He ran after her to say it was a lie, all lies, but she turned on her heel and slammed the door behind her.
Some time later Makertich's arm found Maral's shoulder. He stood there, leaning on her.
Sparrows chirping outside. The smell of fresh-cut lilies. And the soundless sobbing of a sixty-year-old man.
Maral said: 'I can't rub that scene from my mind.'
She would not let him go to bed until she had served the meal.
At the table, his tears continued to fall. Snuffed out, the lovelight in his eye. He felt he no longer existed - any more than the place laid for Jeanine that Maral had hurriedly removed. All he was left with, the shards of himself.
The next day she never saw him. He stayed in his tower.
In the middle of the night she heard strange sounds coming from Jeanine's bedroom, and went to investigate.
The door was open.
She stopped in the middle of the room, stood still. The drawings gone, the photographs gone. The walls glared back at her with an emptiness that was menacing.
'I thought for a second he had thrown open the window and snow had come in, even though it was summer, and then I saw that the whiteness on the carpet wasn't snow but pieces of paper. And then I heard this quiet despairing voice full of emotion and I saw him sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over, his face pallid as if he were out in the snow.
'I remember it with a shudder. This naturally kind, fair-minded man, who had seen the person he loved most reject him, was reading her holiday diary, and then he stopped, couldn't go on, and tore out the page, tearing it into small pieces, and then I realised what had become of his photographs of Jeanine - what had become of all her drawings, her books. He heard my gasp and looked around, and it was as though his eye had been flung into his face. He thought I had come to help him, but he said he didn't need help, it wasn't the first time he had had to do this, and went on tearing the pages.'
In the morning, through his half-open bedroom door as she went to collect his breakfast tray with its untouched newspaper, Maral overheard him on the telephone to Bennett. 'Listen closely now. I need you to do this expeditiously. I wish to postpone the date on which my daughter is due to come into her trust fund.'
'People did not want to be around him after that; they didn't want to be a part of his personality. After Jeanine's visit, it would have required all God's ingenuity to placate him.'
27
Y OU ' RE A CON MAN , Mr Makertich.
His daughter was right. His life was a lie. His identity a lost horse that had failed to come to his whistle - and why? Not out of any principled resolve to estrange himself, but because ever since boyhood he had lacked the courage to summon it.
He walked around the house picking up objects and putting them down. He was English on his passport, but England was not his country. He had no country. His country was a mountainous plateau in the middle of nowhere. A rocky promontory he had never visited and could never visit; a space vanished from the maps, carved up by Turks and Communists, about whose forgotten crimes no one cared.
Jeanine's rejection was a fist in his face. It made no sense. Like people who die without warning. It threw him back into a separate dimension parallel to the one in which he had lived. A dimension that he came to know as Armenia.
A few days after their meeting, Makertich found himself outside the Turkish baths in Queensgate, and entered. He returned home possessed by an overwhelming craving to play a recording of Armenian horn music to which previously he had felt indifferent, even antagonistic.
On Sunday morning, he walked to the little Armenian church in Iverna Gardens and sat in the back pew, listening to a white-bearded preacher giving a passionate sermon. Even as he struggled to make sense of what the man was saying, the following words dropped into his head: How can you help pass on your identity to the next generation if you have disconnected yourself from your roots? He slipped away before anyone could talk to him.
By spring, he had fought through his reticence. He joined a small crowd on 23 April for an afternoon vigil outside the Turkish Embassy, and the next day attended the commemorative requiem at St Sarkis.
'It would be too much to say that he was accepting himself. Rather, he was scrambling up the slopes of a place he'd shut out.'
He had nightly and vivid dreams of his grandmother, slowly moving about the low-ceilinged house in Aleppo, sideways like an old seal. He saw a semi-naked woman with a French cigarette - he had puffed it once and it nauseated him. Her eyes squeezed to a sightless crack by the bight of her years on earth, her lined gaunt face saying to his ten-year-old self, but addressing her own demons as well: 'Armenians did nothing to the Turks. We believed in a different way in God, that's all. Yet the Turks destroyed us. Why were we so passive? Why this unquestioning obedience? Did our passivity arise from our faith? Or was it because we were so desperate to fit in? Find me the answer, Krikor, will you do that? But promise me this. I want an answer, not revenge. Seek revenge and you'll dig two graves.'
