Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

'Could I see her?'

  'Mrs Madigan, you know it's not allowed.'

  'Only a glimpse, that's all I want.'

  'You're risking everything . . .'

  'I haven't seen her for four years .'

  'I really don't think you should be here,' Maral said dismally.

  'What harm could it do - my own daughter?'

  'I was trying to do the right thing. How I wished Krikor would come home. Then she grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye and said: "Mary" - she always called me Mary, not Maral which is what he called me, which was his grandmother's name - "let me see her. Please. Then I'll go."'

  'Maral, who are you talking to?' And before Maral could prevent it, Jeanine was coming down the stairs dressed in her green coat, fiddling with its collar from which Maral had been removing the pigeonshit.

  'There you are!' and with a laugh Cheryl reached out her arms. 'I worried that I wasn't going to recognise you. Happy birthday!'

  Jeanine watched the beringed hands stretch towards her, the fingers that buttoned up her coat, pausing over the damp collar, turning it down and then up again, tousling her hair and smoothing it, unfastening the buttons, one hand sabotaging what the other had done, as if five hands were touching her.

  'And Jeanine gives me this uncertain, shy look, because she doesn't recognise the hulking woman who falls to her knees and kisses her frightened face all over, causing her to squirm away.'

  'Your hair, it's darker - shorter. What a pretty comb. Oh, honey, you're beautiful, so beautiful!' talking to her in this hysterical way. 'What were you doing, my darling?'

  Jeanine looked down, away from this fraught, importunate stranger. She mumbled, trying to make her let go of her arm: 'Maral was helping me with my homework.'

  'Mary was helping you with your homework. How wonderful! You know that Daddy used to help me with mine? And what was your homework, my precious?'

  'I was writing my holiday diary.'

  'And now you've written it what are you going to do?'

  'We were getting ready for a walk,' Maral said, determined to put a stop to this nonsense.

  'Could I come with you? I won't be in the way. I know it's not allowed, but for half an hour. To Holland Park. On her birthday. Thirty minutes.' And touched a square watch-face on her wrist, and plucked at her dolphins.

  'How do I know what she's going through? Because I recognise a mother's instinct. I want to beg her to leave, but I have this irrational need to help her. And like an idiot I say yes.

  'Jeanine had no idea what was going on. I explain to her: "Your mother would like to come for a walk with us." And she looks up and only then does she recognise who it is.'

  'You're back from Australia . . .'

  Cheryl's hands fell silent, expressing what her face could not.

  'As soon as I see Jeanine's face, I regret what I've done, but there's no turning back.'

  'Let me get rid of this,' and Maral put down the cloth she was holding and went to fetch her coat.

  'Not a word to your father,' Cheryl was saying, smiling.

  'Anyway, it's only for half an hour, I tell myself. What would I not have given to be reunited with Seta for half an hour! And I'll be there to protect her. I tell myself.'

  Outside, the sun was shining on the railings as if trying to be summer. Maral locked the door behind them and pocketed the key and the three of them - Jeanine walking in small steps between Maral and her mother - turn up the street and into Holland Park, where Maral sat on a bench and watched two kids throwing an orange frisbee, while Cheryl and Jeanine sat on another bench and talked.

  'I imagine that Jeanine is telling her about her birthday party, the friends she's invited, their names, her new plate to reposition her teeth. Then the two of them stand up and come over. Cheryl is holding her hand.'

  'She wants to go to the loo. Her stomach's a bit upset. Don't worry, I can take her.'

  Maral resumed her place. She did not feel like moving. At one end of the playground was a public convenience, a small brick shed with a green asphalt roof. She watched Cheryl lead Jeanine into it - in full view of Maral, so that she was not concerned - and went on looking at a boy playing frisbee with his younger sister. The age that Seta would be now. She would have sat there for the rest of the morning, looking at the girl catching and throwing the frisbee, for the rest of her days, until the end of the world.

  After a while, she checked her watch.

  'This is taking a long time, and I think: Funny, she didn't have an upset stomach earlier , and then I decide not to wait for her to come out and I go in, and there's no one in there, and I call out Jeanine and no one answers and that's when I see the window is open and I realise that Jeanine will not be there for her party.'

