Inheritance Read online

  “Remember,” his father kept saying on the phone, “you’ll always be our daughter.” His mother wanted me to come to St. Cloud and stay with them; she would send me a ticket, she said, while I sobbed on the other end of the line. I can’t, I told her, I have to get far away, please try to understand, and she cried too, and said she did. I would sit cross-legged on the floor, the receiver pressed to my cheek, shaking with dread that one of them would say, You killed our son. But they thought my grief was as pure as theirs. They were going to erect a stone for him, they told me, Beloved son, beloved husband. It would say that God had called him home. He might not have minded that; he shared their weird innocence, an old-fashioned decency that could make me ashamed, make me feel cheap and sleazy and jaded, though in fact he was much better at navigating the world than I was. I got sidetracked by subtleties, peripheral things, and missed the obvious.

  I packed up his things in a Gallo wine box—his diploma from Northwestern, the square black glasses I’d always hated (I bought him round tortoiseshell frames one Christmas, but he never had them fitted with lenses), the baseball he hit out of the park in Little League—and sent them off to Minnesota. I hauled his suits and shirts and ties, in garbage bags, and Scott on Trusts and the six volumes of Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time, to the Cancer Care Thrift Shop on Third Avenue, and sold the furniture to a junk dealer, and canceled the lease. I paid the super’s junkie son to load up his father’s van with boxes of my clothes and books and drive them to a storage facility in Yonkers.

  His father had promised to wind up the business, warning me that it might not be worth much. But there were a few thousand dollars in our savings account, and the shares of John Deere that Eliot’s grandfather had signed over to him on his twenty-first birthday. I knew I should give it all to charity, I had no moral right to it, but I wasn’t as decent as Eliot, I cashed in the shares, I closed the account. I wrote a check for a thousand dollars to Save the Children and gave my wedding ring to a homeless woman slumped in a doorway on the corner. The next day I quit my job at the travel guide company and bought a ticket to London.

  Now I was sitting in the front room of Julian’s house, with Julian’s sister telling me about her roses that were sickening and dying. No matter what she did she could not get rid of the brown spot on City of York. But just as she was leaving this evening, a neighbor of hers, who worked in the FO (whatever the fuck that was) had come over with a preparation she had made herself, that she swore was more effective than anything from the garden center. It had positively saved the life of her Arthur Bell, it had restored the glow to New Dawn. And it was so simple, that was the beauty of it: she just boiled up chamomile tea with stinging nettles. She would bring some over the very next day. Wasn’t that terribly kind of her, Isabel said, smiling at me with queenly kindness herself. And though I thought she was completely phony, and possibly deranged, and almost wished she’d start asking me those searching questions about myself I’d been afraid a soulful, sincere person might ask—I simply could not get a foothold in this conversation, we seemed to be taking part in some play that she had the script for but I didn’t—I couldn’t help admiring her dress, a pale mauve jersey affair, with a high neck, sort of priggish really, but somehow it made me wish I were wearing a dress myself, instead of jeans and red boots and the V-neck velvet top I had bought at the Break shop on Rosslyn Hill. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, either, not even lipstick, and she looked pure and radiant, like a Florentine Madonna, something by Filippo Lippi, only with faintly Slavic cheekbones. I’d been admiring my image in the bathroom mirror before I came down, thinking it subtly sexy; now I felt like trailer trash.

  But that was nothing to the effect she was having on Julian. He was no longer the war hero but a character from a different bad movie, set in the prewar Balkans, a terribly urbane English diplomat with a silky line of patter, talking about stuff I’d never heard him express the slightest interest in before: some interior designer who’d died, whether the winner at Ascot had been pumped up with drugs. Then he got onto the story of how we’d met, in a superior, faux-witty style, as though it had all been too frightfully amusing—the drunk, the hair-pulling, the muttered references to toffs: “Rather outmoded, that brand of class warfare, I should have thought.”

  “And the irony was,” I said prettily, because here at last was something I could say in the mode that seemed called for, “I was coming from Keats’s house.”

  “Oh, poor you. It must have been horrid.” The strange thing was, I felt she might really mean it.

  “I would have given him the money,” I said, anxious to clarify this point, “but all I had was a twenty-pound note and a few pennies.”

  “It’s best always to keep some change in your pocket for those situations. Not that you should have to give them money, but…”

  “It’s what I did in New York, but somehow I didn’t think about it here.”

  But Julian went on relentlessly with his monologue, in that same sneering, sub-Wildean style: the appalling claret served at a recent SDP function, which had given him such a splitting headache he’d almost decided to join the Tories; the friend from uni whose wife had run off with her father-in-law; what sounded like a very complicated and far-ranging scandal in Surrey, involving the passing of brown envelopes stuffed with cash between property developers and a high-ranking member of English Heritage. “We Anglo-Saxons,” he said mockingly, “we’ve persuaded ourselves that corruption only happens elsewhere, we expect it from the Italians or the Africans, but we’re meant to be superior to that sort of behavior, it’s all honor and fair play with us. Which is exactly what enables it to continue undisturbed—nobody admits it’s happening.” And then, because she was silent, “Or don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “There must be all sorts of people who are trying to do the right thing, don’t you think? Perhaps we just don’t hear about them.”