Fifty years on, he had no answer. His parents did not speak of the forces that drove his grandmother and countless innocent others from their homes, one hour to pack, the million and a half dead. 'We can never forget,' was all his mother said, this after yet another of his father's self-pitying lamentations. 'But you have to forget. The Turks won't admit what they did. And no one else gives a brass razoo. So unless you're going to turn this rage and hate into yourself like your poor father, you'd best ignore it. That's my advice.' From his mother, he had caught the bad habit of not asking.
But the unacknowledged story had swelled in his bloodstream like a gallstone. Dormant for so long, a need to learn about Armenia began to torment him.
He knew the alphabet from Aleppo, suddenly remembered it, and started reading. With the dedication of the autodidact, he discovered in Rue Monsieur le Prince in Paris a bookshop which specialised in Armenian authors, and ordered volumes by the shelfload. The Nolans in the hallway yielded to two paintings by Gorky; the Cromwellian oak chest in his bedroom to a stone cross from the time of St Thomas the Apostle; the biographies of English explorers sent by John Sandoe to a miniature Bible in the Armenian script.
He commissioned a tiler to put up, outside the front door, the name of his grandmother's village. He imported honey from Kebussije and took to drinking coffee with cardamom. The house filled with the smell of roasted vegetables. He stopped eating watercress soup and roast beef with horseradish, and requested that Maral feed him aubergines, dolmas and kofte, meals that she was encouraged to lash with paprika and cumin - because Armenia had been on the spice route. And plenty of spring onions.
'Before, he had been resolutely not interested in proclaiming his Armenian background. Now, it became a fox tearing at his stomach. He was coming to terms with what he had spent most of his life avoiding, but in the knowledge that it was too late.'
Early one morning Maral let in some Brazilian builders and led them up to the tower. The men removed the photographic equipment - the bottles of D-76 fluid, the developing tank - as well as each and every one of the framed etchings from Cheryl's exhibition, which, unbeknown to her, Makertich had stored here. His darkroom had lain unused since his wife's departure. He wanted the space for his Armenian books.
His good eye twisted inward. He turned his back on England and retreated like a desert father into his library. The thought of Armenia obsessed him. It was a simple word, but part of something supernaturally larger. The invisible trellis up which his spirit all this while had climbed. The first Christian country on earth. The country of Adam from whom all men sprang. The site of Paradise, but also of untold hideous massacres and environmental disasters.
'Whenever he went to the tower, I could see that he was disappearing into himself, into his own Armenia. His mind was like a stone that he was pushing uphill to get to the right place and always falling back. To the day he died, he did not have an answer for his grandmother. He didn't know why people behaved like the Turks or,
in his own life, like Flexmore.'
Denounced by Jeanine, he refused to revisit their encounter. His daughter was welcome to Kes Wakefield. He knew that he was innocent of her charges.
Maral said: 'In Armenia, mines are always being sold. All Krikor did was sell a licence on a piece of paper. What he didn't realise was that Wakefield was one of the purchasers. After he became Don Flexmore, and before he was Kes Wakefield, he was Bijou Mandrake. There was a good reason he knew the details of the cyanide spill. He had presided over the disaster, not Krikor.'
Obedient to his grandmother's wishes, Makertich instructed his lawyers to desist in their pursuit of the man who had been the bane of his adult life. It was virtually his last demand of Crispian Bennett's firm. As for Jeanine, she was free to bleed her trust fund into lost causes, but only once he himself was dead. He would not contribute further to her addiction. About this, he remained adamant: while he had breath in his body, he was not going to leave his daughter one more thin penny.
