Inheritance

by Jenny Eclair

  Beginnings, middles and ends; Peggy, Serena, Natasha and Bel. This is the room that binds them, this is how consequences work.

  If Peggy’s son Ivor hadn’t died, then Benedict wouldn’t have got the house; if Benedict hadn’t inherited Kittiwake, then Serena wouldn’t have run away from it; and if Serena hadn’t run away, then Natasha wouldn’t have . . .

  It goes round in circles, but it always begins with the death of a child.

  2

  The Terrible Accident

  Kittiwake House, Cornwall, 1950

  ‘We were only playing,’ they chorused.

  ‘A game of water golf,’ Natasha admitted later, the aim being to hit golf balls across the indoor pool without landing them in the filthy water. ‘It’s harder than you’d think,’ Benedict chimed in, and Natasha explained that if you hit the ball too hard it bounced off the opposite wall and disappeared into the murk, but if you hit the ball too softly it dribbled over the edge. It was Natasha’s job to keep score because at eleven she was good with sums, unlike the easily muddled nine-year-old Benedict. Meanwhile, Ivor, being the eldest of the three children, was in charge of the rules.

  The rules decreed that whoever lost the most golf balls had to dive into the filthy water at the end of the game and retrieve as many as possible from the scuzzy depths.

  ‘We were only playing,’ they cried, and Peggy knew in that moment she would never want to wake up again.

  *

  The inquest came back with a verdict of accidental drowning. It didn’t make sense. All her children could swim, Peggy had made sure of it, it was important, swimming could save your life.

  Peggy’s father, Randolph Oppenheim, had been friends with a couple who’d been on the Titanic. Once the ship began to sink, the husband, a strong swimmer, had stripped down to his underclothes, dived into the water and survived; his wife, a non-swimmer, weighed down by her furs and all the jewellery she could carry, did not.

  How could a fit young boy, who had been swimming since he was six, drown? It didn’t make sense, and yet his lungs were full of water, he had drowned. The only other remark on the pathologist’s report was the description of a small egg-shaped lump on the boy’s head, consistent with a bump or a knock.

  Had he maybe banged his head before he fell in the water?

  ‘No, no,’ repeated her other children, ‘he was fine, he was laughing, he just fell.’

  ‘We were only playing,’ the children’s voices seemed to echo, over and over again.

  It was all Teddy’s fault. They should never have been allowed in the pool room. The water had been contaminated for months, it should have been locked and bolted, but Teddy was too distracted by his business affairs in London to sort it out. She couldn’t do everything. Her husband had failed her and now Ivor, precious Ivor, her firstborn and favourite, was dead.

  Back in London, with the blinds firmly drawn in the Chester Square townhouse, Peggy withdrew to her bedroom, opening what seemed like a constant stream of letters of condolence and letting them drop to the floor. She barely ate and for the first time in her life took no pleasure in her resulting weight loss.

  One thing was certain, she would never set foot in Monty’s Cove ever again. And if she had her way, she would torch Kittiwake House.

  Her anger was like mercury. She couldn’t bear to see the faces of her other children and the worst of it was that, even though she blamed Teddy, deep in her heart she knew it was her fault.

  They wouldn’t have been in Cornwall if it hadn’t been for her, she had bought the place outright with her own money, in her own name, it was hers, hers to do whatever she liked with and she had taken her son there to die. The place had been a trap, her whole life was a screaming mistake.

  Peggy Oppenheim wished she had never set eyes on Teddy Carmichael, never mind married the man, but they’d met before the war when they were young and life was fun and they fitted into each other’s arms as if it were their destiny. Blame it on the dancing, thought Peggy bitterly.

  In 1930, Peggy had been a twenty-year-old debutante ‘doing’ the London season while staying with an aunt in Pimlico. She was a glamorous young woman, with little natural beauty but a great deal of style and a hugely wealthy father, which more than made up for the fact that her nose was on the large side.

