Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  For a moment it is as if she is appealing to Diana, woman to woman, about a mutual friend. Then she remembers where she is.

  ‘Do you know what he left me in his will? Two hundred and fifty pounds. In compensation for everything I gave him. For the life I should have had. I loved him.’

  They all stare at this new, unfamiliar Mrs Finch in varying degrees of horrified fascination. Her cheeks are flushed pink, her hair is loose and falls wild around her shoulders. Passion has rendered her unrecognizable.

  ‘I found it, you know. The new will. After you all moved to the new house in Nice and I was packing up Guy’s things to bring them over. I saw how much he’d left me. And then I saw he’d left a quarter of this house to an Eve Forrester.’

  Now her gaze comes to rest on Eve and some of the fire goes from her eyes.

  ‘I assumed you were another one of his affairs. Don’t pretend you didn’t all think the same thing. That’s why I said yes when Monsieur Meunier asked me to help him, after Mrs Forrester here refused to leave. I was owed something, don’t you see?’

  She is appealing directly to Eve, who doesn’t know where to look.

  ‘I suppose Meunier had no intention of buying the bloody house,’ says Duncan, whose skin is now paler than his shirt.

  Victor, standing nearest to Eve with his policeman minder, shrugs.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘I am afraid greed blinded you all to sense. There are houses like this one for sale all the way up and down this coast. I would have signed the agreement and paid a few months’ rent.’

  ‘Giving you time and space to excavate the paintings from the cellar before disappearing,’ says Sully.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Victor politely. Then he turns to Diana. ‘And you might like to try digging in the terrace as well. Who knows what you might find.’

  Noel, who has been quiet up until now, approaches Mrs Finch.

  ‘What did you do when you found my father’s will?’ he asks, his voice low and dangerously tight.

  The housekeeper swallows loudly enough that they all hear, and just for a moment Eve finds herself feeling sorry for her.

  ‘I confronted him, of course. There was a horrible scene.’

  ‘When?’ asks Noel, stepping towards Mrs Finch so that she visibly recoils. ‘When did you confront my father?’

  The housekeeper looks nervous, her gaze falling to the ground, those purple blotches livid on her chest again. But Noel will not relent.

  ‘When was this confrontation?’

  ‘The morning of the day he died.’

  ‘It was your fault!’ Duncan is on his feet. ‘You knew he had to avoid stress.’

  ‘I was upset! I had every right to be.’

  ‘No.’ Noel is shaking his head, his face just inches from Mrs Finch’s so that she cannot look away. ‘You do not get to look for sympathy. You do not get to play the victim. You didn’t have to stay here, once you knew Guy wasn’t interested in you. You weren’t a prisoner. The war gave everyone a chance to reinvent themselves. Why didn’t you build yourself a new life instead of coming back here?’

  ‘He needed me. You all needed me.’

  ‘You were the housekeeper,’ says Duncan. ‘We could have replaced you a dozen times over.’

  The exchange is interrupted by an exclamation from the hallway.

  ‘Mrs Finch. It’s you!’ cries Libby, barrelling into the room and giving the housekeeper a hug from behind. Then she notices the two policemen and her eyes grow wide.

  ‘Are you under arrest? Did you kill someone?’

  Mrs Finch seems to shrink as if someone has knocked the air out of her. The high colour fades from her cheeks, and the eyes that just moments before were burning with that conviction unique to those who consider themselves grievously wronged turn suddenly dull.

  ‘Alors,’ says the older policeman, blinking above his crooked nose.

  The two gendarmes turn around, steering their charges in front of them.

  As he is led away, Victor reaches out and grasps Eve’s hand.

  ‘It was only about the art,’ he says, smiling sadly. ‘It was never personal.’

  27

  AFTERWARDS EVE WILL wish she had asked Victor what he meant by personal. Is it that it was never about her at all, that she could really have been anyone, and the muttered ‘beautiful’ that she has been hoarding in her head like secret treasure since the night in Le Crystal was as specific to her as to that vase over there, or that cloud outside the window? Or is it his crimes that she is not to take personally?

