The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by Barbara O'Neal

  “That must be about a twenty-four-hour trip from Mumbai to London.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, not at all. Only about ten, usually.”

  “Oh, of course.” I shook my head. “You would fly west, not east, to London, as I do from San Francisco.”

  For the first time, she swiveled her head to look at me. “Are you an American, Lady Shaw?”

  “Please call me Olivia. Yes, I was born just outside of San Francisco.”

  “Your accent doesn’t sound American.”

  “My mother was British. Obviously, I guess.” Which sounded snotty on some level, and then I was afraid if I fixed it, it would be worse.

  “Your mother was Caroline Shaw—is that right?”

  “Right. Did you know her?” I leaned forward eagerly.

  “No. She was gone long before I arrived. I’ve always thought she had something to do with poor Sanvi’s disappearance. Or knew something.”

  “Here we are!” Pavi said brightly, and I realized that we were parked in front of the chip shop.

  But I couldn’t just let the accusation lie there. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  Mrs. Malakar turned back to look through the windscreen. She gave the slightest of shrugs.

  “No offense, Olivia,” Pavi said, “but I’ve got to run. Get these asparagus in cold water.”

  “Sure.” I climbed out, but before I closed the door, I said, “Mrs. Malakar, my mother wasn’t that kind of person.”

  “No?” Her eyes, large and dark as a night sky, met mine. “She knew something.”

  Pavi gave me a look over her shoulder. “Gotta go, Liv.”

  I nodded. “Sorry.”

  “I’ll call you later,” she said, giving me a barely perceptible shake of the head, as if to nullify her mother’s words.

  I closed the door and watched the van disappear, feeling suddenly cold. Left out.

  As the rain continued to pour down, I turned on the radio for company and steamed the asparagus, sliced fresh bread to make toast, and set out an egg to top it all. Wrapped in a warm sweater and yoga pants and thick socks, I tried to focus on cooking for myself, instead of feeling bereft that I had really been looking forward to cooking for Samir in his tiny but efficient kitchen. Cooking was my lingua franca, my love language. I hardly felt I could express myself fully, show him what I was feeling, if I couldn’t cook.

  Instead, while I sat alone in my flat, over my egg and toast—and it had to be said, the beautiful asparagus, which tasted of every moon of winter and the first dawns of spring and the first fertile stirrings of the earth—I imagined all of the Malakars sitting down to their supper above the restaurant. Would Mrs. Malakar have done the cooking tonight, or would Pavi want to dazzle and spoil her mother?

  A hollow little echo of loneliness filled my lungs.

  Ridiculous. I’d only just met these people!

  Trying to get myself in hand, I considered the tasks I could knock out. It was late morning in California, and I could get in touch with several people I’d been needing to talk to.

  The first was the lawyer, who called me back within a few minutes. I explained the new situation with Grant and my need to get things settled as soon as possible. He didn’t seem to think it was a huge problem—California was not a community property state—but he’d have to check into options for getting the case dismissed. “If your main issue is to get the money from the house sooner, I’d try to find some common ground with your ex, see if you can come up with something you’ll both be able to live with.”

  “Yeah, I tried that,” I said.

  He promised he’d do his best to expedite the hearing, but I could tell he didn’t think it would happen at all fast. In the meantime, the money was in escrow so the sale could move forward from the buyer’s end.

  I hung up, wondering if he was right, if I should just give in and let Grant have half of the sale of the Menlo house. Make him go away.

  I called my mother’s art dealer. “I’ve come across a puzzle,” I said and explained the paintings my mother—I assumed it was my mother—had left in the wardrobe. “Any idea why she might have done that?”

  “No idea,” Madeline said. “Which ones are copies?”

  “A Monet, a Constable, and another one by an artist I can’t identify. I can send you pictures.”

  “Do that. I’ll see what I can find out. What else was in the group? Anything I might be interested in?”