  Teddy Carmichael, whom Peggy presumed was loaded due to the cut of his dinner jacket and the fact he could trace his ancestry back to King Charles II, was actually the younger son of a younger son and therefore somewhat lacking in the wallet department.

  But what did that matter?

  She had more than enough moolah for both of them. He was tall – which was important for Peggy, being five foot nine herself – as well as socially well-connected, beautifully mannered and, most importantly, quite apart from being utterly charming, he was brilliant on the dance floor. Together the two of them cut quite a dash as they foxtrotted and tangoed across some of London’s most glittering ballrooms. No one was surprised when their engagement was announced in The Times in the spring of 1932.

  What the announcement in The Times omitted to mention was that once Teddy had got down on one knee to ask Peggy to marry him and she happily agreed, he had slipped a disc getting back up. The pair had to wait until he was out of his special surgical corset before Margaret Christina Oppenheim and Edward George Christopher Carmichael could become man and wife.

  By this time it was 1935. She expected to honeymoon on the Italian Riviera, but Teddy took her trout fishing in Scotland, where his back played up and Peggy was ravaged by midges, sickened by the notion of haggis and shocked by the size of her new husband’s penis.

  Sadly, the only place Teddy was well endowed was around the genitals. His bank balance, by contrast, was more meagre than Peggy had been led to believe. She understood his elder brother had inherited the lion’s share of the family money, but surely he earned something from that job of his in the City? Yet she saw precious little of it and money soon became a bone of contention in the Carmichael household. In truth, Peggy was used to a rather more lavish lifestyle than Teddy’s pockets could provide and rather than admit the severity of his financial limitations to his wife and allow her to foot the bill for any luxuries she fancied, Teddy adopted a fogey-esque horror of anything new-fangled or modern, declaring her requests for a new car, stair carpet and drapes ‘vulgar’.

  His wife’s Americanisms had quickly begun to grate. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, they’re curtains not “drapes”,’ he snarled, washing down the painkillers his doctor had prescribed for his back with a glass of single malt.

  She might have left him right then, had the babies not started arriving. Ivor came first in 1937, her firstborn son and heir, a golden child with a light spirit and a good nature. She had adored him on sight.

  A year later came a daughter, small and sallow and so very different from pink-cheeked Ivor. They called her Natasha, but Peggy was never entirely convinced by the name and she once ordered her daughter a third birthday cake from Harrods with the name Natalie piped across the top. ‘Happy birthday, dear Natashalie,’ sang the assembled guests.

  Finally, in 1940, when Teddy had failed the army physical and been seconded to Whitehall to work in intelligence, Peggy delivered a second son, Benedict, born at Teddy’s brother’s farm in Norfolk where Peggy and the children had been evacuated.

  Honestly, thought Peggy, lying back exhausted after a difficult thirty-six-hour labour, what was the point of a third child? This one was like yet another beige-coloured handbag. She simply didn’t need it.

  Three children in as many years had done for Mrs Carmichael. Thus far she had been lucky with her waistline, but there was no way she was going to risk her figure by having a fourth. So when the war ended and the family moved back to Chester Square, she did all she could to avoid another pregnancy by slathering her face with night cream and pretending to be fast asleep and snoring by the time her husband had finished his nightly ablutions.

  Which
came first: Peggy’s unwillingness in the bedroom or Teddy’s increasing reliance on drink?

  Well, what else was a man supposed to do, argued Teddy. His back hurt, he couldn’t sleep, his investments kept going belly-up, and to top it all, his wife lay curled up like an armour-plated armadillo in the marital bed. Whisky was the only thing that kept him warm, eased the pain and eventually knocked him out.

  Peggy had expected Teddy’s fortunes to pick up after the war but they didn’t, and the three children played in a freezing room on the top floor with toys that Teddy and his brother had once owned: a miserable battalion of lead soldiers, entirely without paint, moth-eaten bears and a derelict-looking toy farm. Most shamefully of all, Peggy realised her daughter’s stockings had been darned at the knee, ‘on sir’s orders’ the housekeeper bleated.

