Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  'If he'd had more time -' he suggested.

  'Pah! He had all the time. He had nothing but time.'

  'It's always hard . . . with philosophical memoirs.'

  She swivelled her head. 'Philosophical memoirs? He wasn't writing a history?'

  'He began with that. But I encouraged him to go more personal. To find his voice. To get at the inside story - and through the inside story the wider history. Through the personal comes the cosmic,' he blathered.

  'I had no idea he was interested in philosophy . . .'

  'God, yes. He was particularly taken by the works of Montaigne.'

  'Montaigne? The French writer?'

  He had been carried away.

  'That's right. Montaigne gave him the reason to go on living, he told me. His favourite line - "Our greatest and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately." In his last seven years - and I say this without fear of contradiction - your father lived appropriately.'

  Jeanine put down her wine and stared straight into Andy's eyes.

  'What does that mean, to live appropriately ?'

  Andy's answer was a stone to stick under a tottering cart. 'It's no good me telling you, Jeanine. You'd have to read it for yourself, what he wrote.'

  In her expression, incredulity and anger mingled with curiosity. 'At the end . . . how did he strike you?'

  'Complex.' Then added for good measure: 'There was really no one like him.'

  'You obviously knew him better than me.'

  'Not necessarily,' his eyes reverting to the ceiling. But he was aware of a sadness in her voice beyond the sarcasm.

  'Look at me. I want to know what he was like.'

  Every problem, they say, is new. Here he was, lying to an upset girl about her dead father, not a dilemma catered for in any of the titles on the Carpe Diem list. The only way of escape was to plunge on, towards the figure of Furnivall. At least Andy had a body to work with. And now a manuscript.

  The only true authority he had possessed over a book. One by a dead man that no one was likely to read.

  In his desperation, he continued to describe the character of his teacher. He could not lay claim to someone he did not know, but if he pictured Stuart Furnivall, it was easy to resurrect Christopher Madigan.

  Across the room, Jeanine regarded Andy with a look of unguarded re-evaluation. She repeated in a husky voice: '"English to his toe-nails"? But he had this thing about coming from Armenia.'

  'Armenia?'

  'Yes, but don't think he told me, I had to find that out myself.'

  Andy swallowed. He, too, was having to assimilate rather a lot.

  What did he know about Armenia? The massacre for one, not that he had any idea of the details. He ransacked his mind. He remembered that Armenia was the first Christian state and that Byron believed it to be the site of Paradise and that the country that today called itself Armenia was considered not a patch on the original. And that Charles Aznavour was Armenian, as was Khachaturian the composer. That was it. Sum total.

  'Being Armenian was certainly important to him, but so were other values.'

  'Like what?'

  He took a long breath and again sought Furnivall in the ceiling above. It struck him that Jeanine not having set eyes on her father for seven years, much might have happened to Christopher Madigan. He could have gone into therapy and become a terrific bloke. He could have started reading Montaigne in the original. He could even have written a book. It might be hard for her to believe, but practically anything was possible. Each of them possessed only the haziest portrait of her father. All Andy had to do was to make it plausible.

  Pointless to tread water any longer. He submerged his head.

  'Your father, Jeanine, believed in the power of empathy.'

  'Of what ?'

  On her face that expression of adjusting to a revelation still more astonishing.

  He breathed out, clinging to the memory of his teacher. '"Stand in my shoes, see with my eyes, feel with my heart" - that was one of his mottoes.'

  'Really?'

  'Another was: "Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand out like stone. Kindness in another's trouble, courage in your own."'

  She shook her head and laughed, but with an edge of uncertainty. Like many daughters, Jeanine had felt that she understood her father better than he did himself, despite not having spent time with him since she was a small girl.

  'You've got the wrong man. My father didn't have a heart.'

  'That was his business face, Jeanine.'

  Her hand rose in a tentative motion and fell. 'You . . . you did business with him?'

  'I didn't myself, but I observed him with others.'

