“Jeremy,” I said, “did you ever tell Aunt Penelope how much you love antique cars?”
“Hmmm?” he said distractedly, still examining it. “Of course not. Why should I? Who would have guessed she was harboring one of these babies all these years?”
We examined the car closely together. It truly was ever so elegant, with a cobalt-blue body, a wide, luxurious dark interior of fine leather and horsehair seats, a wooden dashboard and huge steering wheel and all those other glamorous things that nobody puts in cars anymore. A good old auto with an air of loyalty. It deserved to be fixed up and loved. I understood how Jeremy felt—as if we’d found a prize racehorse neglected in an old barn; you wanted to give the animal a decent brushing, feeding and proper home.
With great enthusiasm we went through the glove compartment and perused some faded maps on tissue-thin paper that was practically disintegrating right before our eyes.
“These are the Alps!” I said in delight.“Wonder if she was a skier? Hemingway was sliding around Europe in Aunt Penelope’s day! He used to go to remote areas with no lifts where you had to walk all the way up the mountain just to ski down it. He said it gave you the kind of legs that made you a good skier. Hey, there are pencil markings on some of the roads. Looks like she trekked all the way through France, Italy, and Switzerland.”
I was sitting on the passenger side, when my foot knocked something under the seat. I reached down and, very carefully, dragged out the object and examined it. A wooden toy soldier, made of cylindrical pegs all threaded through with string, connecting the forearms, upper arms, lower legs, thighs, feet, hands, and torso to the head, so that if you pulled up his hat, you could make his arms and legs jump at the elbow and knee joints, and his little round head wobbled back and forth, all making an amusing clacking noise. He had painted black eyes and a moustache, and a red nose and mouth and apple-red cheeks.
“Look, Jeremy!” I said, playing with the strings. “It’s a toy soldier.”
“Is it valuable?” he asked.
“Not terribly. They’re pretty common, but it’s old; I’d say it was made on the Continent between the two world wars”—I turned the soldier upside down so I could see the bottoms of his black-booted feet—“Yes, in France.”
Jeremy was checking out the trunk of the car, which he called “the boot,” where he found a picnic basket, outfitted in wicker and leather with old crystal champagne flutes in it and an ancient rusty winescrew and some old salt and pepper shakers.
“Could this buggy actually be drivable again?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. I liked the idea of tootling around slowly in a car, instead of rushing about to run errands. Jeremy patted the car affectionately as he walked past it. For pete’s sake, he didn’t even act this excited over the villa.
We continued our tour of the garage, with Jeremy going around announcing whatever else he found—rusty rakes, shovels and other gardening equipment, old folding chairs. I kept taking notes as we had with the house, for the inventory of the estate. But I began to feel a creeping, familiar feeling of foreboding stealing over me, there in the presence of Great-Aunt Penelope’s loyal old auto, which had been young and vital when she was. Now the car was rusting away, still waiting for a driver who would never come back. It struck me now, in a more real way, that Aunt Penelope, who had once been so alive, was gone.And if she could die, then so could I, and Jeremy, and everybody I knew and loved.
Erik calls this Historian’s Melancholy. It hits you at odd times, but you know it when it strikes. Every so often, when you’re sitting in the dead zone of the library where all the old books end up, or an antiques shop when you come across an old pocket-watch engraved from one stranger to another with a dedication that was so personal to the owner but means nothing to anybody else—all at once it dawns on you that these are really just the used, worn-out detritus of some dead person’s life. Whose owner was just like you, believing he’d live forever.
And suddenly the dank smell, the darkness and the dust freak you out and you want to run as fast as you can, outdoors into the light, where you can gulp lots of air and reassure yourself that you’re not dead yet. Erik says it’s healthy—because it’s life warning you that death is no good, that you’ve come too close, and you the living shouldn’t be wallowing in the dust of the dead, but should be out conducting your own life in the sunlight. (And drinking and carousing, Timothy would add.)