  I parried. “Not sure. I have an appraiser coming in this week”—a lie—“but you’ll be my first choice if there’s anything interesting.”

  “Mmm. Just remember, Americans pay a lot more for European paintings than anyone in Europe will.”

  I laughed. “I’ll remember.” I took a breath. “In the meantime, I’m wondering if there are any of my mother’s paintings that I might be able to sell?”

  “Maybe. Do you want to go through them, first? That was what we were waiting for.”

  “I do, but I’m not sure when I’ll be back to the Bay Area. Things are complicated here—and expensive. I’d like to make a sale as soon as possible.”

  “Still the ex?”

  “He won’t back off.”

  “That asshole. I’d like to set the dogs on him for all this.”

  I let go of a harsh laugh. “You and me both.”

  “All right. Let me see what I can do. I can also have my assistant email you digital copies of the paintings, at least all of the ones we have in our catalogue.”

  “Great idea.” I paused. “Madeline, do you know what she was working on the last few months before she died? She was working all the time, but I don’t remember seeing what she finished.”

  A soft pause fell, which made me sure she was lying when she said, “I have no idea.”

  Was this like the earl pretending to know nothing of my mother, when actually he’d seen her? “Thanks, Madeline. I’ll look for those digital copies.”

  “Olivia, I would caution you to be careful. You don’t want to make decisions in your grief period that you’ll regret later.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not making big decisions is a luxury I don’t have right now. But thanks. I’ll be careful.”

  “I’m going to talk to a guy I know who specializes in intellectual property and estates. It would infuriate me if Grant were able to get his hands on your mother’s money.”

  “Thanks.”

  It had been a long day. The air was cold and damp. Maybe a nice fire and a hot bath. A good book. Since Samir’s books had caused all this trouble today, I was inclined to avoid them, but I was sure I had something in my bag or on my reader.

  From below came the sound of braying laughter, a girl trying too hard. The chip shop was always busy this time of day, and it was the only time I really had a sense of how many people lived in the area, really. The smell of frying food wafted upward, not unpleasant, but it grew wearying after a while. This place was better than the hotel had been, but it still had the feeling of a skin that I’d shed any second.

  I imagined again the carriage house flat, what it would be like to cook on that AGA, how much I loved the finishes and the space. I could bring some of my mother’s paintings over and hang them on the walls. In my imagination, the vision started to take shape—I would paint the walls a pale celery and add accents in shades of magenta. A giant bed for the generous bedroom, with excellent sheets and big fluffy pillows. I imagined waking up in that room and looking out toward the fields and the distant hills.

  Maybe I should go shopping in London. Take a day off from all the madness and see what I could find.

  But in the back of my mind, I was still rolling the puzzles around, trying to fit the scrambled pieces into something that made sense. Or at least pointed in a single direction.

  From the table, I picked up the key the earl had given me. Nothing at all remarkable about it. A little smaller than a standard house key. Shiny new, as if she’d had it made for me. What did it open?

  Samir had s
ent the photos he’d shot of the paintings, along with a note that said, simply, “Very sorry about our dinner plans tonight. Will call when I’ve finished with family obligations.”

  Again that hollow feeling of being on the outside. It would have been unseemly for me to be there, but somehow Pavi and Samir had become my cornerstones in this world. Without them, I was untethered.

  Focus.

  I opened the paintings one by one, arranging them on my screen so that I could see them clearly. No commonality of subject matter—there were portraits and landscapes and still lifes. Again, I moved them around until they formed the colors of a rainbow and found a sweet, nostalgic pleasure in the exercise, but it didn’t seem to point to anything I understood.

  Next, I laboriously copied each painting into a Google image search. A few came up with nothing, but I matched several others to minor painters over the centuries: a sixteenth-century portrait painter, Joseph Highmore, who’d also illustrated the original novel Pamela; a minor pre-Raphaelite John Wharlton Bunney.

  Maybe, I thought, feeling a bit lighter, some of these would be worth something.

