Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  There is a smile playing around his lips as he says it, as though they are sharing a joke or a wry observation. But there is no humour in his glittering black eyes.

  Eve wants nothing more than to do as Laurent bids and go. Everything disgusts her. The stench of perfume coming off the pool. The leathery man next to her, tipping back his head to let an oyster slide down his throat. All the people who’ve eaten Laurent’s caviar and drunk the champagne laid on by the studio, who have come because of who Gloria is, yet who didn’t try to pick her up or find out why she’d had to stuff herself full of pills in order to get through her own wedding.

  The weather has turned oppressive now. The heat is wet and grey.

  Eve starts picking her way through the crowd after Sully’s retreating back. Laurent’s unmistakeable warning takes hold of her throat, making it difficult to breathe, and for a moment she wishes she had not stopped Sully, had just stood back and let events unfold.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Diana has materialized from the crowd and stands blocking Eve’s way, the light catching the gold material of her dress so that she resembles a statue.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten that we are all meeting at Villa La Perle to sign Bernard’s papers?’

  Eve has not forgotten. Rather she has deliberately wiped the information from her mind.

  Diana, noting her hesitation, continues. ‘I don’t need to remind you, Eve, that we could still decide to challenge the will, if you continue to drag your heels.’

  Eve knows she can put it off no longer. The wedding party is coming to an end anyway. Hollywood has its fairytale. Laurent has his trophy bride. The specially invited photographers have each signed a contract guaranteeing that the studio will have final approval over all pictures used, so the images of Gloria Hayes collapsed on the floor will never appear, though a few will surface years later in private collections.

  Tonight the newlyweds will entertain a few dozen dignitaries at home and tomorrow they will leave for their honeymoon on board Laurent’s yacht, the recently renamed Princess Gloria.

  Is this how it is? Eve wants to ask Diana. Are there no happy couples, only people going through the motions out of convenience or habit or because it’s easier to say yes than no? But then she thinks of Bernard and the way he loves that orange cat in his office only because Marie too loves it, and the Colletts and how they seem like two trees she saw once whose trunks had twisted around each other as they grew, so it was as if they were one single organism, unbreakable even during the very worst storm.

  ‘We’ll take the party home with us,’ declares Sully, who has only now turned around to find out where she is. They are all so self-absorbed, Eve realizes now, all these people she has met since she came here. So totally convinced that their story will turn out to be the only story.

  She glimpses Noel standing talking to Clemmie, who has her hand on his arm and her face turned up towards his, laughing at something he has said. They look so perfect together. Eve thinks of the photograph she saw among Guy’s things of Anna, Noel’s dead fiancée, with her enquiring eyes and her wide smile, and is reminded of her own bruised face, the grubby bandage circling her lower arm.

  ‘I can see what you’re thinking, Mrs Forrester.’ She hadn’t even noticed Duncan standing by her side, swaying, gazing at his own fiancée as if trying to commit her to memory. ‘But Clemmie loves me, whatever she might have felt for Noel in the past. I know you and she haven’t exactly hit it off. Clemmie can scratch like a cat if she feels herself to be up against the wall, but she’s fun and she’s loyal. As soon as I’ve paid off the debts, we will be married and then she’ll calm down and everyone will stop thinking, Poor Clemmie, ending up with the wrong brother.’

  Eve is astonished. Duncan has never said so much as a few words to her unprompted.

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters, Eve?’

  Eve shakes her head.

  ‘I envy you. Although, please don’t get me wrong, I pity you too. I was a mummy’s boy, I’m sure Noel will have told you. After she died I spent my childhood trying to live up to my father and my older brother, and then my adolescence trying to come to terms with the fact that I never would. Do you know, the war was almost a relief? I was stationed in the Far East, you know. Whole continents away from all the other Lesters. No one knew who Guy was, who Noel was. When they looked at me, it was just me they saw. Not whoever it was they were comparing me to. It was quite the novelty.’

