Inheritance

by Jenny Eclair

  Teddy Carmichael was a coward. When the summer holidays came round, his children barely had their trunks through the front door before he sent them to stay with their cousins in the country. The alternative was unbearable, Teddy decided. Whenever the three of them were alone together in Chester Square, it felt like they were trapped in some terrible board game that was missing half its pieces.

  He left it to his brother’s wife Simone to tell them about Peggy. When the deed was done, she phoned to say they’d coped with it remarkably well, although Benedict had wet the bed. Like father like son, thought Teddy, blushing at the recollection of having drunk himself into a stupor of incontinence only days before.

  Determined to make some positive decisions in the wake of Peggy’s departure, Teddy decided to close up Kittiwake. He wasn’t abandoning the place due to some silly superstition – Teddy wasn’t like Peggy, he didn’t have the imagination to develop any neurotic loathing of the place. Tragedy could happen anywhere. His son could have drowned in the Thames, what difference would it have made? He was gone, the boy with the glowing school reports and the ability to pluck a cricket ball from thin air was dead and all that was left of him were the things he would never grow out of.

  Teddy ordered a purge of Ivor’s possessions; he didn’t want anything left in the house to remind him of the boy.

  Some months later, when Benedict came home for a brief weekend exeat, he discovered a suitcase under his bed containing all the things Ivor had taken to Kittiwake that last Easter holiday. Rifling through it, Benedict found a ten-bob note in a pair of his brother’s shorts; he shoved it into his own pocket, then shut the case and slid it as far back under the bed as possible.

  Years later, when the suitcase disappeared, along with everything else from his childhood, Benedict would feel a pang of regret that the only memento he’d ever had of his brother had been frittered on sweets in the school tuck shop.

  Shutting down Kittiwake was one of the few sensible financial decisions Teddy made that year. He couldn’t afford to run the place and he couldn’t sell it because it was in the Yankee bitch’s name. So he sent word for the pool to be drained and instructed their regular cleaning woman, Brenda, to cover the furniture and wall hangings with dust sheets and promised her a generous retainer to keep an eye on things. Aside from the fact it went against the grain to allow an asset to fall into complete disrepair, Kittiwake was his children’s inheritance – and it looked increasingly likely they were going to need it. In fact, at the rate things were going, it might be the only thing left for them to inherit.

  With that thought in mind, Teddy poured himself a sherry. The only thing he would truly miss about Kittiwake was the wine cellar. Peggy had insisted on getting it properly stocked; in a few years’ time, some of those bottles could be worth a few bob. He’d even laid down some port for Ivor’s twenty-first, and the sudden realisation that this day was never going to happen made Teddy tremble uncontrollably.

  4

  Escaping

  Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, May 1950

  Peggy Carmichael wasn’t a stupid woman. The truth about Teddy’s gambling addiction had eventually dawned and she knew full well that if she left her diamonds and pearls, her rubies, emeralds and Cartier watch in Chester Square, they were likely to end up on a Knightsbridge gaming table.

  Her jewels were now safely stowed in the safe of her first-class cabin on Cunard’s luxurious ocean liner the Queen Mary, and as the ship pulled out of Southampton Harbour on its five-day voyage across the pond, Peggy wept with relief. She had escaped.

  Apart from her jewellery, she was travelling light in an effort to maintain the fiction that she was only going home for a short break. In reality, she had no intention of coming back. Her marriage was dead, Teddy’s touch made her skin crawl, and visions of Ivor haunted her day and night. She saw him dead, waterlogged on the side of the pool, she saw the blanket being pulled over his beautiful face as they stretchered him into the ambulance, and she saw him blue-lipped and waxy in the morgue.

  But even worse, she saw him alive. Chester Square had been unbearable. She had seen him everywhere she looked, running up the stairs laughing, eating a biscuit in the conservatory, practising his batting in the back garden. It was agonising, she had to get away, she would go mad if she stayed.

