Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  ‘Stan Sullivan,’ he says in a drawling American accent. ‘But everyone calls me Sully. I would stand up to shake your hand, but—’ He looks down at the cardigan covering his lap.

  ‘Oh no, please don’t get up,’ she says hurriedly.

  There is a pause while she tries to gather her thoughts. A seagull shouts angrily from the top of the house. The smell of jasmine stoppers up her nostrils.

  ‘Do you have a name?’ he asks at last. ‘Or have you perhaps been washed up from a shipwreck in which all your companions perished, with no idea who you are or where you’ve come from and—’

  ‘Eve Forrester,’ she says.

  To her surprise he smiles, showing a flash of white teeth, the outer ones longer than the others, creating a distinctly wolfish impression.

  ‘Excellent. I was quite dreading that you’d be one of those stout, moustachioed women who spent the war roaring around the place on motorbikes and are furious with all men for coming back and ruining their fun.’

  Eve does not know where to start with this. Stout and moustachioed. The cheek of it. When he is both those things. And what does he mean, he was dreading?

  ‘You’ve been expecting me then?’ she says.

  ‘Oh yeah. Guy told me weeks ago he’d left you a share in the house. It was all very mysterious, but he said he’d explain all once he’d been over to talk to you in person. Only he never made it.’

  ‘He told you, but he didn’t tell his wife?’

  ‘I take it you’re not married, sweetheart. Don’t you know your spouse is the very last person you tell things to?’

  ‘I am married, actually.’

  ‘Never mind.’ Before she can wonder what he means, he continues: ‘He said it would most likely be sold. The house, I mean. Which would be a shame as it’s quite charming. And Guy did love it so.’

  ‘Did he tell you why he included me in his will?’

  Stan Sullivan looks surprised.

  ‘I didn’t ask. I just assumed you and he—’

  ‘No! Absolutely not.’

  He smiles at her vehemence.

  ‘How very mysterious. And how has darling Diana taken the news?’

  His teeth are so very white, and, being such uneven lengths, obviously all his own. Which is uncommon in Eve’s experience.

  ‘Mrs Lester has been gracious. All things considered.’

  ‘Don’t you be taken in by that superficial politeness. There’s a nest of poisonous vipers writhing under that lovely exterior. If you look closely you can see her skin undulating. Be wary, little Eve. She complained about this house non-stop but she won’t like you having a claim to it. Diana doesn’t like to share.’

  Eve is silent.

  ‘So will you vote to sell it?’

  Eve shrugs, reluctant to disclose to a stranger her many reservations about accepting her surprise inheritance.

  ‘I imagine so. I won’t know until I discuss it with my husband.’

  Sully smiles again, as if she has said something funny.

  ‘Where will you go, if the house is sold? Will you be able to find someone else to stay with? I should not like to think of you destitute.’

  The American gives her a long, hard look.

  ‘Tell me, Eve Forrester. Have you never heard of me?’ Eve, taken aback, shakes her head. ‘Stanley Sullivan?’ he prompts her, as if repeating his name might dislodge some blockage in her memory.

  She shakes her head again. ‘But then the head librarian at our local library is rather biased against American writers,’ she apologizes, when she sees how crestfallen he looks. ‘Agatha Christie, on the other hand. P. G. Wodehouse, even—’

  ‘Will you pass me that robe?’

  Now Eve notices for the first time a silk robe tossed on to one of the other chairs. She takes a step towards the American’s steamer but stops well short and tosses the garment the rest of the way before turning her back discreetly.

  She wanders over to the jasmine bush and inhales deeply.

  Here I am, she thinks, by a swimming pool in the South of France, chatting to a naked American writer.

  ‘You can turn around now.’

  Sully is belting up his robe over his rounded belly. He is shorter than she’d imagined, but powerfully built, like a boxer. His bald head glints in the sun. He ought to be ugly, with those muscular shoulders, that flat nose, little discernible neck. And yet there is something about him that makes you look and want to keep looking.

  ‘Mrs Finch tells me you’re staying here the next two nights. So how would you like to come to a party with me tonight?’

