Inheritance Page 4

  While my limbs accommodated him, while I rocked him inside me, I was feverishly hatching plans. It was like being in high school again, working out schemes for waylaying the long-haired boy from civics class I’d spotted with a copy of Baudelaire. We’ll go and see Sasha, I thought, then I can call her up to report, and the idea pleased me so much I almost laughed with gladness. Later I would say it must have been a premonition, but at the time it felt more like nostalgia, to do with the past and not the future—a reminder of some other way of being I’d forgotten about, a sliver of myself I thought I’d lost for good.

  Three

  In my last year at Stony Brook, I began to believe—mistakenly, as it turned out—that I had it in me to write a novel, and signed up for a creative writing course with an aging novelist from Kentucky, author of several books about Appalachian rednecks, who shut his eyes and rocked back and forth, all but groaning audibly, as we read our stuff aloud in class. He also said “fucking” a lot, which he seemed to think would shock us.

  He didn’t say my nascent novel was fucking boring, as he’d told the student who read before me; he said I had a fucking unreliable narrator and didn’t seem to know it: “It’s okay for Clara not to see her father was a prick for walking out like that, but we’ve got to know that you see it.” Clara was my middle name; the father in the book was called Peter, which was my father’s. Much of my reason for writing the book was to make the world see that he wasn’t a prick after all. My mother thought he was, the welfare officers did, and the ladies from the church. I had set out to show they were wrong.

  Even when we sat around the dorm at night, ruthlessly dissecting our parents’ failings, I could never bring myself to condemn him. (My mother was a different story.) Instead I painted him as the principled rebel he had almost been: the only teacher at the high school who’d refused to sign the loyalty oath (in fact he’d caved in at the end; he’d been fired not for subversion but for drunkenness), a man who had thrown off the shackles of his dead marriage, his dead-end job (the shoe factory in town had taken him on after the Board of Education let him go), a man whose talent had been thwarted by the narrowness of his milieu. Because my father too had written fiction.

  But like the Kentuckian, Eliot found that version of things unacceptable. To him my beloved father, who’d sung me arias and recited poems for me, who’d woken me up to look at a harvest moon, was nothing but a deadbeat and a weakling. I had to stop deceiving myself, no man had the right to walk out on his children, he said, with such finality it felt as though the moral failing was mine as much as my father’s. No wonder, then, that during my marriage the novel withered and died. Though Eliot was certain I would write something wonderful, though he urged me never to give up (“a quitter never wins and a winner never quits”) and bought me a beautiful red fountain pen and a green gooseneck lamp for my desk, secretly I blamed him for my lack of progress: before my book ever had a chance, he had strangled it with his deadly common sense. Now that he was dead, now that I was living on his money in another man’s house, with nothing else to do, I felt I owed it to him—idleness being against his principles—to revive it in his terms, a story of a feckless father and a pitifully deluded young girl pining for his return. But I couldn’t seem to strike the right note.

  Instead I used the red pen to write false lying letters to his parents. Julian didn’t exist in those accounts of my London life; I was still in my hotel room, I was thinking of them and of Eliot. I borrowed sentiments from sympathy cards with flowers and ribbons on the front: I hoped they were finding comfort in their happy memories, in knowing how much Eliot had loved them. Knowing he hadn’t suffered. That he’d been happy. (That was the worst lie of all.)

  Not even to Joannie, my best friend in the city, did I admit my true situation. I read about exhibitions in the paper and described them to her, I dug up facts of interest about historical sites I hadn’t visited, I asked her to send me pictures of her pregnant stomach, which she duly did. I’d been having lunch with her at a Thai restaurant on Mott Street while they were trying to resuscitate Eliot at the hospital in Flushing; by the time I got back to my office and got the message from his assistant, he’d been dead for fourteen minutes.

