Inheritance

by Ellen Kefferty

  Edith stowed her phone and shook her head. Self–pity was worthless. Sam had to be feeling much worse. She had last seen him lying on the floor of the bedroom the night before, the manager trying to stir him unsuccessfully.

  Checking in electronically was easy, and naturally she had no bags. The queue for security checks was long, however, and there was no way round it. The main queue crawled forward for fifteen minutes. Once at the head of the line a guard directed her to another line at the far left scanning machine—which hardly looked the shortest—and she proceeded to wait there.

  A bald man in front of her wore a faded black jacket. He continually itched his face, his neck, his head, his hands. He would only stop itching one part of his body in order to scratch another. Edith hung a few steps back, away from his immediate space.

  They shuffled forward toward the scanner and conveyor belt, but stopped far enough away that they were decidedly not next. Edith guessed that it would be another fifteen minutes, at least, before she was through. She texted Sam. He might catch his flight before she reached him. He should have asked her to come earlier.

  “Where you going, love?” The man in the faded black jacket had turned round. He was itching his cheek.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Edith was startled by the question. She forgot the pretence of catching a flight.

  “You’re not going anywhere? I think you’re in the wrong place then!”

  “Oh, I mean,” she realized how odd she must have appeared, “I’m going to Dublin.”

  “Well, that’s somewhere, isn’t it? What you going for? Most people go for a boozy weekend, don’t they?”

  “I, erm, I’m doing my family history.”

  “That’s nice. Irish, then?”

  “Of course. My mother’s family are from Ireland and I want to learn more about them.” A half–truth. Edith’s mother’s family had come from Ireland, though the Crogans hadn’t been near the place in a hundred and seventy years. Maybe a cousin or two had visited, but they had also been to Prague and Tenerife. Maybe even liked those places better. At some point it had become just a name, one which Edith didn’t even share.

  The face scratcher kept talking. And itching. “That’s nice! Family’s so important. Are you not taking your mother with you?”

  “She’s no longer with us.” Edith had been saying those words for half her life. Aunt Shelley said that was the ‘proper’ way to say it. Apologizing for her mother not being around. It never got any easier. She hoped that one day, when she was older, much older, people would stop asking. Nobody asks old people how they feel about being orphans.

  The man raised an eyebrow, nodded slowly, and turned back round. He had no investment in the conversation and no need to bother with the awkwardness he had caused. Just like the workman all those years ago.

  The line for the scanner crept forward minute after minute, until the man in the faded jacket was finally in reach of the conveyor belt. He took a tray, loaded it with his coat, his wallet, his shoes, his belt, and all the detritus he dredged from his pockets. Thus lightened he slid the tray forward toward the machine and made room for Edith.

  She deposited her hoodie, trainers, and handbag in a tray. She pushed it slowly forward along the conveyor belt as the line itself moved. As the man ahead went through the metal detector, she let her tray go into the scanner.

  Beep!

  Edith looked around, and then to her fore. The man had set off the metal detector. He remonstrated with the security guards. He pointed to various bits of his body: his neck, his knee, his arm. Shortly a guard with a handheld detector came forward and waved it liberally. At every point which the man had indicated it beeped. The guards nodded and let him through.

  What had happened to him? How had he ended up with so much metal in his body? Some kind of accident? Edith glanced at him as he dressed, noticing now the slight stiffness in his movements. Something had broken him. He had been pieced together. His outside, bar the incessant itching, held barely a sign of whatever had happened. Deep down, below the skin, the metal held him together.

  Once through security she tried but failed to find the man with the metal.

  He was gone.

  The wide atrium beyond security dissolved into a duty–free maze of booze and cheap perfume. There was no way through but a left turn at the Toblerones followed by a sharp right by the cigarettes. A perfume counter rose before her selling a bewildering array of perfumes branded with a slew of celebrity names. It occurred to Edith that, of all the things we might pretend to know about celebrities, their smell was definitely not one. It seemed to worry nobody else.

  Once Edith had made it to the gates she pulled out her phone.

  “Hi Samuel. At the terminal now. Where are you?”

  “North. Right at the end. Gate 26.”

  She strode past the cafes and restaurants. She glided along the travelators, one after another, watching bored holidayers wait for their planes and the frequent travellers rest with equanimity. The passengers thinned as she headed north, punctuated only by the occasional gate in the process of boarding.

  At the last travelator she stepped on the deck only to spy Sarah, Sam’s day–old bride, gliding toward her. Sarah spotted Edith and cast her face down. As they neared one another Edith held out her hand. A futile gesture of comfort.

  “Sarah...”

  Sarah shook her head. Tears ran down her cheeks, etching her feelings upon her face. Sam must have told her everything. The threat to her husband. To her future children. A threat which didn’t even have a name or a meaning.

  At the north end of the terminal stood a circular room with half a dozen gates and hundreds of seats. The room thrust out onto the airport’s concrete apron. Planes taxied and gyred all around, their movements only metres from the wall of windows. Nobody came to watch the planes, the room was almost empty. Other than Edith, there was only the lone figure of Samuel, pining by the far window. He stared at nothing.