I didn’t run out of the garage, but I fell silent. “Well!” Jeremy exclaimed, dusting off his hands, when he was done. I handed him the pages of my inventory notes, and he said that Severine would review it and her office would type it up officially. With great reverence he closed the garage doors and brought down the wooden arm that held them shut.
“You okay?” he inquired, looking quizzical. “You’re awfully quiet.”
“Yes,” I said, glad to be outside with other living things, like those fragrant blossoms and stalwart trees. I thought of Aunt Penelope, with her deep, throaty laugh and her love of gossip. I said, “Life is awfully short, isn’t it? One minute Aunt Penelope’s a gay young flapper, and the next thing you know...”
Light broke across his face, and he took me by the hand and said, “I know. But come on, darling. Brace up, Aunt Penelope would say. We’ve miles to go before we sleep. Let’s take one last look out the back before we go.”
We crossed the lawn, which was already wet with dew or whatever it is that steals across the grass at night. The sun’s golden path on the water had vanished; now the moon left a silver trail in its place.You could imagine silvery fish swimming under that silvery trail, on their way out to the wider sea.We paused, gazing in companionable silence, and the sky grew darker around us, but like children we didn’t really notice until suddenly, it seemed, it was night. The flowers began to give off that mysteriously intense night scent.The air had the mingled songs of late birds, cicadas, crickets, and I thought I might even have heard an owl hoot.
And then, while we stood there, lights started to go on, one by one at first, in the other villas around us. There was something sweet and comforting about seeing other homes nestled into the rocks and cliffs, lighting their lamps and twinkling at us like stars. Signs of life, and hope, like votive candles in a dark church. Finally it was dark enough to make us both sigh like kids who know they have to go indoors now. Jeremy shone his circle of light ahead of us.
As we crossed the lawn I mused that Jeremy would move in here someday, with a new wife, surely, and they’d have kids scampering on the lawn who’d have to be called in at night. One of them would be sent out to the garage to greet me, dotty old maiden aunt Penny, who’d come sputtering up in her silly old car to visit. I could see it now, how hard I’d work to be funny and cheerful. The image made me sick.
Jeremy put his hand on my shoulder to guide me, keeping me closer to him in the dark. “You always used to have scratches on your legs and scrapes on your knees,” he said.“I’m not going to let you fall down on my watch, or your mother will have my head.”
He opened the car door for me on my side and shone his light into the car, then closed the door after I got in. I saw him cross in front of the car with his light guiding him. Then he climbed into his seat, switched off the flashlight, and started the car.
“Well? What do you think?” he said, as he turned the car around to head out.
“It was awfully sweet of her to give us both a place to live. She could have sold it all off and socked it away in a bank and then left it to some charity or some memorial to herself,” I said.
Jeremy glanced at me as if he sensed something. “We were her family, and she cared about that,” he said.Then he added, quite deliberately, “I promised you a good dinner, and I know just the place. If it’s still there. It’s in the old town, in Nice. They make an excellent beef daube—it’s like a stew in red wine, served with ravioli. It’s a specialty there, a perfect combination of Italian and French.You and I are going to have a fantastic meal.”
>
Chapter Eleven
I THINK IT WAS COLETTE WHO SAID THAT ALL SORROWS OF THE HEART can be cured with food.Well, perhaps she was right.When the man who does the cooking greets you as if he’s genuinely glad that you’ve come to his restaurant, which on the outside looks like a hole-in-the-wall in a crumbling building off a cobbled street, but on the inside is all warmly decorated with red walls and white tablecloths and flickering candlelight; and you are encouraged to work your way slowly through a meal, course by course, with waiters flitting quietly like angels, their presence delicate and unobtrusive when they appear at your side just as you want more wine, or to change the forks and knives (which come from a locked china cupboard’s drawers) as a herald of each new plate of food, which they handle in an unfussy but respectful way as if it were sacred; and when the food is so spectacularly good that it dawns on you slowly that you have died and gone to heaven; and when the wine is cool and soft and works its magic slowly, gently, like the lapping sea—well, you can’t be melancholy at all.You can only be glad that you were born in the first place and are lucky enough to be here on this night, at this table, with this nice person sitting across from you who understands how you feel and is enjoying your company as much as the meal because, for once, the world is full of nothing but people of good will.