  At one o'clock, Makertich heard a key turn in the lock. He stopped stroking the cream-bellied kitten, frowned. 'Where is my daughter?'

  The rest of that day was terrible.

  Much later, the doorbell rang and they had a surge of hope, but it was Phoebe's mother dropping off Phoebe early for the birthday party, which in all the tumult they had forgotten to cancel. And when the telephone rang, it was a policewoman to say that Mr Madigan's daughter had been located, was with her mother all afternoon, perfectly safe.

  That night was the only time she saw Makertich drunk.

  'Where's that bottle of Colares?' and he poured some for himself and then as an afterthought for Maral - 'though I didn't deserve it'.

  13

  D ON F LEXMORE HAD WALKED out on Cheryl five months earlier, but for most of that time she was too proud to accept it. She believed that he would come back. He had squeezed her till there was nothing more to squeeze, and vanished again without a sigh, faithless to a proverb.

  'He left her without even enough to pay the telephone bill.'

  Upon their divorce Makertich had settled on Cheryl the six-bedroomed house in St John's Wood. Plus a substantial lump sum, which ensured that she would be able to live well for all her days to come.

  'We, as his lawyers, were hardly involved,' Bennett said. 'His idea of the right thing grieved us. We disagreed with the deal and wanted to protect him. But would he take our advice?'

  Maral said: 'At first, Cheryl didn't mind not seeing her daughter. She had Don. This passion she has for someone so rotten, you must feel sorry for her.'

  But Cheryl was useful and interesting to Don only when she was with Makertich: inside the honeypot and spooning it out. The last thing Don wanted was for Cheryl to leave 11 Clarendon Crescent. To be living with her was not in his scheme. Until one morning in their fourth year together, she overheard him in his dressing-room singing 'The Carnival is Over' in a melodious voice, and then silence, and minutes later out of the window there he was, swinging a canvas suitcase into the back of a cab, and when she raced outside and demanded to know where he was going, he looked at her with eyes that could be so beautiful, but which came staring from the face of a dingo, and said: 'There's a top block of land I have to check out in Jarvis Bay. Don't worry, baby. I'll be back in a week, ten days max.'

  She took it badly, and not only because she could not stand to be on her own, the Seekers' words reverberating in her head, the words like flies that dashed against the window and buzzed around and died, and all the while imagining Don and those holes he was digging for his eucalypts, that he had dug her into. Because her own true love had left her with a habit worse than missing him.

  A space, a loneliness, yawned open. Unfillable, not even with row upon row of blue gums and scribbly gums and manna gums, forests of them, covering mountain slopes and deserts, until one morning she woke up and through the dark spidery scaffold of branches she heard on the radio what day it was, August 13, and climbed out of bed to put her face on and go and find her daughter to wish her happy birthday. But once she had lifted Jeanine through the window of that public convenience in Holland Park, her determination was maniacal to go on clinging to the girl with every muscle in her body, like the trunk of a tree that if she wrapped her
arms around would lead her back up into sunlight.

  14

  S MALL HAND NO LONGER IN his: Makertich's desire to have Jeanine returned was more than matched by Cheryl's savage resolve to keep her.

  'Cheryl hired the services of a solicitor called Skilling who knew about matrimonial law.'

  Skilling, acting quickly, acquired an ex parte application that allowed Cheryl to keep custody. Makertich was cautioned that if ever he took back his daughter a tipstaff would come on the judge's order and return Jeanine instantly to her mother.

  Over crisps the following evening - leftovers from the birthday party - Makertich and his lawyer discussed the matter.

  'To my client's disgust, I advised a cautious approach,' Bennett said. 'It sounds odd to say this, in these days of over-parenting and Fathers for Justice, but you have to remember at that time the father had fewer rights.'

