Inheritance Read online

  “That’s Shelley.”

  “Christ, is it? You Yanks always seem to know more about English literchur”—pronouncing it in an exaggerated American accent—“than we do.” His eyes strayed to the television in the corner, where a game of snooker was in progress. My feet were hurting, I was wishing I hadn’t come. I decided to take a taxi back to my hotel. First, though, I would go to the ladies’ room and tidy myself up. I was sure I had mascara running down my cheeks, and my hair felt greasy from the drunk’s hands.

  But when I stood up, he said gruffly, “One of my sisters was very keen on all that.”

  “All what?”

  “Keats and Shelley and that lot. Byron. John Cam Hobhouse.” I stared at him in puzzlement, not sure what this had to do with anything, or why he should sound so gloomy as he brought out the name of Hobhouse. Then his eyebrows went up again. “Don’t look so gobsmacked. Why don’t you sit down and finish your drink?”

  So I did, and we exchanged some basic information: where I was from (I just said New York), where he was from (“originally the West Country”), what I did for a living (edit ecologically minded guidebooks for backpackers: I didn’t say I’d quit my job). He told me he’d lived for a couple of years in Kenya; he and a friend of his who’d been born there had taken tourists on wildlife safaris. Once he’d been summoned to shoot a rogue crocodile that was attacking people. “Crocs are quite difficult to take out, actually, because you have to get them right in the brain, and they have exceptionally small brains.”

  “But did you manage it?”

  “Afraid not. But at least he didn’t kill me either. Would you care for another drink? You’re looking much more cheerful, by the way. It must have been the croc.” He waved away my twenty-pound note and went off to the bar.

  What was he doing now, I asked when he got back. “You can’t be leading safaris in London.”

  No, he said, he was your average disillusioned bureaucrat, not even a proper bureaucrat, because he worked for a think tank. “A ludicrous name for it, given the paucity of thinking that takes place there.”

  “But do you think?”

  “Not very often. I’d be the office pariah if I did.” He’d got a law degree at uni, he said; his remit was jurisprudence, exploring possibilities for coordinating sentencing guidelines among EEC members. He launched into a riff on the contradictory and byzantine laws governing sentencing in France and Italy and West Germany—“So you can get two years for passing a bad check in one country and six months for murder somewhere else”—breaking off occasionally when a shout or a wave of clapping alerted him that something had happened on the snooker table. Apparently there were great disparities in police procedures too, though those weren’t his department. In France they never released a single fact about a crime until they’d arrested someone. In England they begged the public to help them, and all the mad people phoned in and told them how they’d seen the crime in a vision…strung…dem…The place was getting more crowded, there was much hooting and laughter; what with that and his accent and the two double gin and tonics I’d had on an empty stomach, I was missing about a third of what he said. Something about the SDP, something about the wankers in the government.

  At one point I decided I’d better have something besides booze in my stomach, so I went to the bar and bought us two cheese rolls. By my third drink I felt sure that he was suffering, he was in pain without being able to express it. It made me very sad, so sad that twice I went to the ladies’ room to have a little cry. In the passage leading to the ladies’ room, there was a brown-and-white engraving of a lavishly mustachioed man, head of some Indian regiment, and as I leaned against the wall to steady myself and stared into his face, I realized that Julian’s tragedy was that he’d been born into the wrong century: he was meant to be searching for the source of the Nile, or administering justice in some outpost of Empire. Protecting the women and children from rogue crocodiles. That made me cry some more.

  I could never remember how I wound up going home with him that night—whether he said casually, with a shrug, Why don’t you come back to my house? or it was just taken for granted that I would. But somehow there I was, stumbling back along Constantine Road, bumping into him, until he turned right and I did too, down Rona Road, whose name I only learned later. I don’t remember first entering the hallway of his house, or his first entering me, for that matter.

  The next morning, though, I woke in panic, not knowing where I was. I heard his breathing next to me and jerked myself upright, staring around in the semidark to get my bearings. It was seven weeks and four days since my husband had dropped dead, and I was in a stranger’s bedroom in London.