  His whole facade wobbled for an instant, there was a flash of fear, before he rallied. “Of course it’s different when you’re wrangling with the ablative absolute all day. Much more satisfying, I’m sure.”

  “I really wouldn’t know,” she said. “I haven’t wrangled with the ablative absolute in eons.” Her voice sounded like Julian’s a few moments before—like a wall of glass, nothing you could ever penetrate. Wow, I thought, she can do it too. Maybe they can all do it.

  He yawned. “Sorry. I can’t keep up with the hectic pace of change in your life.” He looked at me. “Wasn’t there some mention of our eating dinner tonight?”

  We proceeded to the kitchen in silence, in single file, and I ladled the celery soup into bowls. “It’s lovely,” she said politely, though in fact it was too floury. She complimented me on the bread. “I’m afraid it’s only soda bread,” I said, with a little flutter of self-deprecation I thought of as English. “I’m cursed with bad yeast karma, it never seems to rise for me no matter how I cajole it. Very sad.” An effortful smile from Isabel. She asked me where I was from in America. I told her, she said she didn’t know it, was it very beautiful? It could be, I said, particularly in the fall.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve seen photographs,” she said. “The trees turn all those brilliant colors, it looks too too splendid.”

  I in turn asked her about her teaching, which turned out to be not at some high school, as I’d assumed, but at Kings College London. “And what about your book?” I asked then. “Do tell me about that”—another Englishism. Julian had said it was about dancing, making it sound like a how-to book about the polka, but it had something to do with dance and religion in the ancient world: “one of those books that nobody ever reads all the way through except the writer and the editor, and I’m not even sure about my editor.” (Later I found out that wasn’t quite true: the TLS had called it groundbreaking, the LRB reviewer used the word “seminal.” She was way ahead of me in the self-deprecation department.)

  Julia
n, who had sulked through the soup course, perked up when the chicken arrived, embarking, apropos of nothing, on a story about a chap he’d known who’d produced his English driving license in a car rental place in Florida and been asked by the woman at the counter what state England was in. America was a favorite topic of his; he would summon me from downstairs to watch with him if they were interviewing some obese John Bircher on TV, bitching about the Commies in the guvment fleecin’ him to put food in the mouths of some lazy slut’s bastards, or a preacher in Mississippi exhorting his followers to give him their dollars for the fight against homos. I sometimes wondered if the BBC had special scouts combing America for the most freakish specimens they could find; even in the bumfuck town where I grew up, there was no one to equal the grotesques on Panorama.

  And still I would giggle merrily, eager to share the joke; I recited the Gurneyville cheerleaders’ chants for his amusement, or the patriotic songs they made us sing at assembly: “I am so lucky to be in America”…“At ’em boys…give ’em the gun.”

  Not that night, though. Not with someone who said “too too splendid” and made me feel like a slut for wearing eye shadow.

  But she hardly seemed to be listening; she kept darting troubled glances at the pewter hutch, her fingers in constant motion, kneading tiny bits of my soda bread on the new tablecloth. I couldn’t understand why the sight of the innocuous objects on those shelves should distress her so, unless she coveted some family heirloom that had gone to Julian.

  He had moved on to the subject of his work, describing his meeting about the prison bill with a committee from the House of Lords. “It’s astonishing, really, that there’s never been a revolution in this country. Half of them were barking mad, and the rest could charitably be described as clueless. One of them suggested we might introduce pigeon breeding into the prisons to build character. ‘Give the poor devils something to keep them out of trouble, what?’ ” Meanwhile Isabel kept rolling those bread crumbs between her fingers, only smiling faintly in response. I could sense his irritation mounting, I thought we might be hearing about the ablative absolute again, so I jumped in, as falsely sprightly as I was with my mother: “Oh, that’s perfect, I love that…I mean, they’re real English eccentrics, aren’t they? It just seems so right.”

  Then he said abruptly, “Speaking of barking mad, how’s Sasha doing?” That was the sister he’d told me was bonkers, the one who knew about John Cam Hobhouse. When he’d announced that Isabel was coming, he’d said, “Not the mad one, the other one.”

  Her fingers stopped moving. “She’s wonderful, actually. I mean, so much better, it’s like a miracle, really. They say it happens like that sometimes, it can just disappear, the illness, when people get a bit older. Into their thirties. Though of course they can’t be sure it will last. But then she’s got this lovely young woman living with her, I’m sure that’s got a lot to do with it. It makes such a difference, being able to have proper conversations again. Not being talked to as though she’s an idiot. They have arguments about books, they go to the theater together, and to lectures at the V&A.”

  “How very jolly,” Julian said, picking up his glass.

  “You should really visit her sometime, Julian, I know she’d love to see you.”

  “Of course I’m going to visit her. I just haven’t had time these past few weeks. We’ve been rather occupied here.” He gave me a mock leer. “In fact I was going to ring her over the weekend.”

  “She’ll be so pleased…Are you sure you have her new number?”