'He sold his racehorse, wound down his Foundation and was never the same towards me. The relationship we'd had before, talking about ourselves, it was over. He got harder of hearing, which isolates you. He would sit there and smoke his cigarettes, and I would talk and talk and he wouldn't say anything, until finally he would look up and say: "Are you finished?"'
If they met on the stairs he glared at her moodily, looking out as if from behind a mirror, and continued walking. Either down to the cellar - he never lost his taste for wine - or up to the tower.
'Please don't ask me what he did there. There was a campaign chair on which he liked to stretch out; on the floor, a pile of battered paperbacks and a ream of paper. Sometimes I heard Komitas's liturgy playing or the sounds of a duduk . I like to think that he was nourished by that music in a way that he might not have predicted. Most of the time the room was silent. I would collect the glasses and empty the waste-paper bin, but never saw evidence he was writing anything - except the Telegraph crossword. Oh, and that essay which Mr Vamplew sent me. Mainly the bin was full of cigarette butts. He took up smoking in those last years - I would have to go to a tobacconist in St James's and buy him French cigarettes, which is what in the end killed him.'
The Pykes called, angling for an invitation to stay.
'He refused to see them. He wouldn't see anyone. He was extraordinarily absent. The outside world - those planes crashing in New York, the men blowing themselves up in the London Underground - it didn't concern him. Only the racing pages and the business section. That, and whatever he was doing in his library.'
Like this, seven slow years passed. He grew a bit more stocky, his nose broadened, but his mood stayed the same. He was alive, but only in the way that nails and hair grow after death.
'What I would like to believe . . . this resignation - I'm sorry, I'm slurring my thoughts.'
She sat forward and brought her hands to her face, her fingers curving round it, concentrating. And began again.
'Maybe this is what happens. His life has pretty much had it. He's not a fool. But he has a presentiment that someone in the future will redeem him.'
Because late one morning Makertich shuffled into the kitchen. He was wearing his favourite Hardy Amies suit, her yellow cardigan visible beneath it.
She waited for him to bark 'Maral, get me some coffee' or 'Please cut this out' - for she noticed that he was holding the Daily Telegraph and had double-circled an article, a legal report she discovered afterwards, about a charity for the blind.
To her surprise, he stuck a hand into his jacket and brought out two objects, laying them one after the other on the table.
'Look,' in a breathy voice, his black hair scarred with grey. 'What do you see?'
'A stick of wood and a piece of mud.'
'Look again.'
'And I saw a limb of the apple tree that had taken out his eye and a shrivelled pellet of the bread that his grandmother had survived on in the desert.'
'I'd like you to have these. Now get your coat, we're taking a drive.'
'Where to?'
'Ealing.'
'Are you sure you want me to come with you?'
'What?'
'I said, are you sure you want me to come with you?'
His brusque temper, finding nothing to fasten on, deepened on hearing her tone. She sounded so apologetic.
'I have to make my will,' he said in their language.
28
'M ORE WINE ?' A NDY ASKED .
'I've had too much,' Maral said. 'But I'll have some more. Why not? I got used to it on my own. What was I talking about?'
'His will.'
'There's little else to say. He died four months later. I found the card that Jeanine had written to him. I called the number that was on it and left a message with details of the funeral. Midway through the service, I heard the door open and when I looked around and saw the blue suit and blond hair I thought for a dreadful moment Don Flexmore had arrived.'
'But he was a man of seventy or more.'
'I didn't have my glasses on, Mr Larkham. Then Jeanine turned up and I tried to speak to her - but she didn't want to know. When you left together I was convinced that you must be connected with Don or Kes or whoever. And I thought so again when I met you in Mr Vamplew's office, and I went on thinking that until - well, until whenever it was that we came down here.'
'Were you surprised by the terms of the will?'
'I could not believe what I was hearing. Yet looking back, it made sense. Mr Vamplew told me that he thought it was Krikor's wish - how did he put it? - to leave his fortune to fortune. I agree.'
