Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  'And now, I will have some more wine, please,' and pushed out her glass. She looked up. 'You're not writing this down?'

  22

  E ARLY A PRIL , THE SUN pressing through the branches, the roots protruding from the lawn like the bones on the back of his hand, Makertich sat in a chair under the copper beech, tartan blanket over knees, reading his newspaper. He looked up at her over it when she came outside to collect the tray.

  'If you're going to insist on staying, hadn't we better find you something to do?'

  He introduced her to aspects of his life of which, until then, she had remained ignorant. As part of her new duties, she visited bookshops, antiquarian dealers and libraries, to collect the books he had ordered.

  She cut out newspaper articles that he circled with his pen, and pasted them into a marbleised green album.

  'Up until then, I did not have much time for reading. My level was the children's stories I read aloud to Jeanine. But these books became my education. The articles, too. Krikor was very good at encouraging me to study whatever he had marked. And anything I did not understand he explained, in the same way I imagine as he had helped Cheryl. Like that, I learned a lot - well, except about horses. I'm not interested in horses.'

  Most of her work continued to centre around 11 Clarendon Crescent. She had nothing to do with the Cicada Foundation or the family office in Duke Street.

  'He never talked to me about his charity or his business or his mining investments. That's why this sticks in my mind.'

  One December morning, Makertich ran into the kitchen.

  'There's been an earthquake in Soviet Armenia!'

  'He had seen the images - villages reduced to rubble, a teacher with his dead daughter slung over his shoulder. The ethnic fights affected him most. Boys clubbing old women. Young Azeris pouring teapots of petrol over girls, setting them alight. It was another smash to our culture, and he needed someone to tell it to.

  'We looked on the map. Some of the worst damage was in Alexanderpol, which the Soviets had renamed Leninakan. Streets of half-blocks of flats, the temperature 20 degrees below with no electricity or gas, because the Azeris had turned off the supply. The strange thing was, the tenth-century churches had survived. They were built with two layers of walls, so that any tremor reinforced the strength of the foundations. But modern flats had collapsed, because they had skimped on the right cement.'

  She asked him if he intended to go there.

  'Can you imagine? To go back and feel some of that antagonism.' Anyway, he would be a liability. Rats everywhere, no clean water. He would only fall ill.

  'But he wanted to help. He went and packed supplies in a giant hangar in Heathrow. There, he learned just how bad things were, much worse than he imagined, and he made an approach through his Foundation to charter a plane to fly in food and medication. Initially, the Communist authorities blocked him. Why would an Englishman do this? - because that's who they thought they were dealing with. The truth was, they didn't wish to rock the boat with the Soviets to whom they were fantastically grateful for saving them from the Turks. Thanks to Russia - their Uncle Kedi - those Armenians had never felt more secure, with one of the world's great armouries on their side - and in return they had this loyalty. But when rumours circulated revealing what a large amount Krikor was prepared to donate, a local bigwig got in touch: they would accept his offer of support on one condition - that he invest in a copper mine that the earthquake had closed down. And, of course, Krikor agreed. For him, the copper mine was a shortcut, the fastest way to reach those who had no shelter. The only reason he gave money to reopen it was so that he might feed people who were dying of starvation and cold, who didn't have a tent to sleep under.

  'Soon afterwards, when Soviet Armenia became independent and the mine came up for tender, the same official approached Krikor to buy it outright. Krikor did not own it for long. It was one of several mines that he bought and sold. I'm telling you this because of what happened later, but don't get me started - here is not the place to go into it.

  'What I want to say is that after the earthquake, I noticed more references to Armenia in the articles I cut out. It was obvious that the earthquake had opened up hidden feelings. But he did not talk to me about it. There were still some questions that as soon as you opened your mouth to ask them, you had to pull it shut.'

  One of the articles that Maral read before pasting it into his album was a review of a biography of Byron, who had spent a period of weeks in Venice learning the Armenian language. Makertich had underlined the quotation: My master the Padre Pasquale Aucher . . . assured me 'that the terrestrial Paradise had been certainly in Armenia' - I went seeking it - God knows where - did I find it? - Umph! - Now & then - for a minute or two.