  The letters tucked in my bag, I would leave the house, delaying my return from the post office by heading up Rosslyn Hill to browse in antique shops, clothing shops, bookshops, loitering behind shelves and among racks of dresses to eavesdrop on people’s conversations. There were none of the bald direct statements, the kind of forceful opinions, that everyone went in for in Manhattan. The style was different, the cadences were different; the rule seemed to be that complaints, about the weather and every other subject, must be leavened with wry jokes and end on a note of optimism. (“Never mind. Perhaps it’ll brighten up this afternoon.”) I was very pleased with myself when I managed to bring off what seemed like the authentic tone, and, echoing Isabel, I started using the word “lovely” a lot.

  One afternoon when it had failed to brighten up I decided to make use of the lovely feather duster I had bought in a junk shop in Flask Walk, a plumy Edwardian-looking thing with a long handle—the cleaner who came every Wednesday morning, a tiny shy Indian woman, confined herself to mopping and vacuuming and wiping off surfaces in bathrooms and kitchen. I began on the books in the study, all those dreary-looking law textbooks and memoirs by Labour politicians; after that I climbed on a chair to get rid of the cobwebs on the moldings in the front hall. Then I decided to dust the pictures.

  I had dusted my way through the living room, with its photographs of lions and its gilt-framed painting of a cart and horse; the conservatory, with its framed Pink Floyd posters; the Claude Lorrain prints of lakes and mountains, in many shades of brown, in the study. I was humming to myself as I worked my way up the stairs, brushing the cobwebs off a lithograph of a red flag with Arabic lettering, a painting of a coffee cup on wood, a photograph of Einstein sticking out his tongue. Second from the top was a framed pen-and-ink drawing I’d never noticed before, of a vast house with a fountain in front, and oriel windows and many chimneys. It was so covered with dust that I took it down to blow on it, rubbing the glass with the heel of my hand, and saw the inscription at the bottom: Sidworth Hall, Teign Valley, Devon, 1979, with a printed signature, all in capitals, in the right-hand corner: SASHA DENBY.

  “The West Country,” Julian had said when I asked where he was from in the pub that first night, conjuring up some wild rocky place in my mind, nothing like the dream landscape my father had promised to take me to the summer he left us, to show me the pink and white flowers in the hedgerows.

  My father never talked about D-Day, or the Battle of the Bulge; only much later did I think to wonder what happened to him on those beaches, or afterward, in the forests of the Ardennes. It was always Devon he wanted to tell me about, those nights he came into my room and sat on the bed, sipping from his glass of Scotch—the thatched cottages, the wild ponies on the moor, the woods full of bluebells. The last days of his innocence.

  “You’d love it, kitten, you walk through the countryside, and off on a rise, or in a little dip, you see this old stone church, it might be hundreds of years old, a thousand years, and there are sheep grazing in front…and crooked stone walls everywhere, straggling up the hillside, and birds singing their heads off. Actual nightingales, I always thought they were like unicorns, they didn’t really exist, but they do, they’ve got ’em…and the villages have these crazy names, like Warrington Beefstock and Gormsley Pudge…and everywhere is so green. So green you can’t imagine.” I’d fall asleep listening to him talk about the nightingales and the sheep and Gormsley Pudge. “Someday I’m going to take you there,” he’d say, but it was always someday, a promise for the future, until that last spring, when school was almost out, and he came into my room and said, “Tell me, Miss Devereaux, what are your plans for the summer?” I looked at him, puzzled, and he took my hand, gripping it hard.

  “I s
houldn’t tease you…because I’ve been thinking, listen, I want us to go to England. I want to show you Devon while you’re young enough for magic.” Other plans had been hatched on those Friday nights when he’d been listening to records in the basement, only to dissolve into nothingness by Saturday morning. But he was looking at me so intently, with such eagerness, I couldn’t disappoint him. In some ways he was younger than I was, I knew that even then. I knew, too, that other people saw him as not the right kind of grown-up; only the week before, when two girls from my class came to the house, and he was playing Count Basie for us, I caught them rolling their eyes behind his back: “Listen to this,” he was saying, “this is a great part, you have to listen,” while they smirked knowingly at each other.