  'Skilling is lethal,' Bennett warned Makertich. His fingers on the hand-cut glass were thick and white. 'I knew him at Cambridge. He makes the point that you - without a legal leg to stand on - forbade a mother from gaining access to her daughter. And that's the amuse-bouche . His line of argument: at the time the mother was under a lot of pressure, she regrets it now, but it was monstrous of the father to have made not seeing the child a condition of providing reasonable financial relief. It was not in the interests of the child, and however badly the mother behaved in succumbing to the lure of this buck, she regrets it and she would like to see her daughter again. It grieves me to say this, Christopher, but the judge will find in her favour. Which is why I have come here tonight to give you this advice as your lawyer, but I hope also as your friend: don't sue for custody. Go for shared access.'

  'Krikor never forgave Mr Bennett for that. All these expensive men to advise him and he could not get his daughter back. The final straw when he discovered that a man in Bennett's own firm, David Blaxworth, the same person whom Krikor had paid to deal with Cheryl's affairs, had recommended Skilling to her! Not to mention that Krikor would be footing the bill for the case against him. He never discussed it with me. It was too painful. To be paying for the lawyer who was denying him access to his own child!'

  As well as hoping to change the subject, while letting Makertich brew on it, Bennett had brought along a file on Don Flexmore. It added little to what previous investigations had uncovered. Don Flexmore was a fictitious name, as was Carl-Andrew Purcell. He had been born Craig Edge, the son of a telephone engineer from Darwin who left home when he was a child. His 'nieces' were daughters from a previous marriage. He was bisexual and a suspected rapist, with a liking for heterosexual young men. As James Thetan, he had briefly worked for a Dutch investment bank, until he was sacked following accusations of bid-rigging. And then he had disappeared, a habit in which he excelled. Xemu Holdings no longer traded. 'He's probably assumed another name in pursuit of another victim,' Bennett said. 'We're talking about one of the biggest rogues God put breath into without bringing him to account.'

  But Jeanine was Makertich's priority, not Don. That he followed his lawyer's advice was neither from weakness nor out of fear of the Press. It was because he dreaded the impact on Jeanine's well-being of a violent and protracted tug of war.

  'Bluntly put,' Bennett said, accepting another glass of Chambolle Musigny, 'the law is so framed so that no power can wrest Jeanine from Cheryl if it isn't Cheryl's wish to let her go.'

  15

  J EANINE MISSED HER FATHER . She could not sleep and would not eat. She wanted cinnamon toast like Maral made; her home-knitted cardigans. She pleaded with her mother: 'Let me go home.'

  Cheryl was obliged to deliver Jeanine to Makertich at 5 p.m. the following Friday, but from the outset she ignored the family court's decree that the father had the right to shared access.

  Makertich telephoned her the first time she failed to arrive.

  'I'm afraid the child won't come,' Cheryl said.

  'Let her speak to me.'

  'She doesn't want to.'

  Makertich applied to the judge.

  'How old is your daughter?'

  'Ten.'

  The judge was sorry, he could not force Jeanine to speak to her father. Still less could he order her to stay with Makertich.

  His impotence exasperated Makertich. 'Then why don't you ask her yourself?'

  She was too young to be asked to express a view. She was not a reliable witness, he was told.

  Maral said: 'At that age, the assumption was that the mother was the more appropriate parent. But it became apparent that Cheryl was not telling the truth.

  'One afternoon, Jeanine rang - speaking from a call box. "I want to come and live with you." Her mother had had to go off somewhere . . . and then the coins ran out. It was a big decision for a child to make, and she had made it herself. I couldn't get hold of Krikor, so I grabbed the car keys, but I'm not a confident driver and I was in Swiss Cottage before I realised my mistake. If I had not lost my way - if I had arrived sooner in Tallis Drive - who knows how things might have turned out?

  'She was sitting on the front step, bag packed, this little figure, with a Mexican hat and a koala bear. She leaped to her feet when she saw who it was, and was already at the gate when a car pulls up and Cheryl leaps out, eyes wild, and seizes Jeanine and yells at me. All I can do is stand in the street and watch her pushing Jeanine inside. I was struck by how lonely and destroyed she looked, with the only thing to plug her loneliness being her daughter.

  'And that night she rang Krikor, Jeanine standing next to her in the call box, saying that she was going to take Jeanine away . . . unless . . . unless she had his word he would not try anything like that again.'

  'But, Cheryl, it was she who asked to come home,' Makertich said.

