Inheritance

by Jenny Eclair

  For a moment Freya allows herself to bask in her own glory. The obstacle course had been a fantastic idea, Lucy had even twisted her ankle, which was an added bonus, Lance loved her present and her little lace-up Demelza boots fit like a dream. Later on there will be champagne and dancing. With any luck, Lance will be drunk enough and happy enough to fuck her.

  Down the corridor, Andrew checks up on Bel again, she is fast asleep, snoring like a hedge trimmer. He feels her brow, there is no fever and he googles ‘concussion’ but he can’t get onto the internet because 4G doesn’t work around here, and he doesn’t want to bother Freya or Lance for the Wi-Fi code.

  No doubt Maisie and the boys will have managed to log on by now, he’ll ask one of them for help later, but Bel’s breathing sounds completely normally, so that’s good.

  He’s also reassured by the fact that she’s eaten some of the sandwiches he brought up a couple of hours ago when the caterers served afternoon tea on the terrace. Andrew had enjoyed that, pretty waitresses offering cucumber triangles and tiny bite-sized scones with jam and cream. He’d had quite a heated debate with Freya’s mother over which should go first, the cream or the jam, and that had been nice too.

  Andrew isn’t entirely comfortable amongst the Kittiwake gathering, there are a lot of very good-looking men around ten years younger than him with thick hair, deep tans and fashionable heavy-rimmed glasses. No one is particularly interested in an NHS statistician from South London, however senior, and even his own mother-in-law has yet to address him. He’s not particularly fussed that Natasha doesn’t like him. In his opinion, the woman is toxic and he gave up trying with her years ago. As for Lance, they have nothing in common; his brother-in-law is so alpha male that even his handshake hurts.

  If it were up to him, he would much rather stay up here with Bel than rejoin the party. Maybe he could nip down, show his face, then smuggle up a couple of beers and a bit of that hog roast? Andrew’s mouth waters, the smell wafting round from the back of the house is pretty incredible, and he wonders fleetingly whether today will be one of Maisie’s vegan days, or if she will make an exception for roast pig, like she frequently does for chicken, bacon, mince and lamb.

  He hasn’t seen much of her or the boys since they got here. He wishes his sons could be more at ease in company, introduce themselves, shake hands firmly with strangers, instead of sidling off and disappearing for hours on end. But Andrew understands their reluctance to mingle, because he is shy too and being surrounded by all these overtly confident, good-looking people is nerve-racking and playing havoc with his digestion. Andrew takes a swig of Gaviscon and gives a small burp of relief.

  All the women have thin wrists and multi-stranded necklaces, featuring tiny gleaming charms. They all look as though they have spent the summer on some fabulous Greek island and some of them have rings around their toes and pierced noses.

  He wishes now that he and Bel had bothered to come up with some sort of fancy-dress plan. In a spasm of desperation he toys with the idea of dragging the bottom sheet off the bed and pretending to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but is immediately appalled by the idea.

  He will wear the pale blue linen shirt from Marks that Bel packed for him, and he will be friendly and sociable because it’s what Bel would want him to be. It’s only for a couple more nights, nothing goes on for ever. Also the food is very good.

  Natasha is still groggy from her afternoon nap. Much as she dreads the thought of heading back downstairs, she doesn’t want to give Freya the satisfaction of labelling her a ‘difficult bitch’. So she slips into a simple black silk dress with sheer chiffon blouson sleeves and a pair of gold brocade slipper shoes and fights back a wave of desolation as she takes out her powder compact and runs a coral lipstick around her narrow mouth.

  Her mother’s face looks back at her in the mirror. How did she get so old? And she watches her mouth twist into the shape that Peggy’s made when they told her Ivor was dead, but, unlike her mother’s, Natasha’s scream is silent.

  Maisie has dressed up as a sexy silver siren, part mermaid, part Hollywood starlet, her silver dress is slit to both the navel and the knee and fans out to form a fishtail at the back.

  She has sprayed her silver-blond wig with green glitter ‘seaweed’ streaks and around each wrist and ankle are bracelets threaded with tiny silver shells that make a tinkling noise as she walks.

