The Inheritance

by Sheena Kalayil

  His friend scrutinised the screen for some moments longer, then gave another whistle and handed the camera back, picked up his bottle of beer, held it to his mouth.

  He felt a wave of irritation. ‘So what do you think?’

  Gildo gave a small wave with his bottle: ‘Estava foudando ela.’

  The pronouncement, crude as it was, yet summing up the situation perfectly, was wholly unsatisfactory.

  ‘But who is she?’

  The words, unspoken so far, exploded from his lips, and his friend raised his eyebrows, shook his head.

  ‘I mean she’s young, right? A student of his?’

  Gildo sighed, then spoke: ‘We can assume.’

  ‘He was having an affair with a student?’

  When his friend did not respond, he continued: ‘Gildo . . .’ he gulped. ‘I mean. Do you think Clare found out? Do you think they had a fight? In the car—’

  ‘Francois, whatever or whoever, don’t make a nightmare—’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking . . . was that why—’

  ‘It was a car accident. Like Lady Diana—’

  ‘What was he doing . . . fucking around like that?’

  ‘Maybe Clare was fucking around too. Did you check her camera?’

  He wanted to hit his friend, but instead he threw his bottle against the rock on which he was sitting, and for some reason it didn’t shatter as he had expected, but bounced back up and smacked him on the cheekbone, the remnants of beer it contained dribbling down his chest.

  Gildo was laughing, wiping him down, ‘Hepa. Are you OK?’

  He nodded, pressed his hand to his face.

  ‘Let me see.’

  His friend pushed his hand away, held him by the sides of his head, then clapped his cheeks. ‘Just a bruise. You’re still beautiful.’

  ‘Gildo,’ he said, still holding his face, ‘I don’t think this was the first time.’

  His friend looked at him. ‘And so?’

  He shook his head, frustrated. What was he hoping to get from Gildo? His reaction was so . . . African. Gildo, married to Jacinta for fifteen years, had not, he was sure, remained faithful all that time. He was always making jokes about his polygamous heritage: jokes which had a ring of truth. And yet, was he, Francois, any better? He had stayed faithful to any woman he was sleeping with, yes, but that was sometimes only a matter of months, weeks, days even. A serial monogamist. His short marriage had been his longest relationship. And what of his brother? Ben and Clare had been under enormous strain, compounding the ordinary wear and tear of a long relationship. Yes, he was shaken by whom his brother had chosen to have an affair with: a very young woman. A girl. But he could not be sure that he would act any differently if placed in the same situation. He was angry with himself and the moral high ground he seemed intent on occupying.

  The bottles of beer were finished too quickly. They returned to the house, where Jacinta exclaimed in shock on seeing Francois’s face, berated Gildo’s sanguinity. He sat in the kitchen, his friend’s wife tending to his cheek, a clear view of her cleavage, her breasts at one point brushing against his chin. He wanted to bury his face in them. She smelled of the cream she used to straighten her hair, the rich aloe vera which she used on her skin. She smelled of sunsets and a warm wind blowing: a Maputo night. Gildo lingered in his eyesight, his face indulgent, before announcing that he would take Francois out that evening to a bar in the small town, run by an Angolan, who, after a discreet word from Gildo, brought them drink after drink. Francois sat in a warm bath of hospitality, the dark faces and cadences of the language taking him back. If he had stayed on the continent he had been born in, kept a foothold on behalf of his parents and brother, his family would still be intact. The feeling grew and grew the more beers he downed. When Gildo helped him into the taxi later that night, he leaned against his friend.

  ‘Don’t you miss it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you miss Africa?’

  If his friend responded, he didn’t hear.

  He woke the next morning to Jacinta’s voice scolding their daughter in the kitchen: the sounds of domestic life. Later that day, Gildo drove him back in his van to Lisbon, stayed a few hours, before taking the train back to his wife and daughter.

