Hugo a further seven hundred and fifty pounds.

  ‘I wish I did know,’ he told his brother-in-law as they drunkenly shook hands. ‘I wish I did know if Bel is mine. I’m terribly fond of her.’

  ‘No doubt you are, old man, but give us some credit, you couldn’t have taken care of her. Besides, you’ve never had the slightest proof. Let’s face it, you were in a pickle, she was a baby and Natasha needed a baby. Simple.’

  But as Benedict weaved his way home, he decided that it was time to do what he could to find out, one way or the other. He’d read about some new technology – what was it called? DNA testing. Lord knows what it involved but he needed to find someone who could do it for him, a doctor. Harley Street would be the place. He knew a couple of chaps with practices down there. Dr Whatshisname had got him out of a bit of a hole concerning his todger not six months ago. The thing had started burning, he could barely pee it stung so much, and then a yellowy pus began to ooze from the very tip of it. Benedict had thought he was going to die. ‘Die of fucking?’ his doctor laughed. ‘Not quite, mate, but it is syphilis and you could go mad, so let’s get some of these down you.’ And he prescribed Benedict a two-week course of what he referred to as ‘nuclear-strength antibiotics’ and advised Benedict to use a condom should he find himself in bed with girls who ‘put it about a bit’.

  Yes, McFarlane was the man to go to, he’d get in touch with him first thing in the morning.

  38

  Benedict Finds Out

  McFarlane was sniffy about the idea of DNA testing.

  ‘It’s pretty new-fangled,’ he told Benedict. ‘I don’t actually have the technology here in the surgery, there are all sorts of legal implications and the girl isn’t eighteen, we’d need the consent of her adoptive parents. However,’ he continued, ‘there are other steps that might prove easier to take. For starters, Benedict, you came to me with an infection some months ago, which leads me to think you might have been slightly careless over the years and yet this is the only potential offspring you are aware of?’

  Benedict nodded. ‘I’m not really a condom kind of man, and fortunately most girls these days are on the pill.’

  McFarlane smiled. ‘Nowadays, yes, but back then – when was it, the early sixties? – that wasn’t the case. Anyway, it won’t do any harm to run a couple of basic tests before we go down the DNA route. Oh, and the other thing we need to find out is your blood group. Blood groups can be very useful when it comes to paternity cases, so we’ll take a couple of samples today, blood and semen, and see what comes up.’

  Ten minutes later, having taken a syringe full of blood, dark red with haemoglobin, Dr McFarlane sent Benedict away to masturbate into a plastic cup.

  Fortunately, a battered copy of Playboy did the trick in no time. Benedict couldn’t help feeling proud of how much of a sample he was able to produce.

  ‘Nearly had to ask for another cup,’ he smirked at the nurse.

  McFarlane’s receptionist called him ten days later and Benedict agreed to pop in to discuss the results with the doctor, though it seemed ridiculous that he couldn’t be told everything over the phone and save himself a journey.

  ‘Confidentiality,’ the receptionist had retorted before putting the phone down.

  A couple of hours later, Benedict was sitting opposite Dr McFarlane. To his surprise, he found that his hands were sweating like Swiss cheese as he watched the doctor open a file and scrutinise the results. He was desperate for a positive sign, a nod, a smile, but McFarlane’s face was as blank as an empty Scrabble tile. Eventually, the doctor looked up at Benedict over half-moon glasses, cleared his throat and began to speak.

  ‘There is no possible way you can be this child’s father. The proof is conclusive, even without a DNA test.’

  Benedict slumped back in the expensive black leather chair. ‘Ooof,’ he said. ‘Ooof.’ It was a ridiculous noise, but he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. He would have liked to put his head on his knees, but he didn’t want to seem overly dramatic.

  McFarlane must be used to this. Breaking bad news was part of his job; people came to him with funny lumps and nagging doubts, and some would go home reassured and relieved, but others . . .

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Dr McFarlane had added a measured dose of sympathy into his tone, though not too much, because it wasn’t as if Benedict was going to die, he simply wasn’t a father and it wasn’t as if he’d ever thought he was, not truly, not deep down.

  ‘The fact is, old boy, you don’t have any sperm.’

  Benedict almost laughed; what a chump this man was, he had sperm, his sperm had very nearly spilt over the top of that plastic cup the other week, he had sperm to spare.

  ‘That’s semen,’ McFarlane explained patiently. ‘You ejaculate normally, no woman would ever know, but the fact is, there is no sperm in your semen, so you cannot father children. Oh, and the other peculiar thing, you have a quite a rare blood type: you’re AB rhesus positive. Less than five per cent of the population share your blood group, so it’s something you should know, should you ever need an emergency transfusion.’