  “Why don’t you give it to me again, just to be sure? Not now,” he said irritably, as she made a move to rise from the table. “Surely it can wait.” And then, as she sat down again, “Relax. I said I’d go.”

  “I’ll come with you if you want,” I said.

  “Ah, the famous magnanimity of women.” He was pouring himself more wine; he didn’t see her face as she mouthed a thank-you to me, the way it softened, as though she were suddenly shy. I felt different about her after that.

  Throughout the evening, there’d been no mention of whatever it was she supposedly wanted from him. I thought my presence might be a deterrent, so when dinner was over I announced in something of Julian’s manner that coffee would be served in the sitting room, and lingered in the kitchen long enough for the discussion to take place. But when I brought in the tray with the coffee, along with a pen to write down Sasha’s number, Julian was telling yet another story, about an Irish chap in his office who’d crashed his Mini into a police van after a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Soon after that, she thanked us for a lovely evening and left. When I asked him what it was she’d wanted to talk to him about, he picked up the Guardian from the table and started leafing through it. “Nothing much.” He turned a page. “It was to do with our diabolical mother, actually. Whose very efficient lackey she’s always been.” He replaced the Guardian on the table in favor of the New Statesman. “We had a sort of falling-out a few years back, and I cut the cord.”

  “What was the falling-out about?”

  “I’d just as soon not discuss it, if you don’t mind. It was a grueling enough evening as is, without an interrogation at the finish.” He yawned. “Anyway, I’m knackered. Time for some telly. Shall we go up?”

  “I’ve got to clear up…Why didn’t you tell me how beautiful she is?”

  “Perhaps because I knew you’d say it. Women always do. I don’t think men fancy her much.”

  “How do you know? You’re her brother, they wouldn’t tell you if they did.”

  “She just doesn’t look like the fanciable type to me. Besides, she never mentions a bloke, except her murdered Greek, and that was ages ago. I sometimes wonder if she might be frigid. Didn’t she strike you as rather frigid?”

  “What are you talking about? What murdered Greek?”

  It was when she’d been on a fellowship in Athens, he said. “There was an uprising at the university there, they were protesting the fascist dictatorship, and the army broke it up with tanks. He was mowed down with some of the others, poor sod. So she came back to England with the kid.”

  “But that’s horrible. How could you not have told me?”

  “It was donkey’s years ago. The daughter is fifteen now.”

  “You never even said she had a daughter.”

  “Forgive me, I had no idea you were so interested in my family history.” Sniff. He put down the magazine. “One has to wonder what goes on under that facade of hers. Of course she presents herself as perfectly sane, the very model of self-containment. But that can’t be all.”

  “What do you mean? Why shouldn’t she be sane? You’re pretty sane, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed.” He heaved himself up. “Remarkably sane. Extraordinarily so. I learned it a long time ago. Now I really am going up, come join me when you’re finished.”

  Twenty minutes later, when I went upstairs after dealing with the dirty plates and the leftovers and drinking the remainder of the wine straight from the bottle, he was lying naked on the sheets, channel surfing. But even once I’d washed off my makeup and shed my clothing I couldn’t bring myself to join him. I stood fiddling with the light cord, trying to figure out what he’d meant about learning to be sane. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Who?”

  “Her Greek lover.”

  He kept his eyes on the TV, where there was a program about sheepdog trials, with views of a castle in the background. “Once. In Athens. When I was traveling with my girlfriend from uni. There were a couple of others there too, the lot of them smoking like chimneys. But only tobacco. At first they all spoke English, for Deirdre’s and my sake, but after a bit they were jabbering in Greek, getting very worked up. Probably about politics. And Isabel was hanging raptly on their every word, especially his; she seemed terribly proud of him, looking over at me to see if I was properly impressed, whereas he barely took any notice o
f her. Every once in a while he’d smile and nod in my direction, and ask some polite question, like what type of law I wanted to go into, and where were we heading next. And as we left he gripped me by the shoulders, he told me to get out of Greece, it wasn’t a good place, I should come back when it was free. Then he quoted a Dylan song, about chimes of freedom. I remember that because it sounded so incongruous in his accent. That’s all I can tell you.” He switched off the TV and flung the covers back on my side, beckoning me to hop in.

  “What about her daughter?”

  “What about her?”

  “You haven’t even told me her name.”

  He shut his eyes. “Lucy Eleftheria. That means freedom in Greek. I told you, he was a revolutionary. She’s quite earnest, like her mother, rather pretty though, she went off to boarding school in Hampshire this year, and I am extremely bored with this subject.”

  But even in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about her, bits of the evening kept coming back to me, making me wince with shame. Because I knew how we must have seemed to her, Julian with his glib patter and me doing my cheap little imitation of English gentility. I have to explain, I thought, I have to tell her, though it wasn’t clear to me what exactly I would tell—the truth, the whole ball of wax? Did I think she could grant me absolution? Meanwhile our bodies were going through their usual contortions, though even when desire kicked in, the heat of it couldn’t stop my brain from ticking over: I felt more than ever how separate we were from each other, two lonely animals clambering over each other in a pretend act of love.