  The weeks passed. It was winter in Lisbon, a rainy, windy season. He spent most of his energies at that time of the year preparing canvases, soaking them with gesso, grounding them with different colours. It was routine, therapeutic work which set him up for his more productive months, when he had no commitments to the art college or the Gulbenkian. One evening he looked at the students gathered around in a semicircle. The class was working on a still life. They appeared impossibly young to him, out of reach. Good lines, Isabel, he said, smiling at one, and she looked up in surprise: he rarely commented so early on in the process. She had almond-shaped eyes, rimmed with eyeliner; the whites shone pearly and untouched. When a nervousness crept into her expression, he patted her shoulder, carry on, then went to the front of the class, stared out the window. The only sounds were of brushes against canvas, the scrape of a stick against a palette: the soundtrack to his life.

  He received an invitation to submit for an exhibition in London – Hearts of Darkness – the coming spring; the curator was a contemporary from Michaelis. The remit: to explore love and lovers, sex and sexuality, through a global dimension. Would he have an artwork he was working on or even a completed canvas? He knew why he had been approached. He had produced a series of paintings which had received much acclaim, of sex workers in Maputo, a project set up by a Mozambican friend who was running an HIV awareness centre in the Alto Mae area of the city.

  But because his mind was still full of the events and discoveries of recent months, he found that whatever he sketched or outlined in preparation for the exhibition was banal; his thoughts kept returning to the photograph on Ben’s camera. He had at one point considered cropping the photo, then sending it to his brother’s former colleagues: recognise this girl? But even from neck up the viewer would be sure of her nakedness below. He would be compromising his brother, and this stranger. Instead, he found himself sketching her. Before long he had six drawings scattered around him. Her proportions were like a gazelle; in one picture he drew her with hooves at the end of her legs. In others, he drew her naked. He needed little imagination to sketch her buttocks and hips, her breasts, decorated with – somehow he knew – dark nipples. It was unlikely that she shared the same history, the same kind of life and livelihood as the girls he had painted in Maputo. But he could not shake off the sense that there was a thread connecting them, even as he balked at assigning his brother to the same category as the girls’ clients.

  Youth and beauty were always a currency, sometimes a bane. It was the expression in the girl’s eyes that was most arresting. She was looking back at Ben, but she was also looking at him, the viewer of the photograph. What had happened after this moment? He was sure that this image followed love-making. Had they made love again after the shutter had clicked? He chose a small canvas, cutting it carefully, then prepared his paints: an activity that always soothed him. A portrait, up to her chest, her neck and shoulders gleaming, as Clare’s had done in the wedding picture.

  He had been warming up some soup on the stove when Lucie appeared one evening at his flat. They greeted each other with a kiss, but neither could ignore the rarity of the occasion: she hardly ever arrived unannounced. Their whole relationship, he could see, had been conducted as two busy, independent adults. Nothing like the way his brother seemed to have been enmeshed with people. She accepted a bowl of soup; he poured her some wine. She wanted to know if they should go to the beach the next day: they could brunch at one of the cafés. He agreed and noticed with some guilt the release of a tension in her eyes. As he started clearing the table – he never left dishes for the next day just as he kept his flat, aside from his atelier, in meticulous order, old-womanish traits she liked to tease him over – she took her glass to the other side of the room, where under the skylig
ht the light fell onto the small painting.

  ‘Who is she?’ she said.

  She was looking at the canvas, at the messy pile of sketches on the floor, had not noticed the photograph he had clipped up, on the other side of the room. She stood between the two, as if the timeline had become skewed. The canvas was his present. She was his past. The girl, his future. He gestured to the photograph, and she turned.

  ‘I found it on Ben’s camera,’ he said.

  She stood stock still, and he took a moment to survey her. He knew every inch of her body, he knew what she liked to hear, he knew what she liked him to do in bed. But at that moment he felt as distant from her as if an ocean divided them.

  ‘When did you find it?’

  ‘When we were cleaning out his flat.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  ‘Who is she?’ she repeated.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So Ben was having an affair with this girl?’