  This is Duncan’s bid then, his clumsy explanation of why she must sign the sale document – so that he can pay off his creditors and make a fresh start. She almost laughs. Does he not know it is all over, and she has given up? He could have saved himself the indignity. But still a part of her is moved by his honesty. Just as Eve will always remain in some small way that child yearning for her mother’s approval, so Duncan cannot escape his brother’s shadow, his father’s expectations, destined not to be met.

  ‘He loves you though, your brother,’ she says, aware on some level that a sober Duncan will regret the confidences this lit-up Duncan has shared so freely, and resent her even more for being the one he shared them with.

  ‘I know that. He wants it for me, you know. The money from the house. Wants to ride in like the bloody cavalry and rescue me from the mess I’ve got myself in, just like he always does.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one then?’ she says. ‘Not everyone has the luxury of knowing there are people who care enough to want to help.’

  Duncan blinks in surprise, taken aback at her vehemence. For a moment, while the band behind them plays a Glenn Miller number, the notes sliding and gliding in the scented air, they gaze at each other as if seeing one another afresh, and something is exchanged that, if it is not understanding, is not far removed.

  Clemmie arrives, looping her hand through her fiancé’s arm as if claiming him for her own, and the moment is broken.

  ‘I demand to know what the two of you are talking about.’

  Clemmie looks at them both in turn.

  ‘We were only talking about the wedding,’ says Eve, turning away.

  When Duncan wanders off to get more drinks, Clemmie and Eve are left standing awkwardly together.

  Eve casts her eyes over the crowd while she tries to think of something to say, coming to rest without even realizing it on Noel, who is standing a few yards away, talking to a man she does not recognize.

  ‘You are wasting your time there,’ Clemmie snaps.

  Eve looks puzzled.

  ‘Noel. Oh, don’t bother protesting. I’ve seen you looking. But the fact is that Noel was in love once and something dreadful happened and that was enough. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.’

  ‘I presume you’re talking about Anna.’

  Clemmie’s mouth opens in surprise.

  ‘He told you about her? My, you two have become quite the bosom buddies.’ Clemmie steps back to scrutinize Eve, as if seeing her in a different light, before asking, ‘And it hasn’t put you off him?’

  ‘There is nothing to put off. I’m not the slightest bit interested in Noel Lester, apart from in what he might be able to tell me about what I am doing here. And besides, I also had a fiancé who was killed in the war, so the idea that it might be something—’

  ‘He told you Anna died during the war?’

  ‘Clemmie!’

  Duncan has returned and there is no mistaking the warning note in his voice.

  For once Clemmie looks shamefaced.

  ‘Oops,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Duncs.’

  She mimes sewing up her own lips.

  Arrangements are made to regroup at the villa for the meeting with Bernard. After the excitement and the champagne, no one has much appetite for it. But it has to be done.

  The blue dress is sticking to Eve, and she sees grey clouds building up over the horizon, reminding her of Ruth’s prediction of stormy weather. The others have left already, departing en masse so suddenly that Eve didn’t even see them go. Gathering up
Sully in preparation for leaving herself, Eve notices Laurent over by the swimming pool, deep in conversation with Victor.

  After a short wait, a car is summoned to take her and Sully home, the driver a young man in a dark blue suit with a frosting of virulent acne over his chin and neck. She is too relieved to take the weight off her feet to enquire who he is and who is paying for him.

  Rounding the final bend before Villa La Perle, she experiences a moment of pure relief to be home, followed almost immediately by a savage jab of pain as she remembers that she will soon be leaving here, that she will have no more right to call it home than this pimply young man, who seems far too young to be behind the wheel of a car.

  In the gravelled car park to the side of the house, she sees Noel’s black convertible and Marie Gaillard’s orange tin can, and Marie herself leaning back in the driver’s seat with a newspaper over her face, clearly asleep. And also a third car, which she recognizes with a sinking heart as Victor Meunier’s.