  Once the glue is dry on her double set of false eyelashes, she paints her eyelids bright gold and her lips dark ruby. She is treasure from a sunken chest, she is a long-lost jewel from the bottom of the sea and her heart is beating like Bel’s egg whisk when she makes meringues.

  He recognised her over the fish pie last night. He had choked and pretended to have a tiny bone stuck in his windpipe and Freya droned on about the fishmonger promising he had been through the salmon with a pair of surgical tweezers and what a drag it would be if he ruined his own birthday by choking to death. Which was an odd kind of crap joke that made the two foreign women laugh a lot. She found out later they were Freya’s mother and sister; Maisie feels sorry for the sister, who looks like Freya crossed with a pug.

  So far today they have kept out of each other’s way. Maisie has been on her best behaviour, but she’s had a line of coke in preparation for tonight and drunk a bottle of prosecco while getting ready. She straps up her silver heels, throws the little white fox shrug around her shoulders and wobbles down the stairs. Fuck knows where Ed and Jamie are. Last time she saw them they were holed up in the twin room she’s meant to be sharing with Ed, playing video games on a PS4 they’d hooked up to the TV. If they ever appear and anyone asks what they’ve dressed up as, she can always reply ‘losers’.

  It had been Maisie’s idea to switch rooms. Last night she’d told them she wasn’t feeling well, blaming the long drive, and Bel had backed her up, saying she did look quite feverish. Ed had leapt at the chance of a bit of downtime with his brother – and a break from his demanding girlfriend.

  With Maisie off Ed’s back and their mother out of the picture, there’s no one to give the boys a hard time for not ‘mixing’ or joining in the dancing, which Maisie loves and Ed doesn’t. He and Jamie are quite happy, they’ve got beer and crisps and a big pile of weird Norwegian sweets. Maybe later Maisie will bring them each a piece of cake wrapped up in a paper napkin.

  The barn is pulsing by the time Lance and Freya make their orchestrated entrance. As they walk in hand in hand, accompanied by the Poldark theme tune, which Freya has had remixed to sound a bit more clubby, all the guests turn and applaud.

  Freya’s spirits soar, she doesn’t even need a drink, it’s all been completely worthwhile – the expense, the headaches, the spreadsheets – and she starts to dance, at first with Lance and then with her sister and Baby Aksel and then with the enormous Cornish pasty, who apologises every time he steps on her little leather Demelza boots.

  Andrew sits down slightly self-consciously on one of the hay bales. In another hour or so he will have done his duty and can return to Bel and his pyjamas, but in the meantime he eats his second hog-roast-and-apple-sauce roll and watches Maisie dance with Donald Trump. As she gyrates Andrew hurriedly turns his gaze in another direction; there is something a bit ‘dirty old man’ about watching your son’s girlfriend gyrate.

  Next thing he knows, Freya’s mother has grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him to the dance area. He shuffles awkwardly from one foot to the other in front of her, neither of them recognise the song that blares from the speakers, and it’s all rather excruciating, but fortunately they are both spared any further humiliation by the arrival of the cake.

  There is an audible gasp as the creation is carried in by a couple of six-foot waiters. They step carefully, avoiding any breeze that could blow the candles out – fifty of them are studded into Kittiwake’s crenellated rooftop, it looks like the place is on fire. The effect is spectacular, as Freya knew it would be, it had cost her over a thousand pounds and in the morning any remnants wil
l be stale, fit only for the birds, but in this moment as the guests clap and cheer, it is worth every penny. The cake is so realistic that she is surprised not to hear the tiny sugar-glazed windowpanes cracking in the heat of the candle flame. People burst into an impromptu ‘Happy birthday, dear Lance’ and Freya feels her eyes well up. This is it, this is the moment – if only she hadn’t left her fucking phone indoors. Dammit, all that money and she can’t even Instagram it.

  The cake comes to a halt on one of the trestle tables at the back of the barn and a slightly unsteady Lance lurches over to blow the candles out.

