Inheritance

  ALSO BY EVELYN TOYNTON

  FICTION

  Modern Art

  The Oriental Wife

  NONFICTION

  Jackson Pollock

  Copyright © Evelyn Toynton 2019

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Toynton, Evelyn, 1950- author.

  Title: Inheritance / Evelyn Toynton.

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018061174 (print) | LCCN 2019003440 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519219 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: England—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Psychological.

  Classification: LCC PS3570.O97 (ebook) | LCC PS3570.O97 154 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018061174

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519226

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Evelyn Toynton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  In memory of

  ZPB, MD

  A luxury weight-loss spa deep in the English countryside…a country-house break to restore you body and soul.” Rows of shiny machines in what was once the drawing room, barres on three walls of the morning room, black rubber matting on the study floor. Gray-painted walls, and all the furniture stripped out: the wing chairs, three-legged footstools, fringed sofas in tobacco-colored velvet. The paintings in their gilt frames, the clutter of books and lacquered snuffboxes on the parquet tables. The window seats have been removed, the fireplaces sealed up, the mullioned glass replaced with double glazing. And why should that matter to me, anyway, what difference can it possibly make now?

  I remember her saying that when she was young she was always hoping she’d got things wrong, there was some explanation she hadn’t thought of. “Because surely whatever it was couldn’t be as awful as it seemed, or whoever it was couldn’t have meant to be so nasty. I actually thought that when I got older, and understood more, I’d see that everything was all right really. Oh dear.” That’s one of the phrases I associate with her: “Oh dear.” Now I say it myself sometimes. When my baby daughter tries to walk and falls, “Oh dear,” I say, scooping her up before she can start to cry, and she lisps it back to me.

  I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t picked up an old copy of Vogue at the hairdresser’s in St. Paul. I was browsing through the magazines, waiting for my highlights to take, and there it was, a four-page spread complete with glossy photos. Women in identical quilted robes, with matching slippers, were gliding through the hall in single file on their way to the treatment cubicles in the basement. In the dining room, where they’re served their penitential meals of kimchi and digestive bitters, the Hungarian naturopath who runs the place stood in the doorway, a model of Mittel-European chic with a faintly tragic air of wounded majesty. Another shot showed rows of padded pink lounge chairs on the terraced lawn, with the sun setting over the hill behind. Impossible to tell if the greenhouse to the left is still there, where, in her childhood, the body of a woman dangled from a hook.

  The Duchess of Argyll Room, the Rosebery Room, the Mrs. Humphrey Ward: all the rooms upstairs, where the guests are housed, have been named for notable figures said to have visited in the glory days of Empire (the writer was careful to explain who those forgotten personages were). And each bedroom has been restored to an imagined former splendor, with a four-poster bed and a chaise longue, a ewer set in a flowered china basin on the bureau.

  There was no mention of the nursery on the top story—the staff must be quartered there now—or her mother’s lab across the hall, with its cages full of mutant rodents. In the nursery fridge, where Nanny kept the milk in summer, corpses lay on chipped Royal Doulton saucers, their paws in the air; these were the voles whose aberrant genes had been proved to account for their promiscuity.

  The lascivious voles got a paragraph to themselves, but of course her mother’s sex life was never alluded to. She was the heroine of the piece, the highborn Englishwoman, daughter of a lord, grown old in the house where she was born, but forging her own unorthodox path in the grand tradition of English eccentrics. A crusader for the environment, discoverer of new patterns in chromosomes. And there she was, her bony face staring out from under a jeweled turban, her hands clutching a Chinese walking stick carved with dragons. Even the great catastrophe of her final years, the article said, the death of her first-born child in a freak accident, had not crushed her indomitable spirit. “She died, aged 83, happy in the knowledge that her work was being carried on by others.”

  Her son and heir, the journalist explained, had sold the Hall to its present, corporate owners—a consortium in Luxembourg—after her death. “He is now living in Kenya, where, in his own way, he is continuing the family commitment to conservation, leading wildlife tours in the bush. When I finally reached him at the park lodge, he told me how glad he is that others can enjoy the tranquillity of his ancestral home.” I must have given a snort, or muttered something under my breath; the stringy-looking woman opposite me, her head encased in an enormous puffy helmet, gives me a reproachful look. I roll up the magazine and jam it into my bag, but she isn’t finished with me; she frowns her disapproval, shaking her head inside its bouffant covering. A staunch Midwestern moralist, who’s never stolen even an old magazine. But instead of blushing, instead of removing the Vogue from my bag, looking sheepish, suddenly I’m furious. My hands are shaking, I glare at her so fiercely she averts her eyes, alarmed, pretending to examine the Redken poster on the wall. And still I can’t let up, I’m glowering like a maniac, because she’s all I’ve got, the only available target for my rage. Not one of its true objects
is within reach, or ever will be.