  'Tough. I bet he was tough as guts.' She looked at her stockinged feet. 'It takes three Greeks to get the better of a Jew, but it takes three Jews to get the better of an Armenian. I read that recently.'

  'You could trust your father with business, but no one enjoyed doing business with him. If it was a fifty-fifty deal, he'd take the hyphen.'

  She nodded to herself, her head at more of an amused angle. 'That would be him. Still, from what you say, he did change a lot . . . The person I knew - thought I knew - wasn't worth knowing.'

  'Nonsense!' chucking the hair-pin on the floor. 'That's ridiculous!' Now he was being heedless, but she might have been talking about himself. This was how Sophie had made him feel. How his sister had talked about their father.

  'Andrew, please . You were his friend - probably his only friend. That's something worth discovering. I thought he was incapable of friendship, of love . . .'

  'What about you?'

  It was a simple phrase tossed off. But something in her swam towards what Andy had said. His eyes found hers and he had this mystical flash. The floor was a raft and they were floating on it, and the world outside was the mess.

  'I thought he had no redeeming quality whatsoever . . .' in a fractured voice, her face tender as if the slightest touch would hurt it.

  Andy dropped his eyes. Up until now he had got away with the assassination of Christopher Madigan. He put down his glass and stood up. Before he blew it. Before he had time to dwell on that flash. But he would not forget it.

  She was looking up at him. 'Oh, don't worry, I loved him too, adored him - until I found out how he treated my mother. It's what killed her in the end. She couldn't live with the truth.'

  'Very few people can,' he nodded.

  'What about you?' in a disarming way. 'You seem able to.'

  'Me? Yes, well . . .' He was about to make such a fool of himself. 'Listen, there's nothing I'd like to do more than chat with you about your father, but I don't have time right now. Could we speak again?'

  'When?'

  'I'm tied up for the next few days. Why don't we meet later in the week?'

  'Yes,' she said, pulling herself together. She leaned forward and released her legs from under her and twisted around. 'Because I need to tell you something important.'

  'You tell me what you need to tell me, and I'll tell you about your father and his book,' he said pleasantly, and went to fetch her coat.

  'What about Friday?' she said, buttoning it up. 'Could we meet then?'

  'Friday would be good. I'll take you to my favourite restaurant.'

  They arranged to meet at the Camoes at 7.30 p.m. He wrote down the address. He was not thinking ahead. He did not ask for her telephone number or where he might contact her. He was in that much of a hurry to get her out of his flat. Out of his bloodstream, too.

  Jeanine folded away the piece of paper and thrust her hands into her pockets. Still processing what he had told her.

  'My father was so secretive. You've reminded me of how little I knew him.'

  'Well, whatever I can do to help . . .'

  She looked up. 'There is one thing. I would love to read his book.'

  'And read it you shall,' in a careless tone, opening the door, surprising himself with what he had said. 'It's in the office right now.'

 
'Why don't you bring it with you on Friday?'

  They were standing close to each other. Their shoulders brushed and they started back.

  Before Andy could formulate his prevarication, Jeanine frowned, appearing to remember an important matter that she had forgotten. Her voice became stiff, her expression flintier.

  'I ought to warn you, I am thinking of contesting the will. I spoke this afternoon to my lawyers - actually my father's lawyers, before he decided to leave them for this Vamplew character, of whom no one has heard.' In her pale face her eyes shone doubly brown. 'They say I have an exceptionally strong case.'

  14

  A NDY HEARD IT RINGING from the front steps. One last look at her Beetle driving off. Then he closed the door, making it in three bounds to the landing.

  He ran into the living room and hurled himself at the telephone.

  'Hello?'

  No answer. He could make out a woman in the background singing 'Do you see, do you see, do you see how you hurt me, baby ?' before another voice he had known all his life said: 'Andy?'

  'Oh, hi,' and slumped to the floor.

  'I've been trying to reach you all week. Mum told me about Sophie. I'm sorry, Andy.'

