The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “They can’t work until the autopsy is released.”

  “Ah. Should we be mucking about in here, then?”

  “I’m just looking for my grandmother’s stuff,” I said, knowing I probably shouldn’t be. “Lost heirlooms, hatpins to sell on eBay.”

  He chuckled. “If you’re sure.”

  We made our way down the hall. It seemed lighter, somehow. “How was your dad last night over the skeleton news?”

  “Stoic, but I can tell he’s bothered. He’s always felt he should have protected her, his little sister.”

  “That’s sad.”

  I pushed open the door to Violet’s room, and a puff of cool air washed over us. “Is there a window open?”

  Samir crossed to the wall and pulled back the heavy drapes. It wasn’t open—it was shattered. Shards of glass were scattered over the floor. “Must have been someone with a pretty good arm,” he said, picking up the hefty rock. “Probably kids.”

  I thought of the teenagers hanging out by the grocery store, smoking. “It’s not like there’s much for them to do around here.”

  “True enough.” With his foot, he scraped the glass toward the wall. “You’ll need to have someone come in and get all of this catalogued, get the paintings to a safer location. I’m pretty sure a couple of these are worth a fair bit.”

  “Jocasta said that one is an Ingres.”

  “So how do you want to start?”

  I pressed my lips together and turned in a circle. “When my mother set up these treasure hunts, she was mostly visual, and she liked puns, jokes, riddles.” I looked around slowly at the paintings, the drawings, the bed.

  Wandering to the dressing table, I picked up the empty perfume bottles and smelled them, set them back down. “I want to take the Lalique bottles back with me,” I said. “We should have brought something to carry things in.”

  “I would imagine there is some sort of bag or something in here.” He opened a closet, and there, mostly in shreds, were the remains of Violet’s wardrobe, the bright India silks Helen had told me about, the embroidery. The remnants stung me, hanging there for so long unnoticed.

  “She died at least a few years before my mother left, and this room is just as it was when Violet was here. Why?” I frowned, moved back into the room, looked at the paintings, one by one. “Mom, what did you want me to see?”

  Nothing leapt out at me—if any of these paintings had influenced my mother’s work, I couldn’t trace it. The exotic landscapes and portraits, some tiny, some enormous, were nothing like her work. In one, a white Persian cat sat in the lap of a fat sultan wearing shoes with turned-up toes. I lingered on the harem painting and the one of a tiger that I’d seen before, and I stepped close to what I thought might be the plantation where my grandmother had been born, the place she had been forced to leave. “I wonder why she didn’t just let Rosemere go if she loved India so much,” I said aloud. The painting made it appealing, blue-green hills rising in mysterious distance behind the house, the scroll-like shapes of tea plants etched across them.

  “Duty?” Samir answered. “Or maybe she saw the writing on the wall with Indian independence. When did she leave?”

  “I can’t remember exactly. The forties, but it must have been after the war—it would have been difficult to travel anywhere while the war was raging.”

  “Partition was 1947.” He shook out a length of fabric, riddled with holes but mainly intact. “She probably knew it was time to leave.” He separated relatively good fabric from the crumbling, destroyed things, each in their own pile on the floor.

  The name of the place was tacked to the frame on a tiny brass tag. “Have you ever seen photos of the plantation? Is this it?”

  “It was called Sundar Hills.”

  “This is it.” I took the painting off the wall. “I’m going to take this with me too.” I looked on the back of the painting for a clue from my mother, but there was nothing more, and I laid it on the bed next to the Lalique perfume bottles.

  Next, I moved to the dressing table, opening drawers to find the usual accouterments—a brush, a manicure set made of bone, bobby pins, a loose button. A line of carved wooden elephants, all sorts of them, some decorated with bits of mirror or beads and, shockingly, bits of ivory fitted into their tusks, marched across the back of the table, their reflections murky in the spotted mirror. The elephants, too, I wanted to bring with me, and I gathered them up, frowning again over the idea that no one had cleared the room after Violet’s death. Had it been too painful? Had my mother been angry? Why hadn’t her son done it either?