  Benedict had gone pale.

  ‘I’m sorry, old man,’ the doctor continued. ‘Do you need a glass of water?’

  Benedict didn’t want a glass of water – he wanted something stronger. He waved away the offer, stood up on shaking legs and started backing out of the door, unable to look at another man.

  ‘I know it’s a bit of a shock,’ said McFarlane, ‘but it doesn’t make you less of a man.’ Benedict put his hand up, he was in no state to continue this conversation. ‘Send me the
bill,’ he instructed, as if he had merely been to the garage to have his car MOT’d, and he left the building having completely forgotten his umbrella.

  As he crossed Cavendish Square, his mind reeled. If only he hadn’t interfered. Things had been fine. Not knowing was agony, but knowing what he knew now was even worse.

  She wasn’t his, there never had been any chance. Benedict began muttering angrily under his breath: ‘Of course she isn’t, I’m an idiot, she’s nothing to do with me, absolutely nothing, zero, shit, oh, Christ.’

  He found a pub at the back of Oxford Street and drank three double gin and tonics in quick succession, threw up in the gents and went home feeling lonelier than he ever had in his life. He’d always thought that one day he might settle down, marry some nice girl with wide child-bearing hips, maybe even move to Kittiwake and raise a brood down there. But not now. He couldn’t marry anyone now, it wouldn’t be fair . . .

  And in that moment, Benedict resolved to make the most of the cards he had been dealt. There would always be girlfriends and dinner dates, and in some respects he was a lucky man, he had the mews house in London and the income from Kittiwake, he hadn’t got cancer, he wouldn’t die . . . though at precisely that moment, he wouldn’t have minded if he did.

  A week or so later, he informed Hugo that he had conclusive medical proof that he was not Annabel’s father, but nonetheless he would continue paying her school fees.

  ‘I’m still very fond of the girl,’ he insisted over the phone. ‘We have a bond, I can’t quite explain it, but, Hugo, I don’t want her to know about this. It’s not as if she ever suspected anything in the first place, no one has ever hinted that I could be her father. I can still be her favourite uncle.’

  But he felt demoted.

  Hugo played it very cool, ‘Well, what did you expect? I always said the mother was a filthy little scrubber, looks like I was right. Could have been anyone’s child, but not yours. Oh well, at least now we know, though I’m not sure how Natasha’s going to take it.’

  Natasha didn’t take it at all well. She told Hugo that she felt she had a stranger in the house, that ever since having Lance she had found it harder and harder to feel any real affection for Annabel, not when she was conscious the whole time that she wasn’t her real mother. The presumed link with Benedict had been the only thing that made it possible to accept her.

  Hugo wished he hadn’t broken the news so late at night. Natasha had been hitting the hard stuff even harder than usual, drinking steadily since before dinner.

  ‘It was easier when she was a baby,’ Natasha slurred. ‘Babies are so vulnerable, you love them because they need you, but as children get older, you start to see them for who they really are, only I don’t know who she is, I only met her mother once.’

  Hugo raised his eyebrows, ‘I didn’t know you’d met her.’

  Natasha laughed; a mean, metallic mirthless sound. ‘Oh, don’t play silly buggers with me, Hugo, we both know I was at that party. She knew who I was, and she certainly knew who you were too.’

  Hugo held his hand up. ‘Whoa, Natasha, I think you’re getting a bit carried away. I think you need to calm down.’

  Only Natasha wasn’t going to calm down, she was upset and on her fifth martini, so if Hugo wanted a fight then she was more than ready to give him one.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Hugo. Young and blond and tarty, I knew at first sight she was right up your street, what with those big tits of hers – no wonder she lost her balance.’

  Hugo was silent for a second. Natasha could be startlingly venomous at times. His voice became cold and sanctimonious: ‘Hold on, Natasha, let’s not forget that the woman in question died that night. Yes, she may not have come from the same background as either you or I, but the fact remains she was a young woman who lost her life in a tragic accident less than a year after she gave you the child you so desperately wanted.’

  At this moment, Annabel – home for the Easter holidays, unable to sleep, and listening from her usual perch on the stairs – heard a glass being hurled at the wall, and her mother yelling the words, ‘But I didn’t want her child! Why should I want a child whose own mother didn’t want her? Whose own mother abandoned her in a drawer? I wanted my own child – adopting the baby was your idea, yours and Benedict’s, and now it’s backfired on the pair of you.’

  There was the sound of a scuffle behind the closed door and Annabel scurried back to her room, knowing full well who would come off worst. No doubt her mother would be wearing sunglasses again in the morning.