  I almost didn’t run an image search on the painting of my uncle. It seemed unlikely the portrait was worth anything. In the end, I fed it in and clicked search and sat back, taking a sip of tea while I waited.

  The search populated with a dozen matches. One was to a Dutch portrait of a noble in seventeenth-century dress, and it was startling how close the resemblance was. Another was to the portfolio of the painter, long dead, who had painted many of the English gentry in India. So this painting had been done before they’d left.

  All of the others were connected to actual stories of Roger Shaw, Earl of Rosemere. I clicked through to the Wikipedia article I’d already read, which was very sparse, just birth–September 9, 1939, and basic facts. Born in India, immigrated to England when his mother inherited. Then a short paragraph on the disappearance. “In 1977, the house was abandoned and has stood empty ever since.”

  The search brought up several minor newspaper mentions of Roger, of the same type I’d found of my mother. Social pages, a dance, a ribbon cutting. In the early seventies, he was in his prime, a very good-looking man with his mother’s sensuality and a mouth that was somehow cruel.

  Or maybe I was just projecting.

  I looked at the portrait again, then abruptly stood up and went to the box I’d brought from my grandmother’s room. There were hundreds of photos in the box, and it took a little while to find some of Roger. The first I pulled out wasn’t one I’d seen before—this one was in England. I recognized the house in the background. It must have been one of the picnics. Violet stood next to a tall, lean man with a craggy face—of an age to have served in the war, which would have made anyone weary. Roger, a little over twenty, held his little sister in his lap. My mother. She looked ready to cry. He smiled into the camera. The camera had caught the exact second that Violet’s husband—really, he was my grandfather; why didn’t I feel any connection?—had swung his hand toward Caroline, as if to pick her up.

  The little girl was reaching for him. Or Violet. Roger clung to her waist.

  I swallowed a sick feeling. Here was the evil in the forest. Everyone said Roger was cruel, controlling. Had he abused her? Physically? Sexually? Mentally?

  Carefully, I leafed through the photos again, sorting them into piles. Roger; Violet in India, Violet in England; Caroline; Nandini. I tried to blur my eyes respectfully over the nude photos, but again, my heart was captured by her lush beauty and even more so by the knowing, powerful connection she’d made with the person who had snapped the photos. Violet.

  Very few of my grandfather. He was the Shaw. I fed his name into Wiki and came up with nothing except the acknowledgment of his once having been married to Violet. He’d died in 2001, married to someone else.

  I tapped my fingers on the keys, feeling as if I was missing something, something just in the edges of my peripheral vision. On impulse, I paused and typed into the search engine, “Sanvi Malakar.”

  Nothing. No match at all, only “Did you mean Sanjaya Malakar?” who had, evidently, been a contestant on American Idol.

  Frustrated, I closed the program and looked again at the paintings, JPEGs lined up on my screen. I played with last names making words and first names making words. Nothing.

  My phone buzzed, and I picked it up. No, I snatched it up, which made me feel embarrassed, even more so when I saw that the text was from Samir: Might I stop by on the way home?

  Everything in me wanted to say yes. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in twenty thousand years. And yet I couldn’t shake the way his mother had looked at me. I also had to be honest enough to admit that my feelings were hurt. Not because he hadn’t brought me to a family dinner. But maybe the feeling that he was hiding me.

  Which was completely ridiculous. We’d been dating for five seconds. It wasn’t like me to be so . . . dramatic.

  As I considered what to type, a knock sounded on the door. “It’s me, Olivia.”

  I opened the door, and Samir stood there, looking like six feet of dessert. His hair was smoothed a bit, and he wore a dress shirt with tiny blue stripes, open at the throat. He carried a package of food, which he lifted with a wry smile. “Pavi sent a peace offering.”

  “I already ate dinner.”

  He grinned. “I assumed you had.”

  I shrugged a little.

  “Was my mother terrible?”

  “Yes!” I stood in the doorway, half-torn as I eyed the box. “What is it?”