  Oblivious to the fact that Teddy was playing dangerously expensive card games at the various gentlemen’s clubs in town, Mrs Carmichael came to the conclusion that her husband was mean. He had money, she was convinced of it, otherwise what was the point in him going to work every day? He simply refused to spend it.

  And so, in a fit of pique, she hired a property consultant, an enthusiastic, flamboyantly dressed young man who brought lavishly illustrated brochures into her drawing room and set about choosing a second home – somewhere she would be free to play doll’s houses and decorate to her heart’s content.

  And why not? She had her own money, she wasn’t financially dependent on skinflint Teddy, her father had seen to that.

  After weeks of deliberation, Peggy finally chose Monty’s Cove in Cornwall, preferring its picturesque seaside location to grander shooting estates in Buckinghamshire and moated castles in Scotland.

  As for the distance from London? She hadn’t a clue. Peggy’s geography, as befitting an American heiress, was hopeless. She may have resided in the UK since before the war, but whether Scotland was at the top or the bottom of the map, who cared? All she knew was that her adopted island was tiny, so wherever Cornwall was, it couldn’t be that far away.

  She fell in love with the photographs in the brochure: golden buttercup fields atop silvery cliffs overlooking a glittering blue sea. Steps carved into the cliff-face led down to a small private sandy beach complete with rock pools where her children could wander freely with buckets and spades searching for crabs.

  And then there was the house, Kittiwake, a solid oblong of pale lemon stucco, smothered in wisteria and neatly boxed in at each end by square crenellated turrets. Big but not enormous, Kittiwake was described in the brochure as ‘A fine Victorian coastal manor house with ten bedrooms, three bath/shower rooms and the unusual addition of a fully heated indoor swimming pool.’

  ‘The previous owner was an American too,’ explained the sales agent, and that was the clincher; if an American had owned it then there would be radiators and decent plumbing, proper shower-heads and a twentieth-century kitchen. Not that Peggy cooked, but she did eat, and the meals served in the Chester Square dining room tasted positively Victorian – brown Windsor soup, fatty grey stewed mutton and those foul diseased-looking kidneys that Teddy seemed to relish.

  In Cornwall, they would have pancakes with maple syrup and peanut butter, rich ground Italian coffee and frozen orange juice. She would insist on fresh flowers on every surface – real flowers, not the hideous fake wax effigies that gathered so much dust in London – and she would collect some modern art for the walls, because passing all those dingy oil paintings of bug-eyed, bristle-faced Carmichael ancestors on the stairs every day made her jaw clench and her hands itch for an axe.

  Unfortunately, Peggy’s plans for the Cove were difficult to put into practice. It took so long to get there that weekend visits were impractical. As for the local shops, Peggy wondered why they bothered opening at all. Nobody stocked anything interesting or useful, everything had to be brought down from London, and what with rationing and the local workforce being so terribly slow, Peggy was almost defeated by the place.

  It was easier to get to France, she realised, and as her enthusiasm for Cornwall dwindled, the house responded by sulking. Lights fused, radiators stopped working and the swimming pool developed a thick green scum.

  Even the weather conspired against them. Where were the blue skies of the brochure? Every day the twin combination of wind and tide left a heavy crust of salt on the window panes and the children’s toes turned blue in the rock pools.

  Sadly, it wasn’t only the house that was crumbling. Peggy’s relationship with Teddy was disintegrating too. Over the years their marriage soured like unrefrigerated milk. Sometimes Peggy swore she could smell the failure of their union clinging to them like mildew whenever they were together, a situation that became increasingly infrequent.

  They had run out of things to say, and Peggy spent more and more of her time alone in front of a mirror. Her hair was perfect, her face a flawless mask of foundation and powder, drawn-on eyebrows and lips. Looking the part calmed her nerves and she smoked elegantly through a tortoiseshell cigarette holder, drank martinis before toying with her lunch and then, most afternoons, she napped.

  The accident happened early in the evening, when she was repairing her face for dinner, the drapes shut against yet another cold, wet April day.