  ‘I think so.’

  She was quiet. The flat had become so silent he could hear her breathing.

  ‘Why are you painting her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She paused. ‘Do your parents know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Only Gildo.’

  ‘Gildo . . .’

  She turned and stared at his canvas for what seemed many minutes. He was unsure what to say, where to stand.

  She asked again: ‘Why are you painting her?’

  He came closer to her, then changed tack and sat on the edge of his worktable.

  ‘I’m not painting her,’ he said. ‘At least, I don’t feel like I am. I don’t know her. I’m painting what Ben saw. I feel like I am looking through his eyes. I can’t explain . . .’

  She came to stand in front of him. He slid his hands over her hair, down her neck, then moved his hands to grip her shoulders, his thumbs caressing her collarbone. She was watching him, her expression cool, the amused smile on her lips not reaching her eyes.

  ‘Try,’ she said. ‘You want to bring her to life? Are you going to exhibit this picture so she sees herself one day in a gallery?’

  ‘Of course not . . .’

  She moved away so he had to drop his hands.

  ‘Does it help you, Francois,’ she said, ‘to imagine this girl?’

  He saw that now she looked aggrieved, the expression on her face at odds with the nonchalance of her tone.

  ‘Lucie . . .’

  But she shook her head, as if pre-empting any attempt he would make to lie to her.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I feel . . .’ he hesitated, ‘that we haven’t talked properly for some time. I didn’t know how to bring it up.’

  ‘And Gildo? What did he have to say?’

  He shrugged and was relieved when she did not press him. She returned to stand in front of his canvas, and he went into the kitchen. At one point, he glanced through the hatch. She was smoking a cigarette, sifting through his sketches, tapping her ash into her glass. Then she appeared behind him in the kitchen, not to help but to sit on the stool watching him, until he turned around and tossed a tea towel at her. He felt another pang of guilt when she smiled, came to stand next to him, started drying the plates and glasses.

  ‘I’m forty-seven next year, Francois,’ she said.

  ‘I’m planning for your retirement, don’t worry . . .’

  She elbowed him playfully, but he could see her eyes were sad.

  ‘I just meant . . .’ she began, but didn’t finish.

  She meant many things. She was a woman who had a son who lived in a different country, a woman who guarded her independence just as she admitted her physical needs. She was older than him. The age gap had never been an issue for them; if anything it had been part of the attraction. But perhaps he was being disingenuous: he might have appeared too unrooted, inconstant for her visions of the future.

  After they had washed up, he asked her to stay the night, and she agreed. That itself was another indication that things had changed. He would have preferred a reluctance, for she did not like waking up in a bed other than her own, she had told him. Usually, she would entice him back to her flat, which was bigger and more modern, so that they could plan the next day while having a last drink together on her balcony. Tonight she pulled on one of his T-shirts as bedtime wear. They lay together on his bed, facing each other. He stroked her thigh, and she watched him, her expression meditative. It pleased him to see her in his clothes, and when he kissed her and slid his hand between her legs she pulled off the T-shirt. They made love tentatively at first, as if testing the waters, and then resumed their familiar positions, each with the knowledge of what the other enjoyed. But her words earlier had touched a nerve, and he suddenly had a sensation that it was not Lucie moving above him but the girl, with her silky hair falling onto his face, into his mouth, with her small breasts and wine-coloured nipples. The vision unnerved him and, to exorcise his thoughts, he flipped Lucie onto her back, was much rougher than usual. Afterwards, as she slept, on her side, turned away from him, he found that the sensation had not faded. He felt the girl was still in the room, with him, somewhere he could not see her, waiting.