  What she would do once she arrived back in America, Peggy had no idea. In the meantime, the crossing was proving enough of a distraction. Not that she socialised – she preferred to keep herself to herself. Most people, observing that she dressed in black from head to toe, presumed she was recently widowed. Much to her relief, they kept a respectful distance.

  She ordered her meals to be delivered to her suite, slept a great deal, had her hair set and her fingernails painted in a deep Max Factor scarlet in one of the ship’s beauty salons.

  A couple of days into her voyage, Peggy began to feel like a snake shedding an old skin. She wouldn’t be Teddy’s wife for much longer, and as for the children . . . In some respects, she wished she’d been barren. Losing a child was even more painful than giving birth to one in the first place.

  The best thing to do, she decided, was to compartmentalise her life. Her children belonged to a time and a place that no longer existed. Never mind Kittiwake, she was never going back to Chester Square. England was Ivor and motherhood. In America she would be someone else. She would become the woman she might have been had she never met Teddy. The fact that she had been playing one role for the last fifteen years of her life didn’t mean she couldn’t play another. Philadelphia was less than a hundred miles from New York and Fifth Avenue, she could be reabsorbed into the slipstream of American society, attend the opera and charity functions, eat lobster in expensive restaurants. She would be thin and fashionable, she might even dye her hair a different colour, go darker, banish the increasing number of silver threads for ever. She would grow a new skin.

  On the last night of the voyage, after a solo pitcher of frozen Margaritas and a very good fillet of hake Grenobloise, served with an irresistible potato puree, Peggy found herself pacing her quarters suffering from indigestion.

  As a woman with a twenty-three-inch waist (no mean feat after three children) she didn’t normally eat potato, and in this restless state she retrieved from the silk case containing her headscarves the one memento of her old life that she had brought with her: a black-and-white photograph of her three children.

  Peggy had removed it from its silver frame before she left. She knew it would never sit on her dressing table next to her scent bottles and silver-backed hairbrushes again – how could she face it every day for the rest of her life? The sight of it was too painful.

  The picture had been taken in a professional studio six months before the accident. Ivor, Natasha and Benedict were sitting in a row on a velvet chaise longue, for ever twelve, eleven and nine. Peggy swallowed a sob. If Ivor wasn’t going to grow any older, then it didn’t seem fair that the others should either.

  In the photograph, Benedict wore a sailor’s suit and held the yacht his maternal grandfather had sent him for his birthday. Only Ivor looked directly into the camera, bright-eyed and handsome, his broad smile showing off his even white teeth; the other two looked shifty and glum in contrast. Benedict was jealously guarding the boat while Natasha stared at the floor as if wishing it would open up and swallow her whole.

  Peggy examined the photograph closely and noticed for the first time that the girl’s fists were clenched.

  Why did it have to be Ivor?

  Wiping away a tear, Peggy pulled on a coat. The night sky looked clear and it would do her good to go on deck and see the stars, walk off some of that potato.

  She wished the crossing could last for ever. Being in the middle of the sea was oddly comforting. None of it felt real, there was no fixed time, no fixed place, nothing but the endless stretch of water reaching out on all sides as far as the eye could see.

  It was midnight when she crept into the deserted gran
d salon and stared at the art deco mural on the wall. Depicting a map of the Atlantic, it featured a crystal model replica of the ship charting its steady progress across the ocean. She wished she could slow it down. Out here on the ocean, she could imagine that she was going to America to see her father and that everything back in England was as it should be; her three healthy children were happily getting on with their schooling.

  She liked being in limbo. It was a relief not to be responsible for anything. On board the ship she didn’t need to make any decisions beyond when and what she ate, and the food was rather good. In fact the sea air seemed to have restored her appetite; for the first time since Ivor died, she began to worry about her waistline.