  ‘What is Victor doing here?’ she asks, but Sully, who has spent the journey in dense, brooding introspection, has already opened the car door and spilled out on to the gravel.

  The wall of the house facing them looks almost grey in the heat, rather than its usual warm rose colour.

  The back of Eve’s neck prickles. It is something about that blank wall. Something about the stillness of this house which she knows to be filled with people. As if the whole of it were watching and waiting.

  On the doorstep she turns to Sully.

  ‘I wish—’ she says. But whatever she was going to wish for is cut short by the opening of the front door.

  Mrs Finch stands there in a flowery blouse that gapes across her breasts as if bought for a much thinner version of herself. She seems flustered as she says, ‘You have visitors, Mrs Forrester.’

  Sully lets out a bark of laughter.

  ‘Don’t let Diana hear you call her a visitor,’ he says.

  Mrs Finch’s expression doesn’t change, but Eve sees a pink stain rise up her neck.

  ‘Naturally I’m not talking about the Lesters, Mr Sullivan. I’m referring to the other English lady and gentleman who arrived about an hour ago.’

  She will mean the Colletts, thinks Eve. But something is tightening inside her, like a cord being wound and then wound again.

  As they descend the staircase, Eve is conscious of the clicking of the heels of her borrowed shoes against the stone, how they announce each and every step. From down below there is no sound at all.

  At the bottom, she lets Mrs Finch lead the way into the silent sitting room, hanging back in the hallway trying to quell the panic that seems to be rising up from that low place in her abdomen.

  Maybe I should just turn around now. At least go to change out of these clothes.

  ‘Mrs Forrester and Mr Sullivan are back now.’

  And now there is no turning, no escaping back up the stairs to the sanctuary of her empty room, where she can put on the fan and lie on the big bed and close her mind to it all.

  Instead she follows the housekeeper’s flowery back into the sitting room, normally so bright and light but today shadowed by the dark clouds blowing in from the sea.

  Perhaps it is because of the uncustomary gloom that she does not at first see them.

  Instead her gaze falls on Diana, sitting straight-backed in her gold dress like a party guest who has got the time wrong and arrived an hour too early and must now make the best of it, and next to her, Duncan and Clemmie, pressed close together by the restrictive proportions of the sofa on which they are all squeezed. And now she notices Bernard in the velvet armchair, his hands resting on the briefcase in his lap, his kind eyes sending her a message she cannot decipher. Her gaze sweeps across to a black cane propped up against the foot of the chaise longue, and next to it the unmistakeable figure of Victor Meunier.

  In this strange half-light Noel, leaning against the back wall, in between the two sets of double doors that open out on to the swimming pool terrace, appears a sombre figure in his black suit, with only those two pools of green providing some softness. What on earth did Clemmie mean about her being put off him because of what happened to his fiancée? But there is no time to follow this train of thought because as she looks at him, he turns his head deliberately and she follows his gaze.

  There, sitting on a hard-backed chair that has been pulled out from its usual home against the wall, is Clifford, his lips parted under his moustache as if in astonishment as he takes in the borrowed dress and shoes, the bandaged wrist and blackened eye, the clotted cut on her forehead that even Ruth’s best efforts haven’t been able to disguise.

  But it is not her husband who holds Eve’s attention. Her entire focus, every beat of her racing heart, is trained on the woman who sits by his side in a matching chair, wearing a heavy plaid woollen suit far too warm for early June on the Riviera and a black linen hat that Eve recognizes from her father’s funeral some fifteen years earlier, and a look that Eve remembers all too well – awkwardness and nerves mixed with rigid disapproval.

  Mother.

  23

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU doing here?’

  It is as if all the various, disparate parts of her life have collided here in this weather-darkened room, and Eve’s brain just cannot seem to comprehend how such a thing might be possible.

  She has a moment of sheer terror as she suddenly remembers the photograph and the threat to send it to Clifford. Is that what has brought him here? But surely there would not have been sufficient time?