  ‘Tonight? But it’s a Wednesday.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Amusement in those discomfiting blue eyes.

  ‘You’ll find that days of the week don’t mean much here on the Riviera. We have different ways of counting down our lives. Will you come? It’s not even a party, more of a reception, and by reception I really mean small, miserable gathering, and it’s not far. The next house along. You can’t have missed it.’

  Eve remembers the black gates. The black-uniformed guards outside with the white-blond hair.

  ‘You can’t mean … the Duke and Duchess?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Eve stares at him, sure he must be toying with her. But he returns her gaze quite levelly.

  ‘The Duke and Madame Duke, or Fräulein Duke as I like to call her, are throwing a reception to welcome Gloria Hayes to the Riviera. I trust you know her, at least. Or does the head projectionist at your local cinema have something against American actresses?’

  Eve smiles.

  ‘Oh, please come. Don’t worry about anything you may have heard about the parties around here. There will be nothing debauched. The Duke and his wife are notoriously mean and anyway, they are appalled at the idea of a vulgar Yank like Gloria Hayes lowering the tone of the area. Nazis are one thing. But Americans …?’ Sully clutches a string of imaginary pearls at his throat in mock horror.

  ‘But you’re American,’ Eve points out.

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve been in Europe long enough for them to be willing to overlook it. Besides, they figure that if they surround themselves with people who write books it’ll exempt them from actually having to read any.’

  ‘But film stars …?’

  ‘Utterly beyond the pale, I’m afraid. If the Duke and Duchess hadn’t been on the receiving end of the Martin family’s largesse so many times, you can bet they wouldn’t be giving Gloria Hayes the time of day. So their hospitality will be rationed, you can be sure. We will probably be back here and tucked up in bed by ten o’clock. What do you say?’

  Gloria Hayes. The Duke and Duchess. Words plucked from a dream. Still Eve hesitates, wary of imposing. Then she thinks of the evening stretching ahead of her, sitting alone on her bed in that green room, not venturing downstairs for fear of disturbing Mrs Finch.

  ‘Why not?’ she says.

  Isn’t this whole thing like a dream anyway? The journey, the house, the night spent completely alone without Clifford’s soft snuffling snores making the air over the bed feel damp and spongy. So now she will add royalty and Hollywood stars to the unreality of it all.

  Why not?

  8

  SHE REMEMBERS WHY not on her way back to her room a few moments later, when it occurs to her that she has nothing remotely suitable to wear. She had thought about packing her oyster-coloured evening dress with the embroidered bodice, which rests daringly off the shoulders, but when Clifford had seen it laid out on the bed, he’d laughed. You won’t be needing that, my dear. Just smart, sensible clothes to show them you’re someone to be taken seriously.

  So she has the bottle green linen skirt. And the silk blouse she has been wearing all day that now looks like something Mrs Finch might use to mop a floor. And the brown crepe dress and blue travelling suit. But nothing partyish. Nothing to wear to meet Gloria Hayes.

  Walking into her bedroom, she stops short, struck by an unsettling conviction that something has
changed. She casts her eyes around the room. As she approaches the desk on which she had laid her suitcase, the skin on Eve’s arms prickles and she shivers, despite the heat.

  Eve hasn’t completely unpacked, not wanting to appear to be taking ownership of her room. Though her skirts are draped over the back of the chair, the rest of her clothes are still in her case. Hadn’t she left the lid open with her clothes exposed to the air, hoping that might somehow freshen them up?

  Has someone been in her room?

  But almost immediately she starts to doubt herself. She had been in such a state of tension before venturing out; can she really be sure she didn’t close the suitcase herself? Perhaps she did it without thinking. Isn’t it exactly the kind of little gesture one could make automatically, without even registering one was doing it?

  Mollified, she turns her attention back to the matter of her clothes. Or rather the lack of them. In the end she decides on the skirt suit with a white blouse that is the only clean thing she has. She puts a narrow belt around the skirt’s waistband. But when she sees herself in the mirror she reminds herself of the very librarian she was discussing earlier. Her hair, naturally wavy – so she doesn’t need to sleep with a head full of uncomfortable knots – has formed tight curls around her face and neck after exposure to the sun and sea air.