  Unlike her mother, she did not die happy. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, you stupid cow.

  One

  I had come to England, that May of 1986, expecting lofty and exalted feelings, but everywhere I went I kept picking up distress signals, thin vibrations of pain: a blotchy-faced girl shredding a Kleenex with both hands on the 73 bus, a dark birdlike man hunched over his soup in the shabby café near the South Kensington Tube station. And every morning, when I opened my eyes in my crummy hotel in Bloomsbury, all the mismatched bits of furniture bristled at me with silent malice. Then I’d tell them to fuck off, though not loud enough for them to hear.

  On my eighth day in London, I woke to the smell of mildew: one door of the lopsided wardrobe had swung open during the night. I slammed it shut and padded to the window, peering through the net curtains to check out the street. Sometimes I’d stand for an hour, one leg snaked around the other, watching the people below. That morning it was drizzling, they were putting up umbrellas, tugging at their collars, tossing cigarettes into the gutter as they headed for the Tube. I couldn’t pick out faces very well, but even from the third floor I could spot the luckless ones, trudging along with their heads down, communing with the sidewalk. A squat bald man barreled impatiently ahead, knocking his briefcase against a woman’s bare legs. Ordinary, trivial rudeness. You’d have to be half nuts to get riled about a thing like that when it wasn’t even happening to you. But there I was, heart pounding. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life…there was no answer to that, nobody had ever found an answer.

  Time was running out. There were only a few days left to find the romance of England, in which I’d placed so much faith; so far it had eluded me even among the swans and turrets and purple irises of St. James’s Park. It was just past nine o’clock. I made my way to the damp bathroom down the hall, where I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face; back in my room, shivering by the tepid radiator, I dressed quickly in my good black suit and high heels, as though I had somewhere important to get to. In front of the cracked mirror of the wardrobe, I applied lipstick, blush, the new greeny-gold eyeliner in a pot that I had bought on the last day of my old life and never worn. Then I went down the shabby steps and onto streets newly washed with rain; in the first square I came to, the leaves on the trees were blurry with sunlit water. A tremulous, born-again feeling. I realized I was hungry, and climbed the majestic steps of the Hotel Russell.

  A boy who looked no more than fifteen, in a maroon uniform whose matching hat tied under his chin with gold braid, emerged from behind a speckled marble pillar and asked if he could help. I’d like some breakfast, I told him. “Certainly, madam,” he said, in a grave adult voice, though it squeaked. “I’ll go see if we have a table available. Would you care to take a seat while you’re waiting?” He gestured to a deep alcove at the left of the staircase, where a small round table with a vase of gold and crimson flowers sat between two identical plushy armchairs.

  One chair was occupied by a bony old man in a clerical collar, with a rough-coated white terrier at his feet. As I seated myself opposite, he turned toward me, and I saw that the left side of his face had collapsed, his eye half-sliding onto his cheek. Very slowly, he lifted a trembling hand from the arm of his chair, then lowered it again. Men in suits and gleaming shoes walked past. A few minutes later my teenaged guide reappeared to inform me in the same grave voice that my table was ready. When I stood up the man opposite lifted his hand again, higher this time, so that I almost thought he was going to pronounce a blessing.

  I ate a large plate of eggs and sausages and fried tomatoes in a cavernous room crowded with chandeliers.

  After that I had a burst of determination; I got out my guidebook, with its little foldout maps, and made my way on foot to the National Portrait Gallery, where I tried to sort out which wigged and powdered man was which; I revisited the van Dycks next door; I wandered down the Mall and up Whitehall, and circled the thunderous-looking statues on plinths in Waterloo Place. Then I remembered that I hadn’t yet been to Keats’s house, and went looking for a 24 bus.

  When I was eleven, my father had sat on my bed and told me the story of Keats’s life in a voice husky with tears. At fifteen I had read Keats’s letters in bed, under a pile of blankets, in a house my mother could no longer afford to heat, and believed that I could have saved him somehow. In college I’d kept on my desk a postcard of his grave that I’d found in an old library book.