  He bends over the cake, one hand protectively holding back the ruffles of his potentially flammable shirt, and blows hard and long. ‘Happy birthday, dear Laaaance, happy birthday to you.’

  The candles are all extinguished and everyone surges towards the cake to inspect its scaled-down perfection. Even the twisted vines around the porch are an identical match, while the front door is so realistic, it looks like you could actually open it and step inside the cake, into a world of marzipan stairs and sugar-spun chandeliers.

  A knife is produced, long-handled and sharp. Freya blinks, it’s not the knife she had chosen for the job. Its partner, the eBay-sourced decorative silver serving slice, is in situ on the cake board, but the matching knife isn’t there. This one looks like someone has hastily wiped down the carving knife from the hog roast. Someone in the crowd shouts, ‘How could you?’ in mock horror at the idea of slicing into this masterpiece, but another voice shouts ‘Cut it’ and soon the barn is full of revellers chanting ‘Cut it, cut it, cut it!’

  Lance brandishes the knife and aims right for the centre of the roof. As he brings the blade down, the entire party whoops and cheers, plates are passed around and people clamour for bits of turret or a slice with ‘some of that fondant icing’.

  Freya breathes out, they can all relax now and party until they drop. She weaves her way through the throng to have a quick word with the ‘mood’ technician they have hired for the night, and he turns the music up, dims the lights and begins to project the digitalised ciné film. Seconds later, to everyone’s delight, the barn walls come alive with dancing strangers from another century. The space begins to seethe and pump, people laugh and point at the funny old-fashioned people and some of them begin to imitate the Technicolor ciné guests, boogieing sixties-style.

  *

  Natasha stands apart from the main action, watching the Kittiwake cake crumble and fall apart. There goes Ivor’s bedroom window. Now the top of the west turret.

  She keeps catching fleeting glimpses of faces she vaguely recognises, though she knows they can’t possibly be here. How can Valerie Cooper be dancing the twist, with her auburn hair flying around her shoulders as if she were still twenty, when Natasha knows she has been bed-bound in a nursing home for the past five years?

  Natasha is confused, her balance feels off-kilter, she can’t remember what she is doing here or how on earth she knows all these oddly dressed people. She wishes she was back in her little house on the Île de Ré with its small courtyard where she can sit in silence and choose what she wants to remember and what she chooses to forget. But here everything is all jumbled up and she feels anxious. Looking for an escape route, she catches sight of a familiar blonde and instantly the blood curdles in her veins. She can’t possibly be here. She died. Natasha knows she died, because she was there when it happened, she saw her fall, she saw the dark ring of blood ooze around her silver head. Natasha finds herself moving closer to the girl, close enough for her own shadow to fall across her and block her from view. All of a sudden the illusion makes sense – she should have known, it’s a film. Once upon a time, she and Hugo had bought Benedict a ciné camera for his birthday; how silly of her to think it was real.

  Surrounded by strangers and images of long-lost friends, Natasha feels herself wilt. Maybe she should go to bed now. She has seen everything there is to see. Tomorrow night there will be a small firework display to finish off the weekend and then her taxi will come and she can fly home and look at her own calm white walls. Serena isn’t here, she is an apparition, a piece of celluloid preserved in a metal tin and projected onto the bare barn wall.

  Natasha would rather the tin had never been opened, she hadn’t wished to see the genie dancing out of her bottle, the nightmares are enough without seeing her magnified like this, those blue eyes boring into her, the way they had that night over half a century ago. She turns to go, she is tired now, the champagne feels acidic in her stomach. Tonight she will sleep in Blake’s old room and try not to think of him holding her dead brother in his arms. She will take a sleeping pill – she has needed them for years, her French doctor is very accommodating – and sleep will solve everything. But first she must say goodnight to her fifty-year-old baby. She is his mother, she’s allowed to seek him out, to search for him like she had when he was a toddler and went missing for twenty minutes in a Spanish airport.