  The photograph still exists. It sits in a slightly battered silver frame, amongst a group of carefully curated objets d’art on the grand piano in Kittiwake’s newly refurbished drawing room. Freya had to dither around for hours positioning everything to look exactly right – the framed photo, a marquetry cigar box, a Lalique glass vase, a tiny speckled blue egg and an ornate Victorian fan – but the resulting image has scored over three thousand likes on Instagram, which is the main thing.

  5

  Coming Undone

  London, 1950–1961

  The fifties were not kind to Teddy Carmichael. Every New Year he swore blind things would change and resolved to cut down on the drinking and the gambling. But every year things seemed to get worse and he couldn’t help noticing the gaps that kept appearing in his life since his son died and his wife ran away.

  Teddy couldn’t understand what was happening. Everywhere he looked something was missing: his wife, his children, the ornamental Russian samovar in the dining room – and now some of the oil paintings that used to hang on the stairs.

  At least the disappearance of the paintings would please Peggy, he sniggered to himself, stumbling past the newly exposed rectangles of Edwardian striped wallpaper that stood out vividly against their surroundings.

  Peggy had disliked most of the canvases that hung in Chester Square, but she particularly hated the portraits of his ancestors, ‘those deeply creepy pus-faced freaks’ as she once called them.

  Unfortunately, it seemed the art world agreed with her. None of the Cork Street dealers had expressed the remotest interest in those wealthy but ugly faces, so Teddy’s dead relatives continued to stare at him with bog-eyed disapproval as he hauled himself nightly to his sleeping quarters.

  Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with this farcical ‘going to bed’ routine, given that he barely slept. He might as well have laid down on the horsehair couch in his study for all the comfort his mattress gave him.

  Night after night he thrashed about under the covers, attempting to do increasingly complicated sums in his head, but the figures danced and refused to add up, and the gaps between what he needed and what he had grew bigger and bigger with every month.

  If he did sleep he had terrible nightmares during which he lost his teeth, enamel tumbling from his mouth leaving empty bloodied gaps in his fleshy pink gums, and it didn’t take Freud to understand the reason why.

  Teddy Carmichael was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and in an effort to keep the slavering wolf from the door, he was selling off the family silver, plus anything else that could raise a few quid – china, furniture, his father’s fishing tackle.

  Sometimes, when he came home from his club, he thought for a moment he might have been burgled. Where on earth was that rather good little Stubbs painting, commissioned years ago by his great-grandfather, entitled Samuel with a Gelding under an Oak Tree?

  As a small boy, it had been his favourite painting and he used to stroke the little black horse for luck before he left the house.

  Sadly, some terrible tips and a disastrous day at the Cheltenham races had necessitated the painting’s swift and unceremonious departure. The new owner had lifted it off the wall and given Teddy a knowing smirk as he carried it off under his arm.

  It was his own fault, who else could he point the finger at? The trouble with living by yourself, he mused, was that there was never anyone else to blame.

  Teddy’s fateful day at Cheltenham had culminated in putting all his remaining money on a dead cert in the final race. To his horror, Moon Shadow had fallen badly in the second furlong and broken a leg. A vet was summoned to put the beast out of its misery and as he stared in disbelief at his betting slip, Teddy heard the muffled crack of the fatal shot. Weeks later, he could still hear it.

  And now the Stubbs has gone.

  A gee-gee to pay for the gee-gees, he giggled, trying not to slop the port he was ferrying to his bedroom. In the good old days, he’d have called for Blake his butler to see to his night-time nightcap needs, but Blake left in 1955. These days, without a butler or a wife, Teddy had to tackle his cufflinks on his own.

  The trickiness of this operation, combined with the increasing morning tremor in his hands, regularly brought him to his knees, leaving him sobbing with rage on the floor of his dressing room, biting at the useless dangling shirt cuffs.

  He missed Blake more than Peggy. As for Ivor, time and alcohol had dulled the pain of losing his eldest son. On one occasion, after yet another night of sweating and tossing in his bed, he awoke having completely forgotten what the boy looked like. Desperate for proof that the lad had actually existed, he’d crawled under the stairs and opened the family strongbox, rummaging through the contents until he found his eldest child’s birth certificate:

  Father – Edward George Christopher Carmichael; Mother – Margaret Christina Carmichael (née Oppenheim).