  The truth is lost in the departing of the gendarmes and their detainees, and the bristling of Clifford next to her at Victor’s gesture of familiarity, in the shocked faces of the Lester family and her mother’s unexpressed but still evident displeasure at everything she has seen. In saying goodbye to the Colletts, who will need to go back to their hotel to change their plans before heading to the police station to make a statement.

  ‘Goodbye, my dear,’ says Ruth, hugging Eve tightly. ‘I do hope we shall see each other back in England.’

  Eve nods, not trusting herself to speak.

  Now what is to be done?

  There can be no signing of papers. No transfer of ownership. No pleasing sums of money changing hands. Duncan’s creditors will not be paid. Diana’s sacrifice will go unrewarded.

  Outside the grey cloud persists.

  Diana shakes her head.

  ‘How extraordinary,’ she says. ‘It’s as if she hates us all.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Mrs Finch was motivated as much by the desire to line her own pockets as by her undiluted hatred of you all,’ says Sully cheerfully.

  ‘She as good as murdered my father,’ Duncan says. ‘I know the cancer would have got him sooner or later, but it was the shock of being confronted like that which brought on the haemorrhage. I’m sure of it. Did you know he drowned in his own blood?’

  ‘It’s so awful,’ Clemmie says, her eyes round. ‘A spy in our midst. Who knows what danger we might all have been in.’

  For the first time Eve realizes just how much of an impediment she must have been to Victor. Content to bide his time while Guy was alive and the heat was settling on the stolen art market, when he made the initial approach to Bernard, following Guy’s death, it must have seemed such a straightforward matter to take possession of an empty property that no one really wanted and remove the paintings at leisure. Then along came the mystery beneficiary from England, insisting on moving into the house, refusing to sign the papers. How far might he have gone to scare her off? As far as persuading Mrs Finch to shut her in the cellar? As far as pushing her off the rocks? Blackmail?

  She turns to Bernard.

  ‘I don’t believe you ever trusted Victor. Is there something else you know about him?’

  Bernard shakes his head.

  ‘Not know. Not for sure. But the Riviera is a small place. People talk. Make judgements. Marie, for example, will not breathe the same air as him.’

  ‘Judgements about what?’

  ‘That he was too friendly with the Nazis while they were in occupation – he and Laurent Martin.’

  ‘Laurent is involved?’ asks Sully, suddenly serious.

  Bernard raises his hand.

  ‘This is only rumour. Conjecture.’

  ‘But they’ll be wanting to speak to him? The police?’

  Bernard shrugs.

  ‘There are some men coming from the Préfecture in Paris. Then we will know more.’

  ‘Poppycock,’ says Clemmie. ‘Someone like Laurent wouldn’t need to make money through smuggling. Did you see the photographs of the wedding, Mr Gaillard? Did that look to you like a man who was short of a bob or two?’

  Bernard turns his sad eyes to the young girl who chafes with her own conviction of being right.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘it is not a question of money but a question of superiority. Of proving oneself to be outside the law.’

  In the silence th
at follows, Eve tries to process in her mind the strange events of the morning, all the time conscious of Clifford and her mother watching her from the other side of the room.

  Her mother had seemed to experience the war almost entirely as a personal inconvenience. It was because of the Germans that she had had to sacrifice the roses in her garden to grow lettuce and potatoes, and spend her mornings queuing up to buy bacon, and risk skin rashes in unmentionable areas by using squares of cut-up newspaper instead of toilet paper. Because of the Germans that Eve was out all the time delivering used furniture to people who’d lost everything, and she had to endure night after night alone in that house with the blackout blinds that made one feel like one was sealed into a tomb, or, worse, crowd into a shelter with the very neighbours she spent her life trying to avoid. And now, here in France, she finds her daughter has been mingling with people who, if not German, are seemingly the next best thing.