  The quotation struck her as a curious one for him to be contemplating.

  He stopped shouting at night. Jeanine's painful ghost receded. Everything carried on as before. The sun, the birds, the copper beech had nothing to do with him. They could not penetrate his mood, the envelope of restraint into which he had folded himself until the day when he could be with his daughter.

  23

  J EANINE P YKE WAS SIX weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday when she met him.

  She was sitting at her desk on the fifth floor of a modern building off New Bond Street. It was her second year at Amazon Solutions, an environmental organisation of which she constituted half the staff. She was forwarding an e-mail to her boss, Henry Bale, who made up the other half.

  Their two desks were situated on the landing in an exposed position between the loos and the lifts, and faced the spacious offices of a derivatives trader. Xavier Bidencope had been at school with Bale, and guiltily admiring of Bale's concerns for the environment had leased to him this dog-leg of vacant space from where to pursue his planet-saving strategies. Whenever Bale was away, Jeanine held the fort. Watching out for the barbarians.

  On this sunny morning in July, around noon, a man about as old as her father would be stepped out of the large glass double doors opposite and stood waiting for a lift to take him down. Jeanine was suspicious of every person who made it to this floor, but something in his grim expression caught her eye. He had the crumbled, preoccupied face of someone bearing the cares of the world, condemned to hang, before he gave her a quick sideways glance and saw her examining him.

  Then he smiled and sauntered over.

  He was thickset, his hair blonder than his moustache, and dressed in an over-tight blue suit in a style now out of fashion.

  'What's this company?' looking around at the photographs of whales and polar bears, and the poster of a line of Indians in a jungle, standing in a warlike posture with spears and their bodies painted in tribal designs.

  She said: 'The philosophy of Amazon Solutions is to give an attributable value to the standing forest by paying for its ecosystem services.'

  'How does it work?'

  Her tone was cool, professional. 'Governments are too slow, philanthropists too few, so we're looking for private individuals who believe in the cause.'

  'Go on.'

  'The idea is that you're putting your money into a fund and a percentage of the profits trickle down to those who live in the forest. You're paying them not to cut down the trees and also paying for the service that the forest is delivering. We need to make the forest worth more standing than cleared.'

  'You mean for palm oil, beef and soya?'

  'Exactly. Which means the money goes to those who are the true guardians of the forest.'

  He nodded, peering more closely at the Indians on the wall. 'The soldiers on the front line in the battle against climate change . . .'

  She looked at him. 'That's right. At the moment we have a pilot scheme going in Guyana. For more information you can see our website.'

  'What a coincidence,' he said, stretching the vowels for dramatic effect.

  He was like a friend in a dream whom she did not know. In his tight suit and striped tie. His smile made her uncomfo
rtable. He looked as if he wore mascara on his lashes. She wondered if his hair was dyed. Also, if he might be wearing blue contact lenses.

  'You happen to be looking,' and performed a drum roll with his fingers, 'at an uncompromising eco-warrior.'

  She had to restrain a laugh.

  To bolster his point, he told her of the sharkfin bust he had been on in the Galapagos. And of the time when he had sailed with Greenpeace in New Zealand. 'If you're ever in Auckland, let me know, I can get you a room in the best hotel.'

  'I don't stay in that kind of hotel,' she said with her usual taunting frankness. Still scornful of anyone who came in or out of Xavier's office, sharkfin bust or no.

  He had hoped to impress, but he felt her irritation and it put him on his guard.

  'Like your job?' glancing down at her. His eyes were the colour of carbon paper.

  'It doesn't pay well, but I like it.'

  But he had noticed something was wrong. He leaned over. 'Man trouble?'

  'My mother just died.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Yes, she'd been ill for some time.'

  'Were you close?'

  'We had our moments.'

  'Where are you from?' he asked.