  All ties with Peggy had been unceremoniously cut after the divorce. The legalities were left to their solicitors, but according to Cudlip and Bird of Kensington, Peggy hadn’t blanched at the idea of taking over the running costs of Kittiwake.

  Good job, thought Teddy, the place was nothing to do with him, although to his surprise some months later, when he discovered a spare bunch of rusting keys labelled ‘Kittiwake’ he found he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away.

  Ten years, he reminded himself. An entire decade had passed since he lost both his son and his wife, and now his two surviving children had abandoned him. Benedict, after years of being a complete nuisance at school, surprised everyone by knuckling down and clinching a place at Oxford University to study Modern Greats, whatever that was. While Natasha, now twenty-two, had miraculously transformed from a sullen, whey-faced child into a strangely delicate beauty. She had recently become Mrs Hugo Berrington and moved to Barnes, of all places.

  Teddy was left to struggle on alone in a house he could no longer afford to heat or even clean properly. Natasha’s wedding had financially wiped him out – he was the father of the bride and as such, tradition demanded that he paid for everything, including five bridesmaids, a wedding dress created by designer du jour John Bates, plus a champagne reception followed by a sit-down meal for two hundred at Claridge’s.

  No wonder Teddy’s hair was falling out and the whisky decanter on his desk ran as dry as his savings.

  He thought about asking his brother for yet another loan – Stephen had inherited a great deal more than he had – but he hadn’t paid back the last lump yet and the old miser was a bit stingy when it came to handouts, so Teddy tended to rely on luck and his bookies instead.

  Periodically he’d make an effort to keep away from the gaming tables, but what with the children no longer living at home and most of the staff dismissed, Teddy found the lonely chill of Chester Square too much to bear. Besides, he was incapable of cooking a half-decent meal for himself and man could not live on toast and pilchards alone.

  So every night he set off for supper at his club and every night he drank too much and staggered over to the gaming tables where his run of bad luck continued to bleed his coffers dry.

  Eventually his name became synonymous with ill fortune to the point where chaps he once viewed as chums refused to sit next to him in case his bad luck rubbed off on them, an
d a bad night on the cards was known as ‘having a Teddy Carmichael’.

  While the rest of the world was greeting the dawn of a new decade, Teddy had reached rock bottom and he couldn’t see a way out. Things had gone so badly wrong it would be impossible to put them all right. He couldn’t afford to keep up, he didn’t fit in anywhere any more, he was only fifty-six years old but he was too tired to carry on. So far as he could see, there was only one solution.

  6

  The Telegram

  Sacramento, USA, 1961

  Peggy sat on the veranda in the Californian sunshine eating half a home-grown grapefruit (no sugar) for breakfast, when it struck her that Benedict had turned twenty-one the previous day. Her youngest son, who was now her eldest son – son and heir, she supposed.

  She hadn’t sent a card but a cheque for a hundred dollars had been signed in her accountant’s office at the beginning of the month. She hoped he hadn’t been expecting anything more personal and fretted momentarily over whether she should have sent him one of her father’s old tie-pins.

  She presumed the boy still resembled his maternal Greek grandfather rather than his chipolata-skinned father and imagined he might be quite good looking, albeit nowhere near as handsome as his elder brother. Had Ivor lived, he’d have been breaking hearts all over London by now, lining up future wives and toying with the kitchen staff.

  Thinking of Ivor still brought Peggy close to tears but not like it used to, not since she had her brows lifted and the bags removed from under her eyes, a procedure which, despite taking years off her, had severely affected the mobility of her face.

  Since the op, Peggy had worn a constant expression of surprise. She even looked surprised to be drinking her usual morning cup of strong black coffee as she watched the pool boy fish for stray leaves while the temperature began its glorious daily climb.