  Just as she is picturing Diana Lester’s immaculate elegance, and deciding she cannot possibly go to the party, there comes a knock on her door.

  ‘You’ll do fine,’ says Sully when she tries to tell him she has changed her mind. ‘Anyway, all eyes will be on Gloria Hayes, so no one will be looking at you.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You have two more nights here. That’s right, isn’t it? Before you go back to whatever dreary town you live in. Wouldn’t you like to have an adventure? Something to tell your friends over tea and whatever that ridiculous card game you all play is?’

  ‘I only play bridge on Wednesdays. And my town isn’t dreary.’

  She doesn’t tell him that she has no friends.

  Still, he is right. In two nights’ time she will be on her way home and this will all be over. And that future version of her will rage against the wasted opportunities. Royalty. Film stars. And you stayed home because you had nothing to wear?

  They stroll to the party. The air outside is fresh, the breeze salty against her lips, and Eve regrets her last-minute decision not to bring her pink cardigan on account of the small moth hole she had only just noticed in the sleeve. With every step she is conscious of the man by her side, of the energy that pulses under his tanned skin. He is the kind of American her mother always warned her against during the war. Loud, brash, dominating the space around him so that everything has to be referenced in relation to him; nothing stands entirely on its own.

  When they approach the house Eve noticed the day before, the gates are standing open and there is a line of cars waiting to go inside. Two black-clad men stand by the gates checking the cars.

  ‘Is it a prerequisite that the staff must have blond hair?’ she asks, meaning to be witty. But Sully is offhand.

  ‘Oh, yes. Only Aryans will do.’

  The house is enormous. The combination of bright lights and crowds of people and Eve’s own heart beating so loudly makes it hard to take it in dispassionately. Instead it comes to her in fragments – a vast chandelier overhanging an entrance lobby bigger than her whole house in Sutton, corridors with gleaming marble floors stretching endlessly behind double glass doors, a seven-piece orchestra, the violinist fulcruming backwards and forwards at the waist, waiters sliding past with silver trays, champagne flutes made of crystal that cuts the light into tiny sharp shards. And the dresses! Silk and taffeta that rustle and whisper, necklines that plunge into acres of cleavage, straps of magenta and rose and pale ice blue that mould themselves over shoulders and bosoms, waists no bigger than a side plate and hips that shimmer and sashay and sway.

  Eve’s senses, dulled after the grey war years, feel bludgeoned by the colours, the music, the textures. She has come from an England that is still patching itself up, still rebuilding. Meat is still rationed, and clothing too – that loathsome little pink ration book – and anyway, extravagance feels wrong when so many are still grieving, so much has been lost.

  But here there is no moderation. Here there are slices of smoked fish and grouse and dainty hors-d’oeuvres that Eve does not recognize.

  ‘You wouldn’t think there was still bread rationing here in France,’ says Sully, eyeing up a stack of soft buttery rolls. ‘Good to know the war was fought so that the black market can thrive.’

  A waitress comes past, dressed in black with a white frilly apron. She is twentyish and pretty with high pink cheeks and Eve feels Sully’s energy shift in the young woman’s direction.

  She is conscious of her own winter-grey skin, her unkempt hair, the matronly clothes.

  ‘Can one really get anything here?’ Eve asks.

  ‘Sure, as long as you’ve got the cash to pay for it. Plenty of people did very well out of this war. Are still doing well. Profiteering. Black market. Not to mention the stolen jewellery and artwork the Nazis left behind when they fled that has magically managed to end up in private hands.’

  They make their way towards the orchestra and Eve sips at her champagne. Every few steps someone comes forward to greet Sully, or to place a gloved hand on his arm. Others pause as they pass, then lean together to whisper with sideways glances.

  He really is famous. The realization makes her hot with embarrassment. She tries to remember what she’d said out there on the swimming pool terrace. Had she really used the word ‘destitute’?