“Jeremy,” I said gratefully, with my usual talent for foolish understatement, “what a wonderful place.Thanks for bringing me here.”
And because it was such a beautiful night, even my clumsy words didn’t matter as much as the tone of my voice, which Jeremy heard and understood, and he looked happy that he’d succeeded in making me happy. I asked him how he knew so much about Aunt Penelope’s car, and he was a little embarrassed to confess that as soon as he’d started earning enough money, the first thing he did was to go out and buy a Dragonetta auto for himself. Apparently the company still sold a limited new edition of them each year, made to look like the old model.
“I’ll take you for a ride in it,” he said. “If you promise to let me drive that car of yours.”
When we were done, the proprietor, an elegant man with a bald head and alert dark eyes, walked us to the door with a genuine smile. He shook hands with Jeremy, and gently and lightly kissed my hand.
Then we walked to the Promenade des Anglais, another one of those elegant old boulevards where pedestrians can stroll along the beach and gaze at the gorgeous Mediterranean Sea. It was a warm night and everyone was there—couples with babies, elderly people, teenagers, young lovers—as if the earth was cupping us all in the palm of her hand.
“Beautiful here,” Jeremy commented.“I heard that the bay around Nice is called the Bay of Angels. How come?” He peered at me. “Come on, I know you know. About all these historical bits. Go on, do one now.”
“This isn’t a parlor trick, you know,” I said huffily. “It’s my career. A little respect, please.”
“I am in total awe of you,” he assured me. “Go on.Why is the bay of Nice called the Bay of Angels?”
“Angel sharks,” I said. “And they’re not as dainty as they sound. They kill. But the people who lived here down through the ages believed that they were blessed by them because the sharks chased away pirates and invaders—or ate them.”
Jeremy grinned. “I don’t know how you keep all these things stuffed inside that head of yours.”
“How about you, with all your fancy legalese?” I teased him. “All that ‘whereas’ and ‘the aforementioned.’ I saw you in action at the reading of the will, remember? Very impressive indeed.” We were laughing at each other, and people who passed by us smiled in knowing amusement.
But we had reached Jeremy’s parked car, and, just as we climbed in, I had that terrible kind of moment when you go to collect your belongings and suddenly realize that something is missing. It feels like a hole in your stomach. “Oh, Jeremy!” I cried. “I lost my portfolio!”
I didn’t say aloud that if I didn’t find my portfolio I might as well kill myself, because it contained months of hard work that I could not possibly duplicate, sketches and swatches and notes and phone numbers and—
I didn’t have to say it, because he heard the change in my tone of voice.
“Steady on,” he said.“I know that you didn’t bring it into the restaurant, because I would have told you to leave it in the car. So, it must still be in the car. It probably slipped off the backseat to the floor.”
But we searched the rental car from stem to stern and, as I knew, the portfolio was not there. “Calmly, now, think where you last had it,” Jeremy said, looking confident that we’d find it. And just as he spoke I remembered.
“In Aunt Penelope’s garage,” I said instantly. “I put it on the seat of the car.”
Jeremy sighed. I knew enough about Englishmen not to be fooled by the mild, light nature of that sigh. From a man with his talent for reserve, it was the equivalent of anyone else screaming,“You’re impossible! I’m full of fabulous wine and food and now you want me to drive all the way back on that treacherous road in the dark? And back again? We’ll miss our plane, and we’ll be totally exhausted and dusty and all the dinner magic will have worn off, so why did I spend all this money? I’d like to wring your neck!”
Of course he didn’t say any of this, but I knew he had to be thinking it. What he did say was, “Well, we’ll miss our flight back tonight. But perhaps it’s just as well. We can stay in an hotel tonight and face London tomorrow.”
He busied himself with making the arrangements via his mobile phone, then he lapsed into total silence for most of the way back to the villa. I could feel the black sky and sea echoing his moody, dark silence. But when we got off at Aunt Penelope’s exit and he could feel that we’d made progress, he cheered up a little.