  They were spending the Easter school holidays at Kittiwake, although Teddy had disappeared back to London immediately after the bank holiday weekend, leaving her alone with the cook, the butler and her so-called mother’s help – a dreary girl who suffered from nosebleeds and was forever appearing with a plug of scarlet toilet paper up each nostril. There seemed very little point in staying on; the weather was frightful and the children bored and fractious. ‘Only a few more days,’ she muttered to herself. Trunks were on standby, waiting to be packed. Soon the children would be returned to their various schools and she need only get up for meals.

  She thought at first he was an apparition, her youngest child covered in green slime holding a golf club.

  ‘We were playing,’ he stuttered.

  3

  The Realisation

  London, May 1950

  Teddy Carmichael suspected his wife had left for good when he noticed the empty shelf in her vast mahogany wardrobe.

  Peggy had taken her jewellery. The numerous leather boxes with their tiny brass keys, the salmon-pink Cartier watch case and soft suede pouch in which she kept her pearls, had all disappeared.

  The witch had lied. She’d said she needed a break and had booked a liner from Southampton to New York, where her father would arrange a transfer to the Oppenheim Estate in Philadelphia. A short holiday, she said, a couple of weeks to get over everything.

  He couldn’t stop her. She had paid for her own ticket – first class, naturally. If his wife was going to grieve, she was going to grieve all the way back to the States and in style.

  Teddy understood what she was doing. She was running away from the sorrow and the pitying looks and the endless black-edged letters of condolence – and he couldn’t say he blamed her.

  She left the week after they buried Ivor, that awful sunlit cherry blossom day. It should have been raining, there should have been thunder and lightning and skies the colour of steel, but the day dawned cloudless and the sun shone relentlessly. It wasn’t right. Even in the chill of the grey stone church, Teddy was too hot in his thick black overcoat and his face ran with sweat and tears.

  Peggy sat next to him, her features invisible save for the burning coals of her eyes and the slash of bright red lipstick behind the elaborate filigree of a black lace veil.

  During the service she had stood up and sat down as requested, as if she were a wooden puppet, but afterwards, as they gathered by the side of the small grave, he could feel the uncontrollable shake of her shoulders. And as the first clod of earth fell onto their child’s coffin, she moaned deep and low, a noise that sounded for all the world like it came from somewhere beyond the grave.

  At that moment he reached for her black silk-clad hand, but sh
e moved it away. He had never felt so alone in his life.

  As for his other children, Peggy didn’t even want them in the same funeral car. Benedict and Natasha travelled to and from the service with Teddy’s brother and wife, white faces staring out of the window, their impossibly small feet climbing out of the Daimler in shiny new black shoes.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Teddy, how can anyone hold them to blame? They’re children. She’s being ridiculous. It was an accident,’ his brother told him as they drank whisky together late into that terrible night.

  It was all right for Stephen, Teddy thought bitterly, with his soft biddable wife, his four solid breathing children and his successful stud farm in Norfolk. Since the war, his brother had gone into breeding racehorses and the business was doing remarkably well. Meanwhile, Teddy was floundering. Any investment he made seemed doomed to failure, he had borrowed money against the house, his son had died and his wife had left him.

  A month later, the telegram arrived confirming his suspicions. She wasn’t coming back and he would be hearing from her solicitor.

  The hawk-nosed bitch had not only cut him off, she’d abandoned her two surviving children. Poor Natasha and Benedict, Teddy hadn’t a clue what to do with them. Thank Christ for boarding schools, he swore, as he shredded the telegram.

  Over the weeks that followed the arrival of Peggy’s telegram, Teddy thought about writing to his son and daughter and breaking the news about their mother, but it didn’t matter how often he sat at his desk with the Carmichael crested writing paper in front of him, he couldn’t for the life of him conjure up the right words. Night after night he sat there, his fountain pen dripping ink uselessly, while the ice in his Scotch made tiny catastrophic cracking noises that made his heart jump.

  Everything was falling apart.