  Someone was running down the stairs; I froze, waiting for a knock, but the footsteps continued down another flight, the front door slammed. For all I knew there was a wife somewhere. A child, even. He would want me out of there quickly. The best thing would be to escape before he woke, before things got awkward, and we had to extend this connection beyond its natural course. It used to happen in my single days in Manhattan, waking up next to some man whose name I wasn’t sure of, while one or both of us tried not to show how badly we didn’t want the other one there. Sometimes the man wasn’t even polite enough to pretend.

  Then came marriage to Eliot, who would never have wanted me to leave, who wanted to wake up with me every morning and keep me safe. But at some point an evil itch took hold of me; I sulked and snarled and banged doors and manufactured grievances. Trying to goad him into fighting back, wanting him to make me behave, so I could think of myself as nice again. Instead he followed me from room to room, pleading with me to be reasonable. On the second-to-last night of his life I’d stormed around shrieking that I was sick of him, I wanted out, and he said, “I curse the day I met you.” He didn’t know that nobody talked like that anymore. I laughed a snotty laugh, to escalate things. “Where did you pick up that phrase? In a romance novel?” Two days later, while he was talking on the phone in his office, a bubble that had lain dormant all his life burst in his brain.

  He would have been horrified at my being there, not just the immorality of it but the risk I was taking. “Silly girl”: he used to call me that, fondly; I liked it in the beginning and then I didn’t. Now I heard his voice in my head, its flat Midwestern vowels, not bitter and accusing as I deserved but kind, sensible. It told me to gather my things, get dressed, get out: for all I knew the naked Englishman next to me could be a serial killer. (Eliot had also believed most Englishmen were gay, or at least bisexual. I could have gotten AIDS—it was the age of AIDS. Had he used any form of contraception?) I slipped noiselessly out of bed, furtive as a cat burglar, scooped up my clothing from the floor, wondering if I could find the bathroom without making a disturbance. I had no memory of where it was.

  The curtains were drawn, the room was almost dark, but I could make out its size, about four times that of my hotel room, with high ceilings. I could just see his shape in the bed. There was a door to my left, slightly ajar, which I pushed open with the same stealth: sure enough, it was a bathroom, with a lovely big claw-footed tub, painted blue, with old-fashioned taps. I wished I could sink into it and shut my eyes, but I only dabbed at my sticky groin with the washcloth dangling over the side, threw some water at my puffy eyes, and dressed myself hurriedly, smoothing down the wrinkles in my black suit. After that I returned to the bedroom, to locate the door into the hall. And then a light switched on by the bed; he lay there watching me.

  “Was it as bad as all that?”

  “What?”

  “The sex. Was it really that dire?”

  I could see the light hairs glinting on his chest—a nice chest, taut and lean. It had been seven years since I’d been alone in a room with a naked man, except for Eliot, and he was running to fat. Despite my resolutions of a few minutes before, I felt a shameful thickening in my veins.

  “I’m just a little embarrassed,”
I said, hovering.

  “Well, don’t be.” There was a warning note to his voice, an I-will-not-put-up-with-any-silliness note, that brought me up short. My head felt very clear suddenly.

  “Somebody just ran down the stairs.”

  “An old mate of mine who’s been camping out in the loft for a few days. He has a heavy tread, doesn’t he? But he’s a decent chap.”

  Rain was splattering the windows on the other side of the room; the panes rattled as the wind struck them. The prospect of battling my way to a bus stop, getting soaked and splashed and whipped by gusts, the thought of the grayish light in my hotel room, the furniture bearing down on me: all that seemed too bleak to bear. Meanwhile the white, high-ceilinged room, with its tiny recessed fireplace surrounded by flowered tiles, its long, faded, chestnut velvet curtains, the oil painting of an old mill over the bed, felt like the very place I had come to find. This, finally, was England. And something about the crispness of his voice, his air of casual command: it seemed like a form of protection, there was so much certainty in it.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” When I nodded, he flung off the covers and stood up, taking a white cotton robe off the door and wrapping himself in it. I was left on my own, uncertain what to do: should I follow him downstairs? Should I sit on the bed with my suit on? I went to the window, pulling the heavy curtain aside, and stared out at the street. The rain had turned to drizzle, the sky was the colorless blank I would come to know so well, not even gray but a thick nothingness. After a few minutes I went down, I found my way to the kitchen, where he was pouring hot water into two mugs, and when we had drunk our tea and he had sworn at the toaster for burning what was meant to be breakfast we wound up back in bed.