  What happened here?

  I brushed off my hands and looked at the pasha again.

  A line from a book ran through my head: “White Persian cats lay limply on the lawn,” from One Last Look, by Susannah Moore, a book my mother and I had read as one of our choices for our book club of two. It was a novel about a woman being seduced by India, resisting, then falling in love with it. I’d loved it more than she had, and now I wondered if it was because the woman had reminded her of her mother. I crossed the room and tipped the painting upward to see if there was anything obviously behind it, but it was very heavy, and only dust and cobwebs were visible. “Samir, will you help me with this?”

  “Sure.” We lifted it together and leaned it against the bed. Dust and mildew stained the wall behind.

  But there, taped to the wooden frame, was a key. I let go of a chortle. It was an old-fashioned brass key, with curlicues and a flag at the end, tied to the wood with red string. I yanked it, and the string gave way easily. “I was right. It’s a treasure hunt.” Holding it in my hand, I said, “Now what could this unlock?”

  Samir touched my arm and pointed me to a heavy wardrobe. Sure enough, the key fit, and although it took some doing to open the swollen door, with enough yanking it did at last give way.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not paintings, two shelves’ worth, all carefully wrapped in tissue paper, then sandwiched between appropriately sized cardboard. None were large, and there were probably fifteen or sixteen of them. They’d been so carefully wrapped that I had no idea what they were, but my gut said this mattered.

  Except, why leave them here, where they might have been stolen, plundered, destroyed by time? “We can’t leave these here,” I said. I took one out, wondering if I should take a peek before I—

  “Olivia, you’ll want to see this.” Samir sat on the floor with a low, flat box.

  “Okay. Just a second.” I chose a smaller painting and began to gently release the tissue paper wrapping.

  “Olivia,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Drawn by his tone, I nested the painting back in its place and sat down beside him. “What is it?”

  He handed over a sheaf of pictures. Most were black-and-white photos, faded, some so faded they were hard to decipher. India, clearly, often the plantation in the painting. “Was the box in the wardrobe too?”

  “Yes.”

  I leafed through the photos slowly. A meal at a long table with a dozen guests, men and women; a badminton match with two unknown women making a gesture of conquest. A house with a wide porch—a portico. A handful of letters were tucked into the mix and ephemera of all kinds—a program from a play in India from 1943, a receipt so faded it was impossible to read, a scrap of a note with colors in a list.

  “Look. This must be your uncle,” Samir said, handing over a dozen snapshots of a blond child at several ages—a thin, tired-looking toddler; a still-skinny but smirking twelve-year-old; a shot of a group of children with the same boy standing on a chair with a sword over them.

  “Oh, he looks just swell,” I said drily.

  “It would have been a surprise if you’d discovered all the rumors of his nastiness were inflated.”

  “Are there journals or anything? That would really, really help.”

  “I haven’t seen any yet.”

  We both dug through the box, picking out this and that, looking for clues, an
ything we could understand. Near the bottom of the box, however, was a surprise—a stash of pornographic photos of women. “What’s this?”

  Samir sifted through another stack of papers and didn’t look up. “What is it?”

  “Naked women.”

  No, not women. A woman, singular. An Indian woman with astonishing black hair she smoothed down over her naked body, looking at the camera in a coy way, sprawling over a patterned bedspread completely naked, her breasts lush and young. “She’s so beautiful,” I breathed, and then, electrified, I grabbed his arm. “Oh my God, Samir! Did my grandmother like women?”

  “What are you talking about?” He leaned in as I flipped to the next photo, this one larger and more beautiful than the last, the sloe-eyed woman in her twenties, looking straight at the camera with a small smile, her shoulders elegant, her waist tiny—

  “Ack!” Samir reared back and covered his eyes with his hands. “That’s my grandmother.” He laughed. “Oh, my eyes are burned forever.”