  Once she was safely under the bedclothes she tried to make sense of what she had heard. So her mother was dead, but she evidently didn’t die in childbirth. She’d got it wrong all these years, there was no death-bed wish to save the baby ‘at all costs’.

  The truth was, she had been abandoned, her mother hadn’t wanted her, it was as simple as that. The woman who gave birth to her had left her in a drawer because she wanted to go to parties rather than look after her own child. Annabel switched on her side light as if seeing clearly would help her think clearly.

  As for Benedict’s involvement, how come he suspected he might have been her father? If he thought that, then he must have slept with her mother.

  Annabel knew about the rudiments of sex, if not how it actually worked. Occasionally she would slide her finger into her vagina and wriggle it around the small gristly knot that made her breathless. She knew that this was roughly the place where a man needed to put his penis for intercourse and possibly conception to take place. She had done the drawing of the sperm and the egg.

  Benedict must have put his penis into her mother’s vagina, only he wasn’t her father – but she never thought he had been.

  Everything she knew was wrong, no one had ever told her the truth, she had been lied to since she was a tiny baby, unwanted and given away. Why would anyone do that to a baby? Was she really so unlovable?

  Why had Natasha adopted her, was it because she thought she was her brother’s illegitimate baby, or was it because she didn’t think she could ever have her own child? Would she even have bothered if she’d known that one day Lance would come along? Lance who had the same eyes as Natasha and Benedict?

  As for her birth mother, whoever she was, it seemed the only thing she had to thank her for was a big pair of tits.

  Annabel’s breasts were the bane of her life. No matter how hard she tried to disguise them, strange men gawped at them on the street and attempted to grope them in crowds.

  A distant memory surfaced and Annabel blushed with shame as she recalled being touched up by Father Christmas.

  She’d been about thirteen when she’d accompanied Lance into the Harrods grotto and been forced by a foul-breathed Santa to sit on his knee. She had perched there, feeling stupid and not saying anything, while an elf gave Lance some stupid toy and Father Christmas touched her breasts.

  Annabel switches off her bedside light. She is so furious she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

  39

  Annabel Rebels

  No one knew what was wrong with Annabel. She had never been a particularly difficult girl; bright, certainly, definitely university material, not Oxbridge, but possibly Manchester or Leeds, lots of opportunities out there for a girl like her.

  Adopted, yes, the school were well aware, but that was years ago, when she was a baby – it was no excuse now. The girl was sixteen. There were other pupils in her year who had much more difficult personal circumstances to contend with: Ellen Highshore’s father was brain-damaged after scaffolding fell on his head as he walked to the office two years ago; Nina Brady’s mother ran off with a woman who lived three doors down, and poor Penny Clarke’s mother had only recently died after a prolonged and painful struggle with cancer.

  Penny shared the same dorm as Annabel, which made it all the more peculiar, but the undeniable fact remained that the letters were found in Annabel’s locker. All the letters Penny’s mother had sent her daughter in the last few months
of her life, personal letters, full of shared memories and hope for Penny’s future. Letters only a mother could write to her daughter, Penny’s most treasured possessions, kept in a leather box along with some of her mother’s jewellery – which strangely enough hadn’t gone missing. Whoever had tampered with the leather box had ignored the cameo pendant, the topaz-and-diamond ring and the marcasite butterfly brooch, and taken only the letters.

  Nobody could understand why anyone would do such a thing. Penny had not long returned to school after her mother’s funeral. She had no reason to suspect that Annabel was the culprit, she thought they were friends – Annabel had found her crying and comforted her on several occasions.

  But then Miss Clements ordered a locker search.

  Annabel couldn’t explain it either, but she didn’t deny taking them – she merely hung her head and stared at her shoes in the headmistress’s office.

  Miss Clements ‘regretfully’ decided to suspend her until the end of term. She would only be allowed back into school to sit her O levels, during which time she would sleep in the San and speak with no one.

  Because Hugo refused to come and fetch her, Annabel was put into a taxi and dropped off at the train station with enough money to buy a single ticket home. For a moment she thought about catching a train to anywhere but London. Her father had made it plain on the phone that she’d brought shame on the family name, and that he and Natasha were disgusted by her behaviour.

  Annabel had no idea how she was going to face them, let alone how she was going to cope with living at home in that stuffy little box room, trying to revise for her exams with a ten-year-old brother charging around the place.

  Lance didn’t go to boarding school. Natasha refused to let him go, so he was still at his prep school in Westminster, where he showed promise on the clarinet and had private tennis lessons: ‘Both musical and sporty,’ Natasha crowed.