  Afterward he picked up the remote and switched on the dusty television balanced on the dresser opposite, hopping from channel to channel—not that there were so many of them, not half as many as in New York—making caustic jokes about the various dramas unfolding, until some politician appeared. Then he started shouting over the man’s words: Liar! Ponce! Wanker! This state of emotional arousal only intensified at any mention of the prime minister: that bloody woman. Bloody bitch. Later he went out and bought not one but three newspapers, which he paged through, with more cursing, while I cooked us eggs and bacon in the kitchen, barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt with a picture of a lion on it that he had dug out of a drawer for me. In the afternoon he watched a soccer game, while I flipped through the newspapers myself, reading the headlines and the book reviews. At intervals Eliot’s voice still came through, but not as clearly, easier to shut out. I saw that it was possible to spend whole days with someone, in and out of bed, and never get close to knowing each other. Or even to feeling anything. It was bracing in its way, at least it held my self-pity in check, kept me from oozing.

  “I’m a deeply shallow person,” he said at one point, and I laughed appreciatively. And the next day, “I have such a very small heart—rather like a crocodile’s brain—that anyone aiming at it tends to miss.” I giggled. It was a relief to take my cue from him. Films and nuclear proliferation were perfectly fine topics of conversation. Mothers, fathers, old lovers might be alluded to in passing, part of some comic anecdote offered for the other’s amusement, but the tone was kept light and droll, anything else would be out of line. Nor were there any of those drowsy postcoital confidences where you start rambling about watching a sunset from the top of a mountain, or how you felt when your dog died—or your husband, for that matter. (Remember, this was in a time before men started turning sensitive and emotionally aware. Especially English ones.)

  He would seem to forget for whole hours that I was there, and then suddenly ask if I was hungry, or bored, or would like to go to a film. But the last thing I wanted was to leave the cocoon of that house. On Sunday night I made us a cheese omelet and opened a tin of sardines. On Tuesday I was due to fly back to New York. “I suppose they’re expecting you back at work,” he said, channel-surfing again. And when I shook my head, when I told him the job was finished, he said briskly, still clicking away, “Then why don’t you just stay here?”

  That shocked me: nothing had been said all weekend that implied a continuation; the whole mood of those three days was of a throwaway interlude. “Oh, I couldn’t,” I said. He didn’t even answer, he kept his eyes on the television. But a moment after, the thought hit, Why not, why can’t I? Nothing awaited me in Manhattan: I’d be camping on my pregnant friend Joannie’s couch while I looked for a new job and a new apartment, with her husband interrogating her in the bedroom, in whispers, as to how long I’d be staying. And everyone I met asking questions about my life, my marriage. A few minutes later, with the BBC announcer talking about the new budget, I told him I’d changed my mind, I’d love to stay. “If you’re sure that’s okay.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked you if it wasn’t,” he said coolly. No reassurances, or explanations either. Was it possible he was lonely? Or just tired of finding new women to sleep with? Maybe he had a thing for skinny blondes with brown eyes. Whatever his reasons, he had offered me a refuge, precarious though it felt, and I took it. On Monday morning, while he was off thinking in Westminster, I went to Bloomsbury, packed up my things, and returned to Rona Road in a taxi to start my new life.

  Two

  She must want something,” Julian said, when he told me that his sister was coming for dinner. She was a Latin teacher, he added, rolling his eyes, and frightfully soulful, too bloody sincere for words. Then he sniffed, a sharp final sound. It reminded me of those Englishmen in old war movies: “It’s a bit of a bore”—sniff—“but I’m afraid the Boche have just blown my leg off.”