  “Sam.”

  “Edith. Come over.” He limply beckoned with a hand, not even turning to look.

  Edith drifted toward Samuel, stopping a respectful distance behind him.

  “You know, I should like to meet your father, one day, but I guess that Ben doesn’t do much customer service, does he?”

  “No. Not anymore.” Edith found the lie came too easily. A mere untruth by omission. It was easier than the first time. She blushed with shame.

  “Now that he has his beautiful daughter to do it for him, who can blame him?”

  Edith dodged compliments like the plague. It was only a diversion, anyway.

  “I saw Sarah. I guess she knows everything now?”

  “Yes. Yes she does. She should really have the wedding annulled, given that I should have told her earlier.” Sam scratched his neck. He believed the words he had just spoken. Nobody would want to be with him now he was a marked man.

  “We didn’t know it was this serious.”

  “You don’t know.” Samuel examined Edith with tired eyes. He approached and lowered himself into a seat near where she stood. “Come, sit down. There are things I need to tell you. One big thing in particular.”

  Edith dutifully sat, leaving a seat to separate her from Samuel.

  “First, let me thank you.”

  “What for?” Edith read Samuel’s face to see if he was serious.

  “Sarah and I had only planned a week’s honeymoon. We were going to Portugal to stay in a friend’s villa. I really couldn’t take long off work. Sarah accepted that.”

  “Yes...”

  “Last night has changed that.”

  “I don’t know what happened. I last saw you collapsed in the bedroom, Sam.” Edith still had to reconstruct the timeline of the night before. She knew what she had done. What others had done, or the truth of the whole matter, she couldn’t guess.

  “The shots turned out to be an accident.”

  “They did? What kind of accident?”

  Sam shrugged. �
��Lots of farmers have guns. And it’s better to shoot vermin at night. I think that’s what happened.”

  “Were the police ever called?”

  “No. Nobody was hurt. It would have been pointless disrupting the party while people were enjoying themselves. When I came to Hugh got me back on my feet. He let a few people know I had been out of sorts. After half an hour I was back and nobody remarked on it.”

  “Then what changed?”

  Sam blew out a breath. “You saw how I reacted? I’m stressed. Even if it was an accident last night I can’t relax. I feel as though I’m being hunted?”

  “Hunted?”

  “So we’re going to become the prey. We’re going away forever. Or at least as long as we can. Weeks, months, maybe years. However long it takes to catch the killer. We’ll just keep moving and travelling, seeing the world. It will be an amazing adventure. And, best of all, nobody will be able to keep up with us. We’ll never have to worry. It will be the greatest honeymoon ever.” He swept out an arm as though imagining a future vista through which he was about to travel.

  “I see.” Edith was lost. Samuel was calm, yet his whole world had been destroyed. Life as a fugitive, forever keeping ahead of whoever was killing his family, was no recompense, however pleasant each temporary sanctuary. In some ways his ability to see the positive in the whole situation was admirable. It was also pitiable.

  “All my affairs in this country will be in the immediate control of Hugh.”

  “Hugh Mountgrace?”

  “Yes, of course. He’ll make all the decisions for me and the business, though I will still be in frequent contact.”

  “You trust him to do that?” Edith caught herself after she spoke. Where had the doubt come from?

  “My father trusted him to look after the business after he died.”

  “Oh, I see. Hugh suggested that he and your father had been close.”

  “I don’t know what brought them together—they were really quite different—but as I’ve grown I’ve come to understand that their relationship was something special. Beautiful, even. Does that sound odd to you?”

  “A little.”

  “It shouldn’t. They were like brothers. They weren’t friends because they were alike, but because they had an absolute loyalty to one another.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll ring him now. Well, before you leave. I’ll tell him that he’s to help you with whatever you need in my absence, including money. He won’t say no to me.”

  “Thanks.” Edith was grateful. Apart from the genealogist in the Peak, she currently had few leads. If Hugh could introduce her properly to the wider family it would give her more to work on.

  Sam fidgeted with his phone. She had never seen him do that before. He was procrastinating.

  “There is something else, isn’t there?”

  Samuel forced a smile and turned to stare back out of the window. After a moment of silence he pointed and began to gabble. “Look at that A380. The biggest passenger plane in the world. Sarah and I once travelled to Singapore in one of those. It’s so big inside that you wouldn’t...”

  “Sam.” Edith was firm.

  “Yes. I...I’m losing...I’m sorry.” Samuel pulled a tissue from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes though there was no sign of tears. “There’s a reason why I’m taking this all rather worse than expected.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  He leant back as far as the hard seat would let him, shut his eyes, and spoke. There was no attempt to introduce his subject. The words simply began to fall from his lips.

  “We used to go on holiday every summer. The same holiday, more or less. My father would hire a yacht in the Mediterranean. Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece. We sailed aimlessly for a couple of weeks, stopping here and there. Like sea nomads.

  “Now that I manage Faircote Paints I appreciate now how hard it was for my father to take a fortnight off work. He left the business to others and spent the time completely with his family. No communication with England and no interruptions.