  But no, Eve is being too harsh. she finds herself remembering a scene in their tiny back kitchen at home in Banbury with their neighbour, Nora, sobbing at the fold-out table, still clutching the telegram informing her that her youngest son wouldn’t be coming home. Eve looking at her mother and being shocked at her brimming eyes, her naked empathy. She understands, Eve had thought. She understands this deep, gut-level loss. And simultaneous with this thought came the conviction that it was not the loss of her steady, timid father that inspired such a groundswell of feeling.

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot in all the excitement.’

  Diana’s voice cuts through the tension in the room. She has reached down to open the white handbag at her feet and is feeling around in it, her hair forming a curtain around her face that shimmers as she straightens with an exclamation of satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, here.’ She has withdrawn a bundle of papers, tied up with an elastic band, which she holds out towards Eve.

  ‘What is it?’ Though there has been some small softening between her and the second Mrs Lester over recent days, Eve remains wary.

  ‘It was something you said yesterday that made me think of it. When you were asking your mother about Francis Garvey. When you said maybe she might know him as Frank or Frankie. It rang a bell in the back of my mind. And so I went home and here they were.’

  ‘Yes, but what are they?’ Duncan asks his stepmother as Eve leans across to take the papers being proffered. ‘You still haven’t said.’

  ‘They’re letters. Love letters. To someone called Frankie. They were in a box in Guy’s dressing room that he thought I didn’t know about.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Noel, impatient. ‘Why would Guy have someone else’s love letters?’

  ‘There were a lot of letters in that box.’ Diana’s face has darkened from its usual honey colour. Normally so composed, she looks, briefly, shaky. ‘Letters from other women, going back years. Look, your father was no saint. I know that won’t come as news to any of you. He cheated on me and he cheated on Madeleine before me, and there we are. If the other woman was married, they’d come up with pet names for each other, aliases if you like. There was one who called him Huck and another who signed her letters Sugar, if you can believe that. It added to the illicit thrill of it all, I suppose.’

  Eve, who has been loosening the rubber band that holds the letters together, looks up at the note of bitterness that has crept into Diana’s voice.

  She glances at Clifford, who is seemingly rendered mute by the strangeness of his surroundings and the unorthodoxy of events. He is sitting in a straight-backed chair, his eyes darting around the company. My husband. She repeats the phrase in her head, as if the repetition itself might make it true. And yet this man with his perfectly groomed moustache and his impeccably creased trousers seems more of a stranger to her than Stanley Sullivan, sitting to his left, of whose existence she had been unaware just ten days ago.

  Her eyes slide away to Clifford’s other side, alighting on her mother. Eve’s heart lurches. Her mother is sitting, rigid, her face completely drained of colour, eyes fixed on the stack of letters in Eve’s hand.

  Slowly Eve unfolds the top letter and reads.

  My most darling Frankie, Do you remember how I used to trace the contours of your face with my tongue? She stops reading, flushed with embarrassment. Her eyes scan to the bottom of the letter, her heart leaping into her throat and swelling there until she cannot breathe. Your Own Hen x.

  So Diana is right. These are lovers’ names. She doesn’t look up, but even so she is aware of her mother’s chalk-white face. A wave of nausea sweeps through her. Could this woman, who collected china figurines that no one ever saw and turned off the news when it came on the wireless because life was bad enough and what was the point of knowing there are even worse things out there, be another Mrs Finch, swept off her feet by a handsome face and a suitcase full of empty promises? Could her mother really be this ‘Hen’?

  Then she remembers Francis Garvey. The man Guy is supposed to have killed. If he turns out to be Frankie, it makes scarcely more sense. Why would Guy take possession of another man’s intimate letters and keep them all these years?

  ‘What does it say, for Pete’s sake?’ Clemmie is not used to being kept waiting.

  Eve forces herself to scan through the letter.

  ‘I don’t think you should be reading other people’s private correspondence.’

  Her mother’s voice.

  Eve hesitates.

  Her mother is right. It is a gross intrusion. And yet, this might turn out to be her last chance to find answers, to know why she has been brought here.

  ‘I’m just skimming the lines to see if there’s anything that leaps out at me,’ she says.