  Since the day I’d moved in, I had not so much as shifted a magazine from one place to another on the coffee table. Though I’d hung my clothes in one corner of the bedroom closet, and my nightgown stayed under the pillow during the day, my makeup and birth-control pills were still neatly zipped into my toilet bag in the bathroom. It seemed important to do nothing that looked like staking a claim.

  But the thought of this sister of his looking me over spurred me to assert myself. The day before she was due, I walked up to Hampstead Village and bought a Provençal-style cloth for the long pine table in the kitchen; I replaced the motley assortment of objects on the pewter hutch with some I had found shoved into the cupboards below—a pair of heavy bronze candlesticks, some glazed Moroccan bowls, a bee-shaped honey pot of blue glass and etched silver that I polished and put in pride of place. The next morning I went shopping for food: a chicken, the ingredients for soup and bread and lemon meringue pie, my specialty during my marriage. And that afternoon I finally phoned my mother, to tell her where I was.

  “Guess what!” I said, in the fakely chirpy voice I only ever used with her. “It looks as though I’ll be staying in England a while longer!” I knew exactly where she’d be sitting, in the armchair opposite the television, wearing the green velour robe with the zipper that I’d bought her for Christmas four years earlier, with cold coffee in a white Snoopy mug on the little table beside her. She wouldn’t have gone out for days, she probably hadn’t been taking her hypertension pills and her antidepressants. But the two ladies from the church would drop by later, bringing cookies with brightly colored sprinkles, and make sure she was taking her medication. And then, on Monday morning, the social worker would come.

  Eliot had been better at dealing with my mother than I was. He would tease her in a mildly salacious way, dreaming up all kinds of romantic adventures in her past; she’d toss her head girlishly, tell him to wash his mouth out with soap, clearly enjoying herself hugely. So I had dreaded having to tell her he was dead, I’d broken the news to her as gently as I could. But after a moment’s silence, she only said mournfully that I was like her now, all on my own; I’d better be careful or I might wind up alone forever. “I saw Rita Mitchell last week. And you know what she told me? Her daughter’s husband—they’re down in Tennessee now
—he’s just been promoted to assistant manager. Some people get all the luck.”

  Now she said, “I never hear from your brother these days,” not complaining really, just stating a fact, the way she stated so many other facts that happened not to be cheerful. I told her I would call him and get him to phone her, and then we said good-bye. She hadn’t mentioned Eliot, dead for just nine weeks, but then I hadn’t either.

  He had prided himself on always being able to get taxis in the city; it made me sad to remember that, to remember his triumphant glance at me after his piercing whistle, the authoritative arm he shot into the air, had brought a yellow cab to a halt. Or what a point he made of finding interesting restaurants near us—not just Italian ones, but Korean and Moroccan and Ethiopian, he thought it would be such a treat for me, trying out exotic new dishes. But it wasn’t enough, I could never care about it enough.

  In his mind, I was some kind of exalted being, an unhealthy foundation for a marriage. I was “artistic,” which he saw as meaning something inordinately deep: because I read poetry, instead of watching the Knicks with him on TV, I must be living on a higher plane. In all the years he’d been in New York, he’d only ever been to the Natural History Museum before we met; when I took him to MoMA or the Frick, or a foreign film, I think it satisfied some atavistic notion of Wife as a civilizing influence, in charge of a man’s soul, while he went about the world’s business. More than that, he was doggedly sure, based on two mediocre stories I’d published in the college magazine, that I was destined to be a great writer; over all my protests, he insisted that one day I’d be famous, and then he would be known as my husband.

  He was unreasonably proud of me almost till the end, whereas I was never proud of him, not even of his earning power, impressive for the circles in which we traveled. He’d gone to law school at NYU, but quit to take over the failing business of the man he’d worked for during the summer after his first year; he was always having to deal with some emergency or other, a shipment that hadn’t arrived, a consignment of the wrong goods. He prided himself on remaining calm in the face of his employees’ panic. But in fact it was a slightly ignominious business: a factory in Long Island City that made not clothing but the price tags for clothing, those flimsy bits of cardboard attached to plastic strings. And it often teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Not Master of the Universe stuff.