  “Even after my father began to use a chair we still had our yachting holiday. Hugh came with us as the skipper and to do all the things my father could no longer do. My father bravely hobbled around on sticks when he could, or else just sat for hours on end watching the rest of us. It must have been a trial, I see that now, though I also understand why it was so important to him.

  “The summer we went to Greece I was thirteen. We took the yacht round the coast of the Peloponnese, my father spending the month beforehand teaching us Greek history. He promised that we would find ruins. Ancient temples and the like.

  “We all sensed that it would be my father’s last holiday, though nobody said as much. He was going declining visibly by that time. He was barely mobile and I noticed that people began to have trouble understanding his speech. We knew he wouldn’t be able come the following year, if he even lived that long.

  “You think that when you’re thirteen you’ll live forever. Death takes your pets and your grandparents, but nobody else. It terrified me that my father would die one day soon. It’s not that death scared me, as I hardly understood what it meant. Except that I knew my father would be gone. Taken away from me.

  “Have you ever thought about what the word ‘departed’ really means? I couldn’t imagine him not being part of my life. Being separated from him forever. I saw him as a part of me, whatever he was so was I. How can a person be divided? I’m sure there’s some psychological explanation in there. Freud and his ilk would have a field day, as they do.

  “By that time I had latched on to a new idol. Somebody to take his place when the inevitable happened. I needed a role model, one who was fit and healthy, and who gave me an idea of what I would grow into. A man I could look up to...”

  “Hugh.” Edith interjected.

  “No. My older brother, Gregory.”

  Edith folded her hands between her legs, ashamed that she had assumed more than she knew. She gazed at the floor, stunned into silence as Samuel continued his story.

  “Gregory was seventeen, four years older than me. He was on the cusp of becoming a man, yet young enough to see myself reflected in him. Of course I wanted to be just like him and I was frustrated and excited by how much growing I had to do.

  “He did everything I couldn’t, and everything I wanted to but daren’t. He had sat his exams the year before, and passed them all without trying. He needed only to think about taking up a sport and he would soon be the most elegant and forceful on the field. When he told a joke I would laugh and etch it in my mind to be endlessly repeated to my friends. When he told a story I thought I would never do half the things he had.

  “I flatter him, I know that. Every time I tell people about Gregory he seems to grow in stature. I’m quite happy about it. I look forward to being eighty, telling my grandchildren about Gregory for the thousandth time, when he’s almost a god who could perform miracles. God, if you had asked me when I was thirteen, that’s probably how I would have described him.

  “The greatest miracle I knew he was performing, however, was one I only barely understood. He had girlfriends, lots of them. And not just girls to pretend with. I think he was, well, making the most of it. I’m sure my parents knew, after all they weren’t idiots, but nobody seemed to stop him. He just sneaked them in or out as he pleased.

  “By the summer of that year he had been going with the same girl for a few months. Jessica was her name. She had even been—legitimately—to our house. I knew that things were different with her, not least because he told me. ‘She’s the one.’ That was the limits of his confiding in me. Really it was a boast, just to tease his kid brother. We both knew what he meant.

  “Gregory had asked, somewhat half-heartedly, if Jessica could come to Greece that year. Our father said no, which is what Gregory expected. He knew that the request would never be granted. I think he promised her something he shouldn’t have, or was desperate to show he had an adult relationship.
Even so, he wasn’t petty and childish. He never sulked and let the refusal ruin his enjoyment of the holiday. Not that he could, as he adored the sea.

  “Like Mahlke out of Cat and Mouse, Gregory was an exceptional...oh, I guess you might not have never read it? Well, Gregory was a great swimmer. Holidays on the yacht were a kind of heaven to him. The sea was this inviting blue–green, as clear as a pool. He just leapt right in and covered metres in a single stretch. His favourite game was to dive under the keel of the yacht and emerge on the other side. I guess I’m exaggerating again, but you get the idea.

  “Every time we sailed into a little bay or an interesting bit of coast he dived into the water and swam toward it. My father told Hugh to stop the boat and let his son explore. After a half hour or so my mother would plead with Gregory to come back and let them get underway. It never worked. He swam as much as he wanted. It became the usual thing that if my brother decided to enter the water and spend the afternoon somewhere Hugh dropped anchor and saved the hassle of coaxing him back onto the boat.

  “It never mattered anyway, as we weren’t going anywhere, we were just going. Me and Gregory didn’t care. It was an adventure. It would lead us where it led us. Next year would lead us somewhere else.

  “Our father could count the days he had left. He didn’t have time to waste. But where would he even go? When you’re dying you’re always where you need to be. He was with us.”

  Edith slipped her hand into Sam’s. He kneaded her fingers.

  “One day, soon after we began sailing in the morning, we came upon a wide bay. A jagged cliff rose from the sea like some great theatre. At its foot lay a beach of sunbleached pebbles. Completely deserted.

  “My brother bit his lip. We had only travelled a few miles, he thought that our father would be angry if he dived into the sea so soon. He contented himself by gazing into the waters, hoping for clear glimpses of a seabed below. He took the port and sent me to starboard. We called to each other on the sights we saw or imagined.