  12

  THAT Christmas he arranged to spend the holiday fortnight with his parents, while Lucie returned to Germany; she would bring Josef back with her for the second half of his college vacation. When he arrived at his parents’ house in Clapham, he rang the bell to be greeted by his mother, her face alight with love for him, her only son now, and he felt an ache in his heart. How must it be to be healthy, cognisant, vigorous, when your child is cruelly not allowed to age? His mother took him up the stairs to the room he always stayed in, sat on the bed as he unpacked. He noticed how small, how delicate she appeared, dressed in her usual flowing layers: a Persian scarf around her neck, a long multicoloured skirt. Her right hand was in a bandage: a gardening accident brought on by impatience. His father, it seemed, had suggested that they go out for Christmas lunch at a nearby hotel.

  ‘Excellent idea.’

  ‘Saves me cooking and worrying about what will set me off,’ she said. ‘Plus I’m a bit useless with this on,’ she motioned to her hand.

  He sat down next to her, took her other hand, massaged it between his. She smiled, slipped an arm through his.

  ‘I hope we didn’t spoil any plans you had with Lucie.’

  He shook his head, then smiled at her ruefully. ‘I’m not sure she’s going to put up with me for much longer . . .’

  ‘Oh, darling.’

  She was silent, then she squeezed his arm. ‘These things either make you closer or pull you apart.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s even about Ben,’ he said. ‘I’m just a difficult bastard.’

  She tutted. ‘No, you’re not’. Then she spoke as if he were fifteen years old, suffering from his first, unrequited, love. ‘You’re kind, handsome, talented.’ He started laughing. ‘You just haven’t met the right person.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Mum,’ he said grinning. ‘Maybe it’s them.’

  She smiled back. So they could still smile, laugh; life would go on. He could see ahead to their very old age, and then they would die, and he would be the last of the line. But he would leave something behind: his paintings.

  His mother rose to her feet. ‘Wait here.’

  He could hear her in the next room, and he lay back so he was resting on his elbow.

  She re-entered, holding a small booklet.

  ‘Look what came in the post.’

  On the cover, a black and white print of a photograph: Ben sitting in a circle of children with wide white smiles, skinny dark limbs, clapping hands. One boy had his face turned to the camera, his hand halfway towards meeting the other. His brother was leaning back slightly, his long legs awkwardly crossed, but laughing. There was a cross, an
d the letters RIP printed in heavy black letters. He lifted his eyes and met his mother’s. She was watching him, her lips set in a sad smile. Inside, there was a letter to his parents signed from Agatha Chiweshe – Mother, SOS Children’s Village, Waterfalls, Harare – along with others written by five children, aged ten to fourteen, their handwriting fastidious, their sentences short but heartfelt. Each expressing the wish that his parents be well, and assuring them that Ben would be remembered for his goodness.

  ‘I had no idea,’ his mother said. ‘When he used to go back, he didn’t say that he always stopped by. Your father and I give a regular donation, but Ben actually went there, spent time with those children.’

  They fell silent, both looking at the small booklet in his hands.

  Finally, he said, ‘I’m not surprised. He seems to have touched everyone he met.’

  ‘It’s so sad,’ his mother continued. ‘I know what people think. They give Clare the monopoly on the disappointment that they couldn’t have kids. But Ben felt it too . . .’

  Her voice broke, and he slung his arm over her, so that he was crushing her into his chest. They remained like this for some time until she whispered, smiling, ‘Not very comfortable’, and he released her. She smoothed her hair and glanced at him.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘your dad and I want to do something, in Ben’s memory.’ She paused, took his hand again. ‘Patricia Walther got in touch a few weeks ago, and she wants to set up an award of some kind, for students from Zimbabwe, in Ben’s name.’

  ‘I remember she mentioned something like that . . .’

  ‘Well, both your dad and I thought that was a very generous thing for her to think of. And well,’ she smiled half-apologetically, ‘we want in on the action. So we thought we would also contribute, not as much as the Walthers, but, well, she agreed immediately and even said we should help her in the selection process . . .’

  ‘Mum, that’s a wonderful idea.’ He hugged her again, and she started laughing. When he let go of her, he saw there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I’m cross for not thinking of it myself,’ she said.