  'I was born in London, but my mother was from Australia.'

  'Ah,' he said significantly, ' ca s'explique .'

  Two large brown eyes squinted up at him. 'What did you say?'

  'In Australia,' he remarked in a solemn way, 'when the Kurnai of Victoria saw the Aurora Australis, they exchanged wives for the day and swung the severed hand of a dead man towards it, shouting: "Send it away! Don't let it burn us up!" '

  'I didn't know that,' with an involuntary smile.

  'You remind me of the Aurora Australis,' he said. 'I'm Kes, by the way. Kes Wakefield.'

  'Jeanine.' She denied him her surname.

  'Jeanine?' Something in him had stabilised. His blue eyes looked at her carefully. No longer reckless or smiling. 'Your mother wasn't from Perth?'

  'She did come from Perth.'

  'Peppermint Grove?'

  'How did you know?'

  The peculiar way his eyes delved into her - they did not seem made of what eyes normally are made of, but hard, chunky conglomerate; as they observed her, they excited fear, the sort of fear a kid goat feels when it steps to the back of a cave to lick salt and all at once the stone has claws, sabre-teeth, fur.

  'Your mother wasn't Cheryl Pyke was she?'

  'That's right . . .'

  'Oh no!' and clapped a hand to his head. 'I was a friend of hers.'

  'You weren't!'

  'We were at Perth Modern together. I used to write her essays for her.'

  'You're an Australian?'

  Nothing so far in his accent had suggested that he was anything other than a public-school-educated Englishman of the type constantly to be seen emerging from the fifth-floor lift on the way to beg a financial crumb from Xavier.

  'I'm sorry to hear she's carked it,' he said, momentarily lapsing into an Australian voice. 'She was a top woman, your mother. A crackerjack of a girl. But I hardly need tell you that.'

  The dining room of the East India Club was on the ground floor of a Georgian building in St James's Square, next to the London Library.

  While they waited to be seated, she took in the other diners. Her lips thin with disapproval.

  'I hate these places,' as if she had thought up the phrase in the street outside and was going to deliver it anyway.

  'Yes,' he said agreeably, 'they are rather ghastly. But ideal for eavesdropping on the enemy.'

  Her very word!

  At that moment, a young waiter with an oriental face minced into the room.

  'Sir Richard!' his face brightening. 'How are you?'

  'All the better for seeing you, Sanjit,' and ordered two Bloody Marys, extra-spicy. 'Put it on someone else's bill,' he joked. Then piloted her to a table in the centre of the room.

  'Sir Richard?' raising an eyebrow.

  'It's a joke between us. Sanjit's from Brunei,' as if that explained it.

  From the instant that she sat down, Kes Wakefield was charming and attentive, bombarding her with questions while dismantling a bread roll, and listening to her answers as he dipped the pellets into a saucer of olive oil and chewed on them.

  'How old are you?'

  'I'll be twenty-one next month.'

  'You seem older,' assessing her full mouth, her large, fiery eyes.

  Over a Bloody Mary, he extracted more. She had left St Paul's three years ago, had supported Greenpeace for a while, and was impassioned about saving the whales. On the point of training to be a reflexologist, she was distracted by a television documentary concerning a visit by the Princess of Wales to a minefield in Angola. She decided to go and work in Luanda for an Italian charity that looked after children who were mine-victims. 'My dream is simple,' she had told her mother, quoting the charity's mantra. 'If you help an adult, you help an individual. If you help a child, you help a nation.'

  'How was Angola?' he asked.

  'Upsetting.'

  'I'll bet.'

  Days after returning from Luanda, she met Henry Bale, a young man consumed by Al Gore's mission to alert every government on earth to the effects of greenhouse gases, and had gone to work for him as his secretary.

  At this point, the young Malayan waiter interrupted them.

  She said in a grown-up voice: 'I'll have the soup, then the vegetable curry with spinach.'

  Wakefield ordered oysters and Aberdeen roast beef from the salver.