  “This is your grandmother?” I shuffled through the pictures, and there were dozens and dozens of them, not all fully naked but all suggestive. Some when she was only a teen, maybe fourteen or fifteen, her breasts high and still small. Another was of the same woman in her thirties, her arms rounder, her hips wide, her face mature. Some in India, some clearly here in this room.

  “This is—” The implications were tragic. “They were lovers.”

  He lowered his hands from his eyes and leaned over my shoulder again, covering the top photo with his open palm. His eyes met mine, full of sorrow. “Think of it,” he said quietly. “All those years.” His voice was raw. “It’s so sad.”

  His eyes were so close I could count individual eyelashes, see the barely visible line where his iris met the pupil. I looked at his mouth, which I knew from kissing him was soft and full. The lingering, intense connection between us flared again, and I looked away. “What was her name?”

  “Nandini.”

  “Nandini.” I whispered it, and to my amazement, a tear welled over and fell down my face.

  “What’s this?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to identify the ache. “I don’t know. It’s just heartbreaking.”

  “It is.” He brushed the tear away. “Now they would just marry and be done.”

  “Instead they married men. And Violet became a drunk.”

  His hand, heavy and long fingered, rested across the sheaf of photos on my lap. His nails were clipped short, tidy, efficient, and even so they were beautiful. Like his tapered fingers, his broad thumb, the angle of his wrist. I pressed the tip of my index finger to the tip of his. “Neither of us would exist if they’d married.”

  “Would you mind?” He lifted his hand, and our palms met, sizzling, as if the combination created a shimmering electric field. “If I did not exist?”

  “Yes. I would hate that world.” Impulsively, I reached up and cupped his jaw, moved his hair away from his cheekbone, wondering how I’d missed the fact that this face, this singular face, was impossibly precious. I held it between my hands, peering down into his eyes, eyes like a night sky, eyes had that enchanted me the first time I’d seen him and enchanted me again, over and over. I brushed my thumbs down his goatee, as he so often did, and this time, it was me who angled my head and paused, looking for permission, then leaned in and kissed him.

  Kissed his mouth, those soft, full lips. I fell into them, into him, and then his arms were around me, hauling me half into his lap, the photos scattering, and he was kissing me back, hard, one hand on the back of my head, the other on my lower back. We were kissing each other, plunging, exploring, hungry. I buried my hands in his hair, and he hauled my body into his chest. I ran my hands over his shoulders, powerful and broad, and he slid his hands beneath my sweater to touch my back, my sides.

  Abruptly, he stopped, captured my hands. “Wait.” He swallowed. “Not here, with them watching.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “No, that would be weird. You’re right.”

  He brushed my hair away from my mouth, his eyes following the path of his fingers. “We need to get things right here, too, before we leave.”

  “I know.” I touched his nose, feathered my fingers over his heavy eyebrow. An ache made of equal parts lusty hunger and a piquant yearning filled my body, heart and throat and mind and fingers. Now that we were touching, I didn’t want to stop. “I feel like an iron shaving stuck to a magnet.”

  He smiled, ran his hands down the outside of my legs. “Believe me, I know the feeling.”

  I glanced at the box, then back to him. “You won’t change your mind?”

  “No.” He caught my face in his hands, fiercely, and kissed me again. Hard and deep. His eyes opened, and they were close, close, close. “No. Will you?”

  I couldn’t speak. Only shook my head.

  Gently, he pulled away. “All right, then. Let’s get this business done.”

  I opened one of the paintings, expecting it to be one of my mother’s early paintings, but instead, it was an exquisite portrait of a young woman in sixteenth-century dress, her hair curled on one shoulder, her breasts pressed into the square bodice of her blue gown. The painter had captured a sense of mischief about her, and his command of light—cascading over her skin, tangling in her hair—was magnificent. “This looks important,” I said. “Do you know artists?”

  “Not really, but I agree that it is very high quality. Is it an ancestor?”