  But her mother is already on her feet, gathering herself up straight.

  ‘You might be able to clear it with your conscience, Evelyn, but I will not be part of it,’ she says, and she steps out through the open doors to the terrace where the darkening sky hints of more rain to come.

  Eve turns her attention back to the letters in her lap, trying to ignore the stinging behind her eyeballs.

  She folds up the first letter, noting the many crease marks that betray how often it has been folded and refolded. Now she opens up the second letter. The smooth right angle of your jaw as I lie with my cheek on your chest looking up at your face. Your heart beating in my ear through your skin. She swallows, folds up that letter too.

  By the time she starts the third letter, she has lost her appetite for this.

  ‘Do you need to do this in private?’ Noel asks, seeing something in her face.

  ‘No, I don’t think there is anything here,’ she says, her eyes flicking, unseeing, across the page. ‘Just someone else’s love letters.’

  She folds the letter over once and is just about to fold it again when a word jumps out at her from the line nearest the crease.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘What is it?’ So many different voices chorusing at her.

  ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a name. Mary.’ She reads aloud: ‘You even loved the birthmark I’ve always tried to hide. Mother told me it was God’s thumbprint, then after she’d gone Mary said it was how He marked out bad children, like putting a stamp on the bad eggs. But you said it was an extra heart that I wore on the outside not the inside, so I could absorb your love like sunlight.’

  Clemmie laughs. ‘Oh, good grief. It’s like the stories you read in magazines for women of a certain age.’

  ‘Shut up, Clemmie,’ says Noel. He turns towards Eve, and now she cannot avoid looking at him as he asks steadily, ‘Who is Mary?’

  Eve swallows, feeling herself pulled towards him like a boat on a rope being tugged into its mooring.

  ‘Mary is my mother’s name.’

  28

  AS SOON AS Eve steps out on to the terrace, she is aware of the black sky pressing down on her, of the damp heat of the unseen sun, the dense mass of moisture in the air. She spots her mother down on the wooden jetty, gazing out to sea, her arms folded under t
he beige cardigan she wears draped over her shoulders.

  ‘There’s something curious in one of the letters,’ Eve says, joining her mother. She has brought the paper with her and unfolds it, ready to read, but her mother holds up a hand.

  ‘I don’t wish to hear any more.’

  ‘But the writer mentions a Mary and I just thought …’ Eve looks at her mother’s straight back, at her fingernails digging into the skin of her upper arms under the curtain-fall of the draped cardigan, and the resolution that has carried her out of the living room and all the way here deserts her.

  ‘But of course there are a great many Marys,’ she tails off. Her mother turns back to look at the sea, so when she speaks, Eve at first isn’t sure she has heard correctly or whether the words have been distorted by the cloud that comes so low it seems almost to be touching the water.

  ‘She was my sister. Is.’

  ‘Who? Who are you talking about? You don’t have a sister.’

  Far across the sea, a flash of lightning cracks open the black sky.

  ‘Henrietta. Hen. She is my sister, though I stopped recognizing her as such many years ago.’

  ‘Why?’ Shock thins Eve’s voice like acetone.

  ‘She stole something from me. The thing she knew mattered more to me than any other.’

  Her next words are drowned out by a clap of thunder that makes Eve jump.

  ‘Him,’ her mother says when Eve asks her to repeat them. ‘She stole him. Francis. Frankie.’

  ‘But who was he?’

  ‘He was the love of my life.’ She pauses. ‘Our parents died young, Henrietta’s and mine. Mother in 1912 of influenza and Father not long after. Pneumonia, they said, but I think it was just a broken heart. I was seventeen and Henrietta was two years younger. We weren’t particularly close, but I tried to do the right thing by her. I left school to work as a clerk in the post office to support us both. We had the house in Banbury, but very little in the way of income. The job was so dull I thought I should die from boredom, but then he came to work there. Francis. And everything changed. Not that he knew I was there. Not at first anyway. But I used to watch him across the office – men and women worked separately then, of course. And just knowing he was there was enough.’