  “You’ll have to invite me in to find out.”

  “Why should I?” I said, and to my horror, there was more emotion in the words than I had meant to show.

  Samir flowed over the threshold. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” He gathered me close, and I let him, my defenses melted by the smell of his skin and the smell of whatever was in the box he carried. Just the solidness of his chest rocked me, opened me, and I pressed my face into his shoulder. “She hated me on sight. I felt about thirteen.”

  He kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry. She is sometimes difficult.” Against my hair, he said, “It’s coconut asparagus. She said you would love it.”

  “Coconut, really?” I stepped out of his arms and let him come in, closing the door as I took the box of food, spinning around to take a fork out of the drawer. Leaning on the counter, I opened the box to taste the asparagus. “Mmm. That’s very fresh!” I could pick out black mustard seed and cumin, garlic, chilies, but the flavor of asparagus was the main event—big and so perfectly itself. “Your sister is . . . an extraordinary chef.”

  “She is.” He stood where I’d left him, right inside the door.

  I didn’t make him comfortable, not yet. Taking another bite of asparagus, I eyed him. “How was dinner?”

  “It was good. She’s much healthier than she was last year. Being back in India agrees with her.”

  “How long will she be here?”

  One shoulder lifted. “All summer.”

  I looked at the food. Set it aside. “I think I need to take a hot bath and read a book and go to bed early.”

  For a moment, he was silent. “Are you all right?”

  “I guess. It was a terrible day. Your mother and Grant—and I can’t figure out any of this puzzle, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with any of this.”

  He inclined his head, his arms still folded. “Mmm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  With a sure, easy gesture, he took my hand and pulled me across the room to sit us both down on the couch, which smelled of years and dust. Our bodies fell close, leg to leg, hip to hip, and my shoulder nested right beneath his armpit. “You are tired,” he said, rubbing my arm. “Let me just hold you for a little while, and then I’ll go.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my cheek on his chest. “Just for a little while.”

  “Okay.” He stroked my hair, found the elastic that held my braid together, and tugged it out
, releasing my hair to fall around my face. Tenderness swept out from his fingertips, over my head. “My mother does not hate you. She’s angry with me. She’s afraid I’ll create another romantic disaster. I more or less agreed to see if she could find someone for me.” His voice rumbled through his chest below my ear, making me sleepy.

  “Like matchmaking?”

  “Mmm. It’s still common enough.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I was embarrassed by how badly my marriage ended. Everything about it was humiliating.” His fingers threaded through my hair. “I thought perhaps it could be worth a try, to meet the women she would find.”

  I imagined a parade of lovely Indian women, dewy and glowy, with clear eyes and glossy hair. Jealousy stabbed me. “She was going to do that this summer?”

  “Yes. So you can see why she might be a bit put out that I’ve been seeing someone.”

  “I thought you had a girlfriend when we met.”

  “Mmm. Not really a girlfriend. Just . . . someone I was seeing a little, here and there.”

  “Are you still going to meet those women?”

  “No!” He moved, bringing me around to face him. “How can you even ask that?”

  “Because you are younger than me, and your mother will always hate me, and this whole—”

  “Olivia.” He said it firmly.

  I swallowed, embarrassed by my emotional insanity, and also defiant.

  He cupped my face, stroking both sides of my cheeks, running his hands up into my hair, where he clutched handfuls of it. “Do you really believe anything you’re saying?”

  I met his eyes, the starry, starry eyes, and saw in them what I’d been seeing all along. The tension in my body sluiced away. I shook my head.

  “I didn’t think so.” He kissed my nose, then mouth, and I was so very glad to be with him that I kissed him hard right back. “There you are,” he murmured.

  And then there was no conversation. Not with words. Only hands, mouths, breath.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The rain had half stopped by morning, which meant I had to get to the estate to work with Pavi on picnic prep. She picked me up just minutes after Samir left, but if she’d seen him, she didn’t say.