  She turns to him, but before she can blurt out her apology, he points to a tall, silver-haired man with a thin moustache and pointed beard who seems to be holding court in a corner of the grand room.

  ‘Recognize him?’

  Eve shakes her head.

  Sully’s eyebrows rise up his nut-brown forehead.

  ‘Alberto Alvarez. The world’s greatest living painter, or a talentless fraud who has bamboozled the entire art world. Depending on which newspaper you read.’

  ‘That’s Alvarez?’ Eve stares, rapt, remembering a rare childhood trip to London with her parents, a birthday treat. In an art gallery being trailed around painting after painting that seemed to her young eyes to show just old people in silly clothes standing stiffly or bowls of fruit or dull landscapes of the kind she could see any day from the window of a train – then suddenly coming across this extraordinary image. Colours, shapes, contorted faces that appeared in places where faces should not be. A cat with a tail that turned into a snake, two children sitting behind desks with apples instead of heads. A glimpse of a different world, before her mother steered her firmly away. ‘Can you imagine anyone wanting to hang this rubbish on their wall?’ she’d asked Eve’s father, shaking her head.

  Sully takes two more glasses of champagne from a passing waiter.

  ‘Best drink up. The Duke and Duchess are notoriously tight, so who knows how long stocks will last. They always use rationing as an excuse, but everyone knows they have a plane parked just a few miles from here with a pilot ready to fly off at a moment’s notice to fetch whatever they want. There’s nothing you can’t get on the Riviera, sweetheart. For a price. You ought to learn that fast if you’re going to be sticking around.’

  ‘Oh but I’m not—’

  But Sully’s attention has again wandered.

  ‘Here’s a question for you. What’s the collective noun for a bunch of Lesters? A clutch of Lesters? A murder of Lesters?’

  Eve follows his line of sight and her heart sinks as she spots Diana Lester, her shoulders bare, her hair swept back from her face. She is wearing a strapless midnight-blue velvet dress that falls in a column down to the ground. Something sparkles at her throat.

  Standing close by with their backs to Eve are Duncan and Noel Lester, the black jackets they both wear emphasizing the difference in their physiqu
es. Duncan is almost a head shorter than his older brother, with sloping shoulders thrown into relief by his brother’s broad frame.

  ‘Who is that woman?’ asks Eve, recognizing the blonde from the train carriage by the sulky expression she still wears, her rosebud mouth, with the kind of lipstick Eve’s mother would describe as ‘trashy’, set into a pout.

  ‘Oh, that’s Clemmie Atwood. Lady Clementine Atwood, don’t you know.’

  There is a flint in Sully’s voice that makes Eve look closely.

  ‘Are you married, Mr Sullivan?’ she asks suddenly, wondering why it has not occurred to her to ask before.

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘What do you mean, usually?’

  He shrugs. ‘I mean the state of being married is fairly constant. Though the specifics fluctuate.’

  Still Eve must look blank because at length he elaborates.

  ‘I seem to be a serial wedder. The fourth Mrs Sullivan is currently back home in New York buying more furniture we don’t need and telling anyone who’ll listen what a monster I am. Anyway, back to the lovely Clemmie. She’s the youngest daughter of one of those penniless aristocrats you excel at in England. The Riviera used to be awash with British gentry before the war. You couldn’t move on the beach without tripping over a duke or an earl languishing on the sand behaving badly. But everyone drifted away once Mussolini’s lot arrived and very few of them have come back. Clemmie’s cousin Margaret is one of the last stalwarts and Clemmie came over a few years back, ostensibly to look after Margaret’s children, but really to snag herself an Italian prince or a French playboy. Instead she fell in love with Noel Lester, only somehow she’s ended up engaged to his brother. No wonder she always looks as if she’s sucking on a lemon.’

  Diana Lester glances up and catches Eve’s eye. She says something and now both the Lester sons are turning to look. Eve feels their gaze travel over her, her fuddy-duddy clothes and wayward hair. Noel Lester nods in her direction. Then Clementine Atwood, who has been staring openly at Eve, leans in to say something and the whole group laughs.