  'Thanks,' although his sister had never camouflaged her opinion of Pirate's Dream as she called Sophie ('as in sunken chest'). Another one who believed that he could do with more maturation.

  In a bruised voice, she said: 'Maybe now you'll understand how I felt about Jeremy.'

  Andy and his sister had a relationship of arrested development. They regressed in each other's company, picking up the old script they were working on in Shaftesbury.

  When Andy was fifteen, his sister was exasperated into telling him at last about the pocket tape recorder that she had found five summers earlier in their father's desk. She had taken it up to her room and listened, embarrassed and mesmerised at the same time. Her father sounded unlike himself, his words charged with love, tenderness, consideration. He must have recorded the message on one of his furloughs abroad and posted the tape to their mother in a fierce fit of missing her, she thought. Until their mother's name should have been mentioned. And then, with a subtle alteration in his tone, the name of another woman, prefixed by the word 'darling'.

  'She definitely wasn't called Lynn, who he was talking to. Probably it was Lynn's predecessor.'

  The tape confirmed what his sister suspected and what their mother had tried to guard her children from knowing: their father's history of women. It was the reason why his sister had refused to accompany Andy that summer to Grand Falls. By the time she was able to make Andy understand that she had been trying to protect her little brother from the truth, George Larkham was dead and a pattern established. Andy thought that she was being extremely unfair about their father, while his hurt and furious defence of him got on her nerves.

  Relations between them had remained pretty well insoluble.

  Sometimes when exasperated Andy would let off bitter plumes of steam about his heart-sink sister. How large and gauche and glum she was, given to bouts of despair and biting her nails - the only thing she appeared to live on, he joked cruelly. What else could make her so prickly? No one had been able to work it out. Over the years, his friends had developed a lurid picture of a sit-by-the-fire who still packed her shoes at her mother's and preferred nothing more than to ferment in the countryside, curating her slights - 'some of them so ancient they could be carbon-dated', he complained. Often she was so lost to herself that she would shut herself in the toilet and sob and sob and sob. She was never embarrassed if Andy knocked on the door to ask what the matter was. And a nightmare on the river when fishing.

  'She's been like that every day I remember,' Andy maintained blackly. 'She was probably born like that.' Like the reincarnated member of an errant Merovingian tribe. People were. That kind of scowl took time.

  Still, everyone agreed: something was not right with her.

  She could be pretty. She was almost pretty. Their mother kept telling her she could be beautiful if only she stopped dressing like a frayed sofa and did herself up and ate sensibly. Although that was being optimistic, Andy thought. 'It's hard to be beautiful while you're imitating a security guard at an incineration plant.' Her upper half was delicate, but below the waist she was a large-hipped mammoth. A tulip in a bucket, he joked. Or one of their mother's paint tins that she used for her plants.

  His sister had challenged his affections for so long.

  'Don't run away with the idea that I don't love her, I do. But it's no mystery to me why she's still on her own.' Nodding in a significant way to a tortured Canadian voice singing I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling . That was another thing about her. She loved Joni Mitchell.

  Which was why it was redundant when speaking of his sister to talk of a relationship. There was a horror Andy used to see in Shaftesbury, an unemployed collector of Star Wars memorabilia with hair tufted and gelatined, until he popped up in the shape of his sister's boyfriend. Jeremy P. Tanyard, or Swamp Thing as Andy used to call him, was responsible for his sister's sole experience of romance to date, and not someone that he warmed to much. It was not simply his lunatic fringe; Andy did not trust him a foot. Quite right too, as events proved. His sister moved in with Swamp Thing, a council flat in Bell Street, but he ejected her after three weeks, no explanation.

  After that his sister went back to living with their mother. She juddered around the place, hitting into walls, as if she was being directed by remote. But the mud she threw at Andy over time had cracked off and brushed away. All he wished for her now was to meet someone who might appreciate her good qualities.

  Andy went through the motions of saying yes, he was able to appreciate how she must have felt about Jeremy, and was sorry that he had not been more sympathetic at the time, but he couldn't wait to get off the phone.