It had grown dark outside. Andy stood up and closed the curtains. A radio was on and there was the sound of the sea in the distance.
He turned and sat down, finishing his glass. 'I wish I'd met him,' he said.
'And you would have liked him, Mr Larkham. In some ways he was a very shy, tender man and in some ways a very frightened, broken man who died without admitting who he was. It was a sad end, to love no one like that, himself least of all. But I loved him. Something I will never forget is the peace I saw in his eye when he emerged from his meeting with Mr Vamplew. It was as if for a small moment he had got rid of all that troubled him. There was no pain hidden there. No pain whatever. He had a kind of calm in letting go of everything, and within that calm he had - one wouldn't call it hope, but a sense, even though it didn't matter any more, that it would come out all right. That his daughter would understand who he was.'
INHERITANCE
1
Dear Jeanine,
Forgive me for intruding on you like this - Maral gave me your address. My reason for getting in touch is that I misled you.
It was circumstantial that I ended up in this position. I didn't know your father. I stumbled into his funeral by mistake. Despite this, I have made it my business to find out who he was.
Through an unlikely set of events, I feel that I have come to know your father better even than my own. You were the trigger for this. It may sound far-fetched, but I believe that I have discovered a way to honour him, and for this reason I hope you will agree to meet me.
I understand if this doesn't appeal, but should it interest you to know more, I can explain over dinner at the Camoes restaurant next Wednesday at 7.30 p.m. The above number will reach me.
Yours, Andy Larkham.
2
A NDY COULD NOT SHAKE off the suspicion that this was the table where Richard had pretended to be engrossed in his book. It was 7.30 in the evening, the week before Christmas, and he had never known the Camoes so packed.
It reassured him to see how little had changed, aside from the restaurant's suddenly acquired popularity - and the Christmas tree in a terracotta pot at the centre of the room, a fir roughly of his height that flashed with emerald-and-red electric candles. Otherwise, the same paper tablecloth, the grubbiness of which always offended Sophie back in the pre-Cambrian era; the same photographs of Cintra; the same hoarse, aching voice of a
mezzo-soprano singing fado.
Rui was still serving, refusing to take off his dejected face. He had given Andy a mournful glower when he came in, as though he did not recognise him; and then limped across the floor and scraped back a chair.
The majority of diners were local Portuguese and Spanish families, some with small children who peeped in Andy's direction, wondering what he was reading, before they returned to what they had been doing, which mainly was to doodle on the tablecloth, perfecting dragons and goggle-eyed insects that passed for portraits of their parents or, perhaps, Andy. A tall, blond-headed young man who kept looking at his watch and back to the pages that he had printed out that afternoon and out of habit started to correct.
He had arrived early. It was now 7.35.
Andy could not help wondering what Jeanine had made of his letter. He had - finally - told her the truth. But would it turn her away or would she accept his apology? About one thing he was clear: he did not want to come together again with a woman over a misunderstanding.
He looked at his watch. She had left a message on his machine to say that she would be here. Had she changed her mind?
But it was all right that she was late. There were olives left in the saucer and he had a glass of wine. And it was a while since he had had the chance to sift his thoughts, most of his waking hours for the past two and a half months being devoted to Madigan/Makertich. Most of his sleeping ones, too.
3
M ONTAIGNE BELIEVED THAT THE greatest thing in the world was to know how to belong to oneself. Jeanine's father had learned this too late. So Andy came to understand during his days in Cornwall with Maral Bernhard.
At a pivotal moment, as Maral unfolded her stories, all Andy's frustrations about what to do with Furnivall's text transformed themselves into an overpowering wish to correct Jeanine's false impression of her father. Andy would always believe the turning point was the moment when he saw his teacher's cottage - where Furnivall had written his book. He liked to think that the solution which presented itself allowed him to step up to the mark and do good by both men. His wild scheme to enlist his teacher into restoring to Jeanine the person she had so misunderstood. And by showing Jeanine her father as he was to reveal the love that her father had felt for her.
Inheritance Page 25