  Clifford’s expression is hard to read. Well, of course the moustache covering up half of his face doesn’t help. Why has she never noticed before how very out of proportion it is against his hollowed-out features? And have his eyes always been so close together, as if they are trying to connect across the bridge of his nose?

  ‘You left me very little alternative, Eve. Your actions were so out of character, for all I knew you could be being kept here against your will. I made the journey to Banbury to talk to your mother, even though it was dashed inconvenient to take the time away from the office, and naturally when I discussed it with her she was most anxious to come here and see for herself what on earth was going on, as any responsible parent would be.’

  Eve, dropping into the one remaining free seat, an old Lloyd Loom chair that has been dragged in from the terrace, cannot look at the Lesters. Cannot bear to see what will be written on their faces. She is acutely aware, without needing to look at it again, of her mother’s ill-fitting woollen suit, bought well before the war when she was a much larger woman with a weakness for puddings and fruitcake. Nothing tasted the same made with powdered egg, she’d complain. And how were carrots a proper substitute for apricots?

  Bernard gets to his feet. His trousers are wrinkled where the briefcase has rested on them and he tries to smooth them with his hand. Even so, Eve senses her mother watching.

  ‘I think, in the circumstances, we should perhaps leave the three of you to talk …’

  But Diana is having none of it. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Bernard. Here we all are. Gathered. If Mrs Forrester is about to be whisked off back home, it’s the perfect opportunity to get this business sorted out once and for all. I still don’t know what Guy thought he was playing at, but we shall just have to accept that we probably never will know. Unless, that is, Eve’s mother has any light to shed on the matter.’

  All eyes swing towards the woman in the woollen suit, who responds by sitting up straighter in her chair and pressing her lips together.

  Eve feels her cheeks burn. Could Guy Lester really have had a relationship with this woman? Surely they will all see how completely impossible—

  ‘I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea,’ says Eve’s mother. It is the first time she’s spoken. ‘I’m here only out of concern for my daughter’s welfare.’

  She glances at Eve, this brittle, proud woman, and Eve feels a caving inside her at all the ways she and her mother have failed each other.<
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  Across the room, Victor clears his throat.

  ‘Shall we get on with things, then?’

  Bernard looks over at Eve, awaiting a response. When none is forthcoming, the notary shrugs and opens his briefcase.

  ‘Very well. Let us proceed. I have here two documents. One is the rental agreement – six months, payable in advance, while the legalities of Mr Lester’s estate are settled – and the other a sale in principle, drawn up between the four beneficiaries of Villa La Perle – Noel Lester, Duncan Lester, Elizabeth Lester and Eve Forrester – and the interested buyer. Monsieur Meunier, shall we start with you?’

  To Eve’s considerable surprise, Bernard holds out the papers that he has just withdrawn from his briefcase to Victor.

  Finally, she understands. It is Victor who has made such a generous offer for Villa La Perle. How extraordinary. That he would have made no mention of this coincidence to her while they were talking so intimately the other evening seems to her extremely odd. Judging by the look on Noel’s face and those of his brother and stepmother, it has come as something of a surprise to them too.

  ‘Why has no one mentioned this before?’ Diana wants to know. ‘I fail to understand, Bernard, why you didn’t tell us that the prospective buyer was someone known to us.’

  ‘Monsieur Meunier requested that his name be kept quiet while he extracts himself from his current lease,’ says Bernard, looking ill at ease.

  ‘It is all my fault,’ Victor says. ‘I requested secrecy from Monsieur Gaillard while I dealt with my landlord. The Riviera is a small place. Word gets passed along quickly. But now everything is arranged, I am happy to say we can proceed.’

  Victor takes the document from Bernard and signs it with a flourish, the nib of the pen making a scratching sound across the paper. He looks up and catches Eve’s eye and gives an almost imperceptible nod as if thanking her for something, and she remembers the dead weight of his arm around her as he helped her back to the car, the flash of the camera as they passed.

  And all that time he said nothing.