  'Thanks for ringing.'

  15

  A NDY WAS SITTING BEHIND his desk the following morning - he had been there since 8.30 a.m., the first to arrive - when Vamplew rang.

  Madigan's daughter had slapped a caveat on the will.

  Andy's regret was mingled with relief. Walking to work, he had made up his mind: whatever Jeanine had to tell him at their upcoming dinner on Friday, it was irrelevant. He planned to confess everything. He had not known her father at all. His presence in Chapel 8 had been an accident. If that meant forfeiting his fortune, so be it.

  But his resolve dissipated even as Vamplew continued in a level voice: 'As the executor, I have written to say that they must show grounds for this or back off.'

  Andy struggled to recall their previous conversation. 'You believe they have grounds?'

  'Unlikely. I believe it's a rigmarole to scare the estate while they decide whether to dispute the will. On which subject, may I ask formally what is your attitude to a claim by her?'

  'My attitude?'

  'Do you wish to keep all of your entitlement?'

  'Why, do you think I shouldn't?'

  Vamplew reminded Andy that in the event of any claim he had to be neutral and await the outcome of the court - unless a settlement was reached beforehand between the beneficiaries.

  Andy described Jeanine's second appearance at his flat. He wanted to tell him the truth.

  For a long time, Vamplew did not speak. At last, he said: 'Do you intend to see her again?'

  'I've invited her out to dinner this Friday.'

  There was no response. The traffic went by and down the corridor Goodman was greeting Angela good morning. Then that formal, distant voice: 'If you wish to preserve your entitlement to the estate, it seems to me you should not meet her again, but conduct yourself at arm's length.'

  Nothing happened for the next few days. No midnight bells. No solicitor's letters. The only post the following morning - Vamplew's letter for Andy to show to his bank manager. The effect was instantaneous. Not only did Miss Obiora unblock Andy's credit card and increase his overdraft, allowing him to settle al
l his bills and pay back Angela her hundred pounds, but she urged him to consult with a private wealth expert, and offered to set up the appointment and even accompany Andy to the introductory meeting in Canary Wharf.

  Vamplew had also enclosed a copy of Christopher Madigan's preamble. It was easily paraphrased. Life was absurd. An ugly game. A few paragraphs gave the flavour.

  'I have no idea who you are. Possibly you are a person familiar to me. Or a casual acquaintance who receives this money as a reward for fidelity to habit and ritual. You might be someone I have never met. I'm not concerned. Knowledge is overrated . . .

  'Whatever impulse caused you to be an Attender at the final prayer, I enjoin you to remember that an old man's sayings are seldom untrue. My fortune bought ease and convenience, but its own poverty, too. Nobody is suddenly good or suddenly rich. Nor are we suddenly loved. Before I acquired my wealth, no one but my grandmother, my parents and the woman I was to marry appeared interested in my well-being. After I became rich, that changed . . .

  'All that money has taught me is this: If you believe in love, you are taking on an illusion that will kill you. The only reality is blind chance. It was luck that brought me this money. I distribute it now in the same vein.'

  Andy read and reread the letter. It seemed written in a stilted style. He was going to have to find out more. His sole lead was the address in Holland Park which Vamplew had mentioned in the will. This was where Maral Bernhard was permitted to live for the next eighteen months, before it became hers to divide with Andy. Jeanine apart, Andy's fellow Attender was the only person who might be able to answer his welter of questions.

  11 Clarendon Crescent was a substantial white house in a quiet street bumpy with sleeping policemen. Twice after work, Andy opened the low cast-iron gate, climbed the steps and rang the bell. The tall windows, four to a floor, remained dark behind their shutters and no one came to the door, which for a front door was rather distinguished, with stained-glass panels in the pattern of the zodiac.

  On the second occasion, Andy walked down an alley to the rear of the house. A large copper beech dominated the back garden, obscuring a stucco facade the colour of clotted cream. The most noticeable feature was a brick tower - he expected to see a stream of bats fly out of it.