  “I don’t know, but she could be.” I looked at the wrapped paintings and made a decision. “I don’t want to leave them, but I also don’t want to look at every single one of them. Will these fit in your car?”

  “Not all at once.” He gestured to the bed, where other things were waiting transport as well. “I can call someone, perhaps.”

  “No, no. I know who to call.” I scrolled through my favorites on my phone and found Peter’s number. He was available. “He’ll meet us in front in an hour. We can drop the paintings and the box at my flat.”

  One side of his mouth faintly, faintly lifted. “And then we can go to my house, if you like.”

  I nodded, just as faintly. The atoms of my skin whispered the news to each other, Soon soon soon. I had to look away from him to break the spell. His hand fell on my shoulder, slid beneath my hair to my neck, then dropped away, as if he, too, had to find a different focus.

  We worked in silence, making sure nothing terribly important was left behind in the wardrobe, though it really did appear that the paintings and the box of photos were all that was in there.

  Samir poked his head inside and pressed on the back. “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Just making sure there’s no hidden passageway to Narnia.”

  “Or the kitchen.”

  He looked at me, then back at the wardrobe. “The kitchen?”

  “A lot of these places have secret passageways.”

  “Ah, so that’s how they would get together without people noticing.”

  I lifted a shoulder. “Nandini was Violet’s lady’s maid or whatever. She would have been able to come and go whenever Violet summoned her.” I imagined her padding through the hallways in her slippered feet, her sari fluttering behind her, then slipping into Violet’s room and bed. “I wonder if she slept overnight.”

  Samir rubbed his diaphragm, looking back over his shoulder at the bed. “I wonder if they were happy.”

  “Me too.”

  “I hope they were.”

  Finally, finally, we carried the paintings, five or six at a time, through the hallway and down the front stairs.

  A faint awkwardness had risen between us, and impulsively, I reached out and took his hand. He smiled softly and shifted his hand so that our fingers could weave together.

  At the top of the wide, carved staircase, I halted. “Look!” On the ledge of the gallery, another floor above us, sat the cat, his tail draped in luxurious fat length over the edge. It swished as he looked at us, yellow eyes alert an
d unafraid.

  “Hullo,” Samir called. “Won’t you come down and visit?”

  Swish, swish.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I worry about him, now that the construction has started.”

  “He’ll be all right. Ferals are wise.”

  “Yes, but nature is cruel, isn’t it?” I looked back up at him. “If you’ll come live with me, I’ll give you liver and milk and everything else you can imagine.”

  He meowed.

  “Oh, you like to talk, do you?”

  Meow.

  “Here kitty, kitty,” I called.

  He only stared at me.

  “We could bring him some food next time, if you like,” Samir said, rubbing his thumb over my knuckles.

  “I would like.”

  Samir brought his car around to the front, and we loaded as much as we could into it, then waited just inside the door for Peter. Across the open fields, framed by the trees on either side of the house, was Saint Ives Cross, a blurry tumble of houses in the rain. “There’s my house, on the hill.”

  “Can you really pick it out?”

  He laughed gently. “No. But I can in my imagination.”

  Peter drove up and without a blink helped us load everything left into his trunk. I rode with him to direct him to the new flat.

  “I heard you had some excitement up here,” he said.

  “Yes—a part of the roof collapsed, and a skeleton was discovered, all on the same day.”

  “Eventually everything comes to light, don’t it, milady?”

  I thought of my mother. “I hope so, Peter. I really do.”

  “Ye’re not canceling the picnic, now, are you?”

  “No, no. Pavi and I—do you know Pavi Malakar, who runs Coriander?”

  “Course I do. Known her since she was a wee thing. And her brother too. Got all famous, then just came back to Saint Ives like an ordinary fellow.”

  “Samir is famous?”

  “Ye didn’t know? He was in all the papers with that book. They almost made it into a movie!”

  “No kidding.” Of course the residents of a small village would burst with pride over one of their own making a splash. “Did you read it, the book?”