  'Room 300?'

  'You remember!'

  She watched the waiter leave, a blush fluttering his cheeks, and then leaned forward and crossed her arms. 'Enough of me. Now you.'

  While they waited for their first course, Wakefield revealed that he had been at Magdalen College, Oxford - 'Hence the tie' - two years ahead of Xavier Bidencope.

  'What were you doing at Oxford?'

  'Oh, you know, sabering the corks.'

  'Aren't you much older than Xavier?'

  'I was a postgraduate,' he said.

  His mother was a Bodley, of the family who donated the money for the library. His father from a German emigre family to Australia. He had spent his formative years in Argentina - here his face clouded - during the Dirty War.

  He looked at her, those blue eyes crinkled down at the corners, and she wondered if he was having her on. But over the next two hours she decided that what she had first taken to be ingratiating optimism was a defence mechanism. Disarmed by his account of his sister, who was caught by the police in Uruguay and tortured, Jeanine's suspicions started to recede.

  'What did you do after you left South America?'

  'Gosh, lots of things.'

  He lectured on business in Iceland; was private secretary to the King of Tonga; smuggled Poles to the West in the Cold War and was a lover of General Jaruzelski's daughter.

  It all sounded preposterous, but then again not.

  Later, he married a Czech girl whom he tried to bring out of Czechoslovakia. It was 1983. He stood behind the German wire at Hof and watched her come towards him, his bride of three months, and then the Czech police opened fire and she fell to the ground before his eyes.

  'To see someone you love die -' in a furred voice, 'it cuts something out of you that can never be replaced.'

  He had never remarried. He travelled instead - on what he called his 'assignments' - driven by the passion that his cruelly murdered wife had stirred in him and which, though it could never replace her, was his means of commemorating the selfless ideology by which Zdenka had lived. It was owing to this passion that he currently owned land in Sierra Leone, Morocco, Brazil, Croatia, New Zealand, Jarvis Bay, British Columbia, Northern Ireland and Guinea-Bissau.

  She asked what he did with this land.

  He told her that he planted trees.

  She looked at Wakefield in her serious way. 'We don't think much of afforestation.'

  'Really?' H
is eyes were swimming-pool blue with pinprick pupils.

  'We're not against planting, but we haven't got the time,' she said. 'It takes thirty years for a tree to mature enough to sequester carbon efficiently.'

  'Don't worry, I've got shares in carbon capture and storage, too.'

  She was still not impressed. 'What's the point when you already have the most sophisticated mechanism on earth which delivers it for free - which is the rainforest.'

  At this Wakefield smiled. 'Ah, but let me explain to you about my latest project.'

  He went into detail about a rainforest in Tasmania that he was involved in trying to protect, and she at last became interested. Of everything that Wakefield had so far told Jeanine, this information made an impression on her. At the words 'old-growth rainforest', the image that she had had of him completed a somersault in her head. He grew very real.

  It was a sizeable tract of land south-east of Zeehan, comprising two river valleys dense with ancient eucalypts, some looking as old as the world. In an awed voice he described walking up beneath a canopy of electric-green ferns ('like the fan-vaulting of a cathedral') to the trunk of an immense Tasmanian swamp gum, the Eucalyptus regnans , the tallest flowering plant on earth. 'I stood at the base of that tree and I pressed my face against the bark and I said to myself: "This has been growing since the time of Abel Tasman, this has survived God knows how many fires and draughts and storms," and I looked up at the sky and I tell you, Jeanine, it was as though I was looking into it up the spine of an endangered whale. How anyone is able to fell such a tree and live with themselves, I do not know. It's no different to killing a whale. And now there's a massive pulp mill about to be built that will bring these trees crashing down - and for what? For loo-paper to wipe Japanese bottoms, that's what. Well, not if I can help it.'

  She looked at him with the face of a child, her eyes big from the practice of suppression. 'It's funny, but my mother loved eucalypts.'

  He smiled. 'Could it have been me who planted the idea?'