  Oddly enough, she feels the same trepidation as she had all those years ago: Lance seems to have disappeared from his own party. Her heart begins to race as she scans the crowd for a sight of him. She has to keep reminding herself that he is no longer three years old and he is not wearing blue checked shorts and a red T-shirt, he is a fully grown man with children of his own. Eventually she finds him behind a stack of hay bales, a few yards beyond the table where the cake lies in ruins. The wreckage, now missing its roof, reminds her of when she was a little girl coming back to London after the war and seeing the ruined church round the corner from where she lived. The Luftwaffe had bombed it – danger has always been everywhere.

  He is dancing, her son is dancing with a girl in a silver dress, his hand is on the small of her back, her white-blond hair spills down past her shoulders. Her son is dancing with Serena. So, the lying bitch is here, how like her to come back now. It has to be Serena, she is wearing the same little fox fur shrug that she wore that night in Mayfair, the one she stole from Peggy’s wardrobe at Kittiwake. She is the same as she ever was, a thief and a slut.

  Maisie sees it before he does, a flash of silver, and she moves faster than him, spinning out of his arms and looking over her shoulder in horror as Natasha pushes the hog roast knife, all covered in cream and icing, into her own son. Then Maisie screams, she screams like a woman in a film would scream, the scream is blood-curdling and oddly contagious.

  Maisie screams then Beyoncé screams and Melania Trump screams and then the woman dressed up as a giant pixie screams and eventually someone turns off the music and the lights come up.

  Elise takes charge of the situation immediately, ripping Freya’s Demelza petticoat to make an impromptu tourniquet, ‘It’s only a nick,’ she tells Lance, who has gone as white as Kittiwake’s freshly laundered pillowcases, ‘nothing to worry about,’ but even though Elise keeps reassuring everyone that it’s a superficial flesh wound, there is quite a lot of blood.

  The man dressed up as a Cornish pasty gently removes the knife from Natasha’s hand and the old woman just stands there looking like a hundred-year-old doll.

  ‘I saw Serena,’ she repeats. ‘I thought Serena had come back to Kittiwake, I saw her, I saw Serena.’

  51

  Serena Leaves the Baby

  Kittiwake, February 1963

  Serena looked at the baby again and tried very hard to feel something, but the space in her chest where she was expecting a warm and fuzzy glow was resolutely empty.

  All she felt was distant, as if she were watching herself from far away, on another planet looking down from afar at this girl and her baby.

  ‘My baby,’ she whispered to herself, ‘you have a baby girl.’ It’s what Morwenna, the midwife in the hospital, had told her, so it must be true. Morwenna’s hands were covered in blood but she kept smiling and said, ‘She’s perfect.’

  Only she isn’t, thought Serena, she’s a small sallow thing, a bit like a weasel wrapped in a blanket.

  Things had been fine while she recovered in
the maternity ward. They had looked after her, no one asked any questions and at visiting time when other new mothers had their ‘loved ones’ crowding around them, a nurse who was about the same age as Serena came and drew the curtains around her bed and simply said, ‘You get yourself some rest now.’

  They had taken the baby to a nursery at night and fed her from a bottle. Serena watched a few of the other women breastfeed, but it looked disgusting, like the baby piglets at the farm down the road, snuffling and tugging at their mother’s teats. She saw what happened to the mothers’ nipples, how they were pulled out of shape, and she heard them cry with the pain of it.

  Her baby has never been anything but bottle-fed. The hospital gave her a big tin of powdered formula to start her off, with ‘added vitamins for healthy bones’ and once she ran out, she got Robbie from the farm to go to the chemist and buy her some more.

  Robbie was loyal, he was the one who had taken her to hospital when her waters broke and she panicked. His mother didn’t approve of her. Serena hid on Tuesdays when Bren came to clean the house – she took the baby up to the attic and watched through a hole in the floorboards as Bren swept and polished below. If the baby cried, she held the shawl over her mouth, but never too tightly. The baby kept breathing, but sometimes she looked at Serena as if to say, It’s you against me.

  The baby was stronger than she looked and sometimes Serena was a bit frightened of her.