  “Oh, please,” I said, “please let’s go.” And then he was gratified, he chuckled, and squeezed my hand against his cheek. “You’re going to love it,” he said, “I promise you.” We could stay with his friends the Crofts, he said, his friend Stan, who had been with the British Army, helping to train the Yanks…

  My mother must have protested, but not with any real force; she had reached the point of aggrievement then where it seemed her sole aspiration was to martyrdom; everything he said evoked sighs and grimaces. The very next week, he took me, full of importance, to Mr. Sansom on Main Street to have our passport photos taken; Mr. Sansom, too, he told about the churches and the sheep. But by the time the little blue-and-gold booklets arrived in the mail, he was gone.

  For all those months that my mother and the welfare people and his boss at the mill were speculating angrily about his whereabouts, I was sure he was in Devon, among the nightingales. But however much it hurt that he’d left me behind, I stayed loyal, I never told a soul. Only years later did I realize that he couldn’t have left America, his passport hadn’t arrived yet when he left.

  The night before he disappeared, another Friday, he came and sat on my bed just as I was falling asleep. He sounded different from the way he usually talked to me, almost as though I was his own age. “Hey, Annie”—not baby, or kitten, or Miss Devereaux—“did I ever tell you about Marty?” I shook my head. “He was my buddy in the platoon. A Jew from Brooklyn. We used to hang out together a lot. He was always teasing me about the stories I published in the base paper. ‘You gotta stop with the Hemingway crap,’ he’d say, ‘that shit’s passé now.’ But he told the other guys how terrific the stories were, he said they should remember my name, I’d do something great one day.”

  I had always felt, always known, that he was special, different, better than my mother and everyone else we knew. Now I had proof.

  “Could I read them?”

  “Oh, sweetheart”—I was back to being a child again—“they were no damn good. Marty was right, I was trying to be Hemingway.”

  “Are you still friends with him?”

  “Who?”

  “Marty.”

  He took a long swig of Scotch. “Marty’s dead, kitten. Blown up the minute we hit the beaches.” He patted my hand. “You’d better get some sleep, it’s late.”

  The next day, he was gone. And shortly before I left myself, to go to college, I went through the boxes in the garage where my mother had stowed his things and found, buried beneath a jumble of old belts and shirts and his prize collection of Bix Beiderbecke 78s, two moldy copies of the base paper with his stories in them, along with half a dozen unpublished ones, in faded blue type on carbon paper. Maybe he’d sent the originals off to magazines he hoped would publish them. Even I could see that Marty was right: they were tough-guy, mock-Hemingway stuff. He’d been twenty-five, twenty-six when he wrote the last ones, going on the GI Bill to St. Lawrence, where my mother was a secretary to one of the deans. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if he hadn’t taken on the teaching job and the mortgage and all the rest of it, he would have kept at it till he found a voice that was his. Maybe. It was even possible that one day a package would arrive at our house, a shiny new copy of his Great American Novel, and he would be transfigured in everybody’s eyes, they would all admit they’d judged him unfairly, he’d been a great man all along. But only possible in the sense that anything was possible. Even then, I couldn’t muster up much hope.

  Four

  It must say something about my relation to reality that I had never tried to locate Devon on a map. But I had noticed, in Julian’s study, a Times Atlas jutting out from the top shelf, which I now took down and opened to a map of the British Isles. And there it was, my lost Eden, in the bulge of the jagged peninsula tapering off to the west. Devon. The West Country.

  I foolishly supposed that Julian would be as pleased as I was over my discovery. Finally I would tell him the whole story of my father’s desertion, and the aborted trip to Devon, and he and I would go there, he could show me all the places my father had described. After that things would be different between us, we’d have found our connection.

  Except I never got to tell my story. As soon as he returned home I began, excitedly, to explain about finding the drawing, I thought of that as the preliminary part, to be hurried over, but he cut me off: “Where is the bloody thing? What have you done with it?” And when I told him it was in the study, with the atlas, he brushed past me and came back holding it away from him; he marched out the front door and left it propped against the dustbins. “I’d forgotten it was there,” he said grimly when he came back in. “I would have got rid of it ages ago.”