“I know a man in Monte Carlo who could tell you how much it would cost to get that car up and running and beautiful again,” he said. “He used to have a dealership in Plymouth, but now he’s in a sort of semi-retirement down here.”
“Just for my own info, if I didn’t fix it up, what’s it worth?” I asked, pushing my luck.
Jeremy looked scornful. “You’d be an idiot not to fix it up.”Then he duly considered my question. “If you didn’t, someone like my friend would probably buy it for several thousand pounds. But that’s just a fraction of what it could be worth.”
As we headed down Aunt Penelope’s driveway, a startled frog leapt across our path in the headlights and leapt again to safety. But Jeremy suddenly slammed on the brakes, cut the engine, and turned off his headlights.
“What’s the matter?” I cried. “The frog’s okay.”
“Somebody’s there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the garage. “There’s a light on, see?” In the silence we could hear men calling out to each other, and indeed I saw lights bobbing, as if somebody was carrying a lantern back and forth; and there were other lights not moving but fixed, glaring out at us. But we were in shadows, and since the men were talking above the roar of their own car, they didn’t hear us turn into the far end of the long driveway.
Before I could stop him, Jeremy was out of the car and advancing on foot. I got out, too, out of pure cowardice because I didn’t want to be left behind. I crept after Jeremy, who was walking off the path so that he’d be stepping on pine needles instead of noisy gravel.We proceeded quietly, then paused just close enough to see what was going on ahead of us.
A big, ugly truck was parked in the driveway at a crazy angle, its rear to the garage, its tail-lights aimed straight at the doors of the garage, which were flung wide open. As we watched, I saw, to my disbelief, that two men were actually pushing Aunt Penelope’s car out of the garage. Apparently it was hard to push because two of its tires were flat as pancakes. Still, they had it pretty far along, just outside of the garage, and one of them had flung down a kind of ramp, as if they intended to push the car up into the open back end of the truck. I couldn’t believe it. How could car thieves know about this place?
�
�Shouldn’t we call the police?” I whispered. But Jeremy held up his palm to shush me. A third man, who’d been sitting in the front passenger side of the truck, was the one who evidently had been doing the shouting, because he was calling out now to the two men that were pushing the car. He sat with his door open and his legs dangling out the side, and he was smoking. He wore a white suit and a panama hat. As he hollered, a look of recognition crossed Jeremy’s face, and then even I recognized the lazy, condescending voice.
“Mind the windshield, for Christ’s sake!” he called out in a contemptuous tone. “And somebody had better start steering it now!”
“It’s Rollo!” I breathed. Jeremy took my hand and led me back to his car.We slipped inside, and he got on his phone and murmured quietly into it, speaking some combo of English and French.When he got off the phone, he looked grimly satisfied.
“Sit tight,” he said. “They can’t get out past us. Severine’s assistant is going to have the cops down here right away.”
“What if they have guns?” I quavered. “They could shoot their way past us.”
“Then stop chattering like a magpie,” Jeremy said pleasantly. “Or you’ll alert them to the fact that we’re sitting here.” Then he added, “They don’t have guns.”
“How do you know?” I hissed.“My mother says Rollo had a drug habit. Maybe still does.Those guys could be—”
“Shut up, they don’t have guns,” Jeremy said maddeningly. He wouldn’t say how he knew, and in fact he wouldn’t say anything else, he just kept repeating that one phrase, as if saying it over and over would prove it true, which proved to me that he didn’t know. Men. This is what they do when they have no empirical evidence, when their prized logic and rationality fail them, when they are going only on instinct but refuse to say so.
I’m guessing that it took about twenty minutes for the police to come swooping down the driveway behind us. Jeremy heard them and turned on his car lights, so they’d see us, but even so, they came awfully close and their cars squealed noisily to a halt.Then with flashlights bobbing, all four of them ran down the drive and caught Rollo red-handed.
A Rather Lovely Inheritance Page 9