  'Then I will take her away and you will never see her again.'

  'All right, all right,' Makertich said. 'I give my word.'

  'On your grandmother's memory,' for she was crafty enough to know what would bind him.

  'On my grandmother's memory,' through his teeth. His grandmother who had set store by keeping a promise. 'But what are you going to tell her?'

  When she did not answer, he pictured her standing in the kiosk, looking down at their daughter.

  Then in a voice of unnatural calm: 'I'll let her know what you've decided. She'll be disappointed, but I do think she ought to be told.'

  'Told what?' Jeanine said, staring up at her mother, wiping her eye, fully aware that the conversation was about her.

  'Your father has decided to leave us. He is going back to Australia.'

  16

  R AIN , AT FIRST A few untrustworthy spots, and then the leaves all dripping. From her window upstairs, the view was brown and grey, autumnal and chill. She heard the woman calling. 'Jeanine . . . ? Jeanine . . . ? Jeanine, what are you doing?' It didn't seem like a question.

  Her body still stiff from standing there, she turned and went downstairs.

  Cheryl stood on the landing, looking up.

  'I've made you some egg noodles.'

  'I don't like eggs.'

  'They don't taste like eggs, but they've got eggs in them. They taste nice,' and reached out to take her hand.

  Now that Cheryl had rediscovered her daughter, she had rediscovered her dreadfully. She promised Jeanine that she would not let her go again. Only when she suspected the immensity of Jeanine's longing to be with her father did her anger and pain flare up.

  Despite all the harm his wife had done to him, Makertich had never allowed Cheryl to be bad-mouthed in front of Jeanine. This is not how Cheryl behaved. Almost from the instant that she bundled Jeanine back into the house and slammed the door on Maral, she worked hard to fell the image of Makertich that existed in Jeanine's head.

  How flammable Cheryl had been when she and Chris Makertich kissed on Cottesloe Beach. The sea breeze swelling her Thompson's ball gown and jingling her earrings. Warmer than the sand, the memory of their intoxicating dance at the Golf Club, still dancing on a white shiny table when
the sun came up - 'Armenians are good dancers, too.' Her heart had burned down since then. Deserted by Don Flexmore and yet unable to blame him, she fixed on the easiest target.

  In doing so, she twisted things in her head. Remembered them in different colours. All that Flexmore had done to her she piled instead on to Jeanine's father. But she had not blotted Flexmore out. In her warped alchemy - and in the greatest insult of all to her husband's life - she turned him into Makertich.

  'He never loved you.'

  'Daddy?' in a small voice.

  'You don't remember this. I had to take care of you.'

  Jeanine, though young, had pleasant memories, wonderful memories. 'No, no, that's not right.' She remembered how scary her mother had been when she came to collect her from Clarendon Crescent; how she herself had resisted climbing out of the toilet window; how she had wept and wept, wanting to go back for her birthday party.

  'The birthday party was a set-up,' Cheryl said. 'There was never going to be a birthday party.'

  'But he was getting me a present . . . I saw him drive off.'

  'He was driving to the airport,' Cheryl sighed. 'He was leaving you. Us. "I will go to where you will never find me."'

  'That's not true!' She did not believe what her mother was saying. She ran upstairs and crawled into bed and covered her face with a pillow. It would be a long time before she did not cry herself to sleep, although when she was older she would cry in someone else's house, so as not to cry at home.

  But like a mutton-bird chick, Cheryl was harvesting her daughter before she had learned to fly.

  Jeanine's memories of her father began to totter and creak under Cheryl's barrage. She could not work out why someone so evil should have aroused in her such warm feelings, and why, if her father really was so mean, she and Cheryl continued to lead a good life in a comfortable house. But as she listened to her mother's plausible, soft voice, so, inevitably, bit by bit, did Jeanine conspire in rubbing out the tender image that she had preserved of Makertich and replacing it with her mother's treacherous version, until what she retained was not the portrait of a kind man who would have protected her and done anything to keep her from harm, but an ogre from a children's book, a one-eyed monster who had abandoned her in the dark forest and deliberately put the widest ocean in the world between them.