  “But why? Isn’t it the house you grew up in?”

  “It is. Which is precisely the reason I got rid of it. You have answered your own question. Well done. Now shall we go to the pub? It’s snooker night, remember?”

  That Sunday, though, by prearrangement, we went to see the drawing’s maker, at the flat in Elm Park Gardens where their mother had installed her.

  “She seems very taken with her new nanny,” Julian had said when he got off the phone with Sasha. “Everything is referred back to her—we’re to be given tea by Daphne, Daphne is so looking forward to meeting us, et cetera.” I really expected Daphne to be like a nanny, stout and motherly, but in fact she was a slight young woman with a Dutch-boy bob and a shiny face. I wondered if she was a Quaker, if she had taken on this job in the spirit in which someone else might join the Peace Corps.

  She ushered us into a pale gray room where Sasha waited on a pale green sofa, looking like a parody of normalcy, the picture of Blandly Average Womanhood in an avant-garde play: dumpy, secretarial, in drip-dry brown trousers, a beige blouse, a brown cardigan; her short brown hair was permed, her blue eyes almost hidden in little rolls of shiny-smooth fat. Isabel had said she was longing to see Julian, but she stayed put when we entered, she didn’t even reach up and put her arms round his neck as he bent to kiss her. Instead she clenched her jaw, turning her face away, so that the kiss landed on her hair. There was a mottled red flush on her cheeks that remained the whole time we were there.

  Having taken our coats and seen to it that we were seated, Daphne excused herself to go prepare our tea. “Give a shout if you need any help,” Julian said. He had not yet addressed any remarks to Sasha, beyond Hello.

  “So you’re from America,” she said to me, in a high, aggressively bright voice, full of barely concealed rage. I couldn’t tell if she hated me for being Julian’s girlfriend or if she was taking her revenge on him for staying away for so long. “Aren’t you lucky. I adore America. I’d love to live there.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Julian asked mildly. “I seem to recall you were only there once, for about a week, when you were twelve.”

  She didn’t even look at him. “I have the most glorious memories of it. And of course I see it all the time, in the cinema. I love the way Americans smile, with all their teeth showing. Though you’re not smiling. What are you doing in this country, anyway? I mean, apart from fornicating with my brother. What made you come here?”

  It did not seem like the time t
o tell her about Eliot, or my trip with my father. So I said feebly that I had always had a thing about England.

  “Really. How odd of you. What sort of thing?”

  Oh well, I said, trying for lightness, I guessed it had started in earnest when I read Jane Eyre.

  “Yes? And what else?”

  Well, and the rest of English literature, I said, feeling increasingly foolish.

  “Such as?”

  Such as Keats, I told her, and Coleridge, and George Eliot, and Wordsworth, and Virginia Woolf.

  “I see. So you’re here because of a lot of dead people, is that right?”

  I supposed so, I said.

  “That’s not awfully healthy, you know. You could wind up very very unhappy if you go on like that.”

  On the contrary, I said recklessly, my relationships with dead people had given me some of the happiest times of my life.

  She looked at me in triumph. “Then you really shouldn’t have come. Because, you know”—she leaned toward me—“they’re not here anymore.” After that she turned her attention to Julian, telling him about a dream she’d had, in which they’d been skiing down a slope together. “Do you remember that time in Pontresina, Junes? That awful instructor with the wart on his nose? Was he actually called Adolf, or was that just our name for him?” She and Daphne were planning to go to Italy that winter, she said, maybe to Umbria. Then she said abruptly, “You haven’t told me what you think of my new digs. Would you care to see the rest of it? I’m thinking of redecorating, I don’t like all these calming colors. What do you say? Wouldn’t this room look better in shocking pink?”

  “That sounds delightful,” Julian said, drawling out the word, and she stuck out her tongue at him just as Daphne reappeared, bearing a lacquered tray with a teapot and cups and little iced cakes, which she set down on the low table by the couch.