  I’d expected his house to be silent, like a shrine, but a straggly party of Russians was being ushered around by a stocky female with a harsh angry voice. I lingered on the ground floor, by the case with Fanny Brawne’s engagement ring, waiting for them to go upstairs, but even when they did, I could still hear her booming away. The bony woman at the ticket desk told me that the Russians had gone to lay a wreath on Marx’s grave in Highgate; now the guide was killing time before delivering them for their scheduled appointment at the Consulate. “She’s come here before, she doesn’t know anything about Keats,” she burst out resentfully. “I think she just lectures them about the evils of the class system.” I liked how fierce she sounded, like a dog growling; I wished I could go on talking to her—I hadn’t heard my own voice much that week—but I couldn’t think of anything helpful to say.

  Upstairs the guide’s guttural consonants followed me as I peered at the portraits, the death mask, the tiny bed he might or might not have slept in, trying to feel his presence in those white antiseptic rooms. Finally I gave up and took myself for a walk on the heath, where no nightingales sang, and one of my heels sank into a dog turd hidden in a clump of tiny purple flowers. But at least I hadn’t picked up any signals of anguish from the Russians.

  I had just made my way back to South End Green and turned onto Constantine Road when an unshaven man with half his teeth missing accosted me and asked if I could spare a couple of quid. “I could say it was for food, darlin’, but I’m not going to lie to you.” He winked at me. “I’m an alcoholic, see, I can’t help it, it’s a disease.”

  All I had in my wallet, apart from a twenty-pound note and a day’s travelcard, was a five-pence bit and a few pennies—that and the ticket that allowed for free entry to Keats’s house for a year, which he might not find very useful. So I handed over the change, apologizing: “I’d give you more, honest, but this is all I have on me.”

  “What about the note, then?” And when I said I wasn’t going to give him twenty pounds he thrust his face at mine. “What’s twenty quid to you compared to me? Eh?”

  “Sorry.” I closed my bag and walked away, but he followed behind, muttering just loud enough for me to hear, “Fuckin’ Yank, we don’t want you here, go back where you came from, foreign cunt,” all the time breathing heavily, quickening his pace when I did. After a minute I was short of breath too—pant puff, pant puff: our breaths had synchronized—and hampered by my high heels, so that I could only trot in short steps. Across the street a woman was talking to her dog, a fat dachshund on a leash, without taking any notice of us. I wondered if I should shout for help, but I still hoped he was basically harmless, he’d get bored with calling me a Yank and a cunt and veer off.

  Then he grabbed my hair, jerking my head back; I clutched my handbag to my chest and tried to hit him with my other hand, flailing behind me, while he tugged harder. At that point I did scream for help, but I had hardly gotten out the H when he let go, I heard a sort of crack, and turned my liberated head around: a tall sandy-haired man in a V-neck sweater had a cigarette in one hand and the other wrapped around my assailant’s neck. “Now,” he said, “I think that’s quite enough, don’t you? In fifteen seconds I’ll let go, and then you’ll scarper. Agreed? Just nod if you agree.” Insofar as he could, the drunk nodded his head. “All right, off you go,” Sir Lancelot said briskly, and released him.

  “Fuckin’ toff,” the man said, rubbing his neck, and then, as he crossed the roa
d, “Bleedin’ imperialist toff.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “Really, I can’t thank you enough, you saved my life.”

  “I doubt very much that your life was in danger. Still, it must have been a nasty shock. You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, “I’m fine,” and burst into tears.

  “Of course you are.” He threw his cigarette in the gutter. “I was just on my way to the pub. You’d better come along.”

  I had to scurry to keep up as we headed back toward South End Green, which made me more teary. I must get rid of these shoes, I thought, sniffling, I must get some flats.

  “Here we are,” he said, opening the pub door, and I tottered after him to the long wooden bar, where he spent a good three minutes discussing what I gathered was soccer with the man behind it, while I diverted myself by reading the signs on the dark walls and the words on the little pumps.

  Finally he turned to me and asked what I’d like to drink. He frowned when I said a gin and tonic, as though that was the wrong answer. But he went ahead and ordered it.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Jules?” the barman said, measuring out the gin.

  His eyebrows shot up. “I’m afraid we haven’t been formally introduced.” He turned to me again. “Would you mind telling us your name?”

  So I did. “And you’re Jules.”

  “Julian, actually. But Jules will do.”

  In a booth by the window, I got my first direct look at him: eyes the gray of rain clouds, a long bony nose, slightly jutting chin, an altogether decisive-looking face. He took a long swig. “So. Tell me what you were doing wandering around Constantine Road.”

  I had been to Keats’s house, I explained.

  “Ah yes. ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit.’ ”